Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: G M on January 15, 2013, 02:37:32 PM

Title: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on January 15, 2013, 02:37:32 PM
Of the damage done to this country by Obama, the destruction of the rule of law is the worst wound inflicted, and will long plague the American people after he leaves office.
Title: US ordered delay in intern's arrest
Post by: G M on January 15, 2013, 02:40:18 PM
http://washingtonexaminer.com/ap-exclusive-us-ordered-delay-in-interns-arrest/article/2518616#.UPXaP2_A_y1

Politics: Congress
AP Exclusive: US ordered delay in intern's arrest
January 15, 2013 | 12:45 pm



FILE - This Sept. 27, 2012 file photo shows Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J. speaking in Sayreville, N.J. Federal immigration agents were prepared to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender days before the November elections but were ordered by Washington to hold off after officials warned of "significant interest" from Congress and news organizations because the suspect was a volunteer intern for Menendez, according to internal agency documents provided to Congress. (AP Photo/Mel Evans, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal immigration agents were prepared to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender days before the November elections but were ordered by Washington to hold off after officials warned of "significant interest" from Congress and news organizations because the suspect was a volunteer intern for Sen. Robert Menendez, according to internal agency documents provided to Congress.

The Homeland Security Department said last month, when The Associated Press first disclosed the delayed arrest of Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, that AP's report was "categorically false."

Sanchez, 18, was an immigrant from Peru who entered the country on a now-expired visitor visa. He eventually was arrested at his home in New Jersey on Dec. 6. He has since been released from an immigration jail and is facing deportation. Sanchez has declined to speak to the AP.

After the AP story, which cited an unnamed U.S. official involved in the case, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and six other Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked the Obama administration for details about the incident.

According to those documents, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Newark had arranged to arrest Sanchez at the local prosecutor's office on Oct. 25. That was fewer than two weeks before the election.

Noting that Sanchez was a volunteer in Menendez's Senate office, ICE officials in New Jersey advised that the arrest "had the possibility of garnering significant congressional and media interest" and were "advised to postpone the arrest" until officials in Washington gave approval. The documents describe a conference call between officials Washington and New Jersey to "determine a way forward, given the potential sensitivities surrounding the case."

The senators, in a letter to the Homeland Security Department, said the agency documents showed that Sanchez's arrest "was delayed by six weeks," as AP had reported. They asked for details about the department's review of potentially sensitive, high profile immigration cases when arrests are delayed.

In a letter Monday, Assistant DHS Secretary Nelson Peacock said an allegation that the government delayed Sanchez's arrest "for political purposes" was categorically false. Neither the unnamed U.S. official cited in AP's original story or the senators in their letters to the department had specifically alleged that the arrest had been delayed for political purposes.

The documents provided to Congress do not indicate why the arrest should have been delayed or whether anyone outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- such as in the headquarters offices of the Homeland Security Department -- was consulted.

Menendez, D-N.J., who advocates aggressively for pro-immigration policies, was re-elected on Nov. 6 with 58 percent of the vote. Menendez said last month that his staff was notified about the case immediately before AP's story, he learned about the case from the AP and he knew nothing about whether or why DHS had delayed the arrest.

According to police records, Sanchez was 15 when he was arrested on a charge of aggravated sexual assault in 2009. The records show he was accused of sexually assaulting an 8-year-old boy at least eight times and sentenced to two years' probation and required to register as a sex offender. The AP is not reporting the boy's relationship to Sanchez to avoid identifying the victim.

The agency documents show that Sanchez failed to update his sex offender registration, and local prosecutors considered arresting him for that. During the same time, immigration officials learned that Sanchez had applied for the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which would have allowed him to stay in the country and legally work for two years. He did not disclose his arrest or status as a sex offender on the application and was eventually denied, according to the documents.

Immigration enforcement operations in New Jersey were largely halted starting Oct. 28 as officials prepared for Hurricane Sandy. By Nov. 29, ICE had planned to arrest Sanchez after Citizenship and Immigration Services had formally denied his deferred action application. The following day, the ICE Office of the Principal Legal Advisor was consulted. The agency's chief counsel was also consulted and the arrest was approved Dec. 5.

Sanchez was arrested the next day.

During the final weeks of President George W. Bush's administration, ICE was criticized for delaying the arrest of President Barack Obama's aunt, who had ignored an immigration judge's order to leave the country several years earlier after her asylum claim was denied. She subsequently won the right to stay in the United States after an earlier deportation order, and there was no evidence of involvement by the White House.

In that case, the Homeland Security Department had imposed an unusual directive days before the 2008 election requiring high-level approval before federal agents nationwide could arrest fugitive immigrants including Zeituni Onyango, the half-sister of Obama's late father. The directive from ICE expressed concerns about "negative media or congressional interest," according to a copy of that directive obtained by AP. The department lifted the immigration order weeks later.

___

Follow Alicia A. Caldwell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/acaldwellap
Title: EPA: Culture of Corruption
Post by: G M on January 15, 2013, 02:43:14 PM
http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/09/the-epa-pushes-the-envelope-again

The EPA Pushes the Envelope, Again
A long train of abuses suggests an institutional culture that sees the law as an impediment.
A. Barton Hinkle | January 9, 2013

In accusing the Environmental Protection Agency of trying to regulate “water itself as a pollutant,” Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is not showing an excess of exactitude. But his looseness is rhetorical and harmless. The EPA’s is neither.


Last week federal judge Liam O’Grady sided with Cuccinelli when he ruled that the EPA had overstepped its bounds. As a measure of just how far the EPA had overreached, note that Cuccinelli’s suit against the EPA was joined by Fairfax County, led by Board of Supervisors chairman Sharon Bulova.

Bulova, a Democrat, is nobody’s idea of an environmental menace. A longtime advocate for commuter rail and mass transit, she started a Private Sector Energy Task Force to increase energy efficiency, sustainability, and “green-collar” jobs in the county.  Nevertheless, she and other county leaders objected when the EPA tried to limit the amount of stormwater runoff into the 25-mile-long Accotink Creek, which empties into the Potomac.  “When people talk about federal agencies running amok, this is exactly what [that] looks like,” said GOP Supervisor John C. Cook in July. “The EPA’s overreach is so extreme that the Democrats on the board realized that, even in an election year, they had to do this for the county.”

Concerned about sediment in the Accotink, the EPA had sought to cut stormwater runoff nearly in half—a proposal that would have added perhaps $200 million to the roughly $300 million cost of addressing sediment itself.

But as O’Grady noted, while the EPA can regulate sediment, which is considered a pollutant, it has no authority to regulate stormwater—which is not.

The EPA claimed—notably, “with the support of Virginia[‘s Department of Environmental Quality]”—that it could regulate stormwater as a proxy for sediment itself, even though it had no legal authority to do so, because nothing explicitly forbids it to do so. As Cuccinelli said, “logic like that would lead the EPA to conclude that if Congress didn’t prohibit it from invading Mexico, it had the authority to invade Mexico.”

Why would the EPA insist on regulating stormwater, which it has no authority over, instead of simply regulating sediment? After all, it has written rules for sediment literally thousands of times. That insistence makes no sense. But it does look like part of a larger pattern.

Last spring, the Supreme Court ruled against the agency in the case of Mike and Chantell Sackett. The Sacketts owned a piece of land, a little larger than half an acre, in a growing lakefront development in Idaho. They were building a vacation home on the spot when the EPA declared it might be a wetland and ordered them to cease construction, and restore the land to its prior state or face fines of up to $75,000 a day. The agency decreed that the Sackettshad no right to challenge the order in court.

The Supreme Court unanimously call that bunk. It’s not easy to get Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the same page, but the EPA managed to do so. The agency also drew the wrath of The Washington Post, which editorialized that “The EPA Is Earning a Reputation for Abuse.”  The editorial began by condemning the now-infamous remarks of now-former EPA administrator Al Armendariz, who compared his enforcement philosophy to Roman crucifixions: “They’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them. And then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”

Troubling stories about the EPA just keep piling up. In Texas, the agency went after Range Resources Corp. for allegedly polluting two wells. The company racked up more than $4 million in fees defending itself before the EPA grudgingly admitted it had no proof Range Resources had contaminated anything.

In July, the federal district court in D.C. ruled that the EPA had overstepped its bounds regarding Appalachian coal operations. That ruling followed another  concluding the EPA had no business revoking a waste-disposal permit, issued by the Bush administration, for a West Virginia mine.  Judge Amy Berman Jackson—an Obama appointee—called the agency’s action “a stunning power for the EPA to arrogate to itself,” and accused the agency of “magical thinking.”

With the possible exception of a few anarchist cells, nobody questions the need for environmental regulation—or the EPA’s authority to enforce environmental laws. But those objecting to the agency’s abuses—Bulova, Ginsberg, The Washington Post, Judge Jackson—are hardly anarchists. They aren’t even Republicans. That ought to ring warning bells; this isn’t just a partisan vendetta. The EPA’s long train of abuses and usurpations suggests an institutional culture that sees the law as an impediment, rather than a guardrail. It also offers a reminder that those who wield power tend to push the boundaries of their authority. They will succeed, too—unless others push back.

A. Barton Hinkle is senior editorial writer and a columnist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Title: HSBC: Too big to jail
Post by: G M on January 15, 2013, 02:47:51 PM
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/12/15/Too-Big-To-Jail

HSBC: TOO BIG TO JAIL



by SYDNEY WILLIAMS  15 Dec 2012

It is not often that I find myself in agreement with the editorial page of the New York Times, but I did on Wednesday. The Times criticized the $1.92 billion settlement agreed to by HSBC as “a dark day for the rule of law.” No bank executives, according to the LA Times, were charged. While $1.92 billion sounds like a lot, it is about 0.06% of the banks $2.6 trillion in assets. All banks stretch the limits and meaning of regulation. HSBC, the world’s third largest bank, and one that has been frequently warned, has simply been the most egregious. Without the rule of law, civil society devolves into either totalitarianism or anarchy.
The problem is not just the fact that no one at HSBC was jailed for criminal activities that make Jessie James, Willie Sutton and Bernie Madoff look like amateurs; it is that there seems to be collusion between the bad guys (the big banks) and government. The government imposes fines, which appear steep but are manageable, payable to the agencies charged with monitoring their behavior. It is symbiotic, crony capitalism. Banks simply look at fines as a regular cost of doing business. Agencies view them as a source of revenues. It is the public, the bank’s customers and shareholders who bear the cost. Society’s moral fiber becomes weakened.
What HSBC did was knowingly launder money for drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia, and provide banking services for countries known to harbor terrorists and for exporting terrorism. Both are in contradiction with stated American policy, but more importantly, both violate common rules of humanity. Mexican drug lords are not known for their niceties. According to the current issue of the Economist, 60,000 Mexicans, including 60 mayors, have been killed in the past six years. Bloomberg reports that the cartels used cash boxes precisely the dimensions of “tellers’ windows in HSBC’s Mexican branches.” Colombian narcotics dealers sell drugs in the U.S and then send the funds to Mexican banks to be converted into Colombian pesos. Additionally, the bank has provided banking services for countries like Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan. Stuart Gulliver, CEO of HSBC, in paying the fine and accepting responsibility, said “We are profoundly sorry” for what his bank did. Really?
American officials said that they were fearful of imposing punishment so severe that a bank could be destroyed in the process. Fed officials have little concern about smaller banks and the hedge fund industry, which they persist in trying to topple. But big banks remain in a class by themselves. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) praised the settlement saying that it sends a “powerful wake-up call to multinational banks about the consequences of disregarding their anti-money-laundering obligations.” I suspect the real message is get big enough and you won’t have to worry. It seems beyond credibility that executives who so blatantly violated federal laws should be allowed to go free. While HSBC stock, at $51.68, remains below its all-time high price of $99.52 set in October 2007, it is up 36% year-to-date – not too shabby.
Despite the reluctance of the federal government to prosecute executives of very large banks who have violated more laws than Willie Sutton, we are living, according to the New York Times, in “the era of the star prosecutor in white-collar crime.” The paper noted that Preet Bharara, U. S. Attorney for Manhattan, was on the cover of Time magazine and got a shout-out from Bruce Springsteen during a recent concert, because of his decision to go after hedge funds for “insider trading.”
Certainly trading on inside information is wrong and deserves punishment, but in a world in which information flows like the Mississippi it is difficult to determine what is right and what is wrong. The real reason the Bharara’s of the world go after hedge fund managers is because of the widely spread notoriety of their incomes, which, admittedly, seem excessive at a time of persistent high unemployment. However, their incomes are paid by sophisticated investors. Nevertheless, even if their crimes prove true, their actions pale in comparison to the practices of banks like HSBC. The bank laundered $881 million from drug cartels like Sinaloa in Mexico and Norte del Valle in Colombia. Thousands of deaths have resulted from these cartels and millions of Americans have suffered the consequences of their products. The same bank violated sanctions imposed against regimes by our government. The sanctions were meant to contain terrorist activity. Are not these crimes far more damaging to our society than those highly publicized investigations into the possibility that some hedge funds traded on information that may or may not have been received legitimately?
What message about our society does all this send to our children and to all those who strive to play by the rules?  You can escape punishment if you become an executive at a bank “too big to fail and jail,” As a prosecutor, you get shout-outs from rock stars if you indict a well known hedge fund manager, even if his innocent. If, as a hedge fund manager, you achieve enormous financial success you are automatically deemed a piranha to society, and thus a target for an over-eager prosecutor looking to add another notch to his holster. Firms too small to defend themselves are deemed small enough to fail and jail. It is a rotten message, but unfortunately one that captures the spirit of the downward spiral of our culture.
Title: DAVID GREGORY SKATES PAST PROSECUTION
Post by: G M on January 15, 2013, 02:52:54 PM
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/01/david-gregory-skates-past-prosecution.php

DAVID GREGORY SKATES PAST PROSECUTION
Few will be surprised by the news that David Gregory will not be prosecuted for possessing a high-capacity magazine during his appearance on “Meet the Press.” The decision was made by District of Columbia Attorney General Irvin Nathan, who turns out to be a social acquaintance of Gregory and his wife.

The decision not to prosecute Gregory is explained in a statement you can read here. The statement makes it clear that the decision not to prosecute is an act of prosecutorial discretion. In other words, the AG had no doubt that Gregory violated the law; he simply decided he wasn’t going to prosecute him.

The passage in which the AG explains this exercise of discretion is the following:

Influencing our judgment in this case, among other things, is our recognition that the intent of the temporary possession and short display of the magazine was to promote the First Amendment purpose of informing an ongoing public debate about firearms policy in the United States, especially while this subject was foremost in the minds of the public following the previously mentioned events in Connecticut and the President’s speech to the nation about them.

One can distinguish between violations of the D.C. firearms law that occur as a result of providing information to the public and those that do not. Whether the distinction justifies non-prosecution in the former case is very much another question, but one that falls within the AG’s discretion to decide.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult not to suspect that the AG was moved by the fact that he liked the message behind Gregory’s violation of the law. I can’t help but think that the outcome might well have been different if the “First Amendment informational purpose” had been in service of a pro-gun message.

To be sure, I’m speculating here. But it’s not speculation to say that NBC was advised by the D.C. police that Gregory would violate the law if he proceeded (as he did) to display the magazine. The AG states:

Although there appears to have been some misinformation provided initially, NBC was clearly and timely advised by an MPD employee that its plans to exhibit on the broadcast a high capacity-magazine would violate D.C. law, and there was no contrary advice from any federal official. While you argue that some NBC employees subjectively felt uncertain as to whether its planned actions were lawful or not, we do not believe such uncertainty was justified and we note that NBC has now acknowledged that its interpretation of the information it received was incorrect.

Prosecutorial discretion should not be exercised in the case of flagrant disregard of the law — e.g., a violation that occurs in the face of instruction by the police that the action being contemplated is unlawful.

The AG tries refers to the possibility that “some NBC employees subjectively felt uncertain as to whether its planned actions were unlawful.” But he is plainly not convinced that this was the case — that’s why he prefaces the point by saying “you could argue” it and that’s why he affirms the clarity and timeliness of the police advice. The AG is willing to let NBC walk, but not without letting that outfit know that he’s not buying its B.S.

But the bottom line is that NBC has walked. The AG has given a complete pass to a party that scoffed at D.C. law. He has done so quite possibly because he agrees with the scofflaw’s political message, and perhaps under some influence from his personal acquaintance with the scofflaw.

That’s life in the big city, if the big city is Washington, D.C.
Title: NAPOLITANO PERJURED HERSELF TO CONGRESS IN FAST & FURIOUS TESTIMONY
Post by: G M on January 15, 2013, 02:59:46 PM
http://www.humanevents.com/2012/04/13/napolitano-perjured-herself-to-congress-in-fast-furious-testimony/

NAPOLITANO PERJURED HERSELF TO CONGRESS IN FAST & FURIOUS TESTIMONY
By: Neil W. McCabe    
4/13/2012 06:01 AM


In her explosive new book Fast and Furious, Katie Pavlich makes the case that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano not only failed to stop an operation that led to the death of one of her own, Border Agent Brian A. Terry, but she may have also lied to Congress in sworn testimony at a hearing held to find out what really happened.

Inside sources told Pavlich that Napolitano’s testimony was in direct contradiction to emails she exchanged, and reports and briefings she received, according to an exclusive preview of the book by Human Events.

Pavlich’s book Fast and Furious is due to be released Monday, April 16. It is published by Regnery Publishing, owned by Eagle Publishing, which also owns Human Events.

Most of the focus in the Fast and Furious scandal has been on attorney Gen. Eric Holder, because his Department of Justice ran the program through its Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, still referenced to as ATF, its old initials from before it was tasked with explosives.

But while Holder’s people waved the questionable gun purchasers through the checkout line, Napolitano was in charge of the Mexican border those guns crossed.

Pavlich’s book is particularly revealing, especially considering the lengths the Obama administration has gone to keep anyone from knowing anything about Fast & Furious and other gun-running operations. These operations involved multiple federal agencies facilitating illegal gun purchases, by co-opting the normal checks at gun stores in the Southwest, and then ignoring the guns as they were taken into Mexico. In Mexico, the guns were picked up at hundreds of gun sites.

Letting the guns slip away is a called “gun walking,” because the guns were allowed to walk.

In her September testimony to a Senate committee, Napolitano told senators she knew nothing about Fast & Furious until after Terry was killed in a gunfight on the night of Dec. 14, 2010 with an AK-47 purchased at one of the gun stores that was one of the key retailers where federal agents actively let guns walk.

In October, she told Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) at a hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee that she never spoke to the Dennis Burke about Fast & Furious. Burke, who was the U.S. Attorney for the   Arizona Department, was her chief of staff when she was the governor of Arizona and a close friend.

In the same month, Napolitano told Rep. Jason E. Chaffetz (R-Utah) at a hearing held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that she never spoke to Holder about Fast & Furious.

Homeland Security insiders paint a different picture, Pavlich reports.

Members of Congress questioning the secretary seem to know it, too.

One source said to the author, “When she says that [she] and Attorney General Eric Holder have not discussed it, that is a lie. That’s why they keep asking her those questions in the Judicial, Oversight, Homeland Security Committee hearings. They’ve asked her that same questions twice and she’s lied twice.”

How did she know? The source said, “There are five emails linking her to Holder. They go back two days after it happened-the first email was two days after Brian was killed.”

In the emails, Holder and Napolitano discuss Terry’s murder, the source said to Pavlich.

The source concedes that Holder may have “kept her in the dark” about all of the details of the gun walking, but her office approved letting the guns walk into Mexico and one of the agencies under her command, Customs and Border Protection, allowed guns through.

Another source from the ATF confirmed to Pavlich that Napolitano was briefed regularly by an agent from another of her agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.

“There was an ICE agent assigned specifically to be the co-case agent of Fast & Furious. He had to [file] an ICE report that either mirrored or referenced every ATF report that was done,” the ATF source said.

Beyond reports, there were inter-agency jealousies that had to be settled in Washington, he said.

The source said to Pavlich there were constant battles between ICE and ATF agents over who would get credit for different seizures or other issues. “I know phone calls were made to both headquarters to try and settle those disputes.”

It was Terry’s death that brought Operation Fast and Furious to an abrupt end. But now, more than 16 months later, no one has been charged with crimes associated with either the gun walking programs or the cover-up.

Pavlich makes a strong case that when people are finally charged with crimes, Napolitano will have to answer for her perjury to Congress.

“Let me tell you something about Janet,” another source said to the author. “Janet will be lucky not to go to prison.”
Title: Illegal Lawyers
Post by: G M on January 15, 2013, 03:16:02 PM
http://www.teapartynation.com/forum/topics/the-death-of-the-rule-of-law

The death of the rule of law
Posted by Judson Phillips on July 1, 2012 at 6:51pm


 
Just in case anyone missed it, America is no longer a nation of laws.  It is hard to say what we are now, but the law no longer matters.  Most people would jump to the conclusion this blog is about the really horrible week at the Supreme Court last week.  They would be wrong.
 
There is something else that spells the death knell for the rule of law in America.
 
What is it?
 
In California and New York, cases are working their way through the state supreme court to allow illegal aliens who have gone to law school and passed the bar exam to practice law.
 
Yes, you heard that right.  These candidates are not in the country legally.  They are subject to deportation if the rule of law were in fact applied instead of ignored by the Obama Regime.
 
Yet two states are poised to allow illegal immigrates the rights and privileges of members of the bar.
 
From USA Today:
 
 
Judges in several states are preparing to answer the latest question in the complex world of immigration: Can an illegal immigrant legally practice law in the USA?
 
Illegal immigrants brought to the USA as children, and who later graduated law schools in California, Florida and New York, are trying to gain entry to their state bars so they can work as attorneys.
 
Sergio Garcia's family illegally crossed into the USA from Mexico when he was 17 months old, and he went on to graduate from Chico State University and Cal Northern School of Law. He took the state bar exam in July 2009 and passed it but was told he could not join the state bar — a standard requirement for all practicing attorneys — because he had checked a box on his application that said he was in the country illegally.
 
The California Supreme Court asked for opinions on the question and could hold oral arguments in Garcia's case before making a decision. The California State Bar told the court this month that Garcia and others like him should be allowed to be licensed, but it is awaiting guidance from the Supreme Court.
 
Though the ruling could apply only to Garcia, the 35-year-old said the court's opinion could go a long way in determining the fate of others like him.
 
 
For some, the idea of allowing people in Garcia's position to legally work not only would encourage more people to bypass the legal immigration system but would throw a cloud of illegitimacy over the country's legal system.
 
"There's a certain level of absurdity to someone trying to practice law when they're in violation of the law," said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates lower levels of legal and illegal immigration. "It's unfortunate that children find themselves in these situations due to the decisions that their parents made. But that's unfortunately just the way it works. We all suffer from poor decisions that our parents made."
 
America has suddenly been transformed into bizzaro world.  Someone who breaks the law every morning when he gets up is going to be allowed to practice law?
 
When I entered law school in August, 1985, our first day the Dean of the Law School welcomed us with a pretty boring speech about the majesty of the law and how important it was for us to uphold the law for without the rule of law, all was lost.
 
All is lost because the rule of law in this nation means nothing anymore.  The Supreme Court can rewrite a statute to achieve their desired results.  A sovereign state is not allowed to protect citizens within its own borders.  We are ordered to purchase a product whether we want to or not and are faced with the possibility of government coercion or even prison if we refuse.
 
And the government refuses to enforce the most basic of sovereignty laws.  The laws that restrict the presence of people within the boarders of the nation to those people the nation has approved to come in.
 
I am not without sympathy for Sergio Garcia.  He did not get a vote on what happened.  His parents made a decision that has consequences for him today.  However, he has options.  The military allows illegal aliens to enlist and upon the completion of a term of service will allow them legal status and even citizenship.  I have no problem with someone who wants to be in this country who chooses this route.
 
I have no sympathy for someone who simply says, I am here.  Give me that to which I am not entitled.
 
The rule of law is the glue that holds this nation together.  Liberals are dead set on dissolving that glue and by extension destroying the greatest nation the world has ever seen.
 
As for you and I, our American citizenship is becoming more worthless every day.
Title: Obama Salutes Geithner’s ‘Far-Reaching Steps’ to Catch Tax Cheats
Post by: G M on January 15, 2013, 03:18:54 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/7358/obama-salutes-geithners-far-reaching-steps-catch-tax-cheats#

Obama Salutes Geithner’s ‘Far-Reaching Steps’ to Catch Tax Cheats
By Jim Geraghty
May 4, 2009 2:31 P.M.

     
President Obama, today: “The Treasury Department and the IRS, under Secretary Geithner’s leadership and Commissioner Shulman’s, are already taking far-reaching steps to catch overseas tax cheats — but they need more support.”

What, is Geithner telling the IRS, “Look for these signs, because that’s how I did it”?

Well, at least the president only praised one tax cheat in his speech denouncing tax cheats
. . . oh, wait:

“These problems have been highlighted by Chairmen Charlie Rangel and Max Baucus, by leaders like Senator Carl Levin and Congressman Lloyd Doggett.”

Geithner and Rangel thanked for helping crack down on tax cheats? What’s next, a ceremony on the importance of accurate information in public-health communication, thanking Joe Biden?
Title: Re: The death of the rule of law
Post by: sgtmac_46 on January 15, 2013, 05:57:12 PM
Half this country is increasingly populated by people who desire a benevolent messianic figure as government leader, ala Hugo Chavez.  Their notion of government is mother and father to provide for them craddle to grave.   That represents an irreconcilable difference with the other half of us with a diametric opposition to despotic figures, benevolent or otherwise.  At it's root is a fundamental disagreement over the very definition of the words 'right' and 'liberty'.....Positive and Negative Liberty....With the left viewing it through the lense of socialism, ones 'liberty' being some service or benefit OWED to them by the government.....One has a 'right to free healthcare', One has a 'right to social safety net', One has a 'right to protection from the government'.......With the rest of us viewing liberty as being FREE from government intervention, 'One has freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of property, freedom of association, right to bear arms'.........These two views are not compatible.

Title: Laws are for the little people
Post by: G M on January 25, 2013, 09:29:44 AM


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/25/federal-court-obama-broke-law-recess-appointments/

In a case freighted with major constitutional implications, a federal appeals court on Friday overturned President Obama’s controversial recess appointments from last year, ruling he abused his powers and acted when the Senate was not actually in a recess.
 
The three-judge panel’s ruling is a major blow to Mr. Obama. The judges ruled that the appointments Mr. Obama made to the National Labor Relations Board are illegal, and the board no longer has a quorum to operate.
 
But the ruling has even broader constitutional significance, with the judges arguing that the president’s recess appointment powers don’t apply to “intrasession” appointments — those made when Congress has left town for a few days or weeks.
 
The judges signaled the power only applies after Congress has adjourned sine die, which is a legislative term of art that signals the end to a long work period. In modern times, it means the president could only use his powers when Congress quits business at the end of a year.
 
“The dearth of intrasession appointments in the years and decades following the ratification of the Constitution speaks far more impressively than the history of recent presidential exercise of a supposed power to make such appointments,” the judges wrote.
 
“Recent presidents are doing no more than interpreting the Constitution. While we recognize that all branches of government must of necessity exercise their understanding of the Constitution in order to perform their duties faithfully thereto, ultimately it is our role to discern the authoritative meaning of the supreme law.”
 
The case is likely to end up before the Supreme Court, and it turns on the definition of what the Constitution means when it says “recess.”
 
Last January Mr. Obama named union lawyer Richard Griffin and Labor Department official Sharon Block, both Democrats, and a Republican, NLRB lawyer Terence Flynn, to the labor board using his recess powers. He also named Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, using those same powers.
 
Noel Canning, a bottling company, sued the NLRB, arguing that a rule issued by the new board was illegal since the recess appointments were unconstitutional. Senate Republicans, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined in the suit.
 
The appeals court panel, which sits in Washington, D.C., was skeptical of Mr. Obama’s case during oral argument in early December, with Chief Judge David B. Sentelle and Judge Thomas B. Griffith peppering the administration lawyers with questions.
 
The Constitution gives the president the power to nominate judges and executive branch officials, but the Senate must vote to confirm them before they take office. Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president powers “to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate.”
 
Those powers have produced centuries of give-and-take, with senators regularly slow-walking nominees and the White House looking for ways to get its way — including the recess appointment.
 
Mr. Obama’s move, though, appeared to break new ground by acting at a time when the Senate was meeting every third day, specifically to deny him the chance to make appointments.
 
The problem is the word “recess” has several meanings in legislative-speak. It can mean a short break during the day, it can mean a break of days or weeks for a holiday, or it can mean the end of a yearly session.
 
The president argued that even though the Senate was convening every three days, the pro forma sessions didn’t allow any business, and nearly every senator was absent from the chamber, signaling that the Senate wasn’t able to perform its confirmation duties and should be considered essentially in recess.

His opponents had warned that if Mr. Obama’s stance prevailed, then presidents could make appointments when the Senate takes its recess for weekly party caucus lunches.
 
The judges on Friday ruled that the only clear bright line is when the Senate recesses at the end of the year


Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/25/federal-court-obama-broke-law-recess-appointments/?page=2













Title: It's good to be a friend of Buraq
Post by: G M on January 25, 2013, 09:35:25 AM
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2012/08/17/report_obama_cronie_jon_corzine_wont_be_prosecuted_for_losing_billions_in_private_investments

Report: Obama Crony Jon Corzine Won't Be Prosecuted For Losing Billions in Private Investments


 Katie Pavlich
 News Editor, Townhall





Aug 17, 2012 12:10 PM EST
 


 
It's good to be friends with President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, who are friends with Attorney General Eric Holder. Former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine helped dream up and craft the $1 trillion taxpayer funded stimulus program which turned out to be a $1 trillion boondoggle riddled with fraud, waste, abuse and payouts to President Obama's union buddies.
 
FLASHBACK:
 
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=buRO9TSlScQ[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xm3VMrKqJSA[/youtube]


 
 


 
 
Corzine is also the former CEO of MF Global, a now bankrupt company under Congressional and Department of Justice investigation for losing billions in private investments. According to the New York Times, Corzine won't be prosecuted for the loss of those private funds by Holder's DOJ.
 

Federal prosecutors do not expect to file criminal charges against the former New Jersey governor. Mr. Corzine has not yet received assurances that he is free from scrutiny, but two rounds of interviews with former employees and a review of thousands of documents have left prosecutors without a case against him, say the people involved in the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
 
The good news is, Corzine could still face consequences for the loss of funds through the civil side of the legal system.
 

While the government’s findings would remove the darkest cloud looming over Mr. Corzine — the threat of criminal charges — the former Goldman Sachs chief is not yet in the clear. A bankruptcy trustee on Wednesday joined customers’ lawsuits against Mr. Corzine, and regulators are still considering civil enforcement actions, which could cost him millions of dollars or ban him from working on Wall Street.
 
So, without the worry of facing prison, what's Corzine's latest project? He wants to be a hedge fund manager.   


Mr. Corzine, in a bid to rebuild his image and engage his passion for trading, is weighing whether to start a hedge fund, according to people with knowledge of his plans. He is currently trading with his family’s wealth.

 If he is successful as a hedge fund manager, it would be the latest career comeback for a man who was ousted from both the top seat at Goldman Sachs and the New Jersey governor’s mansion.
 
What could possibly go wrong?
Title: Due Process When Everything is a Crime
Post by: G M on February 02, 2013, 12:19:59 PM
Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime

Glenn Harlan Reynolds
University of Tennessee College of Law

January 20, 2013



Abstract:     
Though extensive due process protections apply to the investigation of crimes, and to criminal trials, perhaps the most important part of the criminal process -- the decision whether to charge a defendant, and with what -- is almost entirely discretionary. Given the plethora of criminal laws and regulations in today's society, this due process gap allows prosecutors to charge almost anyone they take a deep interest in. This Essay discusses the problem in the context of recent prosecutorial controversies involving the cases of Aaron Swartz and David Gregory, and offers some suggested remedies, along with a call for further discussion.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 6

Keywords: due process, criminal law, grand jury, plea bargain, overcriminalization, robert jackson, tim wu, harvey silverglate, gene healy

working papers series

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2203713
Title: WAS: Was the AIG rescue legal?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 03, 2013, 10:43:29 AM
Jenkins: Was the AIG Rescue Legal? Never explained is why some were bailed out and some weren't.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
 
AIG is winding up an ad campaign to thank taxpayers for its bailout and note that the rescue returned a profit to the government. That's nice, but we aren't quite ready to wash our hands of the matter.

One reason for dwelling on the AIG bailout is that we may not be done with bailouts. In the next emergency, government is likely to behave arbitrarily in dealing with private parties who come seeking rescues—or whom government feels compelled to rescue against their will. Our accumulation of precedents in this regard rests uneasily in a society built on law, and where trust in law is a precondition for the return of normal business and investment activity.

One lawsuit brought by former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg (who left before the meltdown) was thrown out in November on a technicality, though not before the judge editorialized that government must be free to act in a national crisis. Fine. But that still leaves unanswered questions.

The government wiped out AIG shareholders while using AIG to bail out other companies whose shareholders were not wiped out. Why?

AIG's owners perhaps deserved their fate due to AIG's reckless reliance on rating agencies and bond insurers. But other companies (including many foreign banks) were excused from suffering for their own reckless reliance on AIG. Why?

All the more so because government's profit on the bailout ($22.7 billion) so clearly accrued because taxpayers acquired AIG's assets at fire-sale prices even while sparing other companies similar embarrassment.

GE wasn't required to hand over chunks of shareholder equity in return for government guarantees of its commercial paper. The money-fund industry wasn't required to turn over an 80% stake to Uncle Sam in return for a bailout of the money-fund industry. No exaction was required of Goldman Sachs GS +1.38%and Morgan Stanley MS +3.11%in return for access to the Federal Reserve's lending window.

Maybe a courtroom isn't the right place to explore these choices. Maybe AIG doesn't make a sympathetic plaintiff. But explanations would be nice.

As the world was recently reminded, Mr. Greenberg has another lawsuit pending, which proposes that the AIG rescue was an illicit "taking" under the Constitution. This was the lawsuit AIG itself contemplated joining last month until it was buried in an avalanche of media opprobrium.

Mr. Greenberg's claim seems a tad less fanciful now that the rescue has paid off so handsomely for taxpayers and for AIG counterparties, and so badly for AIG shareholders. AIG shareholders might have been better off had the company filed for bankruptcy rather than submitting to an ad hoc Washington "rescue."

If the nuances here sound familiar, they should. In the Chrysler and General Motors GM +0.28%bankruptcies, government played the role of "debtor-in-possession" financier, then behaved as no DIP financier would, using its leverage to do favors for an important Democratic constituency group, the United Auto Workers, at the expense of debt holders.

The regulator of Fannie Mae FNMA +1.79%and Freddie Mac FMCC +2.11%trumpeted them as solvent and well-capitalized amid the crisis, then gave their boards immunity from shareholder lawsuit in the government takeover that followed a short time later, wiping out their shareholders.

Not directly related to the financial crisis but coming in the same moment of untrammeled government discretion was the BP oil spill. The White House dictated a $20 billion compensation program, funded by BP shareholders, without benefit of any legal process at all.

One might look upon these criticisms the way history does Henry Stimson's insistence that "gentlemen don't read each other's mail"—as the sort of excessive scruple that must be tossed aside in a crisis.

But so much of today's economic frustration arises because all sectors of the economy (except government) are sitting on cash, reluctant to commit to consumption or investment. Microsoft, MSFT +1.75%when it found itself under assault during the 1990s by marauding trustbusters posturing as servants of "the law," kept enough cash on hand to survive a full year without revenues—without a penny coming in. This was a remarkable statement of insecurity in its property and legal rights. Now every company is Microsoft.

There is also a growing consensus that uncertainty about government actions played the biggest part in turning a housing correction into a general panic.

Do we have a solution? No, just a bad feeling. President Obama's second inaugural address wrote a lot of checks—especially about the inviolability of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—that the Fed might be called upon to cash in coming years as the buyer of last resort for U.S. Treasury debt. If so, more disturbances lie ahead, and we may rue the precedent that the rule of law goes out the window just because financial markets are acting up.
Title: Baraq misses budget deadline for fourth time
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 04, 2013, 03:09:57 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politics/2013/feb/4/obama-misses-budget-deadline/
Title: Re: The death of the rule of law
Post by: ccp on February 04, 2013, 07:15:38 PM
Enough is enough.  Our money is our money.

Stop stealing it from us.

Folks we need a crash.  That is the only thing that will wake up enough people.

The f* mass propaganda media will have to address the corruptness of it all. :x
Title: Gangster Govt
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 14, 2013, 08:31:15 AM

http://townhall.com/columnists/michaelbarone/2013/02/14/obamas-gangster-government-operates-above-the-law-n1511638/page/full/

Presidents' State of the Union addresses are delivered in the chamber of the House of Representatives in the Capitol. The classical majesty of this building where laws are made symbolizes the idea that we live under the rule of law. Unfortunately, the 44th president is running an administration that too often seems to ignore the rule of law.

"We can't wait," Barack Obama took to saying after the Republicans captured a majority in the House and refused to pass laws he wanted. He would act to get what he wanted regardless of law.

One example: his recess appointments in January 2012 of three members of the National Labor Relations Board and the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the NLRB recess appointments were unconstitutional.

The decision, written by Judge David Sentelle, noted that the Constitution speaks of "the recess," not "a recess," and reasoned that it could only be referring to the recess between annual sessions of Congress.  Obama, like many presidents before him, interpreted the phrase as referring to any recess during which Congress is not in session. But he went one step further.  When Harry Reid became Senate majority leader in 2007, he started holding pro forma meetings of the Senate every three days and stating that the Senate was not in recess. George W. Bush, who had made recess appointments before, stopped doing so.  Bush took the view that, since the Constitution says that each branch of Congress makes its own rules, the Senate was in session if the Senate said so. Obama took the view that he would decide whether the Senate was in session. Who cares what the Constitution says?

As Sentelle pointed out, Obama's view would entitle the president to make a recess appointment any time the Senate broke for lunch. "This cannot be the law," the judge wrote.
Critics of his decision argue that under it the recess appointment power would be vanishingly small. But under Obama's view, the Senate's power to advise and consent could effectively vanish.

The Framers contemplated that the Congress would take long recesses (as for many years it did) and that it could take months for senators to return to Washington to act on appointments.  It's plausible that the Framers would have considered recess appointments unnecessary in an era of jet travel. It's not plausible that they would have approved of getting rid of the Senate's power to vote on appointments altogether.

Meanwhile, decisions of the NLRB and the CFPB are in legal limbo, pending a Supreme Court decision. Hundreds of thousands of people and are affected and millions of dollars are at stake. There is a price for not observing the rule of law.

There are other examples. For several years, the Obama administration has refused to obey a law requiring the president's budget to be submitted on a certain date. As Budget Director, Treasury nominee Jack Lew refused to obey the law requiring him to issue a report in response to the trustees' report on Medicare.

During the 2012 campaign, the Pentagon told defense contractors not to inform employees that they may be laid off if the sequester took effect as required by the WARN Act.

They were even told that the government would pay any fines for not complying. What law authorizes that?

Similarly, Health and Human Services has stated that the federal government can fund health insurance exchanges run by the feds for states that refuse to create their own exchanges. But nowhere does the Democrats' hastily crafted Obamacare legislation say that.

In spring 2009, we got our first glimmers of this modus operandi. In arranging the Chrysler bankruptcy, administration officials brushed aside the rights of secured creditors in order to pay off the United Auto Workers.  University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel pointed out that this violated the standard rules of bankruptcy law established, interestingly, during the New Deal.

"We have just seen an episode of gangster government," I wrote at the time. "It is likely to be a continuing series."

It looks like that's one prediction I got right. This president, like all his predecessors since Woodrow Wilson started delivering these speeches in person, looks magnificent in the temple where laws are made. But he doesn't seem to consider himself bound by them.
Title: Release the Crackheads!
Post by: G M on February 26, 2013, 04:54:16 PM
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/02/26/barack-obama-pulls-a-move-almost-worthy-of-saddam-hussein/

Barack Obama Pulls a Move Almost Worthy of Saddam Hussein by
Bryan Preston

Bio
February 26, 2013 - 9:34 am     Shortly before U.S. troops stormed Iraq to oust its dictator, Saddam Hussein released thousands of prisoners from Iraqi jails. Some were petty criminals, some were hardcore, some were terrorists. Hussein unleashed them to build his own popularity and to sow chaos.

Today, Barack H. Obama’s Department of Homeland Security is doing this:

The sequester is officially still three days away, but the Obama administration already is making the first cuts, with officials confirming that the Homeland Security Department has begun to release what it deems low-priority illegal immigrants from detention.

The move is proving controversial. Immigrant-rights groups say it shows the administration was detaining folks it never should have gone after in the first place, while Republicans questioned the decision-making.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that runs the detention facilities, said in a statement that the “current fiscal climate” has forced it to do a review of spending, and part of that is taking a look at who is being detained.

“As a result of this review, a number of detained aliens have been released around the country and placed on an appropriate, more cost-effective form of supervised release,” ICE said in a statement.

The cynicism of the move is breathtaking, even for this cynical administration. The “current fiscal climate” is one in which we are spending more than a trillion dollars per year than we take in. The 2009 stimulus spending is locked in. The sequestration threatens just $22 billion this year — and the president gets to choose where to cut. If the sky falls, it’s being brought down on our heads by this unethical rogue president.

So these releases are his choice. And he’s choosing them for pure racial politics and demagoguery. He’ll blame it all on Republicans, while shoring himself up with the amnesty chorus.

More: The president is also threatening to drop our border guard. In a rational age, these acts would be impeachable. Not too many years ago Californians recalled a governor for offering drivers licences to illegal aliens, and here we have a president flagrantly violating his oath to defend the nation.

Title: Compare and contrast
Post by: G M on March 08, 2013, 02:08:27 PM
http://washingtonexaminer.com/dhs-plans-to-release-5000-illegal-immigrants-due-to-sequestration/article/2523295


DHS plans to release 5,000 illegal immigrants due to sequestration

March 5, 2013 | 1:45 pm


Joel Gehrke



House investigators learned Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials developed plans to release about 5,000 illegal immigrant detainees, although Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has denied responsibility for the decision.
 
“An internal document obtained by the House Judiciary Committee shows that Administration officials at ICE prepared cold calculations to release thousands of criminal aliens onto the streets and did not demonstrate any consideration of the impact this decision would have on the safety of Americans,” committee chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., announced.
 
The ICE document contains a table that proposes “reduc[ing] invoiced daily population by 1,000 weekly.” Between February 22 and March 31st, this plan would drop the number of detainees from 30,748 to 25,748.
 
“The decision to release detained aliens undermines the Department of Homeland Security’s mission to keep our homeland secure and instead makes our communities less safe and more vulnerable to crime,” Goodlatte said. “[R]egardless of sequestration, DHS actually has plenty of funding to pay for the detention of criminal aliens.  Unfortunately, it seems Administration officials are more interested in using sequestration to promote their political agenda than as an opportunity to get our nation’s fiscal house in order.”

Napolitano said that it wasn’t her decision, even though ICE is part of DHS. “Detainee populations and how that is managed back and forth is really handled by career officials in the field,” she told ABC.
 
She also confirmed that the releases would continue. “We are going to manage our way through this by identifying the lowest risk detainees, and putting them into some kind of alternative to release,” Napolitano said at a Politico event, per The Daily Caller.
 The New York Times profiled a “low risk” detainee released by ICE. The detainee was taken into custody “when it was discovered that he had violated probation for a conviction in 2005 of simple assault, simple battery and child abuse, charges that sprung from a domestic dispute with his wife at the time.” NRO’s Jim Geraghty asked, “If convictions for ‘simple assault, simple battery and child abuse’ make you ‘low-risk,’ what do you have to do for Janet Napolitano to consider you ‘high-risk’?”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/03/05/obama-admin-wants-to-deport-christian-homeschoolers/

Obama Admin Wants to Deport Christian Homeschoolers



By: Todd Starnes 
3/5/2013 03:01 PM




The Romeike family fled their German homeland in 2008 seeking political asylum in the United States – where they hoped to home school their children. Instead, the Obama administration wants the evangelical Christian family deported.
 
The fate of Uwe and Hannelore Romeikie – along with their six children – now rests with the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – after the Dept. of Homeland Security said they don’t deserve asylum.
 
Neither the Justice Dept. nor the Dept. of Homeland Security returned calls seeking comment.
 
“The Obama administration is basically saying there is no right to home school anywhere,” said Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association. “It’s an utter repudiation of parental liberty and religious liberty.”
 
The Justice Dept. is arguing that German law banning home schooling does not violate the family’s human rights.
 
“They are trying to send a family back to Germany where they would certainly lose custody of their children,” Farris told Fox News. “Our government is siding with Germany.”
 
Farris said the Germans ban home schools because “they don’t want to have religious and philosophical minorities in their country.”
 
“That means they don’t want to have significant numbers of people who think differently than what the government thinks,” he said. “It’s an incredibly dangerous assertion that people can’t think in a way that the government doesn’t approve of.”
 
He said the Justice Dept. is backing that kind of thinking and arguing ‘it is not a human rights violation.”
 
Farris said he finds great irony that the Obama administration is releasing thousands of illegal aliens – yet wants to send a family seeking political asylum back to Germany.
 
“Eleven million people are going to be allowed to stay freely – but this one family is going to be shipped back to Germany to be persecuted,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
 
The fear of persecution is why an immigration judge granted the family political asylum in 2010.
 
German authorities demanded the family stop home schooling. They faced thousands of dollars in fines and they initially took away their children in a police van.
 
German state constitutions require children attend public schools. Parents who don’t comply face punishment ranging from fines to prison time. The nation’s highest appellate court ruled in 2007 that in some cases children could be removed from their parents’ care.
 
“Families that want to have an alternative education can’t get it in Germany,” Farris said. “Even the private schools have to teach public school curriculum.”
 
After authorities threatened to remove permanent custody from the Christian couple – they decided to move to the United States.
 
Uwe, a classically-trained pianist, relocated their brood to a small farm in the shadow of the Smokey Mountains in eastern Tennessee.
 “We are very happy here to be able to freely follow our conscience and to home school our children,” he told Fox News. “Where we live in Tennessee is very much like where we lived in Germany.”
 
Uwe said he was extremely disappointed that their petition to seek asylum was appealed by the Obama administration.
 
“If we go back to Germany we know that we would be prosecuted and it is very likely the Social Services authorities would take our children from us,” he said.
 
Uwe said German schools were teaching children to disrespect authority figures and used graphic words to describe sexual relations. He said the state believed children must be “socialized.”
 
“The German schools teach against our Christian values,” he said. “Our children know that we home school following our convictions and that we are in God’s hands. They understand that we are doing this for their best – and they love the life we are living in America on our small farm.”
 
Farris said Americans should be outraged over the way the Obama administration has treated the Romeike family – and warned it could have repercussions for families that home school in this nation.
 
“The right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children has been at the pinnacle of human rights,” he said. “But not in this country.”
 
Todd Starnes is the host of Fox News & Commentary, heard daily on more than 250 radio stations. He’s also the author of “Dispatches From Bitter America.” His website is www.toddstarnes.com
Title: Re: The death of the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2013, 07:15:44 PM
 :cry: :cry: :x
Title: You might remember this name....
Post by: G M on May 14, 2013, 05:22:12 PM
IRS official Lerner speedily approved exemption for Obama brother’s ‘charity’
 
5:06 PM 05/14/2013

Charles C. Johnson

Lois Lerner, the senior IRS official at the center of the decision to target tea party groups for burdensome tax scrutiny, signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.
 
According to the organization’s filings, Lerner approved the foundation’s tax status within a month of filing, an unprecedented timeline that stands in stark contrast to conservative organizations that have been waiting for more than three years, in some cases, for approval.
 
Lerner also appears to have broken with the norms of tax-exemption approval by granting retroactive tax-exempt status to Malik Obama’s organization.
 
The National Legal and Policy Center filed an official complaint with the IRS in May 2011 asking why the foundation was being allowed to solicit tax-deductible contributions when it had not even applied for an IRS determination. In a New York Post article dated May 8, 2011, an officer of the foundation admitted, “We haven’t been able to find someone with the expertise” to apply for tax-exempt status.
 
Nevertheless, a month later, the Barack H. Obama Foundation had flown through the grueling application process. Lerner granted the organization a 501(c) determination and even gave it a retroactive tax exemption dating back to December 2008.
 
The group’s available paperwork suggests an extremely hurried application and approval process. For example, the group’s 990 filings for 2008 and 2009 were submitted to the IRS on May 30, 2011, and its 2010 filing was submitted on May 23, 2011.
 
Lerner signed the group’s approval [pdf] on June 26, 2011.
 
It is illegal to operate for longer than 27 months without an IRS determination and solicit tax-deductible contributions.
 

The ostensibly Arlington, Va.-based charity was not even registered in Virginia despite the foundation’s website including a donation button that claimed tax-exempt status.
 
Its president and founder, Abon’go “Roy’ Malik Obama, is Barack Obama’s half-brother and was the best man at his wedding, but he has a checkered past. In addition to running his charity, Malik Obama ran unsuccessfully to be the governor of Siaya County in Kenya. He was accused of being a wife beater and seducing the newest of his twelve wives while she was a 17-year-old school girl.
 
Sensing something wrong when he and a group of Missouri State students visited Kenyan in 2009, Ken Rutherford, winner of the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on banning landmines, determined that Malik Obama was an “operator” and elected to give a donation of 400 pounds of medical supplies to a local clinic instead.
 
“We didn’t know what he was going to do with them,” Rutherford told the New York Post in 2011.


Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/14/irs-official-lerner-approved-exemption-for-obama-brothers-charity/
Title: Immigration law may be broken but you don't fix it by rewarding law breakers.
Post by: G M on May 15, 2013, 02:32:21 PM
http://pjmedia.com/blog/immigrating-to-america-is-not-an-entitlement/?singlepage=true

Immigrating to America Is Not an Entitlement

Immigration law may be broken but you don't fix it by rewarding law breakers.



by
Ying Ma


As the drumbeat for comprehensive immigration reform grows louder, the related public debate has not become any more edifying.  Self-serving Democrats, delusional Republicans, and shameless illegal aliens (who prefer to call themselves “immigration rights activists”) insist that legalizing some 11 million illegal immigrants in this country is the right thing to do and label those who disagree as anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic.
 

Amid the finger pointing and political intimidation, some fundamentally flawed assertions have repeatedly surfaced. Below is some common sense that highlights the absurdity of the faulty assumptions.
 

Immigrating to the United States is a privilege, not a right. It certainly is not an entitlement program.
 
 
 
Proponents of comprehensive immigration reform like to emphasize that America’s immigration system is broken, and they are right. Yet they often justify illegal immigration by pointing out that even if aspiring immigrants wanted to get in line for legal immigration, many do not have a line to get into — because they do not have relatives in this country with whom to reunite or they cannot qualify for a limited number of visa categories (such as those for work, education, or investment).
 

Few acknowledge that in life, reality is by nature more unpleasant than our most fervent wishes. Just because people really, really want to come to the United States does not mean they have the right to do so.
 

By numerous measures, America’s tax system is broken as well, and supporters of limited government resent the fact that their tax dollars are extracted to fund a bloated welfare state they despise. Nevertheless, these individuals continue to pay their taxes. Similarly, those who wish to move to America should not be excused from respecting this country’s laws.
 

Certainly, changes to the existing system should be made. For instance, proposals to increase the flow of high-skilled labor make perfect sense. But America’s broken immigration system is not a justification for illegals to walk across the border or overstay their visas.
 

Do not let anyone obfuscate the difference between legal and illegal immigration. Denouncing the latter does not mean being hostile to the former.
 

This country has a legal immigration process in place. It is by no means perfect and imposes cumbersome restrictions. Nevertheless, that process is the law of the land. Numerous individuals from around the world follow it out of respect for the rule of law and for the country they wish to adopt as their new home. They make huge sacrifices, incur heavy financial costs, and wait patiently. Husbands are separated from their wives for years; siblings wait over a decade to be reunited; and high-skilled laborers whose visas are not renewed end up returning to their home countries. Reform efforts to ease the restrictions for these legal applicants are sensible, but amnesty for those who have violated U.S. immigration laws not only rewards bad behavior; it dishonors and dismisses the persistence and sacrifice of legal immigrants.
 

No matter how politicians spin it, offering provisional legal status to illegals is rewarding them with amnesty.
 
 
 
The right to live and work in the United States is a precious commodity. It is also precisely what the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Eight proposes to offer to illegal aliens who are already here. Although these individuals must wait ten years to apply for a green card and 13 to apply for citizenship, they would be eligible for provisional legal status almost immediately.
 

To be sure, these illegal immigrants would have to pay a fine, pay taxes, and not have a serious criminal record before they qualify for provisional legal status, but these conditions hardly amount to a stiff punishment for lawbreaking behavior. In fact, they form the baseline of what America demands from immigrants who seek to enter this country legally.
 

More importantly, legal status in America — even if short of a green card or citizenship — is a status coveted by millions around the world. Impoverished men and women in sub-Saharan Africa, unemployed or under-employed college graduates in China or India, political and religious dissidents who are persecuted by authoritarian governments from Tehran to Moscow, or even scientists from Canada or Europe would gladly accept provisional legal status TODAY if it were offered to them. Numerous legal immigration applicants who are currently standing in line would do the same, especially since many have waited and will continue to wait for years.
 

But it is America’s existing illegal immigrants who will receive preference for the right to live and work in the United States.
 
 
 
Offering a pathway to citizenship to illegal aliens who arrived in America when they were young only strengthens the incentives for more illegal immigration.
 

Republicans and Democrats have been falling all over themselves to offer a pathway to citizenship to young illegal immigrants who are known as Dreamers. According to President Barack Obama, these are “young Americans in all but name.” Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has written that these are “children who were brought here illegally have committed no crime and in most instances know no other country.” Thanks to Obama, these young illegals have now received a two-year reprieve and a chance to apply for work permits, assuming they have no criminal records, are successful in school, or have served in the military. The Senate’s Gang of Eight has proposed offering Dreamers a fast track to citizenship, which begins with a five-year path to a green card.
 

Before politicians on both sides of the aisle gush about their effort to create new Americans, let’s not forget that in the immigration experience, children are not just innocent bystanders of an illegal act. Rather, they are often the primary reason for a family to leave one life to seek another in a foreign land. They are the impetus for adults to work at sub-minimum-wage jobs and the reward for a family’s hard work and shared sacrifice. It is for their brighter future that immigrants — both legal and illegal — fight. By rushing to give them amnesty, Congress would be strengthening, not weakening, the incentives for illegal immigration.
 

Moreover, the absurdity of this mad rush to amnesty would only be compounded by the even more absurd minimal requirement that such young illegals have attended school and will continue to do so. Getting an education in America, just like living and working here, is a privilege sought by millions around the world. Unlike joining the military, going to school is not a sacrifice that requires fighting and dying for America. It is not even a social service that young illegals have somehow provided for their adopted home and for which they now deserve a reward.
 

If the U.S. immigration policy is meant to be a vehicle of American altruism, there are more qualified recipients than the citizens of Mexico.
 

Amnesty proponents like to harp on the heart-wrenching personal stories of illegal immigrants who leave destitution and desperation in their home country to seek a new life in America. Some have even suggested that rejecting such immigrants would be un-American. If poverty and tragedy were to serve as the core criteria for which America should expand its legal immigration flow (and this is a debate policymakers need to have), there are many more individuals around the world who would be more deserving of legal status in America than many of those who are currently here illegally.
 

At the moment, a majority of the illegal immigrants in America are Hispanic and most of them hail from Mexico. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, unauthorized immigrants from Mexico made up 58 percent of America’s illegal immigrant population in 2010. Yet however touching their stories or however painful their journeys, illegal immigrants from Mexico are not the only ones who harbor aspirations for a life in America; they are not even most in need of it.
 

While the World Bank reports gross national income (GNI) per capita for the world’s least developed countries (such as Myanmar, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Tanzania) as $748 in 2011, the GNI per capita for Latin America and Caribbean countries was $8,575 for the same year. It is to this latter, richer set of countries that Mexico belongs. If charity were a key goal of U.S. immigration policy, why not expand immigration privileges to citizens of the world’s poorest countries (including some that are south of the border)? Citizens from these countries lack the ability to just walk across America’s southern border, but their plight is in many ways far more wretched. No doubt they would gladly immigrate to the United States for provisional legal status and work hard for the American Dream.
 

The media has now taken to raving regularly about illegal Hispanic high school students who earn 4.0 plus GPAs, but does a boy suffering from starvation in Senegal or a girl suffering from malnutrition in Uganda deserve less of Americans’ sympathy or less of a chance to have a home and an education in the United States? Certainly, Americans do not believe that such children are any less capable of earning a 4.0 GPA.
 

Just because you’re illegal does not make you inhuman, but it does mean that you are a lawbreaker who should face the risk of deportation.
 

Americans do not have the heart or the resources to deport all 11 million plus illegal immigrants who live in this country, especially since almost two-thirds of them have lived here for over a decade and nearly half are parents of minor children. But reasonable Americans have the right to ask why their government has failed to enforce immigration laws in decades past and why it now continues that failure by refusing to arrest and deport those who flagrantly flaunt their illegal status in public.
 

Already, the Obama administration prohibits Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, under most circumstances, from carrying out two crucial elements of the country’s immigration laws: 1) apprehending persons solely for entering the United States illegally, and 2) apprehending persons for overstaying their visas in the United States. As such, illegal immigrants in America not only receive de facto amnesty, they proudly call themselves “immigration rights activists” and grant interviews to the New York Times, testify before Congress, openly protest on the streets, and otherwise brazenly spit in the face of America’s rule of law — and face no legal consequences. It is no surprise that America’s immigration system is broken and continues to provide incentives for more illegal immigration.
Title: IBD: Did IRS try to swing the election to BO?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2013, 06:59:18 AM
Investor’s Business Daily: "Did The IRS Try To Swing Election To Obama?
"It looks like a concerted effort to hobble Obama's political foes. . . As details of the IRS scandal emerge, it's increasingly giving the appearance of a wide-scale effort to tilt the playing field against conservative activist groups who might have been helpful to Republican candidates in the 2012 election, while at the same time coddling liberal groups helpful to Obama.
"In the end, the IRS managed to put its thumb on the political scale by squelching political activity on the right — some groups report curtailing get-out-the-vote efforts, spending piles of money on legal fees or disbanding altogether in the face of IRS inquisitions.
"All of it happened during a close and hotly contested presidential election where such mischievousness could make a real difference.
Does any of this sound like it’s the result of a random bureaucratic snafu or the work of a couple of 'rogue agents'?"
Title: Re: IBD: Did IRS try to swing the election to BO?
Post by: DougMacG on May 16, 2013, 09:13:35 AM
Obama is stuck on saying how awful this IRS thing is - IF it happened.  It happened.  And it IS awful.  What have they ever gotten to the bottom of, fast and furious, job losses, crony green energy abuse, Benghazi, AP, IRS?  How hard can it be to get to the bottom of something when you have the largest intelligence operation in the world (for Benghazi, Mexican arms running, Secret Service scandal, etc.), the largest, most intrusive computer system in the world (IRS scandal), and nearly complete control over everything including their phone records, emails and texts needed to get to the bottom of this.

In the case of IRS abuse, the federal government is the prosecutor (as well as the accused).  The prosecutor doesn't need to get stuck on innocent until proven guilty; they need to put the charges in the form of a criminal complaint, make arrests and prosecute crimes.  Generally that leads to plea bargains on the way up to the top. 

How about appointing an Independent Counsel to investigate and prosecute if he is serious?

When did the administration know that the victims were being victimized?  They monitor the right wing sites, they should have known all of this AS IT WAS HAPPENING!  The claim by the head of the executive branch that everyone near him is deaf, dumb, blind and stupid, is tempting to believe - but I don't buy it.  If these were left wing women were being harassed by powerful, white, right wing men, would this have been ignored for this long?  I don't think so.

Whoever called these people, who are professionals of the federal government entrusted with the power to investigate and destroy America, LOW LEVEL EMPLOYEES should be fired too!  MHO
Title: Re: The death of the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2013, 09:23:30 AM
At present, Baraq is have Sec Treasury Lieu (sp?) handle the investigation.  In that IRS is part of Treasury, this bodes poorly for sincerity in the investigation.  A special prosecutor is called for here.
Title: Obama co-chair attacked Romney with leaked IRS docs; more , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2013, 09:28:03 AM
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/irs-face-lawsuit-over-theft-60-million-patient-health-records

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/05/14/Obama-campaign-co-chair-attacked-Romney-conservative-group-in-2012-with-leaked-IRS-scandal-documents

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/irs-obama-tea-party/2013/05/14/id/504419

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325068/Documents-IRS-letters-harassing-conservative-groups-came-Washington-DC-headquarters-California-offices-despite-Inspector-Generals-focus-Cincinnati-employees.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-15/irs-delay-in-disclosing-groups-scrutiny-focus-of-probes.html

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/election/2013/05/15/irs-gave-liberal-groups-a-pass-as-it-targeted-conservatives-report/?mod=WSJBlog&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/348441/director-irs-tax-exempt-determinations-office-obama-donor-eliana-johnson



Title: Re: The death of the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on May 16, 2013, 09:42:51 AM
At present, Baraq is have Sec Treasury Lieu (sp?) handle the investigation.  In that IRS is part of Treasury, this bodes poorly for sincerity in the investigation.  A special prosecutor is called for here.

Exactly.  Sec. Lew should be facing his own perjury and contempt of congress charges for the last time he lied to congress under oath, instead receiving appointment to higher office.

I realize he is new to Treasury, but he is not new to serving at the highest levels of the administration.  This happened under his watch and we just saw how they change facts at the highest levels to avoid criticism.  Wasn't Lew the Chief of Staff when Susan Rice was looking for direction?  Neither Lew nor Eric Holder, nor any other administration political appointee is removed or impartial enough to investigate or prosecute this.  

"A special prosecutor is called for here." !!
------------------------------------------------

Also needed is reform and re-write of the 501c3/c4 laws they purport to be enforcing.  
Title: Peggy Noonan lets rip
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2013, 09:12:41 PM
WSJ
This Is No Ordinary Scandal
Political abuse of the IRS threatens the basic integrity of our government.
 By PEGGY NOONAN
 
We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don't look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone.

Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.

As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.

The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.  But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.

A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is to too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.

The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists.

In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the second amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook FB -1.77% posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution.

The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare." Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited.

All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit.

It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved. Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting.

The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so high-handed, so essentially ignorant, that they didn't understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein's cellphone number.

And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder doesn't know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant at only one thing: that he's being questioned at all. That he has to address this. That fate put it on his plate.

We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the government's life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business.

But that bias does not fit these circumstances.
Peggy Noonan's Blog

Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.

What happened at the IRS is the government's essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position's powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don't, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn't stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again.

And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It's not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function.
Title: WSJ Strassel: The IRS Scandal started at the top
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2013, 09:29:50 PM
Was the White House involved in the IRS's targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that's not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

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Getty Images

At the White House, President Obama addresses the IRS scandal, May 15.

Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other donors were described as having been "on the wrong side of the law."

This was the Obama version of the phone call—put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land.

Twelve days later, a man working for a political opposition-research firm called an Idaho courthouse for Mr. VanderSloot's divorce records. In June, the IRS informed Mr. VanderSloot and his wife of an audit of two years of their taxes. In July, the Department of Labor informed him of an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny.

The last of these audits was only concluded in recent weeks. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But Mr. VanderSloot has been waiting more than 20 months for a sizable refund and estimates his legal bills are $80,000. That figure doesn't account for what the president's vilification has done to his business and reputation.

The Obama call for scrutiny wasn't a mistake; it was the president's strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as "less than reputable" to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. The president didn't need a telephone; he had a megaphone.

The same threat was made to conservative groups that might dare play in the election. As early as January 2010, Mr. Obama would, in his state of the union address, cast aspersions on the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, claiming that it "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests" (read conservative groups).

The president derided "tea baggers." Vice President Joe Biden compared them to "terrorists." In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. "Nobody knows who's paying for these ads," he warned. "We don't know where this money is coming from," he intoned.

In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: "All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."

Short of directly asking federal agencies to investigate these groups, this is as close as it gets. Especially as top congressional Democrats were putting in their own versions of phone calls, sending letters to the IRS that accused it of having "failed to address" the "problem" of groups that were "improperly engaged" in campaigns. Because guess who controls that "independent" agency's budget?

The IRS is easy to demonize, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It got its heading from a president, and his party, who did in fact send it orders—openly, for the world to see. In his Tuesday press grilling, no question agitated White House Press Secretary Jay Carney more than the one that got to the heart of the matter: Given the president's "animosity" toward Citizens United, might he have "appreciated or wanted the IRS to be looking and scrutinizing those . . ." Mr. Carney cut off the reporter with "That's a preposterous assertion."

Preposterous because, according to Mr. Obama, he is "outraged" and "angry" that the IRS looked into the very groups and individuals that he spent years claiming were shady, undemocratic, even lawbreaking. After all, he expects the IRS to "operate with absolute integrity." Even when he does not.

Write to kim@wsj.com.
Title: WSJ: Baraq rebuked by courts over non-recess appointments again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2013, 08:07:04 AM
Normally the following might belong in the Legal Issues thread or something like that.  Given the overall gestalt of things however I'm thinking it belongs here:
========================

President Obama's non-recess recess appointments got another legal rebuke Thursday, when the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that another of his NLRB appointments violated the Constitution and left the board without a quorum.

In a 2-1 decision, Judge D. Brooks Smith ruled in National Labor Relations Board v. New Vista Nursing and Rehabilitation that Mr. Obama's recess appointment of Craig Becker in March 2010 was illegal because the Senate was not between sessions. To allow such appointees, Judge Smith wrote, "would eviscerate the divided-powers framework the two Appointments Clauses establish.

"If the Senate refused to confirm a president's nominees, then the president could circumvent the Senate's constitutional role simply by waiting until senators go home for the evening. The exception of the Recess Appointments Clause would swallow the rule of the Appointments Clause."

The decision is significant because the Third Circuit panel adopted the reasoning of the D.C. Circuit in January's Noel Canning decision. But the implications go further. Mr. Becker's term began earlier than the other recess appointees, thus invalidating hundreds of other decisions that the labor board made without a legal quorum. The number of NLRB decisions jeopardized by the three illegal recess appointments now stand at some 1,200. Yet the Obama NLRB keeps issuing rulings as if it operates in its own legal universe.

And still our media friends wonder how the Justice Department could possibly send out those overbroad subpoenas to AP or the IRS could punish conservative political groups.
Title: Annoyed at being scooped?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2013, 10:13:51 AM
second post


Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty
May 17, 2013

Mass Seizure of Reporters' Phone Records . . . Over a Grudge about Story-Release Timing?

The Washington Post reports that the administration's explanation for the AP phone-record snooping may not be accurate:

For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled al-Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day.

The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.

AP balked and proceeded to publish that Monday afternoon. Its May 2012 report is now at the center of a controversial and broad seizure of phone records of AP reporters' home, office and cellphone lines. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the unauthorized disclosure about an intelligence operation to stop al-Qaeda from detonating explosives aboard a U.S. airliner was among the most serious leaks he could remember, and justified secretly obtaining records from a handful of reporters and editors over a span of two months.

Now, some members of Congress and media advocates are questioning why the administration viewed the leak that led to the May 7 AP story as so grave.

The president's top counterterrorism adviser at the time, John O. Brennan, had appeared on "Good Morning America" the following day to trumpet the successful operation. He said that because of the work of U.S. intelligence, the plot did not pose an active threat to the American public.

Holder said this week that the unauthorized disclosure "put the American people at risk."

Bryan Preston: "Get that? The administration wanted to own the story, and wanted AP to hold off publishing until Obama et al could announce it themselves."
Doug Mataconis: "Even if this leak didn't compromise national security, the fact that there's someone in the government leaking information like this raises the possibility that they'd leak something damages in the future. At the same time, however, it seems fairly clear that the claim that this leak was among the most damaging in American history simply doesn't add up. If that's the case, then why would the CIA have told the AP that the national security concerns it had previously expressed were 'no longer an issue?'"


That sound you heard was the "national security" justification going POOF! The AP dutifully held back on reporting the story in order to protect national security and the Obama administration screwed them anyway. The AP reported the story only after it was made clear that the information wasn't sensitive anymore. The information was going to be used for PR purposes by the Obama administration and the AP essentially stole their thunder.
Stealing the Obama administration's thunder is now grounds for secret subpoenas on the press.
Title: DOJ spied on FOX reporter; IRS smoking gun?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2013, 01:57:52 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/19/by-badge-phone-email-heres-how-obamas-doj-snooped-on-top-fox-news-reporter/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/20/is-this-the-smoking-gun-that-ties-the-irs-scandal-to-the-white-house/
Title: Re: DOJ spied on FOX reporter; IRS smoking gun?
Post by: G M on May 20, 2013, 04:13:51 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/19/by-badge-phone-email-heres-how-obamas-doj-snooped-on-top-fox-news-reporter/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/20/is-this-the-smoking-gun-that-ties-the-irs-scandal-to-the-white-house/

Glad the FBI was focused on this and not the Tsarnaev brothers ....
Title: WSJ: A Journalist co-sonspirator
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2013, 06:23:54 PM
A Journalist 'Co-Conspirator'
The feds accuse a Fox reporter of criminal behavior for doing his job.


Ok, we've learned our lesson. Last week we tried to give the Obama Administration the benefit of the doubt over its far-reaching secret subpoenas to the Associated Press, and now we learn that was the least of its offenses against a free press. No attempt to be generous to this crowd goes unpunished.

The latest news, disclosed by the Washington Post on Monday, is that the Justice Department targeted a Fox News reporter as a potential "co-conspirator" in a leak probe. The feds have charged intelligence analyst Stephen Jin-Woo Kim with disclosing classified information to Fox reporter James Rosen. That's not a surprise considering that this Administration has prosecuted more national-security cases than any in recent history.

The shock is that as part of its probe the Administration sought and obtained a warrant to search Mr. Rosen's personal email account. And it justified such a sweeping secret search by telling the judge that Mr. Rosen was part of the conspiracy merely because he acted like a journalist.

In a May 2010 affidavit in support of obtaining the Gmail search warrant, FBI agent Reginald Reyes declared that "there is probable cause to believe that the Reporter has committed or is committing a violation" of the Espionage Act of 1917 "as an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator." The Reporter here is Mr. Rosen.

And what evidence is there to believe that Mr. Rosen is part of a spy ring? Well, declares Mr. Reyes, the reporter published a story in June 2009 saying that the U.S. knew that North Korea planned to respond to looming U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test. That U.S. knowledge was classified. But the feds almost never prosecute a journalist for disclosing classified information, not least because reporters can't be sure what's classified and what isn't.

We can recall only a single such prosecution of a journalist under the Espionage Act in 95 years. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who isn't a journalist, published far more damaging leaks but has never been indicted for it.

To add to his cloak-and-dagger hype, Mr. Reyes also makes much of the fact that Mr. Rosen used an alias, "Alex," while his alleged source Mr. Kim used the alias, "Leo." Believe it or not, Mr. Rosen also disclosed in one email that he is interested in "breaking news ahead of my competitors." And he even went so far as to urge "Leo" to help him "expose muddle-headed policy when we see it—or force the administration's hand to go in the right direction, if possible."

On the evidence of five years in office that isn't possible, but trying isn't a criminal motive. And if working with a source who uses an alias is now a crime, we've come a long way from the celebration of Bob Woodward and "Deep Throat."

The best face on these accusations is that Mr. Reyes was playing up the conspiracy angle to get the judge to approve a more sweeping search, which he did. The feds were then able to read widely in Mr. Rosen's personal email account, and thus potentially use it against him.

As with the AP subpoenas, this search is overbroad and has a potentially chilling effect on reporters. The chilling is even worse in this case because Mr. Rosen's personal communications were subject to search for what appears to be an extended period of time. At least in the AP case, the subpoena was for past phone logs during a defined period. The message is that anyone who publishes a story the Administration dislikes can be targeted for email searches that could expose personal secrets.

Mr. Reyes is far exceeding his brief here, but the larger fault lies with higher-ups. U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen, who is conducting the AP and Kim leak investigations, clearly has little regard for normal Justice standards and protocol for dealing with the media. Such a sweeping probe should also have been approved by senior Justice officials, at least by the Deputy Attorney General.

With the Fox News search following the AP subpoenas, we now have evidence of a pattern of anti-media behavior. The suspicion has to be that maybe these "leak" investigations are less about deterring leakers and more about intimidating the press. We trust our liberal friends in the press corps won't mute their dismay merely because this time the target is a network they love to hate.
Title: Posse Comitatus overruled by Pentagon?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2013, 04:48:31 AM
The reliability of this source is unknown to me, but I have seen this mentioned in a couple of other places as well.

===============================

May 20th, 2013
SHTFplan.com

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 was  originally established to protect
American citizens from the federal use of  military troops to enforce and
execute the laws of the land unless expressly  authorized by the Constitution or 
Congress. Since then, for over a  century, this task has fallen upon local
and federal law enforcement. But with  the War on Terror taking center stage
in the United States for the last decade,  elements within the government
have been working tirelessly to expand the  mission of the US military on the
domestic front.

First, they passed the Patriot Act, which gave the government sweeping  new
powers to categorize any individual as a terrorist, whether they are 
operating on foreign lands or here at home. In 2011, as America brought in the 
New Year, they signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act, which 
made it possible for American citizens who were categorized as domestic 
terrorists under the Patriot Act to be detained and imprisoned indefinitely 
without charge or trial.

Finally, last week we learned that, as President Obama came under fire  for
the many scandals rocking his administration, the government was quietly 
moving to give the Department of Defense unprecedented authority on U.S.
soil,  effectively nullifying Posse Comitatus.

Eric Blair of Activist Post writes:

First, the senate is debating an expansion of the already broad powers  of
the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) so the U.S. can 
essentially engage any area in the world in the war on terror, including  America.
Which brings us to the second development: the Pentagon has recently 
granted itself police powers on American soil.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Sheehan told Congress yesterday 
that the AUMF authorized the US military to operate on a worldwide battlefield 
from Boston to Pakistan.  Sheehan emphasized that the Administration is 
authorized to put boots on the ground wherever the enemy chooses to base 
themselves, essentially ignoring the declaration of war clause in the US 
Constitution.

While Americans were distracted with three developing scandals pushed  by
both wings of the mainstream media, sinister developments were taking place 
behind closed doors. In essence, the US military has granted itself the
power to  deploy troops on the streets of America without approval from the
President or  Congress, and the AUMF, which was originally designed to target
the terrorists  responsible for 9/11, has been expanded to give the government
authority to use  military assets on the domestic front without a
declaration from Congress.

Charlie McGrath of Wide Awake News explains:

Thanks to the hard work of Eric Blair at Activist Post we understand  that
Washington D.C. has been very busy eroding your freedom.

In fact, Senator Angus King went so far as to say that the hearing he  was
involved in was the most astonishing and disturbing hearing he has ever 
seen.

Even John McCain, war hawk John McCain, came out and said the  government
has gone way beyond its authority.

What are they talking about? The AUMF – Authorization to Use Military 
Force.

This piece of legislation that was put into place way back when we  started
the war on terror that is now turning from foreign enemies to YOU. Don’t 
be shocked by that, because you are on the list if you are a freedom minded, 
free thinker that believes in a Constitutional Republic.

They are changing the wording of this thing so that the military can be 
used on the streets of this country.
It’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s not  some kind of a fancy fantasy that
may come true down the road.
It is  happening right now, in the guise of other news events that are not
news  events.

Even more terrifying is the fact that West Point has come out recently  and
said that you – if you have a theory that the federal government is trying 
to take over and implement a national police force – you could fall into
the  category of a domestic terrorist.

A domestic terrorist that can be dealt with by military force…

The only conspiracy here is what the government is telling us.

This legislation is real. The militarization of America is in full  force.
We are the targets.

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/its-not-a-conspiracy-theory-it-is-happ
ening-right-now_05202013
*****
Title: IRS messed with group fighting vote fraud too
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2013, 05:02:03 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/may/20/group-fighting-voter-fraud-among-those-waiting-on-/
Group fighting voter fraud among those waiting on IRS; reams of documents still not enough
By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
Monday, May 20, 2013


A Texas group dedicated to combatting voter fraud applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and has suffered three years of delays, been through four different IRS agents, undergone six FBI inquiries and submitted thousands of pages of documentation — and its still hasn’t been approved.

True the Vote is just one of the dozens of groups caught up in the IRS plan to give extra scrutiny to conservative groups in the 2010 and 2012 elections.

SEE RELATED: Carney: White House aides insulated Obama from IRS scandal

As Congress delves into the question of whether the burgeoning scandal was bureaucratic malfeasance, as the IRS now acknowledges, or a more sinister political witch hunt, as some Republicans believe, True the Vote’s experience is poking holes in the IRS‘ version of events, and lending credence to the nefarious explanations.

In one example, the IRS asked other Texas-based tea party groups what their relationship was with True the Vote — a fishing expedition that group President Catherine Engelbrecht didn’t learn about until the IRS scandal burst onto front pages.

“It suggests that they are trying to construct some kind of web in which to trap groups that they believe are somehow working together,” Ms. Engelbrecht said.

Enlarge Photo

The IRS‘ inspector general released a report last week that found the IRS targeted conservative groups for added scrutiny beginning in 2010, looking particularly at those that used “tea party,” “patriot” or “9/12” in their names.

The IRS acknowledges asking inappropriate questions but bristles at other charges. Acting Commissioner Steven Miller said the agency was trying to weed out groups engaging in political activity in violation of tax laws. He said the scrutiny was enhanced because of a surge of new groups after the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case.

The IRS also said that the actions were taken by employees in an Ohio office, and that the agency has been taking steps to curtail inappropriate information requests in 2011.

But most of those claims appear to be untrue, based on the experience of True the Vote and other groups subjected to extra scrutiny.

Both Ms. Engelbrecht and True the Vote’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, said they had conversations with IRS agents who indicated that the files were being scrutinized in Washington, not in the Cincinnati office blamed by the IRS.

“More than one agent in Cincinnati has advised me that his/her instructions regarding the processing of my ‘tea party’ related organization client(s) were coming from the Washington, D.C., office,” Ms. Mitchell said in a letter to the IRS earlier this month.

And the probing letters continued well after the time the IRS said it began curtailing them, with the most recent inquiries to True the Vote coming in November and again in March.

Conservative target

True the Vote stemmed from Ms. Engelbrecht’s experience in the 2008 and 2009 elections, when she said she worked the polls and saw everything from administrative dysfunction to situations that looked like they could lead to fraud.

In July 2010, she and other supporters formed King Street Patriots under the tax code’s section 501(c )(4), which allows groups to do some politicking as long as it’s not their primary purpose.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 21, 2013, 04:56:11 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/20/washington-times-writer-fox-news-scandal-goes-much-deeper-w-h-sitting-on-something-top-obama-aides-terrified-about/

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/20/doj-reportedly-snooped-on-two-additional-fox-employees/
Title: Sharyl Atkinson´s computers compromised!!!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 23, 2013, 08:16:16 PM

Investigative Reporter Sharyl Attkisson's Computers 'Compromised'*
(http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/05/21/investigative-reporter-sharyl-attkissons-computer-compromised-n1602448)

Katie Pavlich | May 21, 2013
 


CBS Investigative Reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who has been at the forefront of the
Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals, has revealed to POLITICO that her personal
and work computers have been compromised.

   
---Quote---
"I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation
on my end for some months but I'm not prepared to make an allegation against a
specific entity today as I've been patient and methodical about this matter,"
Attkisson told POLITICO on Tuesday. "I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get
their recommendations on info we make public."

    In an earlier interview with WPHT Philadelphia, Attkisson said that though she
did not know the full details of the intrustion, "there could be some
relationship between these things and what's happened to James [Rosen]," the Fox
News reporter who became the subject of a Justice Dept. investigation after
reporting on CIA intelligence about North Korea in 2009.
---End Quote---
Remember when Attkisson was screamed and yelled at by DOJ and White House officials
for inquiring about Operation Fast and Furious? I do.

 Investigative reporter says WH official cussed at her over ATF scandal
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uS1t87pRix0#!)

Yesterday we found out that Fox News Reporters James Rosen, William LaJeunesse and a
producer were secretly monitored by the Department of Justice. Rosen's personal and
work emails and phone calls were monitored in addition to his movement. In an
affidavit filed by the FBI against Rosen, Rosen was named as a "co-conspirator" and
treated as a criminal for gathering the news. LaJeunesse was targeted for his work
on Operation Fast and Furious.

Two weeks ago, the Associated Press revealed that the Justice Department had
secretly monitored 20 phone lines and dozens of reporters.

This won't stop here. It is clear Obama's Department of Justice, with Attorney
General Eric Holder at the helm, has made monitoring reporters routine.
Title: The IRS, Gibson Guitars, and Martin Guitars
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2013, 07:58:45 PM
http://reason.com/24-7/2013/05/24/gibson-guitars-competitor-used-the-same

http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/26/paper-gibson-guitar-raids-may-be-another-case-of-obama-administration-targeting/

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/052313-657569-gibson-guitar-raid-like-tea-party-intimidation.htm
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DDF on May 28, 2013, 08:10:17 PM
The rule of law is for people that are afraid to die. "Give me liberty or give me death." A far cry from today's coffee shop patriots that sit around discussing politics and policy as though they have something in common with the founding fathers.
Mostly, people in the world have lost their balls. They've fallen right off or been traded for the promise of a larger television and an annual 5% raise.
Therein lies the war on the rule of law.  :mrgreen:
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 29, 2013, 08:17:21 PM

The Foundation

"Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly
respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or
his possessions." --James Madison

Editorial Exegesis

"On Aug. 24, 2011, federal agents executed four search warrants on
Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and
seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. One of the
top makers of acoustic and electric guitars, including the iconic Les
Paul introduced in 1952, Gibson was accused of using wood illegally
obtained in violation of the century-old Lacey Act, which outlaws
trafficking in flora and fauna the harvesting of which had broken
foreign laws. ... Interestingly, one of Gibson's leading competitors is
C.F. Martin & Co. According to C.F. Martin's catalog, several of their
guitars contain 'East Indian Rosewood,' which is the exact same wood in
at least 10 of Gibson's guitars. So why were they not also raided and
their inventory of foreign wood seized? Grossly underreported at the
time was the fact that Gibson's chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz,
contributed to Republican politicians. ... By contrast, Chris Martin IV,
the Martin & Co. CEO, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400
in contributions to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National
Committee over the past couple of election cycles. ... Juszkiewicz'
claim that his company was 'inappropriately targeted' is eerily similar
to the claims by Tea Party, conservative, pro-life and religious groups
that they were targeted by the IRS for special scrutiny because they
sought to exercise their First Amendment rights to band together in
vocal opposition to the administration's policies and the out-of-control
growth of government and its power. The Gibson Guitar raid, the IRS
intimidation of Tea Party groups and the fraudulently obtained warrant
naming Fox News reporter James Rosen as an 'aider, abettor,
co-conspirator' in stealing government secrets are but a few examples of
the abuse of power by the Obama administration to intimidate those on
its enemies list." --Investor's Business Daily

Upright

"Our Founding Fathers feared the emergence of an agency such as the IRS
and its potential for abuse. That's why they gave us Article 1, Section
9 of the Constitution, which reads: 'No Capitation, or other direct, Tax
shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein
before directed to be taken.' A capitation is a tax placed directly on
an individual. That's what an income tax is. The founders feared the
abuse and the government power inherent in a direct tax. In Section 8 of
Article 1, they added, 'But all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be
uniform throughout the United States.' These protections the founders
gave us were undone by the Progressive era's 16th Amendment, which
reads, 'The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on
incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the
several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.' ...
The bottom line is that members of Congress need such a ruthless tax
collection agency as the IRS because of the charge we Americans have
given them." --economist Walter E. Williams
The Foundation

"Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly
respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or
his possessions." --James Madison

Editorial Exegesis

"On Aug. 24, 2011, federal agents executed four search warrants on
Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., and
seized several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. One of the
top makers of acoustic and electric guitars, including the iconic Les
Paul introduced in 1952, Gibson was accused of using wood illegally
obtained in violation of the century-old Lacey Act, which outlaws
trafficking in flora and fauna the harvesting of which had broken
foreign laws. ... Interestingly, one of Gibson's leading competitors is
C.F. Martin & Co. According to C.F. Martin's catalog, several of their
guitars contain 'East Indian Rosewood,' which is the exact same wood in
at least 10 of Gibson's guitars. So why were they not also raided and
their inventory of foreign wood seized? Grossly underreported at the
time was the fact that Gibson's chief executive, Henry Juszkiewicz,
contributed to Republican politicians. ... By contrast, Chris Martin IV,
the Martin & Co. CEO, is a long-time Democratic supporter, with $35,400
in contributions to Democratic candidates and the Democratic National
Committee over the past couple of election cycles. ... Juszkiewicz'
claim that his company was 'inappropriately targeted' is eerily similar
to the claims by Tea Party, conservative, pro-life and religious groups
that they were targeted by the IRS for special scrutiny because they
sought to exercise their First Amendment rights to band together in
vocal opposition to the administration's policies and the out-of-control
growth of government and its power. The Gibson Guitar raid, the IRS
intimidation of Tea Party groups and the fraudulently obtained warrant
naming Fox News reporter James Rosen as an 'aider, abettor,
co-conspirator' in stealing government secrets are but a few examples of
the abuse of power by the Obama administration to intimidate those on
its enemies list." --Investor's Business Daily

Upright

"Our Founding Fathers feared the emergence of an agency such as the IRS
and its potential for abuse. That's why they gave us Article 1, Section
9 of the Constitution, which reads: 'No Capitation, or other direct, Tax
shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein
before directed to be taken.' A capitation is a tax placed directly on
an individual. That's what an income tax is. The founders feared the
abuse and the government power inherent in a direct tax. In Section 8 of
Article 1, they added, 'But all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be
uniform throughout the United States.' These protections the founders
gave us were undone by the Progressive era's 16th Amendment, which
reads, 'The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on
incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the
several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.' ...
The bottom line is that members of Congress need such a ruthless tax
collection agency as the IRS because of the charge we Americans have
given them." --economist Walter E. Williams
Title: Running down the apparent IRS leak to Goolsbee during the campaign
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 29, 2013, 08:40:25 PM
Second post

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/29/former-obama-adviser-deletes-bizarre-explanation-of-koch-tax-mystery/
Title: IRS Commish visited White House 157 times
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 30, 2013, 04:26:26 PM
Full Dimensions Of IRS Scandal Emerge

By DICK MORRIS

Published on DickMorris.com on May 30, 2013

The revelation that Acting IRS Commissioner Douglas Schulman visited the White House
at least 157 times during the period in which conservative groups were being
targeted with tax audits gives us the first real indication of the extent to which
this scandal reaches into the White House.

The incredible frequency of the White House visits -- essentially weekly -- indicate
that Obama must have been deeply involved with the inner workings of the audits and
harassment of conservative groups.  If Schulman was in the White House every week,
what was he there to talk about? 

Not ObamaCare.  Not without having HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in attendance,
you wouldn't.  About Treasury issues?  Deficit reduction?  Not without Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner.

The obvious reason is that Obama was following the IRS audits with an obsessive,
personal involvement.  Apparently, the Citizens United scandal so galvanized him
into action and tapped so deeply into his psyche that he was determined personally
to supervise the castration of the wealthy people and groups whose access to the
political system was opened wide by the Court.

To see a man who held a subordinate, non-policy making position 157 times, you have
to be a president on a mission.

It transforms one's sense of the scandal from a rogue agency to a rogue president
using the agency as his personal instrument.  An instrument of vengeance, or
self-defense, and of political influence.

Nixon was doomed when we all realized that the paranoia of the man had infected his
entire administration.  When Chuck Colson led the plumbers unit to investigate leaks
and to use the IRS to terrify and intimidate his enemies, we realized that he was
operating as Nixon's man doing Nixon's bidding based on the needs of Nixon's psyche.

No we realize that the IRS audits and the harassment of conservative groups went
very very deep in Obama's priority system. This scandal will destroy him.

Or, as the Greeks said in ancient times: "Those whom the Gods would destroy they
first make mad with power."
Title: Comments from a federal grand juror
Post by: rickn on May 31, 2013, 03:45:08 AM
Yesterday, I finished a one year term as a federal grand juror.  Every other week we would meet and review the cases presented to us by the US Attorney before any case could proceed to indictment and arrest.  It was a great inconvenience to my work.  It also interfered with my ability to participate consistently in this group.

Inside the jury room, I was impressed by the seriousness that some of “the lowest common denominator” jurors applied to their duty.  Everyone understood that we stood between an unjust indictment and the accused.  And many of the presumptive more highly educated (mainly teachers) were pushovers for government authority.  

Here are some thoughts.

1.  Every federal agent is called a special agent; but no one could explain to me why they are special.

2.  The federal government has defined for itself a huge amount of power; and it has assumed all of that power and then some.  The lip service paid to the Commerce Clause is scary.  Everything is now a federal crime as long as something used in the crime has been a part of interstate commerce at one time in its existence.  That includes a firearm or ammunition purchased legally in a private sale in your own State as long as that firearm or ammo was manufactured years earlier in another State. (When this applies to a convicted felon, there is not a lot of sympathy.  But when will it be applied to everyone?)  It also includes file sharing if the contents of the file were ever involved in interstate commerce even though the accused himself did not use interstate commerce to obtain the file.  The government's theory is that if an ISP owns a server in another State, that is a sufficient interstate nexus even if the user's packets never left the State. (Again, when this concept is applied to a person selling child pornography, it engenders little sympathy for the accused.  What happens when it is applied to someone sharing a political file?)There is no crime for which the Federal government cannot prosecute a person.  (For example, it is a federal crime to possess or brandish a firearm if that action would constitute another crime.)  The most cynical were bank fraud cases in which a lender makes a bad loan and then co-opts the federal criminal justice system to try and collect the bad debt via criminal prosecution by flyspecking a liar loan application.

3.  The federal government is devoting a lot of its resources to the apprehension and eviction of illegal aliens.  That was the largest group of cases that we heard.  But the southern border is like a sieve.  Unless that border is secured, there is no point to other reforms.

4.  I wonder what is intended for the new agency called Homeland Security Investigations.  Keep an eye on this agency because it seems to be popping up in a lot of different situations.  It was originally the new name for ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement).  But we encountered their “special” agents in more than just immigration and customs cases.

5.  Be very careful with your personal data.  The new growing crime is acquisition of your personal data by crooks who then electronically file false income tax returns under your data and receive large refunds sent to debit cards that they control.  They get your information from all sorts of different places including medical facilities.   They don't get the data from hacking computers.  They have people on the inside who are authorized to look at your data.  They are paid to record it and transmit it to the ringleader.  

6.  The IRS does not need a search warrant to invade your privacy.  To us, it was apparent that it was out of control months before the current scandal hit the media.

7.  HHS seeks to indict people and recover money on the basis of statistical samples from "audits" rather than actual proof of every fraudulent billing.

I was glad that I served.  There are a lot of well-intentioned and hard working bureaucrats.  However, the power assumed by the federal government is all-encompassing.  We no longer have a real federal system.  We have a national government with a lot of subservient provinces instead of a federal republic of States.  When the feds need to bolster their stats, they reach into the State system and federalize a case.  And the States are only too happy to transfer the financial cost of these prosecutions to the Feds.

I'm not as concerned about the federal employees as I am concerned about the Congresses that have enacted all of these laws.  They all took oaths to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.  Now, the social contract seems to be ignored for the mere sake of expediency.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on May 31, 2013, 07:56:55 AM
Rick, What a great post even though it sends a chill down my spine.  Reading the Obamacare decision opened my eyes further to the process where we are giving up our liberties and expanding the powers of our central government. The Justices know the transformation is happening incrementally and instead of being alarmed by it are actually looking for ways to accelerate it.  No one joined with Justice Thomas where he simply stated that he would revisit previous commerce decisions too.  Between control of financial affairs and healthcare I don't know what is left to make us a totalitarian state.

The privacy warning is right and I don't know how to get around it.  Yesterday I had small encounters with a bank and with the healthcare system and gave nearly everything that should be private over to complete strangers in their roles as employees of the big business/big government complex.  Either person could easily steal or sell my info; they would have to be quite honest not to.  Auto insurance violates privacy the same way, storing amazing amounts of private information and requiring us to divulge it back to them with every contact.  As a landlord, I find myself on the other side of the privacy issue.  People willingly hand over their personal info while knowing almost nothing about me.  Living under the radar is nearly impossible today and most certainly illegal.

The 'Special Agent' observation is hilarious.  We are all special, aren't we?

Thanks for serving, and the respect you expressed toward the other grand jurors is encouraging.  Hope to see you here more and I hope others have followup on the many points presented.  - Special Poster Doug
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on May 31, 2013, 12:59:19 PM
Very insightful, good post.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2013, 03:31:03 PM
Rick: 

Excellent post!  --- I hope you will continue to hang out with us.

Marc
Title: Noonan: Cynicism Poisoning
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2013, 06:33:17 AM

The Benghazi scandal was and is shocking, and the Justice Department assault on the free press, in which dogged reporters are tailed like enemy spies, is shocking. Benghazi is still under investigation and someday someone will write a great book about it. As for the press, Attorney General Eric Holder is on the run, and rightly so. They called it the First Amendment for a reason. But nothing can damage us more as a nation than what is happening at the Internal Revenue Service. Elite opinion in the press and in Washington doesn't fully understand this. Part of the reason is that it's not their ox being gored, it's those messy people out in America with their little patriotic groups.

Those who aren't deeply distressed about the IRS suffer from a reluctance or inability to make distinctions, and a lack of civic imagination.

An inability to make distinctions: "It's always been like this." "Presidents are always siccing the IRS on their enemies." There's truth in that. We've all heard the stories of the president who picked up the phone and said, "Look into this guy," Richard Nixon most showily. He got clobbered for it. It was one of the articles of impeachment.

Enlarge Image

Associated Press
Our government shouldn't treat the public as the enemy.

But this scandal is different and distinctive. The abuse was systemic—from the sheer number of targets and the extent of each targeting we know many workers had to be involved, many higher-ups, multiple offices. It was ideological and partisan—only those presumed to be of one political view were targeted. It has a single unifying pattern: The most vivid abuses took place in the years leading up to the president's 2012 re-election effort. And in the end several were trying to cover it all up, including the head of the IRS, who lied to Congress about it, and the head of the tax-exempt unit, Lois Lerner, who managed to lie even in her public acknowledgment of impropriety.

It wasn't a one-off. It wasn't a president losing his temper with some steel executives. There was no enemies list, unless you consider half the country to be your enemies.

It is considered a bit of a faux pas to point this out, but what we are talking about in part is a Democratic president, a largely Democratic professional administrative class in Washington, and an IRS whose workers belong to a union whose political action committee gave roughly 95% of its political contributions last year to Democrats.

Tim Carney had a remarkable piece in the Washington Examiner this week in which he looked for campaign contributions from the IRS Cincinnati office. "In the 2012 election, every donation traceable to this office went to President Obama or liberal Sen. Sherrod Brown." An IRS employee said in an email to Mr. Carney, "Do you think people willing to sacrifice lucrative private sector careers to work in tax administration . . . are genuinely going to support the party directed by Grover Norquist?" Mr. Carney noted that one of his IRS correspondents had an interesting detail on his social media profile. He belongs to a Facebook FB -0.82% group called "Target the Shutdown at the Tea Party States." It advised the president, during the 2011 debt-ceiling fight: "For instance, shut down air traffic control at airports in Norfolk, Tampa, Nashville."

Wow. I guess that was target practice.

Peggy Noonan's Blog

Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist.

Here is the thing. The politicization of government employees wouldn't have worried a lot of us 40, 30 or even 20 years ago. But since then, as a country, we have become, as individuals, less respectful of political differences and even of each other, as everything—all parts of American life—has become more political, more partisan, more divided and more aggressive.

There has got to be some way to break through this, to create new rules for the road in a situation like this.

Because people think the IRS has always, in various past cases, been used as a political tool, they think we'll glide through this scandal too. We'll muddle through, we'll investigate, the IRS will right itself, no biggie.

But when a scandal is systemic, ideological and focused on political ends, it will not just magically end. Agencies such as the IRS are part of what Jonathan Turley this week called a "massive administrative state," one built with many protections and much autonomy.

If it is not forced to change, it will not.

Which gets us to the part about imagination. What does it mean when half the country—literally half the country—understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights.

Those who think this is just business as usual are ahistorical, and those who think nothing can be done, or nothing serious should be done, are suffering from Cynicism Poisoning.

The House wants to proceed with hearings and an investigation itself, and understandably. One reason is pride. "We are the ones who got the IRS to do the audit," a congressman said the other night. Another is momentum: An independent counsel would take time and take some air out of the story. But Congress is operating within a lot of political swirls. The IRS certainly doesn't seem to fear them—haven't its leaders made that clear in their testimony so far? Congress itself is not highly regarded by the public. Didn't I say that politely?

Some members have been scared into thinking that tough hearings will constitute "overreach." But when you spend all your time fearing overreach, you can forget to reach at all. A defensive crouch isn't a good posture from which to launch a probe. And some members fear that if they pursue and give time to something that is not an economic issue, it will be used against them. But stopping the revenue-gathering arm of the federal government from operating as a hopelessly politicized and aggressive entity is an economic issue. It has to do with basic American faith in, and compliance with, half of the spending/taxing apparatus of the federal government. How could that not be an economic issue?

There will be more hearings next week, and fair enough. But down the road an independent counsel is going to be needed because the House does not have all the prosecutorial powers an independent counsel would—the powers to empanel a grand jury, grant immunity to potential witnesses, find evidence of criminal wrongdoing, indict.

Another reason to want an independent counsel: There are obviously many good, fair-minded workers in the IRS, people of sterling character. They deserve to be asked about what they were forced to put up with, what they felt they had to bite their tongues about.

There may even be a few stories about people who stood up and said: "You know you're targeting Americans because they hold political views you don't like, right? You know that's wrong, right? And I'm not going to do it."

It would be worth an investigation that breaks open the IRS to find that person, and that moment. You have no idea how much better it would make us feel, how inspiring and comforting, too.

A version of this article appeared June 1
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2013, 05:54:48 PM
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2013/06/02/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+daybydaycartoon%2FkUnt+%28Day+by+Day+Cartoon+by+Chris+Muir%29#006969
Title: The war on the rule of law in the UK
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 02, 2013, 04:30:19 PM
Horrifying description!  This sounds truly totalitarian!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2334123/Secret-court-jails-father-sending-son-21st-birthday-greeting-Facebook-gagged-naming-him.html
Title: Uh oh, things could be getting worse for White House
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 02, 2013, 07:47:21 PM
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/02/interviews-with-irs-agent-suggest-tea-party-targeting-came-from-washington/#ixzz2V7Hvyghq
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2013, 12:17:40 PM
pasting this from Electoral Process

Wife of Former IRS Chief Campaigned for Obama, Questioned Romney's Taxes

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/02/Wife-of-Former-IRS-Chief-Campaigned-for-Obama-Questioned-Romney-s-Taxes

Former Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman is under fire from Congress for his agency's targeting of Tea Party and other conservative organizations. Shulman himself is under suspicion for his numerous visits to the White House compared to other administration officials. Additionally, Shulman's wife Susan L. Anderson reportedly works for the Washington D.C. based liberal organization Public Campaign.

Anderson's group, Public Campaign, describes itself as, "a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to sweeping campaign reform that aims to dramatically reduce the role of big special interest money in American politics."

(The article goes on at the link to publish many of her tweets during the campaign. "If Romney loses the election, I bet he can file an amended return and claim the deductions he didn't claim.”",  "Romney in class by himself - see @SunFoundation charts comparing Romney's tax returns to other presidents. ", "Folks go to Caymans to dodge taxes or dive reefs - wanna bet what Mitt was doing there?")

During a Congressional hearing, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) questioned Shulman if he knew how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had information in supporting a July 2012 claim that Romney had not paid taxes for the last ten years. Shulman appeared not to know how or why Senator Reid made such a claim.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: rickn on June 03, 2013, 03:38:57 PM
The whole point of Watergate was that not even the most powerful government official is above the law.  The first specified charge in Article II of the Articles of Impeachment alleged that Nixon, "acting personally and through his subordinates," violated the rights of citizens by causing "income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."

How soon they forget!
Title: Stephanie Cutter getting caught cutting corners , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2013, 11:11:12 AM
"Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against
absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the
sport of every wind." --Thomas Jefferson

Editorial Exegesis

"A clue as to whether the targeting by the IRS of Tea Party and other
conservative groups was discussed at the 157 meetings that former IRS
Commissioner Douglas Shulman had at the White House may be found in
remarks by Stephanie Cutter, deputy manager for President Obama's 2012
reelection campaign, in a recent appearance on Jake Tapper's show 'The
Lead' on CNN. ... Cutter attempted to dismiss charges they were
political meetings but admitted she had attended meetings with Shulman
at the White House. ... Well, if they were not political meetings, why
was she there at all? Was she there to offer her health care or tax code
expertise? ... When she appeared on CBS' 'Face the Nation' to defend the
president's new campaign slogan 'Romnesia,' she went on to say that
Republican nominee Mitt Romney was 'severely conservative' and had run
as the 'ideal' Tea Party candidate. She said this as she was sitting in
meetings with the head of an IRS that was charged with implementation of
ObamaCare as it was targeting groups that were created to oppose
ObamaCare. Though she denies it, Cutter was also deeply involved in the
ads run by the pro-Obama super-PAC Priorities USA in which steelworker
Joe Soptic recounted how his wife died of cancer after he lost his
health insurance when his plant was shuttered after a takeover by Bain
Capital and other companies working with Romney's private equity firm.
... Cutter should be called to testify under oath before the House
Oversight Committee to explain why a key Obama campaign operative was in
on meetings to discuss ObamaCare implementation with an IRS official
whose agency was targeting groups opposed to it." --Investor's Business
Daily

Title: The starting point of the tax audit strategy?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2013, 12:49:59 PM
second post:

Obama's Tax Audit Strategy

By DICK MORRIS

Published on TheHill.com on June 4, 2013

Did the Internal Revenue Service scandal begin when the Obama administration
aggressively tried to deny tax-exempt status to pro-Israeli groups that funded
settlements on the West Bank in defiance of its wishes? The IRS seems to have used
tax audits to try to cripple these Jewish groups. When the Citizens United decision
came down, did President Obama turn the guns focused on the conservative Jewish
groups to fire on Republican political organizations?

The Washington Free Beacon reports that the idea of using the IRS to undermine
settlement activity surfaced barely two months after Obama took office.

On March 26, 2009, The Washington Post questioned the tax-exempt status of
pro-settlement Jewish groups.

The next day, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which has
enjoyed warm relations with the president, asked the IRS to investigate groups
"allegedly raising funds for the development of illegal settlements in the occupied
West Bank."

Meanwhile, Arab pressure to audit the settlement groups escalated. In October 2009,
a cable revealed by WikiLeaks recounted a meeting between the chief negotiator for
the former Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei and U.S. Consul General Daniel
Rubinstein. The cable noted that Qurei gave

Rubinstein "a copy of an article ... in Israeli daily Haaretz newspaper on August
17, entitled 'American Non-profit Organization Raises Funds for Settlement' and
asked the US to review the situation with an eye toward eliminating organizations'
tax exempt status if they are funding settlement activity."

The Free Beacon notes that the following week, J Street, a pro-Palestinian lobbying
group, also demanded an investigation into U.S. charities that contribute to
settlements.

HaYovel, a group that sends volunteers to work in West Bank vineyards, was the first
to be audited, six months after its role was prominently featured in a New York
Times article. The Times quoted a senior State Department administration official
calling such groups "a problem" and "unhelpful to the efforts that we're trying to
make." It was the first of many Jewish pro-settlement groups to experience IRS
audits.

When the Citizens United decision came down, outraging the Obama administration, the
IRS already had begun to use the agency's power to audit and intimidate Jewish
groups promoting West Bank settlements. The idea of using the same M.O. to go after
tax-exempt groups that sprang up in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision likely
was another fruit of the same tree.

Was the president personally involved? The numerous visits to the White House by
Acting IRS Director Douglas Shulman -- including four personal meetings with the
president -- in a two-year period after the court ruling bear further scrutiny. By
comparison, the Bush 43 IRS director visited the building only once in his tenure.

Schulman's meetings with White House staff may have focused on the IRS's role in
administering ObamaCare, but the chances that the audit of conservative groups was
discussed cannot be ruled out, especially in view of the work of Schulman's wife,
Susan L. Anderson.

Anderson works for Public Campaign, an organization "dedicated to sweeping campaign
reform that aims to dramatically reduce the role of big special interest money in
American politics" and funded by groups like Health Care for America Now!

Anderson, who supported the Occupy Wall Street campaign, appears to have occupied
the IRS through her husband. According to Breitbart.com, Anderson's tweets indicate
that she worked for Obama and had an obsession with cutting Karl Rove's Crossroads
group down to size.

On June 20, 2012, for example, she tweeted "Karl Rove Crossroads get money out," and
appealed to supporters to come to a demonstration to "CONFRONT Karl Rove plus
American Crossroads REBUILD THE AMERICAN DREAM."

Anderson's activities and Schulman's White House visits need further congressional
scrutiny. Who knows where it might lead?

Title: War on the rule of law: IRS political timeline
Post by: DougMacG on June 07, 2013, 07:46:11 AM
Are these not marching orders to the public employee union activists working in the Obama administration agencies?

Kim Strassel, WSJ today, excerpt, link below
...
 Aug. 9, 2010: In Texas, President Obama for the first time publicly names a group he is obsessed with—Americans for Prosperity (founded by the Koch Brothers)—and warns about conservative groups. Taking up a cry that had until then largely been confined to left-wing media and activists, he says: "Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."

Aug. 11: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sends out a fundraising email warning about "Karl Rove-inspired shadow groups."

Aug. 21: Mr. Obama devotes his weekly radio address to the threat of "attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. We don't know who's behind these ads and we don't know who's paying for them. . . . You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation. . . . The only people who don't want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide."

Week of Aug. 23: The New Yorker's Jane Mayer authors a hit piece on the Koch brothers, entitled "Covert Operations," in which she accuses them of funding "political front groups." The piece repeats the White House theme, with Ms. Mayer claiming the Kochs have created "slippery organizations with generic-sounding names" that have "made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington."

Aug. 27: White House economist Austan Goolsbee, in a background briefing with reporters, accuses Koch industries of being a pass-through entity that does "not pay corporate income tax." The Treasury inspector general investigates how it is that Mr. Goolsbee might have confidential tax information. The report has never been released.

This same week, the Democratic Party files a complaint with the IRS claiming the Americans for Prosperity Foundation is violating its tax-exempt status.

Sept. 2: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee warns on its website that the Kochs have "funneled their money into right-wing shadow groups."

Sept. 16: Mr. Obama, in Connecticut, repeats that a "foreign-controlled entity" might be funding "millions of dollars of attack ads." Four days later, in Philadelphia, he again says the problem is that "nobody knows" who is behind conservative groups.

Sept. 21: Sam Stein, in his Huffington Post article "Obama, Dems Try to Make Shadowy Conservative Groups a Problem for Conservatives," writes that a "senior administration official" had "urged a small gathering of reporters to start writing on what he deemed 'the most insidious power grab that we have seen in a very long time.' "

Sept. 22: In New York City, Mr. Obama warns that conservative groups "pose as non-for-profit, social welfare and trade groups," even though they are "guided by seasoned Republican political operatives" who might be funded by a "foreign-controlled corporation."

Sept. 26: On ABC's "This Week," Obama senior adviser David Axelrod declares outright that the "benign-sounding Americans for Prosperity, the American Crossroads Fund" are "front groups for foreign-controlled companies."

Sept. 28: The president, in Wisconsin, again warns about conservative organizations "posing as nonprofit groups." Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, writes to the IRS demanding it investigate nonprofits. The letter names conservative organizations.

On Oct. 14, Mr. Obama calls these groups "a problem for democracy." On Oct. 22, he slams those who "hide behind these front groups." On Oct. 25, he upgrades them to a "threat to our democracy." On Oct. 26, he decries groups engaged in "unsupervised spending."

These were not off-the-cuff remarks. They were repeated by the White House and echoed by its allies in campaign events, emails, social media and TV ads. The president of the United States spent months warning the country that "shadowy," conservative "front" groups—"posing" as tax-exempt entities and illegally controlled by "foreign" players—were engaged in "unsupervised" spending that posed a "threat" to democracy. Yet we are to believe that a few rogue IRS employees just happened during that time to begin systematically targeting conservative groups? A mere coincidence that among the things the IRS demanded of these groups were "copies of any contracts with and training materials provided by Americans for Prosperity"?

This newspaper reported Thursday that Cincinnati IRS employees are now telling investigators that they took their orders from Washington. For anyone with a memory of 2010 politics, that was obvious from the start.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323844804578529571309012846.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Title: reliability unknown
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2013, 02:21:35 AM
Source reliability unknown, but the idea that the Feds are monitoring FB like this is scarily plausible , , ,

http://www.examiner.com/article/secret-service-to-outspoken-obama-critic-we-ll-come-for-your-guns-media-silent?cid=PROD-redesign-right-next
Title: IRS seizes med records
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2013, 02:24:52 AM
second entry

http://therightscoop.com/armed-irs-agents-seized-tens-of-millions-of-medical-records-from-private-insurance-companies/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2013, 03:27:31 AM
third entry


Before this IRS scandal (though that word certainly does not do justice to
the injustice at work here) gets swept under the rug, this was an
interesting interview in the Journal last weekend.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323844804578528193656378164.html
Title: CBS confirms Benghazi reporter's computer tampered with
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2013, 03:41:49 AM
CBS confirms Benhazi reporter's computer tampered with

Private investigators found that CBS News Washington reporter Sharyl Attkisson's
computer was tampered with multiple times late last year, the network said Friday.

Read more...
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2013/06/14/cbs-confirms-benhazi-reporters-computer-tampered-with/?subscriber=1
Title: Re: CBS confirms Benghazi reporter's computer tampered with
Post by: DougMacG on June 15, 2013, 09:26:27 AM
CBS confirms Benhazi reporter's computer tampered with

No worry when it was Fox.  Now that it is AP and CBS, they have crossed an ethical line, not just the legal one.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on June 15, 2013, 09:34:53 AM
Before this IRS scandal (though that word certainly does not do justice to
the injustice at work here) gets swept under the rug, this was an
interesting interview in the Journal last weekend.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323844804578528193656378164.html

Yes, it is more than an IRS scandal, more than election interference, and more than an attack on the rule of law.  The tax law itself is what armed the IRS to wage their war - against free speech, against free assembly and against equal protection for targeted groups.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2013, 12:03:32 PM
Assuming it was the Feds who tampered with SA's computer' then this is quite a bit more than spying :-o
Title: Rasmussen: Distrust of Government is the theme running through the scandals
Post by: DougMacG on June 17, 2013, 09:56:40 AM
Distrust of Government Is What It's All About

By Scott Rasmussen - June 14, 2013

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/06/14/distrust_of_government_is_what_its_all_about_118824.html#ixzz2WUeQEBwf

Only 24 percent now are confident that the federal government does the right thing most of the time.

(That number seems high to me.  24% might be misunderstanding the question.)
Title: Perjury by DoS security officials?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2013, 09:38:56 AM


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/18/did-senior-state-department-security-officials-commit-perjury/
Title: Curious death of journalist , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 20, 2013, 01:58:13 AM

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100222652/wikileaks-says-michael-hastings-contacted-it-just-before-his-death-are-they-implying-he-was-murdered/

Michael Yon comments:

19 June 2013

Due to time constraints, I must write this as an unedited stream of consciousness.  My apologies for the roughness.

Michael Hastings was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles.  The single car accident happened at about 0425.  He crashed into a tree and was burned beyond recognition.  He was 33.

Mr. Hastings was the war correspondent whose Rolling Stone article led to the firing of General Stanley McChrystal, who at the time was the top General in Afghanistan.

Although Hastings was widely read, no serious war correspondents took him seriously, or at least not the ones I know.  He did, however, accurately portray my words and context in his book “The Operators.” Hastings was like an undisciplined hitman with a pen and license to kill.  One of his gonzo articles damaged the career and reputation of Lieutenant General Bill Caldwell, for no cause.  My sense was that he picked fights with key people mostly to draw attention.  Though Hastings was not respected among war correspondents, it is sad to see a man die so young so horribly.  Just why he crashed into a tree at 0425 remains unknown.  No doubt the conspiracies will begin to fly.
Title: Noonan: Congress needs to stay after IRS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2013, 07:16:00 AM


Case Closed? Far From It.
The FBI seems blasé about the IRS investigation, so it's crucial Congress make it a priority.

    By PEGGY NOONAN

Right now the IRS story looks stalled and confused. Congressional investigators are asking for documents—"The IRS is being a little slow," said a staffer—and interviewing workers. Pieces of testimony are being released and leaked, which has allowed one congressman, Democrat Elijah Cummings, to claim there's actually no need for an investigation, the story's over, the mystery solved.

When the scandal broke in early May, the Obama administration vowed to get to the bottom of it with an FBI investigation. Many of us were skeptical. There's a sign we were right.

Enlarge Image
image
image
Associated Press

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings.

On June 13, FBI Robert Director Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee and was questioned by Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) about former tax-exempt office chief Lois Lerner's claim that the targeting of conservative groups was due to the incompetence of workers in the Cincinnati office.

Jordan: "What can you tell us—I mean you started a month ago, what can you tell us about this, have you found . . . the now-infamous two rogue agents, have you discovered who those people are?"

Mueller: "Needless to say, because it is under investigation, I can't give out any of the details."

Jordan: "Can you tell me . . . how many agents, investigators you've assigned to the case?"

Mueller: "Ah, may be able to do that, but I'd have to get back to you."

Jordan: "Can you tell me who the lead investigator is?"

Mueller: "Off the top of my head, no."

Jordan: "This is the most important issue in front of the country in the last six weeks, you don't know who's heading up the case, who the lead investigator is?"

Mueller: "Ah, at this juncture, no. . . . I have not had a recent briefing on it."

Jordan: "Do you know if you've talked to any of the victims—have you talked to any of the groups who were targeted by their government—have you met with any of the tea-party folks since May 14, 2013?"

Mueller: "I don't know what the status of the interviews are by the team that's on it."

Wow. He'd probably know something about the FBI's investigation of the IRS if he cared about it, if it had some priority or importance within his agency. This week an embarrassed Mr. Mueller was ready for questions from senators. There is an investigation, he said, and "over a dozen" agents have been assigned. Well, better than nothing.

Attorneys for the best-known of the targeted groups confirm that they've heard nothing. From the American Center for Law and Justice: "None of our clients have been contacted or interviewed by the FBI." From lawyer Cleta Mitchell: "I hear from people around the country, and no one has been contacted." All of which is strange. If the FBI were investigating a series of muggings, you'd hope they'd start by interviewing the people who'd been mugged.

Meanwhile a CNN poll shows the number of people who believe the targeting program was directed by the White House is up 10 points the past month, to 47%.

So things have gotten pretty confused, maybe because it's in the interest of a lot of people to confuse it.

Again, what is historic about this scandal, what makes it unique and uniquely dangerous, is that it is different in kind from previous IRS scandals. In the past it was always elite versus elite, power guys using the agency against other power guys. This scandal is different because it's the elite versus the people. It is an entrenched and fearsome power versus regular citizens.

The scandal broke, of course, when Lois Lerner deviously planted a question at a Washington conference. She was trying to get out ahead of a forthcoming inspector general's report that would reveal the targeting. She said that "our line people in Cincinnati who handled the applications" used "wrong" methods. Also "in some cases, cases sat around for a while." The Cincinnati workers "sent some letters out that were far too broad," in some cases even asking for contributors' names. "That's not appropriate."

Since that day, the question has been: Was the targeting of conservative groups in fact the work of incompetent staffers in Cincinnati, or were higher-ups in the Washington office of the IRS involved? Ms. Lerner said it was all Cincinnati.

But then the information cascade began. The Washington Post interviewed Cincinnati IRS workers who said everything came from the top. The Wall Street Journal reported congressional investigators had been told by the workers that they had been directed from Washington. Word came that one applicant group, after receiving lengthy and intrusive requests for additional information, including donor names, received yet another letter asking for even more information—signed by Lois Lerner.

Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, which sought tax-exempt status, recently came into possession of a copy of a 20-month-old letter from the IRS's Taxpayer Advocate Service in Houston, acknowledging that her case had been assigned to an agent in Cincinnati. "He is waiting for a determination from their office in Washington," the advocate said. The agent was "unable to give us a timeframe" on when determination would be made.

The evidence is overwhelming that the Washington office of the IRS was involved. But who in Washington? How high did it go, how many were involved, how exactly did they operate?

Those are the questions that remain to be answered. That's what the investigations are about.

Rep. Cummings, having declared the mystery solved, this week released the entire 205-page transcript of an interview between congressional investigators and a frontline manager in the Cincinnati office. The manager, a self-described conservative Republican, was asked: "Do you have any reason to believe that anyone in the White House was involved in the decision to screen Tea Party cases?" The answer: "I have no reason to believe that."

There, said Mr. Cummings, case closed. But that testimony settles nothing. Nobody imagines the White House picked up a phone to tell IRS workers in Cincinnati to target their enemies. That, as they say, is not how it's done.

The frontline manager also said, in his interview, "I'll say my realm was so low down, and after the initial review of a case, which was, you know, within three days after assignment, I became less and less aware of what happened above me." He said he didn't do any targeting, but "I'm not in a position to discuss anybody else's intention but my own."

What investigators have to do now is follow the trail through the IRS in Washington, including political appointees.

Questions: Do the investigators have a list of everyone who worked in the executive office of the IRS commissioner? Have they contacted those people and asked when they learned of the targeting? What did they do when they learned? Who, if anyone, thwarted any attempts to stop it? And what about those bonuses the IRS is reportedly about to award its employees? How does that figure in?

Congress, including both its battling investigative committees, must get the answers to these questions.

The House speaker should make sure it's a priority. There's no sign the FBI will.
Title: Holy Excrement!!!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2013, 11:17:17 AM


http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/20/bush-era-nsa-whistleblower-makes-most-explosive-allegations-yet-about-true-extent-of-govt-surveillance/
Title: Re: Holy Excrement!!!
Post by: DougMacG on June 21, 2013, 03:06:41 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/20/bush-era-nsa-whistleblower-makes-most-explosive-allegations-yet-about-true-extent-of-govt-surveillance/

The big story was that some obscure state Senator from Illinois was among those under surveillance.  Not mentioned is that he had known links to terrorists.

He was looked at (allegedly), not charged or apprehended.

My view of the Patriot Act is that if my number is found in the speed dial or call log of a terrorist, even by mis-dial, I expect to be looked at until cleared.  Same Senator kicked off his political campaign (allegedly) in the living room of an unrepentant terrorist.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2013, 06:32:06 PM
I've been having this recurring fantasy for nearly a year now about having the chance to interview this President , , , there's a real biting question lurking in there Douog  :evil:
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 22, 2013, 08:11:55 AM
reliability unknown:

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2013/06/famed-non-automotive-journalist-michael-hastings-turns-a-c250-into-a-bomb/
Title: Sasha Grey recruits for the NSA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 22, 2013, 06:28:01 PM
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/14dc1b13fa/sexy-nsa-commercial-with-sasha-grey?playlist=featured_videos
Title: The IRS's Best Friend in Congress -
Post by: DougMacG on June 24, 2013, 08:10:58 AM
Young journalist Eliana Johnson keeps some coverage of this story alive as our attention disorder mainstream keeps moving on to other topics.  At the moment this is a lead opinion piece at WSJ, Powerline, Real Clear Politics and National Review.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324577904578557274272099196.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The IRS's Best Friend in Congress
Rep. Elijah Cummings says the House investigation is a 'witch hunt.' Yet revealing evidence keeps coming.

By ELIANA JOHNSON

The House Oversight Committee's investigation into the Internal Revenue Service's discrimination against conservative groups continues—but at least one unenthusiastic member seems to think the committee's work is done.

Over the objections of Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.) last week released online the full, 205-page transcript of an interview that committee investigators conducted with an IRS employee in Cincinnati named John Shafer. Mr. Cummings explained that he was compelled to release the Shafer transcript because it explodes Mr. Issa's "conspiracy theories"—chiefly, that the White House played a role in the targeting of conservative groups, and that it was orchestrated out of IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C. In fact, Mr. Issa has never said the former, and much that is known so far about the IRS scandal suggests that the Washington connection is substantial.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (right) and Acting IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, June 6.

Mr. Cummings's enthusiasm for defending the IRS may make him a lonely figure among the 22 Republicans and 16 Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, but he is likely to find an ally in his chief counsel on the committee. She is Susanne Sachsman Grooms, who worked for the IRS between 2008 and 2011 as an adviser to the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement and then as a senior counselor to the chief of criminal investigations. At the time, the deputy commissioner for services and enforcement—her boss—was none other than Steven Miller, who held the post of IRS commissioner from November 2012 until his resignation in May after the scandal broke. Mr. Cummings also has a strong tie to the Obama administration: His staff director on the Oversight Committee, David Rapallo, is a former White House lawyer.

The release of the Shafer transcript came after a June 12 interview with Politico in which Mr. Cummings labeled the Oversight Committee's investigation a "witch hunt"—in other words, something that should end immediately. A few days before that, in a June 9 CNN interview, he said, "The IG made some recommendations, those recommendations are being adopted by the IRS . . . I think we're in great shape."

As it happens, the revelation of Mr. Shafer's testimony isn't likely to discourage the investigation.

Mr. Shafer, the manager of an IRS screening group in the Cincinnati office, told committee investigators that in February 2010 one of his employees brought a tea-party application for nonprofit designation to his attention.

Given the media coverage that the tea party was receiving, Mr. Shafer deemed the application a "high profile" matter and alerted his managers to its existence. Shortly thereafter, according to his testimony, lawyers in the IRS's Washington, D.C., office said, "We want to look at the case." On the evidence of the Washington office's interest in that initial case, Mr. Shafer said IRS agents in Cincinnati then held the applications of tea-party groups until they were given "further direction" from D.C.

Case closed, according to Mr. Cummings, who wrote in a letter to Mr. Issa: "These statements by the screening group manager appear to directly contradict your allegations of political motivation."

If Mr. Shafer or Mr. Cummings could read the minds of IRS officials in Washington, that might be true. In reality, Mr. Shafer was unable to say why officials in Washington were so interested in the tea-party cases or whether the officials' interest was politically motivated.

"Did you have an understanding at the time about what the reason was for sending the cases [to Washington] for review?" investigators asked him. "No," he responded. They pressed further. "Do you have personal knowledge of the motivations of Washington and how they worked the tea party cases?" "I do not," Mr. Shafer said.

The testimony offered by other Cincinnati IRS employees—which I have reviewed in full, un-redacted form—contradicts Mr. Cummings's claims and those of Obama administration officials, such as White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who has pointed the finger at "line employees" in Cincinnati. The IRS interviews suggest that the agency's officials in Washington closely controlled the review of tea-party cases.

Consider Gary Muthert, the Cincinnati IRS screener who told investigators that he began singling out tea-party applications at the request of Mr. Shafer, who told him "Washington, D.C., wanted some cases."

And there is Elizabeth Hofacre, the Cincinnati IRS agent who for several months in 2010 was charged with handling all tea-party applications. She told the committee that she understood the "lookout list" used to flag the applications of tea-party groups was also intended to flag those of Republican and conservative groups. When the applications of liberal groups came in, she sent them along for general processing.

Ms. Hofacre also told the committee's investigators that IRS lawyers in Washington were controlling her every move. "I was taking all my direction from EO Technical," she told investigators, referring to the group of IRS tax lawyers in Washington that handles tax-exempt organizations. She went on to say that she had "no autonomy" in her handling of the cases, and she termed the behavior of IRS officials in Washington in the matter "very unusual."

Mr. Cummings's efforts have drawn attention away from these troubling accounts, which have been partially released by the House Oversight Committee—and instead bogged the committee down with questions of whether to release full interview transcripts.

Mr. Issa opposes releasing the full transcripts. Disclosing them, he says, threatens to compromise the investigation by providing future witnesses a "road map" of the scope and content of likely questions. It also provides them with time to formulate their answers and to ensure that their testimony corroborates that of other witnesses. Mr. Cummings, who has already made his position clear by unilaterally releasing the Shafer transcript, has called the committee chairman's position on the matter "bulls---."

Many questions remain for the committee to address, even if Mr. Cummings might disagree. Who at the IRS, for instance, developed the intrusive and exhaustive questions that were sent to the tea-party groups? Why did so many of those groups have to wait years for their applications to be processed, and why are many more still waiting? Who specifically were the IRS officials in Washington directing the Cincinnati agents targeting the tea-party organizations?

If the House Oversight Committee can overlook the distractions thrown up by one of its members, the answers may prove illuminating about the way Washington has worked during the Obama administration.
Title: POTH: More on IRS scrutiny
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2013, 08:19:43 AM
POTH defends the IRS , , , somewhat

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/us/politics/irs-scrutiny-went-beyond-the-political.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130705
Title: Hutchinson: Is America's lawyer lying to the world?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2013, 08:46:34 AM
second post

http://www.mercatornet.com/Newsletterv0810/view_txt/is_americas_lawyer_president_lying_to_the_world

Is America’s lawyer president lying to the world?
Robert Hutchinson | 4 July 2013

What the Edward Snowden affair has revealed, more than anything else, is the insanity of electing lawyers to higher office. That’s because too often lawyers take advantage of the inherent ambiguity of natural language to deliberately mislead people.

Or, as Bill Clinton famously put it, it all depends what the meaning of “is” is.

Thinking like a lawyer, Bill Clinton looked the American people in the eye and said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” Monica Lewinsky, because, you see, oral sex isn’t legally “sex,” at least that’s how Clinton understood it.

Clinton also said that “there is not a sexual relationship, an improper sexual relationship or any other kind of improper relationship” with the barely legal intern. This was truthful, Clinton later argued, because he said it in the present tense – “it depends what the meaning of is is” – and the reality was that he had an improper relationship in the past, you see, but not now.

Oh, how clever. Fooled us there, Mr. President!

Now we may be going through the same legal word games once again with another Lawyer-President, Barack Obama. On June 7, Obama went on national TV and told the American people that “nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” A day later, he told Charlie Rose:

“What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls … by law and by rule, and unless they … go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it's always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause.”

The GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent, said the same thing. He told CNN that the NSA “is not listening to Americans' phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law.”

Like Bill Clinton, Obama, Rogers and the whole national security crowd must think they are being so clever... because, you see, no one is listening to your phone calls... but in all likelihood the NSA is simply recording them all.

The “tin foil hat” crowd, otherwise known as people who don’t swallow whole what the government and their lackeys in the mainstream media tell us, have long suspected that the NSA now has the technical capability to record every telephone call, email and instant message on earth... and simply store it all in giant hard drives for later analysis.

James Bamford’s famous 2012 article in Wired magazine about the NSA’s new mammoth spy center in Utah basically revealed this. Bamford wrote:

“[F]or the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration, the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.”

The suspicion that the NSA is actually recording all telephone calls was strengthened during the Boston Marathon bombing case when a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, Tim Clemente, let slip that government investigators were able to go back, after the bombing, and somehow listen to telephone conversations between the bombers and some of their friends.

But if the Boston Marathon bombers weren’t under police surveillance, and even the government admits they weren’t... how were investigators able to tap into the telephone calls they had in the past?

Answer: Because it’s likely that all cell phone, and perhaps all land line calls in the United States and overseas are being recorded. All of them.

So when Barack Obama tells the American people that “no one is listening to your phone calls,” it could very well be that he’s being legally accurate... but could still be lying through his teeth. He’s being deliberately deceptive... just as James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, was being deliberately deceptive when he told Congress that it is NOT true that the NSA is collecting data on millions of Americans. (If any ordinary citizen perjured himself in testimony before Congress, he or she would be rotting in jail... no matter how many excuses they might have.)

It all depends what the meaning of “is” is, you see.

As for Obama’s claim that the NSA has to “go to a judge [and] show probable cause” before it can listen to Americans’ phone calls, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a liberal New York Democrat, claimed that’s simply not true.

After attending a top secret briefing on the NSA on June 14, Nadler said he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.” Nadler later backtracked on his allegation when it caused embarrassment to the White House but documents released by The Guardiannewspaper confirmed his original account.

So, the next bombshell that Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and The Guardian newspaper are going to release is likely to be the revelation that the NSA is recording all of our phone calls.

On June 28, Glenn Greenwald gave a talk via Skype to the Socialism 2013 conference in Chicago, and he revealed that Snowden has documents that prove all Americans’ cell phone calls are being recorded and stored. Here’s a transcription from a blogger of what he said:

“Another document that I probably shouldn't but - since it's not published - but I am going to anyway share with you - and this one is coming soon - but you are getting a little preview. It talks about how a brand new technology enables the National Security Agency to direct, redirect into its own repositories, one billion cellphone calls every single day, one billion cellphone calls every single day.

“What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without it’s being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency. It doesn't mean they are listening to every call, it means they are storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time. And it does mean that they are collecting millions upon millions upon millions of our phone and email records.

“It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy. And what is incredibly menacing about it is that it is all talking place in the dark, with no accountability and virtually no safeguards.”

You heard it here first, folks.

As this drama unfolds, the public has to remember that many of the key players are, like Barack Obama, lawyers. They are attempting to defuse growing public outrage by playing word games.

It could well turn out that the NSA isn’t “listening” to all of our cell and telephone phone calls... it’s just recording them all so future investigators can, at any time, listen to them. For those who cherish constitutional government and the rule of law, that’s cold comfort indeed.

Robert Hutchinson is a writer and the author, most recently, of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible. He blogs at RobertHutchinson.com.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2013, 08:52:11 AM
pasting Doug's comments here as well:

George Will today:
Although the Constitution has no Article VIII, the administration acts as though there is one that reads: “Notwithstanding all that stuff in other articles about how laws are made, if a president finds a law politically inconvenient, he can simply post on the White House Web site a notice saying: Never mind.”

Never mind that the law stipulates 2014 as the year when employers with 50 full-time workers are mandated to offer them health-care coverage or pay fines. Instead, 2015 will be the year. Unless Democrats see a presidential election coming.
--------------------------------

Hey Obama – why couldn’t a Republican President delay all of Obamacare for 10,000 years?

As the Obamacare law is written, the employer mandate is to begin in January 2014. This is what the law said when it was passed by the House and Senate, and signed by President Obama in 2010.

However, it has been reported that President Obama has just delayed the employer mandate part of Obamacare until January 2015. Obama did this without approval from Congress.

It was Obama himself who delayed part of Obamacare for one year. If Obama can do this, I would love to hear him explain why a Republican President could not delay all of Obamacare for 10,000 years.
http://danfromsquirrelhill.wordpress.com/
Title: The Zimmerman Case...
Post by: objectivist1 on July 08, 2013, 05:26:03 AM
Zimmerman’s Fate and Looming Race Riots

Posted By Arnold Ahlert On July 3, 2013 on www.frontpagemag.com
 

The murder case against George Zimmerman is rapidly unraveling, due in large part to the compelling testimony of key witnesses. Ordinarily, there is nothing unusual about compelling testimony changing the course of a trial, but in this case it is witnesses presented by the prosecution that are bolstering the case for the defendant. Thus, with each passing day it is becoming more apparent that the real reason for bringing this case to trial was to assuage the media-driven concerns of the racial grievance industry, led by chief arsonists Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Shamefully aiding and abetting them is the racially polarized Justice Department led by Attorney General Eric Holder.

We begin with the witnesses. Billed as the state’s “star witness,” 19-year-old Rachel Jeantel, the last person to talk to Trayvon Martin before his death, proved to be a major embarrassment. If there is a racial element to this case, other than the prosecution’s unsubstantiated accusation that Zimmerman “profiled” Martin, Jeantel introduced it during her testimony. She revealed that Trayvon Martin had referred to Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker,” even as she subsequently denied it was a racial term. Another compelling part of her testimony was in regard to a letter she had supposedly written to Martin’s mother describing the chain of events that led to Trayvon’s death. During questioning by defense attorney Don West, Jeantel was forced to admit that, despite signing it, she was incapable of reading the cursive script in which it was written.

West further grilled Jeantel about her inconsistent statements to police, and the discrepancies in her testimony. Jeantel blamed them on questions posed by law enforcement officials, and the lengths of the interviews. As to the omission of details, she claimed she was trying to spare the Martin family from enduring additional grief. In the end, Jeantel admitted she didn’t know who threw the first punch, and that she lied under oath. The former admission makes it virtually impossible for the prosecution to prove that Zimmerman didn’t fire in self-defense. The latter admission challenges Jeantel’s entire credibility.

Yet it was testimony from John Good, who witnessed the fight between Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, that provided the most damaging, and perhaps fatal blow to the state’s case. Good testified that he saw Trayvon Martin on top of George Zimmerman, raining punches down on him Mixed Martial Arts style. Good further testified that the scream he heard must have come from Zimmerman, because he was on the bottom, and Martin was facing away from Good.

On Monday, detective Doris Singleton, who questioned Zimmerman the night of the shooting, became the latest prosecution witness to undermine the state’s case. She testified that Zimmerman asked her about the crucifix she wore on her neck, and buried his head in his hands after learning that Martin had died. During the exchange Singleton testified that Zimmerman said it was ”always wrong to kill.” ”I said to him, ‘If what you’re telling me is true then I don’t think that’s what God meant, you couldn’t save your own life,’” she said. Singleton further testified that Zimmerman was shocked when he learned that Martin was dead.

Audiotape of Singleton’s interview with Zimmerman was played in court. He explained he had joined the neighborhood watch after his home had been broken into. As to the fatal encounter with Martin, Zimmerman said Martin “jumped out” at him from the bushes and said, “What the f— is your problem, homey?” Zimmerman claimed he didn’t have a problem, and said Martin responded by saying, “Now you have a problem,” and punched him in the nose. When Zimmerman fell, Martin allegedly got on top of him, throwing punches. “He put his hands on my nose and said, ‘You’re going to die tonight,’” said Zimmerman on the tape. Zimmerman then stated that Martin saw his (Zimmerman’s) gun and started to reach for it, which is when Zimmerman  drew it and shot the teenager.

Hirotaka Nakasone, an FBI audio voice analyst, further discredited the state’s case, saying he was unable to determine which of the two men was captured screaming on audio.

The state’s best witness was former lead investigator for the Sanford Police, Christopher Serino, who testified that Zimmerman’s injuries were “lacking” in terms of his story. He was further concerned that Zimmerman didn’t identify himself to Martin. Yet under cross-examination by defense attorney Mark O’Mara regarding Serino’s suggestion to Zimmerman that there might be a videotape of the incident, Serino admitted Zimmerman was buoyed by the possibility. ”I believe his words were, ‘thank god. I was hoping somebody would have videotaped it’,” said Serino. O’Mara then asked Serino what that response indicated to him. “Either he was telling the truth or he was a complete pathological liar,” the detective responded. The defense then asked Serino if pathological liar was removed from the equation, did he believe Zimmerman was being truthful. “Yes,” he testified.

Additional witnesses presented by the prosecution have, to date, corroborated Zimmerman’s version of the events in question, save one: Selma Mora testified last Thursday that Zimmerman was on top of Martin in the moments before a gunshot ended the fight, telling the court that a man wearing “patterns between black and red” was on top, meaning Zimmerman. ”One of them was on the ground, and the other one was on top in position like a rider,” the Spanish-speaking Mora testified through a translator. Yet unlike Good, Mora did not see the fight prior to the gunshot.

Again, these are witnesses for the prosecution, whose job is to prove that Zimmerman is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet it is more complicated than that. Because the state filed second degree murder charges against Zimmerman (as opposed to manslaughter, where they might have argued he acted without just cause), Florida law requires them to prove Zimmerman ”acted according to a ‘depraved mind’ without regard for human life.”

So why did the state pursue that charge? Because Trayvon Martin became a cause célèbre for race-hatred promoters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who called for marches and boycotts against the city of Sanford. Their efforts were aided and abetted by corrupt media, which bent over backwards to insert race into the equation. Those efforts included the New York Times referring to Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic,” NBC purposefully editing an audiotape of his 911 call to make Zimmerman appear racist, CNN claiming Zimmerman used the word “coon” when he actually said “cold,” and innumerable news outlets publishing a picture of Martin at age 13, despite the fact that he was 17 and over six feet tall at the time of the incident.

If a report by “sundance” at conservativetreehouse.com is accurate, the media’s effort to paint Zimmerman as racist was part of a well-coordinated publicity campaign undertaken by Martin family attorneys Benjamin Crump and Natalie Jackson, in conjunction with publicist Ryan Julison, who was instrumental in providing publicity for the Pigford Farmer’s lawsuit and settlement. “Within the prior networking connections to this lawsuit, and within the media consulting/advocacy, is where the outline of the Congressional Black Caucus and substantive race-dependent civil rights leaders such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the NAACP’s Ben Jealous are connected to Ryan Julison through Benjamin Crump and Natalie Jackson and the Pigford II Lawyer, Greg Francis,” he writes, further noting that their efforts were all about creating a “systematic campaign of optical control.”

Andrew McCarthy reveals the consequences of such a campaign with respect to the DOJ, citing the initiation of a “federal civil rights prosecution that induced state officials in Florida to reconsider the initial decision not to charge Zimmerman.” “It’s easy for a corrupt process to produce criminal charges,” writes McCarthy.

“It is quite something else to prove them. To try to fill the gaping intent hole in its case, the Zimmerman prosecution has transferred the hobgoblin of racism from the headlines into the courtroom. Indeed, it did not even wait for the trial to do that; the prosecutor injected racism directly into the charging documents.”

The Florida prosecutor did that by inserting the term “profiling” into the document which, McCarthy notes, was an effort “to imply, in the absence of any evidence, that Zimmerman is a bigot who assumed Martin was up to no good just because he was black.”

Yet it is PJMedia’s J. Christian Adams, a former attorney at the Justice Department, who reveals a disturbing reality regarding why the DOJ forced Florida’s hand. “Right now, hanging on the door of a federal employee’s office in the Department of Justice (DOJ) Voting Section is a sign expressing racial solidarity with Trayvon Martin,” Adams writes. He further notes that even as the DOJ abetted the mob demanding racial justice in Florida, it did absolutely nothing about New Black Panther leader Mikhail Muhammad, who put a $10,000 bounty on Zimmerman’s head and called for the mobilization of 10,000 black men to capture him.

In terms of making the case a national sensation, all of these efforts have been enormously successful, even as they remain mind-numbingly irresponsible — as well as substantially dangerous. If numerous comments posted on Twitter are any indication, the failure to convict Zimmerman of murder will precipitate large-scale rioting around the nation. In that regard, former Chicago police officer Paul Huebl adds fuel to an already burning fire. “With today’s social media I fully expect organized race rioting to begin in every major city to dwarf the Rodney King and the Martin Luther King riots of past decades,” he writes.

“If you live in a large city be prepared to evacuate or put up a fight to win. You will need firearms, fire suppression equipment along with lots of food and water. Police resources will be slow and outgunned everywhere.”

Philadelphia Tribune columnist Charles D. Ellison takes it one step further, insisting that the “pervasive cynicism currently surrounding the trial could be validated by an acquittal–and there is the risk of a flashpoint as intense as the aftermath of that fateful Los Angeles police brutality verdict in 1992.”

The message here is clear: either Zimmerman is found guilty, irrespective of the evidence, or the country will burn.

Barring a bombshell turn of events, the state will have a difficult, if not impossible, task proving that Zimmerman acted according to a depraved mind without regard for human life. The six female jurors and four alternates hearing the case have been sequestered and will remain so for the duration of the trial. Thus, it remains impossible to know if they are aware of the extra-judicial firestorm this case is engendering, and whether that firestorm will have any effect on their verdict.

Obviously, there is one man who could go a long way toward defusing this entire scenario should he choose to do so. President Barack Obama could rise above the fray and explain to every American that our system of justice means nothing if the threat of violence can corrupt the verdict of a murder trial. The President could make it clear that violent outbursts of any kind are absolutely unacceptable and attempt to defuse an already tense environment. He won’t, however, because race riots are good for the Democratic Party. They fire up the base. It’s what the whole show was for.
Title: WSJ: Obamacare's Liar Subsidies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2013, 08:02:26 AM
Good to have you with us again Obj.

WSJ: ObamaCare's 'Liar' Subsidies
The White House says you can sign up 'without further verification.'

The White House seems to regard laws as mere suggestions, including the laws it helped to write. On the heels of last week's one-year suspension of the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate to offer insurance to workers, the Administration is now waiving a new batch of its own ObamaCare prescriptions.

These disclosures arrived inside a 606-page catch-all final rule that the Health and Human Services Department published on July 5—a classic Friday news dump, with extra credit for the holiday weekend. HHS now says it will no longer attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies and instead will rely on self-reporting, with minimal efforts to verify if the information consumers provide is accurate.


Remember "liar loans," the low- or no-documentation mortgages that took borrowers at their word without checking pay stubs or W-2s? ObamaCare is now on the same honor system, with taxpayers in tow.

People are supposed to receive subsidies only if their employer does not provide federally approved health benefits. Since HHS now won't require business to report those benefits or enforce the standards until 2015, it says it can't ask ObamaCare's "exchange" bureaucracies to certify who qualifies either.

HHS calls this "a slight technical correction" though it is much more than that. The exchanges will not only start dispensing benefits "based on an applicant's attestation" about his employment insurance status. HHS is also handing the exchanges "temporarily expanded discretion to accept an attestation of projected annual household income without further verification."

In other words, anyone can receive subsidies tied to income without judging the income they declare against the income data the Internal Revenue Service collects. This change has nothing to do with the employer mandate, even tangentially. HHS is disowning eligibility quality control because pre-clearance is "not feasible" as a result of "operational barriers" and "a large amount of systems development on both the state and federal side, which cannot occur in time for October 1, 2013."

You've got to love that passive voice. It's true that coordinating and managing vast amounts of information from hundreds of millions of Americans and corporations, and monitoring compliance with more than 10,000 pages of fine-print Federal Register regulations so far, is hard to do. Yet that is the system Democrats installed when they passed the law, which is not supposed to be optional due to administrative incompetence.

HHS promises to develop "a more robust verification process," some day, but the result starting in October may be millions of people getting subsidies who don't legally qualify. This would mean huge increases in ObamaCare spending. Some of these folks could be fraudsters, much as 21% to 25% of Earned Income Tax Credits flow to people who aren't eligible, according to the Treasury inspector general. The same error rate for ObamaCare would amount to as much as $250 billion in improper payments in its first decade.

The irony in the case of ObamaCare is that liberal health policy is predicated on the notion that if Congress commands something on paper, it will happen in the real world. Architects Peter Orszag and Ezekiel Emanuel are still claiming against all evidence that their policy experiments in human behavior modification will yield huge cost savings.

Yet now we are discovering that Democrats passed a bill that is so large and convoluted that even they can't implement it in practice. So don't be surprised if millions of individuals decide they're eligible for the subsidies, or should be, and wait for someone eventually to say they aren't.

Liberals are also now claiming that the employer mandate and these eligibility rules were never important parts of ObamaCare. This is revisionist history, not least because the mandate and eligibility limits helped reduce the cost as measured by the Congressional Budget Office.

The revisionism is also false because every provision of ObamaCare is supposed to "solve" a problem created by some other provision of the bill. Kick out one of the struts like the business mandate and the whole apparatus becomes even more unstable. In the case of the lawless decision to shelve any income or employer insurance scrutiny, HHS's logistical challenges are real. But our bet is that the Administration is also using them as a pretense in a deliberate bid to make it much easier to join the exchanges.

That's because the health planners are terrified that enough healthy, low-cost people won't sign up and therefore the Affordable Care Act's strict regulations on underwriting and risk-pooling will blow up insurance markets. As more and more of ObamaCare tumbles, the Administration is resorting to anything that can salvage the goal of permanently expanding the U.S. entitlement state.

All of this fits with ObamaCare's entire bloody-minded history. Democrats were determined to make their rendezvous with the liberal destiny of government-run health care, so they imposed this debacle on the country on a partisan vote and despite public opposition. Now that they are discovering how difficult it is to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy, they are rewriting the law as they go and telling Americans they have no choice but to live with the consequences.
Title: Odd break-in of whistleblower's lawyer's office
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2013, 12:09:25 PM

second post

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/08/odd-break-in-at-law-office-representing-state-dept-whistleblower-the-surprising-thing-the-crooks-didnt-take/
Title: Re: Odd break-in of whistleblower's lawyer's office
Post by: G M on July 08, 2013, 01:34:52 PM

second post

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/08/odd-break-in-at-law-office-representing-state-dept-whistleblower-the-surprising-thing-the-crooks-didnt-take/

Is Buraq actually trying to check off every item on Nixon's article of impeachment?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2013, 05:23:00 PM
Nixon's list is already long gone in the rear view mirror.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on July 08, 2013, 05:28:05 PM
Nixon's list is already long gone in the rear view mirror.


Never go Full Nixon.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on July 08, 2013, 05:29:25 PM
Nixon's list is already long gone in the rear view mirror.


Oh yeah, screams of outrage from the left in......3.......2......Never.
Title: Unconstitutional Monarchy
Post by: G M on July 09, 2013, 02:09:05 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/352950/unconstitutional-monarchy-mark-steyn

Unconstitutional Monarchy


 By  Mark Steyn

July 9, 2013 8:46 AM




Jonah yesterday, apropos ObamaCare and the postponement of the employer mandate, said we were now living under an “arbitrary system” in which “the political arm of the White House gets to decide what laws are going to be enforced and which ones aren’t“.

I made a similar point guest-hosting for Rush last Friday, noting that this was one of the indictments against George III in the Declaration of Independence:


He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

When legislatures pass laws but the head of state decides which ones he’ll implement and which he won’t, that is a monarchy – and not a constitutional but an absolute one. When the English were as mad with James II as the Americans later were with George III, they spelled it out in the first charge of the 1689 Bill of Rights:


Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom;

By assuming and exercising a power of dispensing with and suspending of laws and the execution of laws without consent of Parliament;

President Obama has developed a habit of “dispensing with and suspending” all manner of laws from health care to immigration. If he gets to choose which laws he’ll enforce, do we get to choose which laws we follow?
Title: We are so fuct-2
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2013, 04:50:12 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0he0cqHH20&feature=player_embedded
Title: Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime
Post by: G M on July 09, 2013, 05:38:53 PM
http://www.columbialawreview.org/ham-sandwich-nation_reynolds/

Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime

 July 2013 Sidebar

Glenn Harlan Reynolds*
 
 
 
Introduction
 
Prosecutorial discretion poses an increasing threat to justice. The threat has in fact grown more severe to the point of becoming a due process issue. Two recent events have brought more attention to this problem. One involves the decision not to charge NBC anchor David Gregory with violating gun laws. In Washington D.C., brandishing a thirty-round magazine is illegal and can result in a yearlong sentence. Nonetheless, the prosecutor refused to charge Gregory despite stating that the on-air violation was clear.1 The other event involves the government’s rather enthusiastic efforts to prosecute Reddit founder Aaron Swartz for downloading academic journal articles from a closed database. Authorities prosecuted Swartz so vigorously that he committed suicide in the face of a potential fifty-year sentence.2
 
Both cases have aroused criticism. In Swartz’s case, a congresswoman has even proposed legislation designed to ensure that violating a website’s terms cannot be prosecuted as a crime.3 But the problem is much broader. Given the vast web of legislation and regulation that exists today, virtually any American bears the risk of being targeted for prosecution.
 
 
 
I.  The Problem with Prosecutorial Discretion
 
Attorney General (and later Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson once commented: “If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, it follows he can choose his defendants.”4 This method results in “[t]he most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted.”5 Prosecutors could easily fall prey to the temptation of “picking the man, and then searching the law books . . . to pin some offense on him.”6 In short, prosecutors’ discretion to charge—or not to charge—individuals with crimes is a tremendous power, amplified by the large number of laws on the books.
 
 
 
Prosecutors themselves understand just how much discretion they enjoy. As Tim Wu recounted in 2007, a popular game in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York was to name a famous person—Mother Teresa, or John Lennon—and decide how he or she could be prosecuted:
 
 
 
It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape,      murder, or other crimes you’d see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like “false statements” (a felony, up to five years), “obstructing the mails” (five years), or “false pretenses on the high seas” (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: “prison time.”7
 
 
 
With so many more federal laws and regulations than were present in Jackson’s day,8 a prosecutor’s task of first choosing a possible target and then pinning the crime on him or her has become much easier. If prosecutors were not motivated by politics, revenge, or other improper motives, the risk of improper prosecution would not be particularly severe. However, such motivations do, in fact, encourage prosecutors to pursue certain individuals, like the gadfly Aaron Swartz, while letting others off the hook—as in the case of Gregory, a popular newscaster generally supportive of the current administration.
 
 
 
This problem has been discussed at length in Gene Healy’s Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything9 and Harvey Silverglate’s Three Felonies a Day.10 The upshot of both books is that the proliferation of federal criminal statutes and regulations has reached the point where virtually every citizen, knowingly or not (usually not) is potentially at risk for prosecution. That assertion is undoubtedly true, and the consequences are drastic and troubling.
 
 
 
The result of overcriminalization is that prosecutors no longer need to wait for obvious signs of a crime. Instead of finding Professor Plum dead in the conservatory and launching an investigation, authorities can instead start an investigation of Colonel Mustard as soon as someone has suggested he is a shady character. And since, as the game Wu describes illustrates, everyone is a criminal if prosecutors look hard enough, they are guaranteed to find something eventually.
 
 
 
Overcriminalization has thus left us in a peculiar place: Though people suspected of a crime have extensive due process rights in dealing with the police, and people charged with a crime have even more extensive due process rights in court, the actual decision of whether or not to charge a person with a crime is almost completely unconstrained. Yet, because of overcharging and plea bargains, the decision to prosecute is probably the single most important event in the chain of criminal procedure.

Read it all!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2013, 09:28:26 PM
An excellent point, and one greatly augmented by an omnipresent surveillance state.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on July 09, 2013, 10:00:28 PM
An excellent point, and one greatly augmented by an omnipresent surveillance state.

One that has been corrupted by a Chicago type thugocrat.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 10, 2013, 08:08:24 AM
Indeed!  This is a very good example of why it is a bad idea to have an omnipresent surveillance state.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on July 10, 2013, 08:58:56 AM
Indeed!  This is a very good example of why it is a bad idea to have an omnipresent surveillance state.

However  this does not negate the need for law enforcement or intelligence for national security. Now we have the worst of both worlds, a system focused on suppressing legitimate political viewpoints while studiously ignoring the jihadists in our midsts.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on July 10, 2013, 09:04:16 AM
An excellent point, and one greatly augmented by an omnipresent surveillance state.
One that has been corrupted by a Chicago type thugocrat.

[Typing while GM posted, this makes essentially the same point.]

Yes.  Increased distrust in government is about the only positive Obama accomplishment.  Maybe out of that we can get IRS shrinkage, tax reform and scale back our overly zealous Census Bureau to its constitutional function.  It may also be the downfall of Obamacare, I just can't yet see how.  On the flip side, we may be losing security by losing our trust in the professionalism and independence of our security agencies.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on July 10, 2013, 09:34:06 AM
Obmacare is the downfall of Obamacare, as part of the systematic collapse we are plunging towards.
Title: As mentioned before...
Post by: G M on July 10, 2013, 12:46:20 PM
http://www.althouse.blogspot.com/2013/07/of-all-stretches-of-executive-power.html

July 9, 2013


 

"Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president's unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects."
 

"As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress 'would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.'"
Title: US DOJ using our tax dollars to forment racist lynch mobs
Post by: G M on July 10, 2013, 12:52:26 PM
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/07/10/newly-released-documents-detail-the-department-of-justices-role-in-organizing-trayvon-martin-protests/

Newly Released Documents Detail the Department of Justice’s Role in Organizing Trayvon Martin Protests

DOJ deployed obscure section to play role in Florida protests. Also read: Justice for Trayvon, Race-Hustler Style, by J. Christian Adams

by
Bryan Preston


Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained documents proving that the Department of Justice played a major behind-the-scenes role in organizing protests against George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is on trial for second-degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in February 2012.
 
Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the DOJ on April 24, 2012. According to the documents JW received, a little-known DOJ unit called the Community Relations Service deployed to Sanford, FL, to organize and manage rallies against Zimmerman.

 


Among JW’s findings:
 •March 25 – 27, 2012, CRS spent $674.14 upon being “deployed to Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain.”
 •March 25 – 28, 2012, CRS spent $1,142.84 “in Sanford, FL to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a neighborhood watch captain.”
 •March 30 – April 1, 2012, CRS spent $892.55 in Sanford, FL “to provide support for protest deployment in Florida.”
 •March 30 – April 1, 2012, CRS spent an additional $751.60 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance to the City of Sanford, event organizers, and law enforcement agencies for the march and rally on March 31.”
 •April 3 – 12, 2012, CRS spent $1,307.40 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance, conciliation, and onsite mediation during demonstrations planned in Sanford.”
 •April 11-12, 2012, CRS spent $552.35 in Sanford, FL “to provide technical assistance for the preparation of possible marches and rallies related to the fatal shooting of a 17 year old African American male.” – expenses for employees to travel, eat, sleep?
 
JW says the documents it obtained reveal that CRS is not engaging in its stated mission of conducting “impartial mediation practices and conflict resolution,” but instead engaged on the side of the anti-Zimmerman protesters.
 

On April 15, 2012, during the height of the protests, the Orlando Sentinel reported, “They [the CRS] helped set up a meeting between the local NAACP and elected officials that led to the temporary resignation of police Chief Bill Lee according to Turner Clayton, Seminole County chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” The paper quoted the Rev. Valarie Houston, pastor of Allen Chapel AME Church, a focal point for protestors, as saying “They were there for us,” after a March 20 meeting with CRS agents.
 
Separately, in response to a Florida Sunshine Law request to the City of Sanford, Judicial Watch also obtained an audio recording of a “community meeting” held at Second Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Sanford on April 19, 2012. The meeting, which led to the ouster of Sanford’s Police Chief Bill Lee, was scheduled after a group of college students calling themselves the “Dream Defenders” barricaded the entrance to the police department demanding Lee be fired.  According to the Orlando Sentinel, DOJ employees with the CRS had arranged a 40-mile police escort for the students from Daytona Beach to Sanford.
 
“These documents detail the extraordinary intervention by the Justice Department in the pressure campaign leading to the prosecution of George Zimmerman,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “My guess is that most Americans would rightly object to taxpayers paying government employees to help organize racially-charged demonstrations.”
 
Organizing such protests falls well within both President Barack Obama’s and Attorney General Eric Holder’s wheelhouses. Obama was a “community organizer” in his career prior to elective politics, a position that uses protests and street theater, along with threats, to obtain concessions from businesses and other political opponents. Holder has accused America of being a “nation of cowards” for not discussing racial issues enough. He also described black Americans as “my people” during a congressional hearing.
 
As the Zimmerman trial winds down, the threat of race riots should he be acquitted has risen.
Title: Re: As mentioned before...
Post by: DougMacG on July 10, 2013, 02:11:43 PM
"Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president's unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects."
 "As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress 'would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.'"

Other examples of this were not enforcing borders, not building the fence, and not deporting.  The justification is that Bush wouldn't do it either, or Clinton, etc.

I don't remember the campaign mantra that we will take the violations and abuse of our predecessor and build on them in ways you can't imagine.
Title: Re: As mentioned before...
Post by: G M on July 10, 2013, 02:37:44 PM
"Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president's unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects."
 "As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress 'would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.'"

Other examples of this were not enforcing borders, not building the fence, and not deporting.  The justification is that Bush wouldn't do it either, or Clinton, etc.

I don't remember the campaign mantra that we will take the violations and abuse of our predecessor and build on them in ways you can't imagine.

It was what he meant when he promised a "fundamental transformation of America".
Title: Napolitano: Obama's war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 11, 2013, 09:34:25 PM


http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/07/11/above-law-obama-radical-rejection-rule-law-has-fatal-consequences/
Title: WSJ: Dems fight back on IRS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2013, 12:40:57 PM
Democrats Step Up Criticism of IRS Probe


By John D. McKinnon

    Associated Press
    The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking Democrat, Rep. Elijah Cummings.

The controversy over Internal Revenue Service targeting of politically active groups continues to deepen.

In the latest twist, congressional Democrats are stepping up their charge that the investigation so far has focused too much on conservative groups and ignored targeting of liberal and progressive groups.

Democrats, in a letter to Republicans, point to new evidence that progressive groups were being scrutinized. That includes a PowerPoint presentation from the Cincinnati office where the review occurred, and a newly discovered watch list. The new evidence suggests IRS workers in Cincinnati were actively scrutinizing liberal groups as well as conservative ones. The Cincinnati office reviews all applications for tax-exempt status.


The letter also cites newly uncovered evidence that the IRS targeting of tea party and other conservative groups for lengthy and heavy-handed review was not motivated by political bias in the Cincinnati office.

It’s not clear how much impact the new disclosures will have. The IRS inspector general who investigated the targeting has said all along that he found no evidence of political motivation in the Cincinnati office. Republicans are more focused on Washington higher ups who helped guide the scrutiny.  But the new evidence of scrutinizing of liberal groups could raise doubts about whether conservative were singled out.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says in the new letter that the inspector general, Russell George, should have included the new evidence in his original report.  Mr. George has said that there were watch lists mentioning liberal groups but they did not appear to be actively used. His office did not immediately comment on the letter Friday.  Mr. Cummings wants committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) to call Mr. George to testify again.

“This  investigation … has been characterized by one-sided and partial information leading to unsubstantiated accusations with no basis in fact,” Mr. Cummings says in the letter.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2013, 08:29:00 PM
http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/07/15/scandal-week-day-1-the-nsa/?utm_source=Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2013-07-15_235849&utm_content=5054942&utm_term=_235849_235860
Title: No prosecutions for improper IRS candidate scrutiny
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 16, 2013, 10:47:05 AM


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/15/feds-admit-improper-scrutiny-candidate-donor-tax-r/
Title: Re: No prosecutions for improper IRS candidate scrutiny
Post by: G M on July 16, 2013, 12:44:51 PM


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/15/feds-admit-improper-scrutiny-candidate-donor-tax-r/

Of course not. Why would they? Laws are for the little people.
Title: Grand Theft Treasury
Post by: G M on July 16, 2013, 01:21:56 PM
http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/151966

Grand Theft Treasury

by Richard A. Epstein (Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow and member of the Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity Task Force)

 The U.S. government has unconstitutionally stripped billions of dollars from Fannie and Freddie’s private investors.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last week’s headline financial story was full of good news for the body politic. The United States Treasury reported a handsome second-quarter profit of $118 billion, which could cut down the deficit and postpone any politically charged negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. Half of that surplus comes from a combination of revenue increases from a slowly improving economy and expenditure cuts introduced in early 2013. The second half consists of a $59 billion “dividend” from Treasury’s “investment” to bail out The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac).
 
   
  Illustration by Barbara Kelley

To call that money a “dividend” relies on a profound public misunderstanding of the complex transactions that generated this ill-begotten Treasury bonanza. These transactions are being challenged in four separate lawsuits, which were recently filed, that attack the propriety of virtually every government action during the turbulent past five years. (Full Disclosure: within the past several months, I been hired by several hedge funds to advise them privately on the legal issues surrounding these events.)
 
The oft-neglected back-story of the “Fannie and Freddie Dividend” casts these transactions in a much darker light. Quite simply, the behavior of the U.S. government over the past five years has been marred by grave legal violations of bedrock principles underlying corporate, administrative, and constitutional law. The Back-Story

Act One: Organizing the Bailout

Prior to August 2008, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were privately owned, publicly traded, and consistently profitable corporations that had issued large amounts of common stock and multiple classes of preferred stock. But both Fannie and Freddie were in obvious distress during the run-up to the September 2008 financial market meltdown, which prompted Congress to pass the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA) in July of that year. That behemoth law authorized the Federal Housing Finance Administration (FHFA) to place the corporations into a temporary conservatorship to preserve and to manage their assets in ways that would help stabilize the housing market.
 
Pursuant to that authority, the FHFA became conservator of both companies in September 2008. It promptly made a deal with the Department of Treasury under which Treasury would advance $100 billion (extended in May 2009 to $200 billion) in exchange for $1 billion in shares of senior preferred stock, which had an original face value of $1 billion dollars. That preferred stock would be increased dollar-for-dollar by any sums that the Treasury invested into either corporation and it carried a 10 percent dividend. At the same time, the Treasury received warrants to purchase 79.9 percent of the common stock of each entity for a nominal price measured in tiny fractions of a penny.
 
Section 1117 of HERA gave Treasury broad discretion on the terms and conditions that attached to its preferred stock, but it also required Treasury to take into account a number of conditions that related to the soundness of the government’s security for its advances and to the “orderly resumption or private market funding or capital market access,” which would allow Fannie and Freddie to each maintain their status “as a private shareholder-owned company.” Shortly after the 2008 deal went into effect, the value of the common and preferred shares both plummeted.
 
Act Two: The Third Amended Agreement
 
I will pass by the many complications that occurred between September 2008 and August 2012 to focus on The Third Amendment to the original stock purchase agreement of August 17, 2012, signed by both Edward Demarco, Acting Director of FHFA, and then Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
 
Its key provision simply ordered what the Treasury trumpeted, in bold type, would be (as of January 1, 2013) “a full income sweep of All Future Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Earnings to Benefit Taxpayers for Their Investment.” Treasury announced the sweep only after it became clear that both Fannie and Freddie were returning to profitability. The stock prices of both sets of shares plummeted. By the terms of the deal, nothing was left for either’s set of shareholders in the absence of political relief or a successful lawsuit.
 
The Flaws of the Government Position
 
The Conservator’s Conflict of Interest

The shareholders’ grievance is quite simple: the disappearance of their wealth. The purpose of a conservatorship is to preserve the assets for the benefit of the individuals whom it represents, which in this instance covers both classes of shareholders. Accordingly, the conservator represents the shareholders in their relationship with the government. Under standard corporate law principles, that conservator is bound, as his name suggests, by a strong fiduciary duty to protect its assets for the benefit of both its common and preferred shareholders.
 
In this case, however, the designation of the FHFA as the conservator created an impossible conflict of interest. The Boards of Directors of Fannie and Freddie were shut out of the deliberations that took place exclusively between branches of the federal government.
 
Given that exclusion, the terms of the financial deal between the corporations and Treasury must be examined to see that in discharging their mandate “to protect the taxpayers,” the two government parties did not run roughshod over the issues of the preferred and common shareholders. Yet, as the plaintiffs allege in Washington Mutual v. United States, there was ample evidence that Treasury exaggerated the financial dangers to Fannie and Freddie in 2008, and thus imposed financial terms that were far too favorable to its own interests, since both Fannie and Freddie had substantial amounts of liquid assets to meet any claims. No wonder share prices plummeted in response to both the 2008 and 2012 deals.
 
By the standards of corporate governance, these transactions are not protected by the ”business judgment” rule, which is intended to give protection to the good faith judgment of corporate fiduciaries when they are acting in the best of interests of the shareholders with outsiders. That rule is needed to protect officers and directors, for no one will take those jobs if he knows that he gets nothing special when he works well, but suffers huge liabilities if an uncertain deal turns sour.
 
In this case, however, we have a manifest case of self-dealing between branches of the United States government, at which point the law protects the shareholders by insisting that the parties to the transaction show that it supplied full value to the shareholders. At the time of the 2008 deal, the Office of the Inspector General inside FHFA concluded that the deal had rendered the common and preferred shares “almost worthless.”
 
It takes no special acumen to realize that the 2012 transaction was completely one-sided; FHFA and Treasury used a fancy set of legal maneuvers to strip both corporations of their assets for the sole benefit of the government. Generally, senior preferred shareholders are entitled to recover their principal and interest in full, after which their shares are cancelled. In this case, the government did precisely the opposite. It treated Fannie and Freddie as gifts that keep on giving, wiping out all shareholder profits.
 
This breach of duty is so blatant that the only serious question is how best to unscramble the omelet. To make a long story short, there are two ways forward. First, and easiest, is simply to annul the August 2012 Amendment so that the government uses its recent receipts to write down the principal and interest owed prior to that date. Second, and trickier, is to reevaluate the terms of the 2008 transaction and write down the size of the government’s senior preferred shares to fairly reflect the financial condition of the company at the same time.
 
The Administrative Procedure Act

The August 2012 actions are also in flat violation of the basic duties of government actors under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which is addressed in one claim filed in Fairholme Funds v. FHFA and a second filed in Perry Capital v. Lew. The gist of these two actions is that Treasury and FHFA are not at liberty to ignore all of the procedural safeguards that were explicitly built into HERA. Any decision of this magnitude must be set aside when no government official has addressed the explicit statutory “considerations” that are supposed to guide their behavior.
 
There is no way that a statutory scheme that was intended to nurse Fannie and Freddie back to health as private corporations can be used unilaterally by the government to devour the interests of the very private shareholders that they were intended to protect. Government actions that don’t comply with the minimum standards of the APA should have no force and effect. Thus, even if the 2008 transaction stands, the 2012 transaction should be nullified, and the private and common shares restored.
 
The Takings Issue
 
The third approach to this problem, taken both in Washington Mutual and Cacciapelle v. United States, hones in on the de facto confiscation of the common and preferred stock of these companies by the unilateral government action. On this view, the government can keep the shares so long as it buys out the shareholders at fair market value. The law of takings, with its just compensation requirement, is intended to make sure that the government does not, in the famous words of the 1960 case of Armstrong v. United States, force “some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole.”

Regrettably, that is exactly what is being done here. The government could never announce that it had decided to seize the shares of Fannie and Freddie, without compensating their owners. Nor can it circumvent that fundamental principle by “amending” a supervisory agreement so that it sucks all the wealth out of those shares. The government’s position is yet more precarious when one considers that the crisis in the housing market was due to the reckless policies that the United States forced on Fannie and Freddie prior to 2008. If Congress makes the mess, it can hardly expect the shareholders whom it targeted to bear the brunt of its misdeeds.
 
Some Ominous Social Implications
 
All three routes therefore lead to the same conclusion. The whole sorry episode represents a form of serious government coercion, with public officials attempting to run roughshod over bedrock principles of corporate, administrative, and property law. It is therefore a sad commentary on the current situation that Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee has introduced the high sounding Housing Finance Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act that is intended to wind down the operations of Fannie and Freddie, which does nothing whatsoever to undo the massive property grab undertaken over the past five years.
 
There is no doubt that this legislation will attract popular support because it demonizes hedge funds and profits taxpayers in the short run. But it is vital to remember the long run. This dispute involves lots more than a simple battle over the proceeds of profitable ventures. All capital markets depend on the strong protection of the rule of law so that firms that invest their capital today can be confident that the government will not steal it away by stealth and artifice tomorrow, which is just what is happening now on a multibillion dollar level.
 
In 2009, I wrote at some length about the dangers of “political bankruptcies” in relation to the General Motors and Chrysler bailouts, which also ran roughshod over the rule of law. At the time, people said it was a one-off situation. After Fannie and Freddie, those words ring hollow. The only way to raise capital at the front end is to stick to the rules of the game throughout the transaction. We now seem to have some bipartisan support for the opposite position, which is one more sober reminder of how far the nation has drifted from the sound and enduring principles of strong property rights and limited government.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Richard A. Epstein, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. His areas of expertise include constitutional law, intellectual property, and property rights. His most recent books are Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law (2011), The Case against the Employee Free Choice Act (Hoover Press, 2009) and Supreme Neglect: How to Revive the Constitutional Protection for Private Property (Oxford Press, 2008).
Title: Beck: Scandal of the Week-3
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2013, 03:50:15 PM


http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/07/17/scandal-week-day-3-intimidating-the-press/?utm_source=Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2013-07-17_237099&utm_content=5054942&utm_term=_237099_237107
Title: War on the rule of law, IRS targeting trail leads right where we thought
Post by: DougMacG on July 18, 2013, 10:02:40 AM
It wasn't a rogue Cincinnati office.  It leads to Washington.  It leads to political appointees within shouting distance of the President and the campaign.

http://nationalreview.com/article/353729/targeting-top-irs-eliana-johnson

 July 18, 2013
Targeting from the Top of the IRS
High-ranking IRS lawyers, possibly including an Obama appointee, delayed tea-party applications.
By Eliana Johnson

The congressional investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of tea-party groups inched closer to the White House yesterday as testimony from three IRS attorneys indicated lawyers in the agency’s chief counsel’s office were involved in reviewing the applications of tea-party groups for tax exemption. The office is led by William Wilkins, one of two IRS officials appointed by President Obama.

A source tells National Review Online that Judith Kindell, a senior adviser to Lois Lerner, also held up the processing of tea-party cases by demanding to review them herself. Lerner, who has become emblematic of the scandal that continues to roil the tax-collection agency, is the embattled former director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division who remains on paid administrative leave, refusing to testify about the targeting unless lawmakers grant her blanket immunity.

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Wilkins, who, according to the IRS, heads an office of 1,600 attorneys, has been involved in Democratic politics for over three decades. He joined the Democratic staff on the Senate Finance Committee in 1981 and became the committee’s staff director and chief counsel in 1987, before going on to a career in private practice at the white-shoe law firm WilmerHale. There, he defended pro bono Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s United Church of Christ when the IRS investigated potential violations of its 501(c)(3) status after then-senator Barack Obama delivered a speech there. Wilkins has also donated generously to Democratic causes, contributing over $35,000 to Democratic politicians and party affiliates since 1990, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He has also contributed to Republican politicians, including Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, but not nearly as generously.

His involvement in the targeting of tea-party groups is a matter of dispute. The IRS has denied it, saying in a statement that he is “not involved in the 501(c)(4) application process” and “did not learn about specific groups being singled out by name until earlier this year.” A senior GOP aide, however, tells National Review Online that witnesses interviewed by congressional investigators claim Wilkins became aware of the targeting at some point in 2012. According to White House press secretary Jay Carney, Wilkins informed neither his boss — the Treasury Department’s chief counsel — nor the White House when he learned of it. Whether he personally helped to develop the guidelines for reviewing tea-party applications remains unknown.

In interviews with congressional investigators, three IRS lawyers involved in the processing of tea-party cases — Carter Hull, Ronald Shoemaker, and Michael Seto — said that lawyers in Wilkins’s office, as well as Lerner’s adviser, Kindell, put the applications of conservative groups through a complex, multi-layered review process that delayed their processing. An IRS source says that Kindell is considered the “political guru” in the Exempt Organizations division as well as “the definitive expert” on “political activities in exempt organizations tax law.” She is the author of Revenue Ruling 2007-41, which provides that tax-exempt organizations “may not participate in, or intervene in . . . any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office” and provides several examples of impermissible political activities among exempt organizations.

According to Hull, a recently retired lawyer with the Exempt Organizations Technical Unit who was providing guidance to the Cincinnati agent processing tea-party cases, Kindell told him the chief counsel’s office would need to review the applications. That, he said, was unprecedented. It also caused lengthy delays in the processing of tea-party applications during the 2010 election season. The applications elevated to Washington, D.C. were “test” applications whose treatment was to provide guidance for the Cincinnati agents processing the bulk of the tea-party cases; lacking a determination on their status, Cincinnati was unable to process any other tea-party applications while agents there waited for word from Washington.

Though he was instructed to make determinations on the applications, Hull explained, “I couldn’t do it because I had no idea which way we were going.” Elizabeth Hofacre, the Cincinnati agent charged with processing tea-party applications, told investigators, “I never got any feedback from [Hull] at all” during that period. The head of the Determinations Unit in Cincinnati, Cindy Thomas, said that for nearly a year, between October 2010 and September 2011, tea-party applications languished while agents waited for guidance from top lawyers in Washington.

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Hull’s superiors, Michael Seto and Ronald Shoemaker, confirmed his account. Seto, the manager of the Exempt Organizations Technical Unit, told investigators that applications were sent to the chief counsel’s office after Lerner “sent me an e-mail saying that . . . these cases need to go through multi-tier review and they will eventually have to go [through her staff] and the chief counsel’s office.” If Seto’s testimony is to be believed, Lerner appears at best to have withheld information from, and at worst to have misled, Congress about her knowledge of the scrutiny to which tea-party applications were being subjected. When the Oversight Committee in March 2012 expressed concern that the organizations were the subject of “heightened scrutiny,” Lerner said only that some applications required “further development” and, in cases with “no established public precedent,” agents sought guidance from lawyers in the Exempt Organizations Technical Unit. She did not tell the committee that her senior adviser and lawyers in the chief counsel’s office had worked to craft guidelines for reviewing the applications about which the committee had inquired.

Though Hull began processing tea-party applications in April 2010, it was not until August 2011 that the chief counsel’s office held a meeting with Hull and Kindell about them. Because the applications had sat dormant for so long, lawyers from the chief counsel’s office indicated they needed updated information from the tea-party groups before they could make a determination. In particular, they sought information about the groups’ political activity “right before the [2010] election period,” according to Hull’s supervisor, Ronald Shoemaker. Shockingly, Shoemaker told investigators that to his knowledge, in the three years since one of the tea-party applications elevated to Washington, D.C., was filed, Kindell and the chief counsel’s office have yet to make a determination on it. “That’s a very long time period,” he said.

Four Republican congressmen disclosed the explosive testimony on Wednesday in a letter to the IRS’s acting administrator, Danny Werfel, who was appointed by President Obama in the wake of the targeting scandal. The disclosures amount to a counterpunch to a 36-page memo from Democratic committee staff released Monday accusing the GOP of engaging in a “sustained and coordinated campaign” to politicize the investigation. Democrats denounced Republicans for alleging that the targeting was politically motivated, calling the allegations “unsubstantiated” and declaring there was “no political motivation or White House involvement in this process.”

Despite the partisan grudge match taking place beneath the surface, we continue, slowly, to get closer to the truth.

— Eliana Johnson is media editor of National Review Online.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2013, 10:31:26 AM
GOP Senate candidate's tax records were breached
More than two years after her upstart Senate campaign rocked the Delaware political world, Christine O'Donnell got an unexpected contact from a U.S. Treasury Department agent warning that her private tax records may have been breached
Title: William Wilkins-- one step removed from the President
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2013, 06:11:55 PM
second post

William Wilkins: The G. Gordon Liddy Of The IRS Scandal?
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on July 19, 2013
Printer-Friendly Version
If the IRS/Tea Party scandal is at all reminiscent of the Watergate debacle that brought down a president in 1974, we may have just discovered the latter-day G. Gordon Liddy, the man who oversaw the chain of events that led to Nixon's resignation.

Who would that be?  Well, a good guess would be William Wilkins, Chief Counsel to the Internal Revenue Service.  More and more evidence is sucking his office into the maelstrom of the IRS/Tea Party scandal.

Let's take a look at him.

Wilkins is one of only two political appointees on the entire IRS staff.  All of the other more than one hundred thousand employees in the agency are civil servants.  Only Wilkins and the Director were directly chosen by Obama.

But there's something else that's worth knowing about Wilkins.  He's a long time Obama crony and Democratic donor who earned his spurs by successfully defending, pro bono (free), the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Yes, that Reverend Wright) from charges that his radical politicization of his pulpit should deny his church tax exempt status.  The event that triggered the IRS' interest?  Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama's speech to the congregation during the Democratic presidential primary campaign.  Now does that sound like 'political activity'?

Well, Wilkins was able to convince the IRS that it was not!  He knows his stuff.  Tax exempt organizations were one of Wilkins specialties in private practice.  He knows the field, making him a likely key man in the emerging scandal.  He's not just a wealthy donor who was rewarded with a plum position who doesn't know much about taxes.  No, he's an expert on the very area of tax law that is at the heart of the charges of politically motivated harassment of the Tea Party and other conservative groups by the IRS.

So you'd think he might be interested in what was going on.

At yesterday's House Government Oversight hearing, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, there was testimony -- for the first time -- that as early as July, 2011, Wilkins' office was involved in the decisions about the unprecedented targeting and unorthodox treatment of Tea Party organizations seeking tax exempt status.

What was patently clear from the testimony is that this illegal and improper operation wasn't run by "rogue" IRS employees in Cincinnati, as the White House claims.  Instead, it was run by rogue employees at the very top of the IRS and possibly the White House as well.

Carter Hull, recently retired after 48 years of service at the IRS, was the tax analyst in D.C. in charge of the Tea Party applications.  Hull indicated that he was told by the top assistant to Lois Lerner (remember her? In May, she refused to testify and invoked her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent) that Wilkins' office had to review all of the tax exemption applications from Tea Party groups that Hull was overseeing.  Hull noted that the one application that he had actually approved was immediately routed to Wilkins office for review.  When Hull disagreed with the Counsel's office and Lerner about how the Tea Party cases should be handled, the files were taken away from him and transferred to a woman with only several months experience at the IRS.

Hull also described a meeting about the Tea Party applications on August 4, 2011 where the IRS chief counsel's office had three representatives present.

Here's what the Inspector General's Report stated in its timeline:

August 4, 2011

Rulings and Agreements office personnel held a meeting with Chief Counsel so that everyone would have the latest information on the issue.

Sounds like the Chief Counsel knew about it, doesn't it?

But Wilkins denies that he knew anything about the handling of the Tea Party cases.  That's hard to believe, because there's uncontested evidence that his office was definitely involved.  And, in addition, Wilkins was one of the top five officials in the IRS.

A close review of the Inspector General's Report on the IRS and the Tea Party applications reveals that, in addition to the Chief Counsel's office, the highest echelons of the IRS were aware of complaints about the treatment of the Tea Party applications in early 2012, and, in some cases, responded to complaints, particularly about disclosing donors.  And the second or third highest official in the IRS, the Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement, told the team working on the applications that if there were complaints about "having to provide donor information" they would not have to send them at that time.

The IG Report also states that on March 23-27, 2012, high level officials discussed concerns about media attention to the Tea Party applications.

So the very top brass at the IRS knew about the problem in early 2012.
 
And now, there may be a direct link to the White House.  Hull's testimony revealed that Chief Counsel Wilkins' office reviewed the draft criteria to be used in decided whether to approve the Tea Party applications for tax exemption. 

And J. Russell George, the Inspector General who found inappropriate procedures regarding the Tea Party applications, indicated that on April 25th, 2012, Wilkins' office provided Hull and Lerner "additional comments" on the draft criteria.

What is key about that date is that it comes just two days after Wilkins met with President Obama and the day after his boss, former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, saw the president at the White House.
   
On April 23, 2012, according to White House visitor logs, Wilkins had a meeting with President Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.  There is no indication of what was discussed.  On April 24, the day before the criteria for Tea Party groups was developed, former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman -- the other of the two political appointees at the IRS -- also visited the White House.

Coincidence?

Well, even a coincidental meeting can result in an exchange of information.

NOTE: Here's something of interest: When Dick worked in the Clinton White House, the Roosevelt Room was the only room where political activity could take place in the West Wing.  We have no way of knowing of that is the case now.

These queries will undoubtedly be central to the next exciting episode of the Darrell Issa Show as the California Congressman seeks to penetrate the veil of deception and misdirection with which the Administration has cloaked the IRS scandal.
   
Before one could get to Nixon, one had to find G. Gordon Liddy and Chuck Colson behind the Watergate burglars.  Before we can get to Obama, we needed to find William Wilkins.  And now we might have the next G. Gordon Liddy.

Stay tuned.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 19, 2013, 07:23:47 PM
Third post

Noonan: A Bombshell in the IRS Scandal
No, it wasn't confined to a few rogue workers in Cincinnati.
By PEGGY NOONAN

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn't say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

To quickly review why the new information, which came most succinctly in a nine-page congressional letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, is big news:

When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office, where a few rogue workers bungled the application process. Lois Lerner, then the head of the exempt organizations unit in Washington, said "line people in Cincinnati" did work that was "not so fine." They asked questions that "weren't really necessary," she claimed, and operated without "the appropriate level of sensitivity." But the targeting was "not intentional." Ousted acting commissioner Steven Miller also put it off on "people in Cincinnati." They provided "horrible customer service."

House investigators soon talked to workers in the Cincinnati office, who said everything they did came from Washington. Elizabeth Hofacre, in charge of processing tea-party applications in Cincinnati, told investigators that her work was overseen and directed by a lawyer in the IRS Washington office named Carter Hull.

Now comes Mr. Hull's testimony. And like Ms. Hofacre, he pointed his finger upward. Mr. Hull—a 48-year IRS veteran and an expert on tax exemption law—told investigators that tea-party applications under his review were sent upstairs within the Washington office, at the direction of Lois Lerner.

In April 2010, Hull was assigned to scrutinize certain tea-party applications. He requested more information from the groups. After he received responses, he felt he knew enough to determine whether the applications should be approved or denied.

But his recommendations were not carried out.

Michael Seto, head of Mr. Hull's unit, also spoke to investigators. He told them Lois Lerner made an unusual decision: Tea-party applications would undergo additional scrutiny—a multilayered review.

Mr. Hull told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. Lerner's senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review:

Q: "Did [the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner] indicate to you whether she agreed with your recommendations?"

A: "She did not say whether she agreed or not. She said it should go to chief counsel."

Q: "The IRS chief counsel?"

A: "The IRS chief counsel."

The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins. And again, he is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.

What was the chief counsel's office looking for? The letter to Mr. Werfel says Mr. Hull's supervisor, Ronald Shoemaker, provided insight: The counsel's office wanted, in the words of the congressional committees, "information about the applicants' political activities leading up to the 2010 election." Mr. Shoemaker told investigators he didn't find that kind of question unreasonable, but he found the counsel's office to be "not very forthcoming": "We discussed it to some extent and they indicated that they wanted more development of possible political activity or political intervention right before the election period."

It's almost as if—my words—the conservative organizations in question were, during two major election cycles, deliberately held in a holding pattern.

So: What the IRS originally claimed was a rogue operation now reaches up not only to the Washington office, but into the office of the IRS chief counsel himself.

At the generally lacking House Oversight Committee Hearings on Thursday, some big things still got said.

Ms. Hofacre of the Cincinnati office testified that when she was given tea-party applications, she had to kick them upstairs. When she was given non-tea-party applications, they were sent on for normal treatment. Was she told to send liberal or progressive groups for special scrutiny? No, she did not scrutinize the applications of liberal or progressive groups. "I would send those to general inventory." Who got extra scrutiny? "They were all tea-party and patriot cases." She became "very frustrated" by the "micromanagement" from Washington. "It was like working in lost luggage." She applied to be transferred.

For his part, Mr. Hull backed up what he'd told House investigators. He described what was, essentially, a big, lengthy runaround in the Washington office in which no one was clear as to their reasons but everything was delayed. The multitiered scrutiny of the targeted groups was, he said, "unusual."

It was Maryland's Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel's ranking Democrat, who, absurdly, asked Ms. Hofacre if the White House called the Cincinnati office to tell them what to do and whether she has knowledge of the president of the United States digging through the tax returns of citizens. Ms. Hofacre looked surprised. No, she replied.

It wasn't hard to imagine her thought bubble: Do congressmen think presidents call people like me and say, "Don't forget to harass my enemies"? Are congressmen that stupid?

Mr. Cummings is not, and his seeming desperation is telling. Recent congressional information leads to Washington—and now to very high up at the IRS. Meaning this is the point at which a scandal goes nowhere or, maybe, everywhere.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, finally woke the proceedings up with what he called "the evolution of the defense" since the scandal began. First, Ms. Lerner planted a question at a conference. Then she said the Cincinnati office did it—a narrative that was advanced by the president's spokesman, Jay Carney. Then came the suggestion the IRS was too badly managed to pull off a sophisticated conspiracy. Then the charge that liberal groups were targeted too—"we did it against both ends of the political spectrum." When the inspector general of the IRS said no, it was conservative groups that were targeted, he came under attack. Now the defense is that the White House wasn't involved, so case closed.

This is one Republican who is right about evolution.

Those trying to get to the bottom of the scandal have to dig in, pay attention. The administration's defenders, and their friends in the press, have made some progress in confusing the issue through misdirection and misstatement.

This is the moment things go forward or stall. Republicans need to find out how high the scandal went and why, exactly, it went there. To do that they'll have to up their game.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law - Noonan on IRS targeting scandal
Post by: DougMacG on July 21, 2013, 12:50:03 PM
I like that Peggy Noonan is keeping a light on this.  Her credibility reaches a little wider than some of the more conservative voices.

This scandal is Nixonian or worse, more like Soviet power.  Ruled appointees/operatives delayed and prevented the political association, fundraising and free speech group rights of political opponents for the purpose of staying in power and pleasing their bosses.  We now know it reaches to the top political appointees and yet there is no consequence.  Give Peggy Noonan credit for expressing outrage.
Title: Christine O'Donnell tax snooping records disappear
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2013, 07:11:56 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/23/records-of-christine-odonnell-tax-snooping-disappe/
Title: WSJ: Theodore Olsen: Treasury's Fannie Mae Heist
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2013, 07:14:46 AM


Theodore B. Olson: Treasury's Fannie Mae Heist
The government asked investors to shore up the two mortgage giants. Now those investors are being stiffed.
By THEODORE B. OLSON

The federal government currently is seizing the substantial profits of the government-chartered mortgage firms, Fannie Mae FNMA +3.25% and Freddie Mac, FMCC +0.69% taking for itself the property and potential gains of private investors the government induced to help prop up these companies. This conduct is intolerable.

Earlier this month I filed a lawsuit to stop it, now known as Perry Capital v. Lew, and other lawsuits challenging the government's authority to demolish private investment are stacking up. Perhaps it's time for the government to change course.

When the nationwide mortgage crisis first took hold in 2007 and 2008, Fannie and Freddie shored up their balance sheets with some $33 billion in private capital, much of it from community banks, which federal regulators encouraged to invest in the companies. As the crisis deepened, the government determined that Fannie and Freddie also needed substantial assistance from taxpayers. Congress passed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, and under that law the government ultimately plowed $187 billion into the companies.

Taxpayers should get their investment back, but once they do, so should the private investors who first came to Fannie and Freddie's aid. The government's scheme to wipe out these investors is bad policy and a plain violation of the law that respects private, investment-backed expectations and our constitutional protection of property rights.

When the government intervened in Fannie and Freddie in 2008, it faced a choice: It could place the companies into a receivership and liquidate them, or it could operate them in a conservatorship and manage them back to financial health. Conservatorship, the government agreed, offered the best chance of stabilizing the mortgage market while repaying the taxpayers for their investment.

Today, Fannie and Freddie are back. Last quarter, Fannie announced a quarterly profit of over $8 billion; Freddie made $7 billion.

Rather than allow private investors to share in these profits, the federal government unilaterally decided to seize every dollar for itself. Last summer the government changed the terms of its investment from a fixed annual dividend of 10%—a healthy return in this market—to a dividend of nearly every dollar of the companies' net worth for as long as they remain in operation.

So, at the end of last month, Fannie and Freddie sent a whopping $66 billion to the Treasury as a dividend. None of this money went to pay down the government's investment. Whatever amount of money the government takes out of Fannie and Freddie, the amount owed to the government is never to be reduced, meaning there can never be any recovery for private investors.

It's a splendid deal for the government: The president's budget estimates, over the next 10 years, that the government will recover $51 billion more than it invested in the companies—and that's on top of tens of billions in dividends the government took out of the companies from 2008-12. But it's a complete destruction of the investments of private shareholders.

That is unlawful for at least three reasons. First, the government's authority to revise its investments in Fannie and Freddie expired more than three years ago. Its change in the payment structure was utterly lawless.

Second, the Housing and Economic Recovery Act expressly requires the government to consider how its actions affect private ownership of the companies. The government has evidently given no attention to that requirement.

Third, that same law requires the government, operating Fannie and Freddie as a conservator, to safeguard their assets, but the government's new dividend scheme conserves nothing. In fact, the government has acknowledged it intends to facilitate the companies' ultimate liquidation. That is the opposite of conservatorship and it violates virtually every limitation that Congress imposed on the government's authority to intervene in Fannie and Freddie.

Some have suggested that this illegal extinction of private investment is justified by the extraordinary levels of support that taxpayers provided to Fannie and Freddie during the financial crisis. Certain recent legislative proposals even purport retroactively to legalize the government's cash-grab in the name of ensuring the taxpayers are repaid. But the companies' return to profitability means that taxpayers likely will be repaid in full, with interest, by the end of next year.

In these circumstances the right thing to do is to permit the companies to pay down what they owe to the government's investment so that private investors also might have the opportunity to earn returns on theirs. Yet, the "right thing" here is not just what the law requires. It may benefit the taxpayers as well. If Fannie and Freddie ever return to private ownership, the government has rights to 80% of the companies' common stock.

The government's recent cash grab squanders that opportunity, but it threatens even more serious harms. The United States has the most liquid securities markets in the world only because of its strong commitment to the rule of law and respect for private property. The government's actions here are an affront to those commitments.

Mr. Olson, a former U.S. solicitor general, is a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
Title: Outright fraud at the U.S. Treasury
Post by: G M on July 24, 2013, 09:42:42 AM
Outright fraud at the U.S. Treasury
 
Exclusive: Lord Monckton has evidence Secretary Lew is cooking debt-limit books
Published: 07/16/2013 at 7:53 PM
Lord Monckton


Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, high priest of climate skepticism, advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, wrote leaders for the Yorkshire Post, was editor of the Catholic paper The Universe, managing editor of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine, assistant editor of Today, and consulting editor of the Evening Standard. He invented the million-selling "Eternity Puzzles," "Sudoku X" and a promising treatment for infections. See the Science & Public Policy Institute.


If one accuses the government of fraud, one sounds like a wild-eyed, part-shaven, pointy-headed, scraggly-bearded, woolly-pullied, foaming-at-the-mouth extremist.
 
So be it, then. The U.S. Treasury is currently engaged in a fraud running into the trillions of dollars. There. I’ve said it. Let me wipe the foam from my mouth and explain.
 
The Republicans who currently command the House of Representatives, rightly anticipating that Mr. Obama’s massive vote-buying among those whom his party’s policies have imprisoned in permanent, cringing dependence upon Auntie Sam for everything from food stamps (getting on for 50 million claimants) to Obailoutcare, decided to show who was boss by setting a limit on the amount the U.S. Treasury was allowed to borrow.
 
That limit was – and is – $16.7 trillion. A trillion is a 1 with 12 noughts on the end. It is a million millions. It’s a whole lot. $16.7 trillion is 16.7 whole lots. You could buy most of my art collection with that.
 
But Obust just went on spending. By close of what passes for business May 17, the U.S. debt subject to congressional limit rose to $16,699,396,000,000.00. That is what passes for a smidgen below the limit.
 
But Obankrupt just went on spending. By close of what once passed for business July 12, he had borrowed another $51 billion.
 
Yet by close of casino July 12, according to the Treasury’s accounting, the U.S. debt subject to congressional limit had risen, compared with 56 days previously, by exactly $0,000,000,000,000.00.
 
What about the net $51 billion in extra borrowing over the past couple of months? Secretary Lew has vanished it.
 
If you think I’m foaming at the mouth, here is the Treasury’s own graph:
 


Since May 17, the graph shows the debt subject to limit (in green) coinciding with the limit set by Congress (in orange), a suspiciously straight line.
 
Secretary Lew even went so far as to write to John Boehner, the dozy speaker of the House, saying he was going to fiddle the books. He said in his May 17 letter that he would be implementing what he called the “standard set of extraordinary measures” [if they're extraordinary they're not standard, Jack, baby] so that the Treasury could go on borrowing in defiance of the will of the people’s elected representatives, while declaring that it was not borrowing anything extra at all.
 
What would the Founding Fathers have thought? Look what a stushie there was when King George’s government proposed to put a modest sales tax of half a crown a pound on tea. If His Majesty’s government had tried to hide two-thirds of a trillion dollars, the Founding Fathers would have had a proper excuse for a stramash.
 
In the commercial sector, false accounting is a felony. Armies of overpaid, under-skilled regulators are waiting to pounce upon every cent that goes astray.
 
In the State sector, false accounting is also supposed to be a felony. Yet armies of overpaid, under-skilled Republicans are waiting to draw their next fat check out of the Treasury. As long as their checks keep coming, they will not – will not – ask the right questions and demand honest answers and straight accounting.
 
Corruption was once something that happened only in third-world countries. But then, the current administration’s wanton profligacy with other people’s money has reduced the United States to third-world status. Bankruptcy and corruption tend to go hand in hand.
 
What should the Republicans do? Just for once, they should act honorably, determinedly, decisively. They should demand that the U.S. Treasury publishes honest figures showing how much the debt has continued to rise notwithstanding the strict limit set upon it by the people’s elected representatives in Congress. Then they should impeach the law-breakers.
 
No administration can commit a more serious offense against democracy than to spend money Congress has not only not authorized it to spend but has explicitly forbidden it to spend.
 
In defense of Secretary Lew, counsel has attempted to argue that there was no fraud because our Jack openly wrote and told John Boehner he was going to cook the books. Since there was no deception, there was no fraud.
 
However, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will not buy that excuse for an instant. For everyone, even Secretary Lew, knows John Boehner is asleep inside his teapot, and the Republicans are asleep at the switch.
 
Even on the generous assumption that the GOP can read, and on the even more generous assumption that they do, and on the lavish assumption that they understand what they read, Secretary Lew correctly calculated that they could be counted upon not to act upon what little they understood. They would say not a lot and do nothing at all while the Treasury fiddled the books and sold their nation into Chinese ownership.
 
Guilty, upon mine honor! And is that the verdict of you all? Take the administration down.

Read more at http://mobile.wnd.com/2013/07/outright-fraud-at-the-u-s-treasury/
Title: A new potential scandal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 25, 2013, 12:49:52 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/24/darrell-issa-reveals-yet-another-potential-obama-administration-scandal-thats-against-the-law/
Title: Morris: Is William Wilkins the G. Gordon Liddy of the IRS Scandal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 25, 2013, 02:13:32 PM
Second post

William Wilkins: The G. Gordon Liddy Of The IRS Scandal?
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on July 19, 2013
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If the IRS/Tea Party scandal is at all reminiscent of the Watergate debacle that brought down a president in 1974, we may have just discovered the latter-day G. Gordon Liddy, the man who oversaw the chain of events that led to Nixon's resignation.

Who would that be?  Well, a good guess would be William Wilkins, Chief Counsel to the Internal Revenue Service.  More and more evidence is sucking his office into the maelstrom of the IRS/Tea Party scandal.

Let's take a look at him.

Wilkins is one of only two political appointees on the entire IRS staff.  All of the other more than one hundred thousand employees in the agency are civil servants.  Only Wilkins and the Director were directly chosen by Obama.

But there's something else that's worth knowing about Wilkins.  He's a long time Obama crony and Democratic donor who earned his spurs by successfully defending, pro bono (free), the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Yes, that Reverend Wright) from charges that his radical politicization of his pulpit should deny his church tax exempt status.  The event that triggered the IRS' interest?  Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama's speech to the congregation during the Democratic presidential primary campaign.  Now does that sound like 'political activity'?

Well, Wilkins was able to convince the IRS that it was not!  He knows his stuff.  Tax exempt organizations were one of Wilkins specialties in private practice.  He knows the field, making him a likely key man in the emerging scandal.  He's not just a wealthy donor who was rewarded with a plum position who doesn't know much about taxes.  No, he's an expert on the very area of tax law that is at the heart of the charges of politically motivated harassment of the Tea Party and other conservative groups by the IRS.

So you'd think he might be interested in what was going on.

At yesterday's House Government Oversight hearing, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa, there was testimony -- for the first time -- that as early as July, 2011, Wilkins' office was involved in the decisions about the unprecedented targeting and unorthodox treatment of Tea Party organizations seeking tax exempt status.

What was patently clear from the testimony is that this illegal and improper operation wasn't run by "rogue" IRS employees in Cincinnati, as the White House claims.  Instead, it was run by rogue employees at the very top of the IRS and possibly the White House as well.

Carter Hull, recently retired after 48 years of service at the IRS, was the tax analyst in D.C. in charge of the Tea Party applications.  Hull indicated that he was told by the top assistant to Lois Lerner (remember her? In May, she refused to testify and invoked her Fifth Amendment right to remain silent) that Wilkins' office had to review all of the tax exemption applications from Tea Party groups that Hull was overseeing.  Hull noted that the one application that he had actually approved was immediately routed to Wilkins office for review.  When Hull disagreed with the Counsel's office and Lerner about how the Tea Party cases should be handled, the files were taken away from him and transferred to a woman with only several months experience at the IRS.

Hull also described a meeting about the Tea Party applications on August 4, 2011 where the IRS chief counsel's office had three representatives present.

Here's what the Inspector General's Report stated in its timeline:

August 4, 2011

Rulings and Agreements office personnel held a meeting with Chief Counsel so that everyone would have the latest information on the issue.

Sounds like the Chief Counsel knew about it, doesn't it?

But Wilkins denies that he knew anything about the handling of the Tea Party cases.  That's hard to believe, because there's uncontested evidence that his office was definitely involved.  And, in addition, Wilkins was one of the top five officials in the IRS.

A close review of the Inspector General's Report on the IRS and the Tea Party applications reveals that, in addition to the Chief Counsel's office, the highest echelons of the IRS were aware of complaints about the treatment of the Tea Party applications in early 2012, and, in some cases, responded to complaints, particularly about disclosing donors.  And the second or third highest official in the IRS, the Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement, told the team working on the applications that if there were complaints about "having to provide donor information" they would not have to send them at that time.

The IG Report also states that on March 23-27, 2012, high level officials discussed concerns about media attention to the Tea Party applications.

So the very top brass at the IRS knew about the problem in early 2012.
 
And now, there may be a direct link to the White House.  Hull's testimony revealed that Chief Counsel Wilkins' office reviewed the draft criteria to be used in decided whether to approve the Tea Party applications for tax exemption. 

And J. Russell George, the Inspector General who found inappropriate procedures regarding the Tea Party applications, indicated that on April 25th, 2012, Wilkins' office provided Hull and Lerner "additional comments" on the draft criteria.

What is key about that date is that it comes just two days after Wilkins met with President Obama and the day after his boss, former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, saw the president at the White House.
   
On April 23, 2012, according to White House visitor logs, Wilkins had a meeting with President Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.  There is no indication of what was discussed.  On April 24, the day before the criteria for Tea Party groups was developed, former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman -- the other of the two political appointees at the IRS -- also visited the White House.

Coincidence?

Well, even a coincidental meeting can result in an exchange of information.

NOTE: Here's something of interest: When Dick worked in the Clinton White House, the Roosevelt Room was the only room where political activity could take place in the West Wing.  We have no way of knowing of that is the case now.

These queries will undoubtedly be central to the next exciting episode of the Darrell Issa Show as the California Congressman seeks to penetrate the veil of deception and misdirection with which the Administration has cloaked the IRS scandal.
   
Before one could get to Nixon, one had to find G. Gordon Liddy and Chuck Colson behind the Watergate burglars.  Before we can get to Obama, we needed to find William Wilkins.  And now we might have the next G. Gordon Liddy.

Stay tuned.
Title: Noonan: Fortress IRS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2013, 07:15:14 AM
In all the day-to-day of the IRS scandals I don't think it's been fully noticed that the overall reputation of the agency has suffered a collapse, the kind from which it can take a generation to recover fully. In the long term this will prove damaging to the national morale—what happens to a great nation when its people come to lack even rudimentary confidence in the decisions made by the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government? It will also diminish the hope for faith in government, which whatever your politics is not a good thing. We need government, as we all know. Americans have a right to assume that while theirs may be deeply imperfect, it is not deeply corrupt. What harms trust in governmental institutions now will have reverberations in future administrations.

The scandals that have so damaged the agency took place in just the past few years, since the current administration began. And it is not Republicans on the Hill or conservatives in the press who have revealed the agency as badly managed, political in its actions, and really quite crazily run. That information, or at least the early outlines of it, came from the agency's own inspector general.

But the point is that it was all so recent. It doesn't take long to crater a reputation. The conferences, seminars and boondoggles in which $49 million was spent, including the famous "Star Trek" parody video—all that happened between 2010 and 2012. The targeting of conservative groups, the IRS leadership's public lies about it, the leaking of private tax information to liberal groups or journalists, the abuse of donor information—all that took place since the administration began, in 2009. Just this week, an inspector general report revealed excessive travel spending by a handful of IRS executives in 2011 and 2012.

All of it has produced the biggest IRS scandal since Watergate. Which makes it the second of only two truly huge scandals to be visited on the agency in its entire 100-year history. (The IRS began in its modern incarnation in 1913, the year the 16th Amendment was ratified.) And Watergate didn't kill the IRS's reputation, only Nixon's.

The effect in terms of public approval can be seen in the polls. Fox News, in May, compared its recent IRS polling with its polling 10 years ago. In May 2003, just under a third of all respondents said they had little or no faith in the IRS—a high number, perhaps, but a cantankerously American one. In May 2013, that number had jumped to 57%. Around the time of Fox's 2013 poll, Gallup had 60% of Americans seeing the IRS as an agency that "frequently abuses its powers." And Gallup had 42% of respondents saying the IRS did a "poor" job, more than double the figure from 2009.

One irony here is that the Obama White House, always keen to increase the reach and power of government, also seems profoundly disinterested in good governing. It is strange. The long-term project of liberalism involves encouraging the idea of faith in government as a bringer or guarantor of greater justice. But who needs more government if government works so very badly, and is in its operations unjust?

This White House is careless with the reputation of government. They are a campaigning organization, not a governing one.

You might think at this point the White House might begin to think cleverly and strategically. That they would very showily give the scandal their time and attention—really give it some priority. That they might show daily indignation, and see to it that the IRS is utterly forthcoming with Congress. That would have two effects. First, it would help the IRS recover if the public saw it being responsive, as opposed to speaking in the usual word salad punctuated with "We have no comment." Second, it would help the Obama White House look responsive, responsible and actually interested in good governance.

Instead the president and his spokesman just run around and call the scandal phony. That's their big contribution: It's phony. It was better in the old days, 2½ months ago, when they feigned outrage.

You would think also the leadership of the IRS would, at this point, be a bit head-bowed—eager to deal publicly with the agency's problems, to be responsive with Congress and, most of all, to demonstrate good faith after the lying that marked the early days of the scandal.

But that is not what's happening. House investigators this week said they have in fact received less than 1% of the documents they have been asking for from the agency. The IRS itself at one point identified a whopping and rather intimidating 65 million documents that might be relevant to the tea-party scandal. To date—almost three months into the scandal became public—the House Ways and Means Committee says the IRS has turned over only 13,000 pages. And some of them were duplicates.

It's gone beyond what staff aides were, last month, calling "slow walking." Chairman Dave Camp said in a statement the IRS's actions look "a lot like obstruction." One aide said: "Patience is wearing thin."

Meanwhile, investigations continue, interviews are ongoing. Congressional investigators believe they have picked up an unusual amount of checking in with and requesting approval and guidance from the office of the IRS general counsel. They also believe they are picking up an intense level of decision making between that office and Lois Lerner, former head of the exempt organizations office. The committee is particularly interested in all correspondence and communications between the general counsel's office, the Treasury Department, and the White House.

An observer might fairly say that the IRS appears to be stringing the story out, that they are more preoccupied with damage control than finding out what exactly happened in the tea-party scandal. Perhaps the agency, and the administration, is thinking that if they string the story out it may disappear into the summer. Maybe its momentum will be broken. Maybe people will begin to think, when they see an IRS headline on page B-12, that they've already read that story. Maybe slowing everything down will take the steam out of the entire investigation.

That might seem a politically astute move—not governmentally responsible but politically astute. Letting the story go forward in slow dribs and drabs won't help the IRS recover its reputation and begin to function in a healthy way, but it may limit immediate political damage to the administration.

But a slow walk of documents carries political risk. It may keep the story down, but it will keep it alive by keeping it from being resolved. Republicans on the Hill show no signs of losing interest. They seem anxious to stay on the story, for all the obvious reasons, both public-spirited and self-interested.

But they may begin issuing subpoenas. And if the story goes into the fall, and continues through the winter, perhaps even the spring, it will become an active drama within the 2014 election cycle.

Which would make the administration's recent moves not only governmentally lacking, but politically maladroit.
Title: President Lawless doesn't need lawyers....
Post by: G M on July 29, 2013, 01:58:30 PM
http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-on-unilateral-action-lawyers-i-dont-need-lawyers./article/2533569

Obama on unilateral action: Lawyers? I don’t need lawyers.

 By BYRON YORK | JULY 28, 2013 AT 6:45 AM

In an interview after his speech Wednesday in Galesburg, Illinois, President Obama was asked if he consulted White House lawyers before unilaterally delaying the employer mandate in Obamacare. Since Congress, in the Affordable Care Act, specified that the mandate is go to into effect at the start of next year, reporters from the New York Times asked if the president investigated whether he had the legal authority to put it off without going through Congress.
 
Obama didn’t exactly answer the question. But judging from what he said, his answer was: No, I didn’t consult White House lawyers because I know a lot more about the Constitution than the Republicans who are complaining about it. And besides, they don’t think I’m legitimately the president, anyway.
 
“People questioned your legal and constitutional authority to do that unilaterally — to delay the employer mandate,” asked the Times’ Jackie Calmes. “Did you consult with your lawyer?”
 

“Jackie, if you heard me on stage today, what I said was that I will seize any opportunity I can find to work with Congress to strengthen the middle class, improve their prospects, improve their security,” Obama began.
 
“No, but specifically — ” Calmes interjected.
 
“But where Congress is unwilling to act,” Obama continued, “I will take whatever administrative steps that I can in order to do right by the American people.”
 
At that point, Obama explained that if Congress doesn’t like what he’s done, then lawmakers can try to do something about it. “I’m not concerned about their opinions,” the president said. “Very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.” And some Republicans “think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency.”
 
This is Obama’s complete answer:
 

And if Congress thinks that what I’ve done is inappropriate or wrong in some fashion, they’re free to make that case. But there’s not an action that I take that you don’t have some folks in Congress who say that I’m usurping my authority. Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency. And I don’t think that’s a secret. But ultimately, I’m not concerned about their opinions — very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.
 
I am concerned about the folks who I spoke to today who are working really hard, are trying to figure out how they can send their kids to college, are trying to make sure that they can save for their retirement. And if I can take steps on their behalf, then I’m going to do so. And I would hope that more and more of Congress will say, you know what, since that’s our primary focus, we’re willing to work with you to advance those ideals. But I’m not just going to sit back if the only message from some of these folks is no on everything, and sit around and twiddle my thumbs for the next 1,200 days.
 
A moment earlier, Obama likened his move to “the kind of routine modifications or tweaks to a large program that’s starting off.” Criticism of his exercise of executive authority in this matter, he suggested, is more the result of a “frenzy” among Republicans than anything he has done.
Title: Re: Outright fraud at the U.S. Treasury
Post by: G M on July 29, 2013, 04:43:23 PM

70 Straight Days: Treasury Says Debt Stuck at Exactly $16,699,396,000,000.00



 July 29, 2013 - 5:21 PM



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



By Terence P. Jeffrey


 
(CNSNews.com) - According to the Daily Treasury Statement for July 26, which the Treasury released this afternoon, the federal debt has been stuck at exactly $16,699,396,000,000.00 for 70 straight days.
 
That is approximately $25 million below the legal limit of $16,699,421,095,673.60 that Congress has imposed on the debt.
 
The portion of the federal debt subject to the legal limit set by Congress first hit $16,699,396,000,000.00 at the close of business on May 17. At the close of every business day since then, it has also been $16,699,396,000,000.00, according to the official accounting published by the Treasury Department.
 
If the debt had increased by even $30 million at any time during those 70 days, it would have exceeded the statutory limit. But, according to the Treasury, the debt did not do that. Instead, it remained precisely $16,699,396,000,000.00.
 
Even though the government's official accounting of the debt has not budged for 70 days, the Treasury has continued to sell bills, notes and bonds at a value that exceeds the value of the bills, notes and bonds it was redeeming.
 
In fact, according to the Daily Treasury Statement for May 17, the Treasury had by then already redeemed approximately $4,776,995,000,000.00 since the beginning of the fiscal year (which started on Oct. 1, 2012). As of that same day, the Treasury had already sold $5,354,508,000.000.00 new bills, notes and bonds during the fiscal year. That represented a net increase in publicly circulating U.S. government debt instruments of $577,513,000,000.00 for the fiscal year.
 
As of July 26, according to the latest Treasury statement, the Treasury had already redeemed approximately $6,128,368,000,000.00 in bills, notes and bonds during this fiscal year. But, at the same time, according to the statement, the Treasury had sold an additional $6,759,148,000,000.00 bills, note and bonds--for a net increase of $630,780,000,000.00 for the year.
 
Thus, the value of U.S. Treasury debt instruments circulating in the public has increased $53.267 billion since May 17--even though the Treasury says the debt has remained exactly at $16,699,396,000,000.00 during that time.
 
How could the value of extant U.S. Treasury securities increase by $53.267 billion during a 70-day period when the federal government’s debt subject to the legal limit has remained constant at $16,699,396,000,000.00—just $25 million below the legal limit?
 
On May 17, the day the debt began its long stay at $16,699,396,000,000.00, Treasury Secretary Lew sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner. In the letter, Lew said the Treasury would begin implementing what he called “the standard set of extraordinary measures” that allows the Treasury to continue to borrow and spend money even after it has hit the legal debt limit.
.. - See more at: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/70-straight-days-treasury-says-debt-stuck-exactly-1669939600000000
Title: Re: President Lawless doesn't need lawyers....
Post by: G M on July 29, 2013, 04:52:43 PM
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/07/29/obama-i-suspended-the-employer-mandate-because-i-could-what-are-you-gonna-do-about-it/

Obama: I Delayed the Employer Mandate Because I Could. What Are You Gonna Do About it?





by
Bryan Preston

Bio





July 29, 2013 - 4:03 pm

 
Via Hot Air and Byron York, Barack Obama has crossed the constitutional Rubicon. The die is cast. He realizes as much, and is daring Congress to stop him in the pixels of the New York Times.
 

NYT: People questioned your legal and constitutional authority to do that unilaterally — to delay the employer mandate. Did you consult with your lawyer?

 


MR. OBAMA: Jackie, if you heard me on stage today, what I said was that I will seize any opportunity I can find to work with Congress to strengthen the middle class, improve their prospects, improve their security –
 
NYT: No, but specifically –
 
MR. OBAMA: — but where Congress is unwilling to act, I will take whatever administrative steps that I can in order to do right by the American people.
 
And if Congress thinks that what I’ve done is inappropriate or wrong in some fashion, they’re free to make that case…
 
He continues, delivering his usual boilerplate about how he’s the only one who cares about the three-letter word called “jobs” and the Republicans are just saying “no” to everything.
 
Then he hits them on their credentials to criticize.
 

But ultimately, I’m not concerned about their opinions — very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.
 
Nice, coming from a once part-time adjunct professor. One of his fiercest critics, by the way, is Sen. Ted Cruz, who was a state solicitor general and has argued and won cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Can President Jumpshot claim as much?
 
From there, the don of the Juicebox Mafia declares that he will do what he wants, so fuggedabout opposing him.
 

I am concerned about the folks who I spoke to today who are working really hard, are trying to figure out how they can send their kids to college, are trying to make sure that they can save for their retirement. And if I can take steps on their behalf, then I’m going to do so.
 
Obama has built up a lengthy history of bypassing Congress and the Constitution and seizing power not granted to him in law. The kinetic action in Libya, 2012′s unilateral revision of immigration law, and now delaying the employer mandate in Obamacare are but three, and they all escalate the stakes incrementally. Where most in Congress aren’t inclined to try limiting a president’s ability to wage war or whatever Libya was, Congress’ role in passing laws has been cracked badly by the immigration change and the mandate delay. He does not have the authority to delay that part of the law. He knows it, Congress knows it. He doesn’t care.
 
As I’ve written before, Obama has effectively hacked the Constitution. Hackers exploit weaknesses in systems they attack; Obama has found a weakness in the U.S. government system and that weakness’ name is Harry Reid. As long as Reid holds the reins in the Senate, Congress cannot effectively stop Obama because the Senate is in charge of the ultimate penalty, impeachment, and Reid will block every attempt to exercise that option. President Part-Time Professor knows that, and is exploiting it.
 
The question is, what’s his next move? The 2014 mid-terms threaten to close off the backdoor he’s exploiting, if the GOP sweeps the Democrats out of power in the Senate. He is already getting away with delaying the employer mandate. Republicans want Obamacare repealed entirely and have tried strongarming the Democrats into helping them via the mandate delay, but they’re not biting. Harry Reid is standing pat like a good little monkey, just doing whatever Obama commands.
 
Does Obama wait until after the mid-terms next year to declare a sweeping amnesty? Does he announce that the 2nd Amendment is no longer in force? How about the First? Or the 22nd? The Agitating Adjunct may rule that the Because I Said So clause trumps all others.
Title: Re: President Lawless doesn't need lawyers....
Post by: G M on July 29, 2013, 05:03:36 PM
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/29/obama-not-even-pretending-he-has-legal-authority-to-delay-the-obamacare-employer-mandate/

Obama not even pretending he has legal authority to delay the ObamaCare employer mandate


posted at 5:21 pm on July 29, 2013 by Allahpundit






Via Byron York, an amazing bit buried in the NYT’s interview with The One after his economy-speech snooze last week. This is as close as you’ll ever get to seeing a pol answer a reporter’s question with “because I said so”:
 

NYT: People questioned your legal and constitutional authority to do that unilaterally — to delay the employer mandate. Did you consult with your lawyer?
 
MR. OBAMA: Jackie, if you heard me on stage today, what I said was that I will seize any opportunity I can find to work with Congress to strengthen the middle class, improve their prospects, improve their security –
 
NYT: No, but specifically –
 
MR. OBAMA: — but where Congress is unwilling to act, I will take whatever administrative steps that I can in order to do right by the American people.
 
And if Congress thinks that what I’ve done is inappropriate or wrong in some fashion, they’re free to make that case. But there’s not an action that I take that you don’t have some folks in Congress who say that I’m usurping my authority. Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency. And I don’t think that’s a secret. But ultimately, I’m not concerned about their opinions — very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.
 
I am concerned about the folks who I spoke to today who are working really hard, are trying to figure out how they can send their kids to college, are trying to make sure that they can save for their retirement. And if I can take steps on their behalf, then I’m going to do so. And I would hope that more and more of Congress will say, you know what, since that’s our primary focus, we’re willing to work with you to advance those ideals. But I’m not just going to sit back if the only message from some of these folks is no on everything, and sit around and twiddle my thumbs for the next 1,200 days.
 
Evidently if Congress doesn’t do what he wants, he enjoys legal authority under the Doin’ Good For The People Clause of the Constitution to do it himself. That’s not the first time he’s invoked that clause either; remember, he decided to continue his intervention in Libya even though his own lawyers concluded that he had no power to do so under the War Powers Act. There, as here, people on his own side of an issue reached a legal judgment — it was a party-line Democratic vote that passed O-Care into law, of course — and Obama eventually decided that because the law interfered with his policy preferences, he’d quietly ignore it. In the case of the War Powers Act, there was at least a halfhearted attempt to square the Libya intervention with the statute (by insisting that it didn’t quite rise to the level of “hostilities” in the meaning of the law). Here there’s none. He’s telling you to shut up and trust him because suspending the mandate is good policy and because he is, unlike many members of Congress, a lawyer. (More than half the Senate are lawyers, in point of fact.) Let’s hear from another lawyer, former appellate judge Michael McConnell, on why O’s unilateral suspension of the mandate is so novel and dangerous:
 

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president on legal and constitutional issues, has repeatedly opined that the president may decline to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. But these opinions have always insisted that the president has no authority, as one such memo put it in 1990, to “refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons.”…
 
The president defended his suspension of the immigration laws as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. He defended his amending of No Child Left Behind as an exercise of authority in the statute to waive certain requirements. The administration has yet to offer a legal justification for last week’s suspension of the employer mandate.
 
Republican opponents of ObamaCare might say that the suspension of the employer mandate is such good policy that there’s no need to worry about constitutionality. But if the president can dispense with laws, and parts of laws, when he disagrees with them, the implications for constitutional government are dire.
 
If Bush pulled the “because I said so” shtick in defending his own decision not to enforce a statute, Senator Obama would have screeched about it endlessly, just like he screeched about executive overreach, signing statements, drone warfare, domestic surveillance, and all the other supposed ills of the Bush age that he’s ended up adopting. As it is, McConnell’s skeptical that any private citizen has standing to sue to enforce the mandate, for the same reason that citizens lacked standing per the Supreme Court’s decision in the Prop 8 case. Maybe Congress could sue, but the GOP doesn’t want to be seen as forcing the employer mandate on business when Obama’s trying to suspend it and Democrats don’t want to cause political headaches for O, let alone side with a stupid health-care measure that’s apt to have adverse economic consequences once it’s in effect. He’s going to get away with this and the precedent will be set — or rather further cemented, per McConnell’s other examples of Obama power grabs — that when a law is inconvenient for the president politically, even when it’s part of his own signature legislation, he can simply ignore it. Because he says so.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 01, 2013, 03:01:11 PM
http://www.glennbeck.com/2013/08/01/cbs-reporter-forces-carney-to-clarify-which-scandals-are-phony/?utm_source=Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2013-08-01_240985&utm_content=5054942&utm_term=_240985_240996
Title: More on the FEC-IRS nexus
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 02, 2013, 02:16:56 PM
New Links Emerge in the IRS Scandal
Emails released this week sweep the Federal Election Commission into the conservative-targeting probe.
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
WSJ

Congressional investigators this week released emails suggesting that staff at the Federal Election Commission have been engaged in their own conservative targeting, with help from the IRS's infamous Lois Lerner. This means more than just an expansion of the probe to the FEC. It's a new link to the Obama team.

In May this column noted that the targeting of conservatives started in 2008, when liberals began a coordinated campaign of siccing the federal government on political opponents. The Obama campaign helped pioneer this tactic.

In late summer of 2008, Obama lawyer Bob Bauer took issue with ads run against his boss by a 501(c)(4) conservative outfit called American Issues Project. Mr. Bauer filed a complaint with the FEC, called on the criminal division of the Justice Department to prosecute AIP, and demanded to see documents the group had filed with the IRS.

Thanks to Congress's newly released emails, we now know that FEC attorneys went to Ms. Lerner to pry out information about AIP—the organization the Obama campaign wanted targeted. An email from Feb. 3, 2009, shows an FEC attorney asking Ms. Lerner "whether the IRS had issued an exemption letter" to AIP, and requesting that she share "any information" on the group. Nine minutes after Ms. Lerner received this FEC email, she directed IRS attorneys to fulfill the request.

Douglas Shulman, former IRS commissioner (left), Lois Lerner, the then-director of the IRS's exempt-organizations office, and Neal Wolin, deputy secretary of the Treasury, at a congressional hearing, May 22.

This matters because FEC staff didn't have permission from the Commission to conduct this inquiry. It matters because the IRS is prohibited from sharing confidential information, even with the FEC. What the IRS divulged is unclear. Congressional investigators are demanding to see all communications between the IRS and FEC since 2008, and given that Ms. Lerner came out of the FEC's office of the general counsel, that correspondence could prove illuminating.

It also matters because we now know FEC staff engaged in a multiyear effort to deliver to the Obama campaign its win against AIP. This past week, FEC Vice Chairman Don McGahn, joined by his two fellow Republican commissioners, wrote an extraordinary statement recounting the staff's behavior in the case.

When the FEC receives a complaint, it falls to the general counsel's office to first issue a report on the merits of the alleged campaign violations. The six-person commission then votes on whether there is a "reason to believe" a violation occurred. No formal investigations are to take place before that point.

The Obama team's complaint broadly claimed AIP was masquerading as a nonprofit, when it should have registered as a highly regulated political action committee. It was a ludicrous claim (see below), yet the FEC staff issued a report in April 2009 recommending the commission go after AIP, not long after its attorneys had been in touch with Ms. Lerner.

When the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC made most of the Obama complaint irrelevant, the staff withdrew its first report, then took 18 months to come up with a second rationale for why the commission should pursue AIP. All this time, FEC staff—Mr. McGahn recounts—were conducting an unauthorized investigation into AIP. The staff was also improperly withholding the results of its research from AIP.

When new issues made its second attempt moot, the general counsel's office went after the group with a third report. AIP's defense all along was that it spent the majority of its money from 2007 to 2010 on its "major" organizational "purpose" of educating and informing the public of conservative principles, and only a minority (less than one-third) on direct campaign expenditures. As such, it easily meets the tests for being a 501(c)(4).

And so the FEC staff's third report presented a novel theory. The staff argued that AIP ought to be judged on what it spent per "calendar year." By shortening the timeline, and looking only at AIP's spending in 2008—an election year—the staff argued AIP had violated campaign law.

The Republican commissioners were appalled, noting that FEC staff had always taken a multiyear view of expenditures, including when it came to cases against liberal groups, like the League of Conservation Voters or the Moveon.org Voter Fund. The FEC staff also sought to impose this new standard after the fact, with no notice to election players and no input from the commissioners.

Vice Chairman McGahn's statement is scathing. "Here," he writes, FEC staff "could be seen as manipulating the timeline to reach the conclusion that AIP is a political committee. . . . Such after-the-fact determinations create the appearance of impropriety, whether or not such impropriety exists."

The broader AIP case is, in fact, beyond improper. It's fishy. The Obama campaign takes its vendetta against a political opponent to the FEC. The FEC staff, as part of an extraordinary campaign to bring down AIP and other 501(c)(4) groups, reaches out to Lois Lerner, the woman overseeing IRS targeting. Mr. McGahn has also noted that FEC staff has in recent years had an improperly tight relationship with the Justice Department—to which the Obama campaign also complained about AIP.

Democrats are increasingly desperate to suggest that the IRS scandal was the work of a few rogue agents. With the stink spreading to new parts of the federal government, that's getting harder to do.

Write to kim@wsj.com
Title: WSJ: More on the IRS-FEC
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2013, 10:47:09 AM
WSJ:

One big question raised by IRS political targeting is whether Obama officials or their bureaucratic allies unleashed the power of the administrative state for partisan ends. Now evidence is emerging that officials at another agency, the Federal Election Commission, used their enforcement power as an anti-conservative sword.

The House Ways and Means Committee this week released emails showing that, in 2008 and 2009, the FEC's general counsel staff sought tax information about conservative political groups from Lois Lerner of the IRS. Ms. Lerner is the IRS official who took the Fifth before Congress rather than tell her side of the story. She had previously worked at . . . the FEC's general counsel office.

Such a request is a no-no in many ways. The FEC staff was investigating these groups without the approval of its commissioners in clear violation of FEC rules. And the IRS is legally barred from releasing confidential tax information—including to the FEC. The emails show that Ms. Lerner asked her staff to provide information to the FEC, and Ways and Means is seeking more documents.

The suspicion of political motivation is compounded by disclosures this week by Don McGahn, one of three Republican FEC commissioners. He released documents that show a litany of FEC staff abuses—including unauthorized investigations, unsanctioned work with law enforcement, and cases when documents were kept from commissioners. These abuses were largely aimed at investigating conservative political groups.



One case involved the FEC handling of an accusation made in March 2012 by a Democratic operative against Rick Santorum's presidential campaign. Mr. McGahn reports that while the complaint was "scant at best," the FEC staff went to extraordinary lengths to find a violation.

The FEC staff is barred by law from conducting investigations without the approval of its commissioners, who are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. This is to ensure political accountability. Yet the general counsel's office "performed extensive research during an extra-statutory investigation that produced various news articles and materials that claimed violations had occurred," says Mr. McGahn.

The FEC's sources included the likes of the liberal Talking Points Memo Muckraker website, which FEC staff sent to the Santorum campaign for a response. The FEC commissioners recently closed the case without taking any action because there was no compelling evidence.

Our Kimberley Strassel reported Friday on a case in which the FEC staff contacted Ms. Lerner as part of its unauthorized inspection of another conservative group, the American Issues Project. Along the way, the staff created a novel, after-the-fact legal theory as a rationale for bringing charges against the group.

That legal theory would judge conservative groups on the basis of their "calendar-year" spending—as opposed to their spending over an entire election cycle, which is the standard that the FEC has used to judge liberal groups. The FEC enforcers happened to dream this up about the time Democrats in Congress and the Obama campaign had begun a public campaign against conservative 501(c)(4) groups that were joining the presidential debate.

Mr. McGahn also released a memo about his efforts to rein in abuses by getting the FEC to adopt a new manual governing staff enforcement conduct. The memo adds to the list of wild behavior—detailing how staff conducts ad-hoc investigations, sits on exculpatory evidence, and discloses sensitive information to the Department of Justice without commissioner approval. Staff even maintained a policy—undisclosed to commissioners—that granted itself at-will authority to interact with Justice.

Far from expressing contrition, the FEC staff has assailed Mr. McGahn's reforms. General Counsel Tony Herman wrote in a memo in June that sensitive FEC decisions were best left in the hands of "non-partisan, career leadership." That nonpartisan riff is a hoot. The White House allies at the Center for American Progress Action Fund have targeted Mr. McGahn for criticism, further highlighting the cynicism of "nonpartisan."

Mr. McGahn has the law on his side. The FEC was created as a bipartisan watchdog in the 1970s, and the law governing its investigations and dealing with other agencies was designed to keep it above partisanship. The staff's flaunting of these strictures suggests that FEC bureaucrats are engaged in the sort of partisan targeting that has sullied the IRS.

Congress is seeking all email communication between FEC staff and Ms. Lerner, and rightly so. Liberals like to expand the government in the name of holding others accountable, but then they never want to hold the government accountable for breaking its own rules, or even the law. We doubt the American people agree.

A version of this article appeared August 3, 2013, on page A12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Another Agency Goes IRS.
Title: DEA Trickery covers uip nature of surveillance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 05, 2013, 08:59:16 AM
http://blunttrama.ning.com/profiles/blogs/dea-special-operations-division-covers-up-surveillance-used-to-in


http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-dea-sod-20130805,0,2087915,full.story
Title: Victor Davis Hanson, Obama's Watergates
Post by: DougMacG on August 06, 2013, 06:17:57 AM
The scandals will not end until the truth sets us free.

 August 6, 2013 3:00 AM
Obama’s Watergates
Denial, evasion, “Let me be perfectly clear” — is this 2013 or 1973?
By Victor Davis Hanson,  National Review

The truth about Benghazi, the Associated Press/James Rosen monitoring, the IRS corruption, the NSA octopus, and Fast and Furious is still not exactly known. Almost a year after the attacks on our Benghazi facilities, we are only now learning details of CIA gun-running, military stand-down orders, aliases of those involved who are still hard to locate, massaged talking points, and the weird jailing of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.

We still do not quite know why Eric Holder’s Justice Department went after the Associated Press or Fox News’s James Rosen — given that members of the administration were themselves illegally leaking classified information about the Stuxnet virus, the Yemeni double agent, the drone program, and the bin Laden document trove, apparently to further the narrative of an underappreciated Pattonesque commander-in-chief up for reelection.

Almost everything the administration has assured us about the IRS scandal has proven false: It was not confined to rogue Cincinnati agents; liberal and conservative groups were not equally targeted; and there were political appointees who were involved in or knew of the misdeeds.

Advertisement
The NSA debacle can so far best be summed up by citing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who has now confessed that he lied under oath (“clearly erroneous”) to the U.S. Congress. Even his earlier mea culpa of providing the “least untruthful” statement was an untruth.

TIMELINES
Yet the truth does come out. None of these scandals so far has been as ignored as the initial Watergate break-in and associated Nixon-administration misdeeds. If the doctrinaire press is now leading from behind, instead of launching a full-scale attack as it did in the Watergate years, the media as a whole are far more diverse than in 1973, with so many different venues and agendas that it’s difficult to suppress the truth for long.

Remember, between when the Nixon operatives drew up their initial plans to commit illegal acts in early 1972 and when the media furor over cover-ups and lying forced Nixon out of office in late summer 1974, the time elapsed was over 30 months — a period as long as or longer than the gestation of the present scandals. Recall also that no one died in Watergate; that the IRS resisted, not abetted, calls to go after critics of the president; and that Attorney General John Mitchell did not lie under oath to Congress. Scandals wax and wane, but until the truth is told, they never quite end.

THE DENIALS
There is also nothing new in administration denials. Both President Obama and his press secretary, Jay Carney, characterized the Benghazi, IRS, AP, and NSA allegations as “phony.” So too Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, characterized the Watergate break-in as “a third-rate burglary attempt” and insisted that “Certain elements may try to stretch the Watergate burglary beyond what it is.” In August 1972, when news of the break-in first got out, Nixon himself assured the nation, “I can say categorically that . . . no one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” The Obama administration’s variation on outright denial is “What difference, at this point, does it make?” And when Jay Carney declares, “I accept that ‘stylistic’ might not precisely describe a change of one word to another,”  I am reminded of Ron Ziegler’s quip, “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.”

THE EXODUSES
By the summer of 1974, Richard Nixon was almost alone. His attorney general, John Mitchell; his closest two advisers, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman; his White House counsel, John Dean; and a score of others — some of them directly involved, others only tangentially mentioned — had resigned, had been fired, or had been indicted. Those not involved simply wanted out of the administration, lest they suffer from guilt by association.

Less than a year after Benghazi, all the chief participants in reacting to the attack are gone from their positions: Susan Rice left the U.N. ambassadorship and is now a very quiet national-security adviser; Hillary Clinton is no longer secretary of state; we have both a new defense secretary and a new CIA director; the ranking military officer responsible for the area around Benghazi, General Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Africa Command, has retired.

Likewise there have been several resignations and suspensions from the IRS. I don’t think James Clapper will last long as director of national intelligence — such a high-ranking official simply cannot confess to lying under oath to a congressional committee and expect ever again to be taken seriously. Eric Holder may prove to be Obama’s version of a steadfast-to-the-very-last General Haig; yet, like the mostly silent Susan Rice, he has been so tainted with scandal as to have little reputation left other than for being loyal to the president, and is thus irrelevant.

THE ELECTION
I think it is a fair guess that had the public learned the truth about the Benghazi deaths — that a videomaker had no role in the violence and that the administration was paranoid about drawing attention to an ascendant al-Qaeda, U.S. missile-running, and lax diplomatic security — or about the IRS targeting or the NSA surveillance or the AP/Rosen monitoring, Barack Obama would have lost a close election. All these scandals had their geneses before the 2012 election, and all were adroitly hushed up until after Obama’s second inauguration.

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That too is in accord with the Watergate pattern. The Nixon administration covered up in Machiavellian fashion the June 1972 Watergate break-in, almost five months before the president’s landslide win. At least six weeks before the election, the nation knew that there were members of the Nixon administration or the Nixon reelection committee involved in Watergate-related misdeeds — but they found that in comparison to Vietnam, the Chinese initiatives, or the economy, the Watergate news was boring. Again, that the Obama scandals were successfully kept hushed up before the 2012 election is not unusual.

Whereas Nixon suppressed the truth and won big in 1972, by the 1974 midterm elections there had been enough blowback from the Watergate scandals that the Democrats picked up four Senate seats and 49 House seats. In other words, 2014 is still a long time away.

THE TARGETS
The Obama administration’s methods and aims — going after political opponents, monitoring a supposedly leaking press, fingering fall guys, soiling the IRS — are likewise Nixonian to the core.

Nixon tried to use the IRS to punish his enemies, although Lois Lerner and William Wilkins appear to have had far less integrity than did Nixon’s IRS chief, Johnnie Walters, who resisted rather than abetted Nixon’s illegal efforts. As in the case of doctoring CIA talking points and pressuring CIA operatives, so too Nixon tried to cloak misdeeds as “national security” operations. Nixon went after members of the press; Obama had the communications of James Rosen of Fox News — and even those of Rosen’s parents — monitored. Mr. Nakoula was the poor soul the authorities almost immediately jailed for his supposedly right-wing, Islamophobic film. He proved a sort of updated version of the caricatured crazy Cuban burglars and the unhinged Gordon Liddy, whose freelancing zeal allegedly caused the Watergate problem in the first place. The only difference is that the latter really did commit relevant illegal acts, while Nakoula’s videomaking was uncouth, not criminal — and irrelevant to the Benghazi deaths.

THE FIFTH
Lois Lerner’s resort to the Fifth Amendment is not new and will not be successful in covering up her record at the IRS. During the Watergate scandals, almost everyone from Charles Colson to John Dean took the Fifth at one point or another while under oath in front of various committees and grand juries. Such stonewalling delayed but did not stop the investigations. I expect more participants in the Obama-administration misdeeds will invoke the Fifth, and the dodges will ultimately have little effect, other than to remind us that many in the administration have lots to hide.

THE FALLOUT
Nixon left office with historic low poll numbers and the economy a wreck. His successful feat of Vietnamization was undone by Congress’s refusal to make good on American promises of aid. His foreign trips were seen as failed efforts to regain political stature back home.

So too already with the unraveling of Obama. Cap-and-trade, green energy, and the idea of global warming are politically dead. So is a new gun-control initiative. The president, not his critics, is dismantling key elements of Obamacare, his signature achievement. Cabinet posts resemble musical chairs. About all we can expect is a new Nixonesque war on someone — post–Trayvon Martin “bigots,” conservatives supposedly waging a “war on women,” “nativists” who sabotaged “comprehensive immigration reform.” In other words, there will be no positive initiatives, just attacks on Them.

The president’s poll numbers are tanking, and even some of the liberal press feels increasingly betrayed. The Middle East is a mess: Syria a charnel house, Egypt pure chaos, Libya the new Somalia, Iraq abandoned, Afghanistan ignored. Al-Qaeda is on the run — toward Westerners everywhere.

The common denominators are perceived presidential weakness, and inattention. But whereas Richard Nixon was seen as a brilliant foreign-policy realist, Obama prior to his scandals was already struggling to overcome the reputation of being a naïf about foreign policy and cool, distant, and inept at home.

Because something terribly wrong occurred in Benghazi, with the IRS, with the treatment of the Associated Press and James Rosen, and perhaps with Edward Snowden and the NSA, and those involved are seeking to mask their culpability, the scandals grind on. They will not end until the truth sets us all free. So expect a long-drawn-out and sordid saga.

If the administration continues to stonewall and taunt its critics, there will soon appear updated Obama versions of diehard Nixon defenders like Rabbi Korff and Representative Sandman — with plenty of the same old “Let me be perfectly clear” and “Make no mistake about it” presidential denials.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books.
Title: FEC-IRS nexus- 3.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 06, 2013, 10:06:26 AM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/06/fec-official-new-emails-show-agency-may-have-colluded-with-irs-in-political-targeting-scandal/
Title: President Lawless
Post by: G M on August 06, 2013, 02:16:33 PM
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com           PRINT

August 5, 2013 12:00 AM

The Front Man

 By  Kevin D. Williamson


Conservatives have for years attempted to put our finger upon precisely why Barack Obama strikes us as queer in precisely the way he does. There is an alienness about him, which in the fever swamps is expressed in all that ridiculous Kenyan-Muslim hokum, but his citizen-of-the-world shtick is strictly sophomore year — the great globalist does not even speak a foreign language. Obama has been called many things — radical, socialist — labels that may have him dead to rights at the phylum level but not down at his genus or species. His social circle includes an alarming number of authentic radicals, but the president’s politics are utterly conventional managerial liberalism. His manner is aloof, but he is too plainly a child of the middle class to succumb to the regal pretensions that the Kennedys suffered from, even if his household entourage does resemble the Ringling Bros. Circus as reimagined by Imelda Marcos when it moves about from Kailua Beach to Blue Heron Farm. Not a dictator under the red flag, not a would-be king, President Obama is nonetheless something new to the American experience, and troubling.

It is not simply the content of his political agenda, which, though wretched, is a good deal less ambitious than was Woodrow Wilson’s or Richard Nixon’s. Barack Obama did not invent managerial liberalism, nor has he contributed any new ideas to it. He is, in fact, a strangely incurious man. Unlike Ronald Reagan, to whom he likes to be compared, President Obama shows no signs of having expended any effort on big thinkers or big ideas. President Reagan’s guiding lights were theorists such as F. A. Hayek and Thomas Paine; Obama’s most important influences have been tacticians such as Abner Mikva, bush-league propagandists like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and his beloved community organizers. Far from being the intellectual hostage of far-left ideologues, President Obama does not appear to have the intellectual energy even to digest their ideas, much less to implement them. This is not to say that he is an unintelligent man. He is a man with a first-class education and a business-class mind, a sort of inverse autodidact whose intellectual pedigree is an order of magnitude more impressive than his intellect.

The result of this is his utterly predictable approach to domestic politics: appoint a panel of credentialed experts. His faith in the powers of pedigreed professionals is apparently absolute. Consider his hallmark achievement, the Affordable Care Act, the centerpiece of which is the appointment of a committee, the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the mission of which is to achieve targeted savings in Medicare without reducing the scope or quality of care. How that is to be achieved was contemplated in detail neither by the lawmakers who wrote the health-care bill nor by the president himself. But they did pay a great deal of attention to the processes touching IPAB: For example, if that committee of experts fails to achieve the demanded savings, then the ball is passed to . . . a new committee of experts, this one under the guidance of the secretary of health and human services. IPAB’s powers are nearly plenipotentiary: Its proposals, like a presidential veto, require a supermajority of Congress to be overridden.

IPAB is the most dramatic example of President Obama’s approach to government by expert decree, but much of the rest of his domestic program, from the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law to his economic agenda, is substantially similar. In total, it amounts to that fundamental transformation of American society that President Obama promised as a candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party. Barack Obama is the first president of the democracy that John Adams warned us about.

Democracy never lasts long,” Adams famously said. “It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” For liberal regimes, a very common starting point on the road to serfdom is the over-delegation of legislative powers to the executive. France very nearly ended up in a permanent dictatorship as a result of that error, and was spared that fate mostly by good luck and Charles de Gaulle’s patriotism. Long before she declared her infamous state of emergency, Indira Gandhi had been centralizing power in the prime minister’s office, and India was spared a permanent dictatorship only by her political miscalculation and her dynasty-minded son’s having gotten himself killed in a plane wreck. Salazar in Portugal, Austria under Dollfuss, similar stories. But the United States is not going to fall for a strongman government. Instead of delegating power to a would-be president-for-life, we delegate it to a bureaucracy-without-death. You do not need to install a dictator when you’ve already had a politically supercharged permanent bureaucracy in place for 40 years or more. As is made clear by everything from campaign donations to the IRS jihad, the bureaucracy is the Left, and the Left is the bureaucracy. Elections will be held, politicians will come and go, but if you expand the power of the bureaucracy, you expand the power of the Left, of the managers and minions who share Barack Obama’s view of the world. Barack Obama isn’t the leader of the free world; he’s the front man for the permanent bureaucracy, the smiley-face mask hiding the pitiless yawning maw of total politics.

#page#In an important sense, the American people have no political say in the health-care law, for example, because Congress did not pass a law reforming the health-care system; instead, Congress passed a law empowering the Obama administration, through its political appointees and unelected time-servers, to create a new national health-care regime. The general outline of the program is there in the law, but the nuts and bolts of the thing will be created on the fly by President Obama and his many panels of experts. There are several problems with that model of business, one of which is that President Obama, and more than a few of his beloved experts, have political interests. The partisans of pragmatism present themselves as disinterested servants of the public weal, simply collecting the best information and the best advice from the top experts and putting that into practice. Their only political interest, they would have us believe, is in helping the public understand what a great job is being done for them. Consider President Obama’s observation that his worst mistake in his first term was “thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. . . . The nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.” (It never seems to have entered into the president’s head that he might have got the policy wrong.) But of course there is a good deal more to politics than that. For example, the president would very much like the unemployment problem to be somewhat abated by the time of the 2014 congressional elections, but he knows that this is unlikely to happen with employers struggling under an expensive health-care mandate that he has not told enough of a story about. And so he has decided — empowered to do so by precisely nothing — that the law will not be enforced until after the elections. Neither does the law empower him arbitrarily to exempt millions of his donors and allies in organized labor from the law, but he has done that too.

This is a remarkable thing. The health-care law gives the executive all sorts of powers to promulgate regulations and make judgments, but it does not give the executive the power to decide which aspects of the law will be enforced and which will not, or to establish a different timeline from the one found in the law itself. For all of the power that Congress legally has given the president in this matter, he feels it necessary to take more — illegally.

The president and his admirers dismiss concern over this as so much chum for the talk-radio ravers, but it is no such thing. The job of the president is to execute the law — that is what the executive branch is there to do. If Barack Obama had wanted to keep pursuing his career as a lawmaker, then the people of Illinois probably would have been content to preserve him in the Senate for half a century or so. As president, he has no more power to decide not to enforce the provisions of a duly enacted federal law than does John Boehner, Anthony Weiner, or Whoopi Goldberg. And unlike them, he has a constitutional duty to enforce the law. Representative Tom Cotton says that the president’s health-care delay makes a deal on immigration less likely — if the president can simply decline to enforce the provisions of a law he fought for, why trust him to enforce provisions of a law he is accepting only as a compromise? Representative Cotton must also of course have in mind the fact that after Congress had unequivocally rejected another piece of immigration reform, the so-called DREAM Act, that the president had supported, he simply instituted it unilaterally, as though he had the authority to declare an amnesty himself. He then did away with criminal-background checks for those to be amnestied, also on his own authority. Strangely, the order to halt background checks came down on November 9, 2012, the same day that John Boehner said Republicans would seek a compromise on immigration reform.

In a similar vein, President Obama has refused to cut off foreign-aid funds to the Egyptian government, though he is required by law to do so in the event of a coup d’état, which is precisely what happened in July in Egypt. It might be embarrassing for the president to punish the Egyptian military and the grand mufti of al-Azhar for their overthrow of the unpopular Mohamed Morsi, but the law does not make exceptions for presidential embarrassment. The president is not legally empowered to assassinate American citizens, but he has done so, after going through the charade of drawing up a legal argument under which he judged himself entitled to do what the Constitution plainly prohibits. The law also prohibits the president and his allies from using the instruments of government to persecute their rivals, but that is precisely what the IRS has been up to for several years, as it turns out. And not just the IRS: Tea-party activist Catherine Engelbrecht was subject to an IRS audit, two FBI visits, an OSHA investigation, and an ATF inspection of her business (which does not deal in A, T, or F). And although the IRS has no statutory power to collect Affordable Care Act–related fines in states that have not voluntarily set up health-care exchanges, Obama’s managers there have announced that they will do so anyway.

#page#The president not only ignores the law but in some cases goes out of his way to subvert it. The U.S. military carried out the killing of Osama bin Laden, but the records of that event have been removed from military custody, where they are subject to inquiries under the Freedom of Information Act, and moved to the CIA, where they can be kept in secrecy. He has attempted to make “recess appointments” when Congress is not in recess and has been stopped from doing so by the federal courts, which rightly identified the maneuver as patently unconstitutional.

There exists a federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which restricts the federal government’s power to force Americans to violate their consciences. The Obama administration is forcing an abortifacient mandate upon practically all U.S. employers, in violation of that law. Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, who is responsible for drafting those regulations, received a number of letters from lawmakers arguing that the mandate she was contemplating violated the law; she proceeded anyway — without so much as getting an opinion from her departmental lawyer.

Congress’s supine ceding of its powers, and the Obama administration’s usurpation of both legal and extralegal powers, is worrisome. But what is particularly disturbing is the quiet, polite, workaday manner with which the administration goes about its business — and with which the American public accepts it. As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.” Barack Obama makes a virtue out of that caprice, having articulated for his judicial nominees not a legal standard but a political standard requiring sympathy for politically favored groups: African American, gay, disabled, old, in his words.

We have to some extent been here before. It is a testament to the success of free-market ideas that it is impossible to imagine President Obama making the announcement that President Richard Nixon did on August 15, 1971: “I am today ordering a freeze on all prices and wages throughout the United States.” President Nixon created not one but two IPABs, the Pay Board and the Price Commission, which were to be entrusted with managing the day-to-day operations of the U.S. economy. President Nixon, too, was empowered by a Congress that invested him with that remarkable authority, through the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970, whose provisions were to be invoked during times of economic emergency. There was no economic emergency in 1971, but it is a nearly iron-clad rule of the presidency that powers vested will be powers used. That President Obama has adopted President Nixon’s approach but limited himself to health care might be considered progress if he had not adopted as a general principle one of Nixon’s unfortunate maxims: When the president does it, it isn’t illegal. President Nixon’s lawlessness was sneaky, and he had the decency to be ashamed of it. President Obama’s lawlessness is as bland and bloodless as the man himself, and practiced openly, as though it were a virtue. President Nixon privately kept an enemies list; President Obama publicly promises that “we’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends.”

Barack Obama’s administration is unmoored from the institutions that have long kept the imperial tendencies of the American presidency in check. That is partly the fault of Congress, which has punted too many of its legislative responsibilities to the president’s army of faceless regulators, but it is in no small part the result of an intentional strategy on the part of the administration. He has spent the past five years methodically testing the limits of what he can get away with, like one of those crafty velociraptors testing the electric fence in Jurassic Park. Barack Obama is a Harvard Law graduate, and he knows that he cannot make recess appointments when Congress is not in recess. He knows that his HHS is promulgating regulations that conflict with federal statutes. He knows that he is not constitutionally empowered to pick and choose which laws will be enforced. This is a might-makes-right presidency, and if Barack Obama has been from time to time muddled and contradictory, he has been clear on the point that he has no intention of being limited by something so trivial as the law.
Title: WSJ: Members only
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2013, 06:37:24 AM
Members Only
How the White House is weaseling Congress out of ObamaCare.

The White House on Wednesday released the legal details behind its ObamaCare bailout for Members of Congress and their staffs, and if anything this rescue is worse than last week's leaks suggested: Illegal dispensations for the ruling class, different rules for the hoi polloi.

Thanks to an amendment from Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley that Democrats enacted in 2010, the Affordable Care Act says that "the only health plans that the Federal Government may make available" to Congress are the ones offered on the ObamaCare insurance exchanges. But Members and many aides have been flipping out because they won't qualify for ObamaCare subsidies and they'll lose employer contributions they now receive under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, or FEHBP, which picks up about three-quarters of the average premium.

At President Obama's personal request, the Office of Personnel Management decreed that the Members don't have to get off the gravy train after all. The eat-your-own-cooking provision begins with the phrase "Notwithstanding any other provision of law." The feds now interpret that clause as a loophole to mean that the Affordable Care Act did not change the 1959 law that created the FEHBP.

Since Members and staff still technically meet the definition of federal employees qualified for the FEHBP, the Administration says they're still entitled to enroll in the FEHBP concurrently with the exchanges. The feds then "clarify"—their euphemism—that the regulatory meaning of health benefits in the FEHBP can be ObamaCare plans. Voila, taxpayers will continue to chip in $4,900 for individual and $10,000 for family coverage.

The charitable term for such legal gymnastics is creative. When statutes conflict, the bedrock administrative law obligation is to enforce the most recent statute. "Notwithstanding" clauses are routine catchalls that are supposed to emphasize Congress's intent that a new bill is controlling and pre-empts other laws on the books.

The White House is claiming the clause means the opposite, as if the 2010 law and the 1959 law have nothing to do with each other. That is not how it is supposed to work. When Congress kicked itself out of the traditional FEHBP, it kicked itself out of the FEHBP.

At least the Members will still have to sign up for exchange coverage as the law requires. Given the lawless White House record, it probably considered finding some excuse to exempt Congress entirely and decided that option was too explosive politically. But creating a special financing stream for the political class is almost as much of an abuse.

ObamaCare's complex subsidy system, with varying levels based on income, is not incidental to the exchanges. It's the beating heart of this exercise in wealth redistribution and social and economic central planning. The entitlement's architects never envisioned that well-to-do movers and shakers—Mr. Obama might even call some of them "the rich"—would get (or deserve) taxpayer benefits merely because they happen to run for or work for Congress.

Millionaire Senators and the affluent professionals who are chiefs of staff, legislative directors and the like were supposed to go on the exchange and abide by its rules. There are only three insurers offering public utility-type plans on the Washington, D.C. ObamaCare exchange. The FEHBP sponsors 21 plans in metro D.C. and 24 in Virginia. Perhaps as a new perquisite the White House will entice a plan to the exchange that only Members can choose.

It would have been fairer and less corrosive to the rule of law had Congress simply passed a bill giving their workers a raise to make up for the lost compensation of dropping out of the FEHBP. But that would mean an ugly political fight that voters might notice. It's so much easier to slip through this political fix in August when Congress is out of session and the press corps can't wait to hit the beach.
Title: War on the rule of law, Lerner Used Personal E-mail to Conduct Official Business
Post by: DougMacG on August 13, 2013, 08:50:40 PM
Eliana Johnson continues to expose this scandal at National Review.

"one tax-law expert told National Review Online that the information she disclosed about one group constitutes a felony"

"[Lerner] is demanding immunity in exchange for her testimony"

  - Doesn't that imply she can deliver someone higher up with her testimony?
-----------------------------
 IRS’s Lerner Used Personal E-mail to Conduct Official Business, Investigators Say
By  Eliana Johnson
August 13, 2013 12:01 PM

Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner sent official documents from her government e-mail address to a personal account, according to House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and his colleague, Ohio congressman Jim Jordan.

“This raises some serious questions concerning your use of a non-official e-mail account to conduct official business,” the GOP lawmakers wrote in a letter to Lerner demanding all documents from her non-official account for the period between January 2008 and the present. “Additional documents related to the Committee’s investigation may exist in these non-official accounts over which you have some control, and the lack of access to this information prevents the Committee from fully assessing your actions,” they explained. Issa and Jordan are requesting that Lerner produce the documents by August 27.

The use of personal e-mail accounts to conduct government work also has the potential to impede federal-records requests by the public because personal accounts are not archived by the government. Controversy erupted, for example, over former EPA administrator Lisa Jackson’s use of a government account under the name Richard Windsor which, like a personal account, would not be captured by records requests relating to Jackson.

Lerner, the former director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations unit, was placed on administrative leave in late May after refusing to resign her post. She invoked her Fifth Amendment rights in testimony before the Oversight Committee and has yet to speak at length about her knowledge of the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups. E-mail correspondence recently unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee shows Lerner exchanging messages with an FEC attorney about two conservative groups; one tax-law expert told National Review Online that the information she disclosed about one group constitutes a felony.

Congressional investigators have not yet called Lerner back to testify; she is demanding immunity in exchange for her testimony.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/355667/irss-lerner-used-personal-e-mail-conduct-official-business-investigators-say-eliana
Title: DOJ, FBI admit fudging crackdown numbers during election
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2013, 08:44:33 AM


DOJ, FBI admit they inflated claims about mortgage fraud crackdown last year
By Judson Berger
Published August 14, 2013
FoxNews.com

•   Aug. 12, 2013: Attorney General Eric Holder speaks to the American Bar Association Annual meeting. (AP)

The Justice Department and FBI have quietly acknowledged they grossly overstated the scope of a mortgage fraud crackdown, which the administration heralded with much fanfare a few weeks before last year's presidential election.

According to a memo circulated by the FBI and a correction posted online by the Justice Department, the number of defendants, the number of victims and the size of the losses are, in reality, a fraction of what officials claimed last October.

Attorney General Eric Holder and other law enforcement officials claimed in early October that the initiative charged 530 criminal defendants on behalf of 73,000 victims who suffered over $1 billion in losses. The so-called Distressed Homeowner Initiative, which targeted fraud schemes against distressed homeowners, was highlighted in a press release and press conference at the time.

Holder, talking to the cameras on Oct. 9, called it "a groundbreaking, year-long mortgage fraud enforcement effort."

The real numbers, it turns out, were far smaller. The feds now admit that the number of criminal defendants charged was more like 107, not 530. The number of victims was 17,185 -- still a large number, but roughtly one fourth the size of the original headcount. And the losses totaled $95 million -- not $1 billion, as originally claimed.
The DOJ and FBI had long been dogged by claims that their numbers were inflated. Bloomberg has been reporting since October that the cases cited by Holder included charges filed during the George W. Bush administration.

Bloomberg continued to press for clarification. The administration went dark on the issue until Friday, when the FBI acknowledged in a memo that it had conducted an "extensive review" and found problems. The original figures included defendants who "were the subject of other prosecutive actions," as well as defendants charged in cases that did not fall under the anti-mortgage fraud program in question, according to the memo, obtained by FoxNews.com.

"As a result, the public announcement overstated the number of defendants that should have been included as part of the Distressed Homeowner Initiative, as well as the corresponding estimated loss amount and number of victims," the memo said.

The Justice Department also updated its own October release  -- as well as the transcript for remarks delivered by Holder  -- with a correction, saying prior versions "inadvertently contained inaccurate numbers."

The administration is still getting hammered for the revisions, though. Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil  called on Holder to apologize, and explain how this happened.
"He used a press conference with the cameras rolling to give out numbers that proved to be false -- and they appear to have been willfully false," Weil wrote. "He should be just as eager to hold another press conference to set the record straight, answer any questions about his apparent sleight of hand when it comes to financial-fraud metrics and apologize to the American people."

Title: WSJ: Did the IRS ever stop targeting?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2013, 10:09:32 AM
second post of morning

Did the IRS Ever Stop Targeting?
By ANGELA HUNT

The Internal Revenue Service still isn't processing tea party applications for tax-exempt status, according to an IRS agent recently interviewed by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Despite President Obama's promise to "put in place safeguards to make sure this kind of behavior can't happen again," it's unclear whether any new safeguards have been applied at all. The agent, whose job is to screen applications for potential political activity, said he and his coworkers have not been given new guidance on how to process such applications.

During the interview, the agent was asked if he would "treat a tea party group as a political advocacy case even if there was no evidence of political activity on the application." The agent responded: "Based on my current manager's direction, uh-huh."

Yes, Mr. Obama made a show of telling the IRS and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to end the targeting, but the president in recent speeches has also taken to dismissing what he calls Washington's "phony scandals." That's a clear message to IRS staff—both political and professional—about how seriously they should take the work of reform.
Title: George F. Will: Obama’s unconstitutional steps worse than Nixon’s
Post by: DougMacG on August 15, 2013, 11:36:36 AM
“Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”  - Former Pres. Nixon.  Aren't we forgetting a branch or two?

Obama’s unconstitutional steps worse than Nixon’s     by George F. Will

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-obamas-unconstitutional-steps-worse-than-nixons/2013/08/14/e0bd6cb2-044a-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html

President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.

Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”

He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. . . . It looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”

Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: brevity. Because there is no such authority.

Obama’s explanation began with an irrelevancy. He consulted with businesses before disregarding his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That duty does not lapse when a president decides Washington’s “political environment” is not “normal.”

When was it “normal”? The 1850s? The 1950s? Washington has been the nation’s capital for 213 years; Obama has been here less than nine. Even if he understood “normal” political environments here, the Constitution is not suspended when a president decides the “environment” is abnormal.

Neither does the Constitution confer on presidents the power to rewrite laws if they decide the change is a “tweak” not involving the law’s “essence.” Anyway, the employer mandate is essential to the ACA.

Twenty-three days before his news conference, the House voted 264 to 161, with 35 Democrats in the majority, for the rule of law — for, that is, the Authority for Mandate Delay Act. It would have done lawfully what Obama did by ukase. He threatened to veto this use of legislation to alter a law. The White House called it “unnecessary,” presumably because he has an uncircumscribed “executive authority” to alter laws.

In a 1977 interview with Richard Nixon, David Frost asked: “Would you say that there are certain situations . . . where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation . . . and do something illegal?”

Nixon: “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

Frost: “By definition.”

Nixon: “Exactly, exactly.”

Nixon’s claim, although constitutionally grotesque, was less so than the claim implicit in Obama’s actions regarding the ACA. Nixon’s claim was confined to matters of national security or (he said to Frost) “a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude.” Obama’s audacity is more spacious; it encompasses a right to disregard any portion of any law pertaining to any subject at any time when the political “environment” is difficult.

Obama should be embarrassed that, by ignoring the legal requirement concerning the employer mandate, he has validated critics who say the ACA cannot be implemented as written. What does not embarrass him is his complicity in effectively rewriting the ACA for the financial advantage of self-dealing members of Congress and their staffs.

The ACA says members of Congress (annual salaries: $174,000) and their staffs (thousands making more than $100,000) must participate in the law’s insurance exchanges. It does not say that when this change goes into effect, the current federal subsidy for this affluent cohort — up to 75 percent of the premium’s cost, perhaps $10,000 for families — should be unchanged.

When Congress awakened to what it enacted, it panicked: This could cause a flight of talent, making Congress less wonderful. So Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management, which has no power to do this, to authorize for the political class special subsidies unavailable for less privileged and less affluent citizens.

If the president does it, it’s legal? “Exactly, exactly.”
Title: NSA report on privacy violations
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2013, 07:55:48 PM
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/nsa-report-on-privacy-violations-in-the-first-quarter-of-2012/395/?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost
Title: Reason: NSA violated privacy at leasat 2,776 times
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 16, 2013, 07:00:23 AM
http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/15/yes-the-nsa-violated-surveillance-privac


Yes, the NSA Violated Surveillance Privacy Rules – at Least 2,776 Times

Scott Shackford|Aug. 15, 2013 9:50 pm

Now Surveilling AllNSA LogoThe Washington Post has the latest Edward Snowden-provided bombshell:

    The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

    Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by law and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

    The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

    In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

We may now also know a little more detail about the one incident where the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court discovered the NSA violating the rules. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued to get this information, which is scheduled to be released next week.

    In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.

So the NSA was not always informing the court of its actions. And yes, they improperly accessed content of communications:

    [T]he more serious lapses include unauthorized access to intercepted communications, the distribution of protected content and the use of automated systems without built-in safeguards to prevent unlawful surveillance.

There's a lot of information in the story and I'm not going to make a mockery of fair use by quoting it all. Please read here. No doubt the fallout is going to be big on this one.
Title: IRS Scandal, Who Knew about targeting? Lois Lerner's Deputy - Holly Paz - knew
Post by: DougMacG on August 23, 2013, 06:36:05 AM
(When does PROSECUTION begin in America?)

What About Lerner's Deputy?

Lois Lerner, the agent at the heart of the Internal Revenue Service scandal, was not the first person in a leadership position to know that conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status were being targeted. Her deputy Holly Paz was.

Ms. Paz testified in May before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that she learned of the targeting accidentally, after noticing an influx of tea party cases and asking Cincinnati agents for the criteria that were used to flag them. But according to interviews with other agents and newly released emails, it appears that how Ms. Paz learned of the criteria was no accident, and Congress wants answers.

GOP Reps. Darrell Issa and Jim Jordan sent Ms. Paz a letter this week asking her to explain certain "inconsistencies." Ms. Paz testified that she asked for the criteria from her employees after noticing the list of cases held for added scrutiny "was being over-inclusive." She said it was in June 2011 that she initially learned agents were using keywords on a "Be On the Lookout" spreadsheet to flag potential political cases. But Cindy Thomas, the manager of the Cincinnati office, had sent Ms. Paz an email making her "aware of a BOLO spreadsheet on March 16, 2011," or three months earlier. If Ms. Paz had the spreadsheet already, why did she need to ask her agents for the criteria?

Moreover, the same spreadsheet directed agents to flag "

Messrs. Issa and Jordan asked Ms. Paz to renounce her testimony or rectify it by September 3. Let's see if she sticks to her story.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324619504579028841667645598.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond
Title: Wasn't there a Reese Witherspoon comedy about this?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 25, 2013, 06:11:29 PM
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/23/nsa-officers-sometimes-spy-on-love-interests/
Title: IRS gave black non-profists favorable treatment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 07, 2013, 08:34:12 PM
This should not stand.  Whether we are becoming one or not, we aren't supposed to be a banana republic.  Time for some defenestrations pour encourager les autres.

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-viewpoint/090613-670166-irs-holder-advised-black-nonprofits-tax-law.htm

IRS Gave Black Nonprofits Preferential Treatment

By PAUL SPERRY

At the same time the IRS harassed Republican nonprofit groups during the 2012 political campaign, it selectively advised black churches and other Democrat nonprofits on how far they can go in campaigning for President Obama and other Democrats.

This raw exercise in political favoritism has not been reported in the context of the still-smoldering IRS scandal, in which the agency in 2012 audited big GOP donors and blocked Tea Party groups trying to obtain tax-exempt status as part of what House investigators suspect was an effort to re-elect the president. But that same year, top officials with both the IRS and Justice Department — including the IRS commissioner and attorney general — met in Washington with several dozen prominent black church ministers representing millions of voters to brief them on how to get their flocks out to vote without breaking federal tax laws.

The "summit" on energizing the black vote in houses of worship was hosted by the Democrat-controlled Congressional Black Caucus inside the U.S. Capitol on May 30, 2012.  The day before the special IRS training session, then-Black Caucus Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver predicted Obama would get 95% of the African-American vote — but only if black pastors "encourage" them to get to the polls. (He ended up getting over 93% of the black vote.)

IRS Goes To Church

At the time, many African-Americans were unhappy that Obama came out in support of gay marriage. So Democrats gathered them in Washington for a "pep talk," which included assurances their tax exemption would be safe if they helped deliver the vote.  It's not clear if the White House helped organize the unusual event, but two key Cabinet members — Attorney General Eric Holder and IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman — both spoke at length to the black church leaders.

Joining them was senior IRS official Peter Lorenzetti, who runs the agency's tax-exempt organizations division. He gave a technical briefing in which he advised against endorsing from the pulpit any candidates by name or distributing voter cheat sheets.

Then Lorenzetti hastened to add: "It is important to note, however, that an organization exempt under 501(c)3 — in this case the church or a religious organization — can conduct educational election activities," including holding political debates or even inviting candidates to speak to congregants.

Get-out-the-vote activities also are allowed, including driving church members to polls and knocking on doors to register people to vote.

"There are so many things that you can do and you should do," stressed Black Caucus member Rep. G.K. Butterfield, D-N.C. For example, he instructed pastors, "You are permitted to endorse a candidate in your individual capacity as a citizen. You can appear on a (TV or radio) program away from the church and be presented as the pastor. You can do that."

He told ministers not to worry that IRS agents "with binoculars" are spying on their churches from across the street. "The IRS does not have the authority to tell a church how it conducts its affairs," said Butterfield.

In an MSNBC interview prior to the briefing, Cleaver, D-Mo., explained: "We want to let (the pastors) know that there is a theological responsibility to participate in the political process. We're going to encourage them to encourage their people" to get out the vote.

Double Standard

U.S. tax code prohibits churches and other nonprofits from "participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office."

The ban includes donations, endorsements, fundraising or any other activity "that may be beneficial or detrimental to any particular candidate." In the past, black churches have been known to pass out voting guides to members in violation of IRS rules.

Washington constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley at the time blogged that the special campaign training session offered these Obama supporters — with the direct participation of the IRS chief and attorney general — was a "raw" display of political favoritism.

"If (former GOP Attorney General) Alberto Gonzalez went to Congress to brief evangelical religious leaders on campaigning in the presidential election, the hue and cry would be deafening," Turley said.

Non-black clergy were not afforded the same legal training in campaigning tactics by the Obama administration.  At the time, Turley did not know that the IRS had targeted GOP donors and nonprofits opposed to the president or that it had temporarily suspended tax audits of churches, which it publicly announced just prior to the election.

"We are holding any potential church audits in abeyance," Russell Renwicks of the agency's Tax-Exempt and Government Entities division was quoted by Bloomberg BNA as saying in October 2012. The agency made the decision despite being bombarded by complaints about churches getting involved in the election.  The high-level legal briefing for Obama supporters made just passing news during the election. But the double standard it poses now in the wake of the IRS scandal is troubling.

Perhaps more disturbing, Turley remarked, is that the two federal law enforcement officials who would be the ultimate decision-makers in future cases involving IRS tax fraud and exemption violations were front and center in counseling tax-exempt groups that might bump up against those laws.
Title: BO's illegal use of a SS#?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 08, 2013, 08:16:37 AM
Orly Taitz is a birther, caveat lector:

http://thelastgreatstand.com/lgs/2013/08/30/attorney-doj-asks-for-more-time-to-respond-to-motion-regarding-obamas-fraudulent-use-of-someone-elses-social-security-number/
Title: Sen. Feinstein draws logical inference , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 08, 2013, 08:34:43 AM
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/09/06/senator-feinstein-to-napolitano-stop-enforcing-immigration-law/
Title: Re: IRS Scandals
Post by: DougMacG on September 08, 2013, 08:54:28 AM
First this: "Time for some defenestrations pour encourager les autres."    Sometimes I need help to read the more widely educated posters.   Google pointed me first back to the forum.  :-) Then to these helpful translations I reprint for the benefit of others:

Defenestration is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window. The term was coined around the time of an incident in Prague Castle in the year 1618. (Oxford)

pour encourager les autres: in order to encourage the others —said ironically of an action (as an execution) carried out in order to compel others to obey or submit  (Meriam-Webster)
-----------------

Back to the scandals, I am pleased to note that CNN is still following the IRS scandal (although they disclaim that the views expressed are only of the author).  So often these scandals are covered only by right wing sources to reporting to right wing readers/viewers.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/03/opinion/ken-boehm-irs-scandal-investigation/

IRS scandal: America needs the truth
By Ken Boehm, Special to CNN  (more at link)

(CNN) -- America can handle the truth. Even if that truth could include a coverup at the powerful IRS.  The IRS mission statement pledges to "enforce the law with integrity and fairness to all."  But public scrutiny has revealed details indicating a level of politicization totally at odds with that.

Look at the two eye-opening developments that have happened at the IRS since May: An acting IRS commissioner resigned, and another powerful IRS official refused to answer questions before Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment.

Whatever is going on, there is only one way to proceed, and that is a professional and thorough investigation.  For people who haven't been following a lot of this, let me quickly get you up to speed:  The IRS inspector general released a report on May 14 describing how the agency had inappropriately targeted tea party and conservative groups that had applied for tax-exempt status.  Then the IRS put these groups through extra reviews, substantial delays and burdensome requests for information.

The reaction was immediate. The next day, President Barack Obama announced that the acting IRS commissioner was resigning.  That doesn't exactly happen every day.  Obama went on to say, "I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but especially in the IRS, given the power that it has and the reach that it has into all of our lives."

After that shocking disclosure, several things happened:

• Senate and House committees launched investigations into the scandal.

• The FBI began a criminal investigation.

• The IRS inspector general expanded its ongoing investigation.

• IRS official Lois Lerner exercised her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination by refusing to answer questions before Congress.

Some interesting developments emerged from all that.  For one, the original claim during IRS testimony -- that the scandal was the result of a couple of "rogue IRS agents" in the agency's Cincinnati field office -- didn't hold water.

It turned out that, according to frontline IRS agents in Cincinnati interviewed by House Oversight committee investigators, the Washington IRS office had played a key role in the handling of the tea party applications.

Retired IRS lawyer Carter Hull disclosed in testimony that IRS Counsel William Wilkins was one of his supervisors in the targeting of conservative groups. (The IRS has denied Wilkins' involvement in the targeting of specific groups.)

The inspector general's report found that Wilkins' office had sent the exempt organizations determination unit on April 24, 2012, "additional comments on the draft guidance" for considering applications of tea party groups for tax-exempt status (PDF).

The connections between Wilkins' office and the inappropriate profiling of conservative groups are especially noteworthy because there are only two appointees of the president at the IRS: the commissioner and the chief counsel.

Cynics may view this controversy as typical when the House is in the hands of a different party than the president, but guess what?

The Democrat-controlled Senate's Finance Committee has also weighed in.  That committee has called for three things: a hearing, an investigation and a request to the IRS for documents.

Montana Democrat Sen. Max Baucus, the committee chairman, stated bluntly, "Targeting groups based on their political views is not only inappropriate, it is intolerable, unacceptable and cannot be allowed."  Baucus promised a bipartisan investigation and has been true to his word. When the first week of August arrived, Baucus and his GOP counterpart, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, said the IRS failed to provide "most of the information requested by the Committee."

New details reshape IRS targeting scandal

As chairman of the ethics watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center, I had filed a complaint with the IRS in May 2011 showing that a purported charity called the Barack H. Obama Foundation -- named for the father of President Obama and run by his half-brother, Malik Obama -- had been raising funds in the U.S. by falsely claiming to be an IRS-approved charitable group.

I submitted proof that the foundation was not tax-deductible and had never even applied for that status despite the fact that it had been fundraising for about three years.  In fact, one of the foundation's directors admitted that an IRS application had never been submitted.  There was compelling evidence suggesting that the foundation was raising money on the Internet by misrepresenting itself as being IRS-approved when it really wasn't.

Suddenly, the foundation rushed an application to the IRS in late May 2011.  In the short span of about a month, Lerner -- the same person who took the Fifth Amendment rather than testify before Congress -- gave the Obama Foundation its tax-deductible status.  And, the IRS made that status retroactive for three years. 

The administration says there's no political basis for the IRS actions. If that's true, then it has nothing to lose.

Even more curious, several of the forms submitted by Malik Obama were stamped as being received by the IRS in July 2011. That's one month after Lerner approved the group's new tax status.
...
The administration says there's no political basis for the IRS actions. If that's true, then it has nothing to lose.
Title: Herman Cain: The IRS scandal continues
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2013, 05:51:04 AM
IRS scandal persists despite media attempts to ignore it
Published by: Herman Cain

Lois Lerner e-mails tell us what journalists refuse to.

It was only a few months ago that political reporters across the country started cheering that the IRS scandal had “fizzled,” a word that was used by so many of them it became obvious it was established as a media talking point.

These Obama apologists argued that a list of IRS watchwords for going after groups seeking tax exemptions included some words that pertained to liberals, and therefore the entire conservative argument of IRS bias against conservatives was “debunked” and there was no more reason to cover the story. When conservatives pointed out that, in practice, the liberal groups were regularly getting quick approvals while conservatives were having to endure long waits if they got approved at all – silence.

The scandal had fizzled and that was that.

Fortunately for the nation, a few people decided to keep digging, and this past week we learned of e-mails from Lois Lerner, the IRS director of exempt groups, which clearly show a bias against conservatives and an attempt to cover it up.

The Washington Times reports:

In one 2011 email, Ms. Lerner specifically calls the tea party applications for tax-exempt status problematic, which seems to counter Democrats’ arguments that tea party groups weren’t targeted.

“Tea Party Matter very dangerous,” Ms. Lerner wrote in the 2011 email, saying that those applications could end up being the “vehicle to go to court” to get more clarity on a 2010 Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance rules.

In another email, from 2012, Ms. Lerner acknowledges that the agency’s handling of the tax-exempt applications had been bungled at the beginning, though she said steps had been taken to correct problems.

“It is what it is,” she wrote in the email, released Thursday by the Ways and Means Committee. “Although the original story isn’t as pretty as we’d like, once we learned [that we were] off track, we have done what we can to change the process, better educate our staff and move the cases. So, we will get dinged, but we took steps before the ‘dinging’ to make things better and we have written procedures.”

That email suggests that agency employees knew they had gone overboard in their scrutiny — despite top IRS officials telling Congress that there was no special scrutiny of conservative groups.

In another 2012 email, Ms. Lerner seemed to take sides in a battle between the Federal Election Commission and conservative tax-exempt groups that were engaging in politics, saying “perhaps the FEC will save the day.”

It’s clear what’s going on here. Lerner, who had a history of hostility toward conservatives going back to her days at the FEC, wanted to find ways to create problems for conservatives without it getting a lot of attention, and certainly without admitting it to Congress, which is why she took the Fifth Amendment when they asked her about it.

Yet the media persists in low-keying the story. President Obama has declared it a “phony scandal,” and that means they have their marching orders. If they cover it at all, it’s buried under the things they really want to talk about – like what happened at George Zimmerman’s house today, or why it’s inevitable that Hillary Clinton will become president in three years.

It’s not so much a cover-up as it is a slow walk until the gullible public forgets about it. That’s because, in large part, the media agree with what the IRS is doing. They think conservative nonprofits are really about nothing but electing Republicans, whereas liberal nonprofits are all about “helping people” or “social justice” or whatever. Basically, they see it the way Lois Lerner sees it. That’s why it doesn’t bother them that the IRS is abusing its power to achieve these ends. They like the ends, and the last thing they want to do is encourage the people to rise up against the government’s actions.

Dave Wiegel, a liberal blogger for Slate, provides the rationale for the media to continue ignoring the story:

Is it scandalous? If you don't think a bureaucrat taking this role in the IRS should hold such views, yes. And if, like the WSJ, you see a discrepancy (sic) here between Lerner saying the cases shouldn't go to Cincinnati and the IRS telling Congress, in April, that "rogue agents" in Cincinnati were behind the aggressive targeting—definitely a scandal. But that's what we're sort of left with, a disagreement over whether the IRS should have been nosy about a surge of political groups asking for tax exemption, and whether that nosiness hit the right disproportionately.

A lot of lefty journalists follow Wiegel’s lead, and what he’s told them is that even though IRS bureaucrats are clearly acting inappropriately, a journalist has license to ignore the story as long as he or she remains unconvinced that conservatives were really the target. There’s a “disagreement” over that, he says, and there’s no need to keep reporting or digging for the truth.

We’ll keep the light on this, because they won’t.

Title: More evidence against IRS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2013, 03:02:04 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/18/new-documents-show-irs-looked-for-groups-with-anti-obama-rhetoric-and-may-have-been-inspired-by-anti-conservative-rhetoric/
Title: FBI still engaging with CAIR
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 19, 2013, 02:52:18 PM
Wolf Demands FBI Punish Agents For CAIR Contact
IPT News
September 19, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4165/wolf-demands-fbi-punish-agents-for-cair-contact
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On a day when the Council on American-Relations (CAIR) issued a report accusing its critics of bigotry, a Justice Department investigation reminds the public why CAIR does not merit the public's trust.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz found a series of incidents in which FBI field offices knowingly engaged in outreach activity with CAIR despite a 2008 policy banning non-investigative cooperation with the Islamist group. Only a summary of the report has been released publicly. The rest is considered classified, but has been made available to Congress.

The ban on interactions with CAIR, first reported by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, resulted from an FBI investigation into a Muslim Brotherhood-created Hamas-support network in the United States.

Internal documents seized by the FBI show that CAIR and its founders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, were a part of that network known as the Palestine Committee. Both men appear on a telephone list of Palestine Committee members (Awad is listed under a pseudonym "Omar Yehya), and CAIR is listed on a meeting agenda listing the committee's branches.

" ntil we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS," an FBI official wrote in 2009, "the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner."

But several FBI field office agents-in-charge balked at the policy, the Inspector General's report finds, and the FBI's Office of Public Affairs repeatedly offered field offices conflicting information. Despite a series of electronic communications explaining the CAIR ban – it does not apply to criminal investigations or civil rights complaints – issued from August-December 2008, and despite a mandatory meeting for Special Agents in Charge (SAC) of field offices, the head of the Los Angeles FBI office told his agents to ignore FBI headquarters.

"[W]e will decide how our relationship is operated and maintained with CAIR barring some additional instruction from FBI Headquarters," the Los Angeles SAC wrote. "Please instruct your folks at this time that are not to abide by the … [policy] but that their direction in regards to CAIR will come from the LA Field Office front office."
In a scathing letter to new FBI Director James Comey, U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., called the violations "intolerable" and demanded punishment for those responsible, including "separation from the FBI."

Wolf is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee responsible for the FBI's budget. He noted that the investigation only focused on incidents involving three field offices – Chicago, Philadelphia and New Haven, Conn., so the depth of the problem still is not known.

The Los Angeles SAC, Wolf added, exhibited "unacceptable and insubordinate behavior from a senior leader of the FBI."

"Despite repeated efforts to communicate the policy to the field," Wolf wrote, "this was undermined by conflicting guidance being inexplicably offered by the bureau's Office of Public Affairs as well as outright violations from several field offices."

That's what happened in New Haven, the report finds. As the IPT reported in 2011, officials in the field office helped organize a community outreach program knowing that two local CAIR officials were involved. Rather than hold to the FBI policy, they agreed to conceal their role in organizing the event. In addition, the Inspector General found, the Office of Public Affairs advised the field office that the interaction was okay.

In 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder was asked whether there was any "new evidence that exonerates CAIR from the allegations that it provides financial support to designated terrorist organizations."

"No," said a written reply from Holder.

Then-FBI Director Robert Mueller publicly reaffirmed the policy in two separate appearances before Congress a year later, saying "We have no formal relationship with CAIR."
"There should have been no confusion about this policy," Wolf wrote, "given the bureau guidance, Congressional direction and media coverage surrounding this directive." Horowitz seemed to agree. He faults the FBI for failing to provide "effective oversight to ensure compliance with the policy."

In addition to avoiding interaction with a bad actor, the ban on CAIR contact is meant to prevent the group from touting its connections with law enforcement as a way to enhance its image. That's exactly what happened in Philadelphia in 2010, the Inspector General's report found. A local CAIR official was invited to an FBI "Citizen's Academy" program despite the FBI policy's specific reference to the program as off-limits to CAIR representatives.

"A few days later," the report said, "CAIR-Philadelphia posted an article on its website describing its participation in the training program, with a link to the FBI's website."
While it boasted about FBI contact in this case, CAIR officials more often disseminate a message of fear to Muslim Americans, portraying FBI agents as ruthless and corrupt – willing to do anything to set up innocent Muslims. One CAIR chapter urged Muslims to "Build a Wall of Resistance" from the FBI and not cooperate in criminal investigations.

The policy did not come out of the blue. Awad, picked up on FBI recordings of Palestine Committee meetings, remains CAIR's executive director. He has never acknowledged his relationship with the Hamas-support network, and therefore, never disavowed it. In a 2003 deposition, he claimed not to remember whether he attended a weekend-long Palestine Committee meeting in Philadelphia called to discuss ways to "derail" American peacemaking efforts between Israel and the Palestinians. The group also talked at length about how to deceive Americans by hiding their Hamas support.

Those are among the things that make the FBI question "whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS" and bar interaction between its agents and the group. Perhaps the Inspector General's report will prompt field office officials to stop ignoring their own leaders and the information gathered by their fellow agents.

Title: What did senior Treasury officials know and when did they know it?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 19, 2013, 10:43:31 PM
Hat tip to Doug:

Senior Treasury Department Officials Knew of IRS Targeting in Spring 2012, Documents Suggest
By  Eliana Johnson
September 19, 2013 1:05 PM

New documents are raising questions about when senior Treasury Department officials, including deputy treasury secretary Neal Wolin and even former treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, learned about the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of tea-party groups. They suggest top brass at the Treasury Department may have been aware of the scandal in spring of 2012, a year before it became public.

An e-mail uncovered in the course of the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the scandal shows that Treasury Department inspector general J. Russell George was briefed by his staff in preparation for a “Secretary’s meeting” that was to take place at the Treasury Department on June 4, 2012. The briefing notes sent to George by a member of his staff read, “We obtained documentation indicating that certain organizations’ applications for tax-exempt status were targeted by the Exempt Organizations Determination office based on the organizations’ name or political beliefs. Additional audit work is needed to determine the extent, if any, of inconsistent treatment of these organizations’ applications for 501(c)(4) status.” Another document indicates that George briefed Treasury Department general counsel Christopher Meade the same day.

It is unclear if either Geithner or Wolin were present at the June 4, 2012, meeting. It does not appear on Geithner’s public schedule for the day (see below). In May, George described the secretary’s meetings to the committee this way: “The secretary holds a monthly meeting with bureau heads and in conjunction with those meetings, I meet monthly with the general counsel of the Department of the Treasury and then on an as-needed basis with the deputy secretary, Mr. Wolin.” George said that he told Wolin about the scandal “shortly” after he briefed Meade, but could not recall the precise day. Wolin has testified that he was made aware of an audit of “the IRS’s review of tax-exempt organizations” in 2012. George’s testimony is consistent with Wolin’s statement: He told Congress he informed the deputy treasury secretary and the department’s general counsel only about “the nature of the audit,” though the notes prepared for him by his staff go into further detail.

The documents also show that former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman knew more about the scandal than he has previously disclosed. On May 30, 2012, according to a timeline from the inspector general’s office, Shulman learned that ”criteria targeting ‘tea party,’ ‘patriots,’ or ‘9/12′” as well as “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” were being used in reviewing applications for tax-exempt status.

Shulman told Congress in March 2012 that no targeting was taking place. Asked why he did not approach lawmakers to correct the record, he said, “What I knew sometime in the spring of 2012 was that there was a list who was being used, knew that the word ‘tea party’ was on the list” but ”didn’t know what other words were on the list” or “the scope and severity” of the problem.

On the basis of the newly discovered documents, Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa and subcommittee chairman Jim Jordan are demanding all Treasury Department documents and communication “referring or relating to the IRS’s misconduct.” In a letter to treasury secretary Jack Lew on Thursday, they wrote, “This information raises serious questions about the awareness of the Treasury Department in the IRS’s mistreatment of tax-exempt applications.” Issa and Jordan are reiterating a previous request to Lew with which the treasury secretary has yet to comply. The department, they said, “has produced only about 350 pages of responsive documents and did not provide any responses to several of our requests.”

UPDATE: A public schedule provided by the Treasury Department shows that former treasury secretary Timothy Geithner did not attend the June 4, 2012 meeting.

http://nationalreview.com/corner/358969/senior-treasury-department-officials-knew-irs-targeting-spring-2012-documents-suggest
Title: High-profile cases show a pattern of misuse of prosecutorial powers
Post by: G M on September 24, 2013, 10:05:39 AM
High-profile cases show a pattern of misuse of prosecutorial powers

By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro — Special to The Washington Times
 


Sunday, September 22, 2013


ANALYSIS:
 
It’s hard to imagine the U.S. as a place where citizens have to fear overzealous prosecution, but last week’s reversals in the cases of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and five New Orleans police officers are part of a troubling pattern reminiscent of the Soviet criminal justice system — a system in which the state is always right, even when it is wrong.
 
In both cases, the judges who overturned the original trial-court verdicts cited instances of prosecutorial overzealousness and abuse of power, making the two cases the latest high-profile trials to run aground on the basis of misconduct by the state’s attorneys.
 
The high-profile cases in recent years run the gamut from the ancient offenses of murder and rape to increasingly esoteric details of campaign finance and contractor law.
 
In 2008, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, the longest-serving Republican in the U.S. Senate, was charged by federal prosecutors with failing to report gifts. During the campaign season, Barack Obama said Stevens needed to resign “to put an end to the corruption and influence-peddling in Washington,” and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, moved to have Stevens expelled.
 
Stevens lost the election, but three months later, FBI agents accused prosecutors of withholding exculpatory evidence that could have resulted in the senator’s acquittal. Newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asked the court to vacate Stevens‘ conviction, but the damage already had been done.
 
The prosecutors’ misconduct destroyed Stevens‘ reputation and political career and affected the balance of power in the U.S. Senate in favor of Democrats.
 
Circumstances were not entirely different in the prosecution of former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who was accused by local Democratic prosecutor Ronnie Earle to influence state elections with corporate money.
 
Mr. DeLay was convicted in 2010, but the Texas 3rd Court of Appeals overturned his conviction last week, saying the charges were based on “insufficient evidence.” Mr. DeLay called the indictment “an outrageous criminalization of politics,” but again, a Republican had been run out of politics. Mr. DeLay said he would “probably not” run for political office again.
 
Washington lobbyist and power broker Jack Abramoff is not as sympathetic a figure as Stevens or Mr. DeLay, but some reports indicate that the Justice Department intimidated Mr. Abramoff into a confession, and his case also revealed how the “honest services fraud” law gives federal prosecutors almost unchallengeable power.
 
Technically, the law lets prosecutors charge people when they “deprive another of honest services,” but it has been used as a catchall charge when the state is looking to secure an indictment from a grand jury but has exhausted all other options.
 
The U.S. Supreme Court eventually had to narrow the statutory meaning of the honest services fraud law, enacted in 1988, to avoid striking it down for unconstitutional vagueness.
 
William L. Anderson, an economics professor at Frostburg State University, once wrote of the law, “Have you ever taken a longer lunch break than what you are supposed to do? Have you made a personal phone call at work or done personal business on your employer’s computer? Have you ever had a contract dispute with an employer or client? All of those things can be criminalized by an enterprising federal prosecutor.”
 
In another case, five police officers were accused of murder in the fatal shootings of two men on a New Orleans bridge amid the chaos after Hurricane Katrina.
 
The officers were white and the victims black, and racial tensions were running high. Federal prosecutors turned to civil rights charges in accusing the officers.
 
Despite the Fifth Amendment’s double jeopardy prohibition, federal civil rights statutes enable U.S. prosecutors to pursue felony charges against a defendant in limited instances even if they have been acquitted of underlying state crimes.
 
Evidence in the New Orleans case was compelling, and the officers were convicted, but U.S. District Court Judge Kurt Engelhardt ordered a new trial last week, saying the government “engaged in a secret public relations campaign” by anonymously making extrajudicial statements against the defendants on a New Orleans news site.
 
“This case started as one featuring allegations of brazen abuse of authority, violation of the law and corruption of the criminal justice system,” he wrote in his order. “Unfortunately the focus has switched from the accused to the accusers. The government’s actions, and initial lack of candor and credibility thereafter, is like scar tissue that will long evidence infidelity to the principles of ethics, professionalism and basic fairness and common sense necessary to every criminal prosecutor, wherever it should occur in this country.”
 
The Duke University lacrosse players’ case is one of the most notorious of selective prosecution designed for political gain. North Carolina prosecutor Michael Nifong made numerous public statements incriminating the team and turning the media against the defendants.
 
Despite the accuser’s history of falsely reporting incidents and lack of evidence, Mr. Nifong pushed the politically popular case in the midst of his re-election campaign. State officials took over the case, dismissing all charges, taking the unusual step of declaring the defendants innocent — not merely “not guilty” — and Mr. Nifong was ultimately disbarred.
 
Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said that “you can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners.” The same could be said of how fairly a judicial system prosecutes its accused defendants. Arrogance, not ethics, is emerging as criteria for prosecutorial discretion, and the result is a society based on fear, not freedom.
 
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C.


Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/22/high-profile-cases-show-a-pattern-of-misuse-of-pro/
Title: Steyn: American Banan Republic
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 24, 2013, 06:20:44 PM
http://nationalreview.com/node/359148/print
Title: IRS scandal means bad news for Obama: Column
Post by: G M on September 30, 2013, 05:14:23 PM
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/09/29/irs-tea-party-column/2892135/

IRS scandal means bad news for Obama: Column

 Glenn Harlan Reynolds 10:23 a.m. EDT September 30, 2013



 Come 2014, the government's damaged brand will reflect poorly on president and his party.





(Photo: Al Behrman, AP)

Story Highlights
Most Americans think the IRS broke the law by targeting Tea Party groups for harassment.
But only 17% think it is even somewhat likely that anyone will be charged.
The lesson for the country is that trust in the government is very low.



So last week, while most of the country was talking about football or fears of a government shutdown, Rasmussen released a poll that should worry everyone -- but especially incumbent Democrats in Congress. According to Rasmussen's survey, most Americans think the IRS broke the law by targeting Tea Party groups for harassment, but few expect it to be punished. Fifty-three percent think the IRS broke the law by targeting the Tea Party and other conservative groups like the voter-integrity outfit True The Vote; only 24% disagreed. But only 17% think it is even somewhat likely that anyone will be charged, while 74% think that criminal charges are unlikely.

COLUMN: Assault by civil forfeiture

So a majority of Americans think that government officials who exercise an important trust broke the law, but only a very small number think anything will be done to punish them.

There are a couple of lessons to draw from this. One is bad for the country in general, but the other is bad for congressional Democrats.

The lesson for the country is that trust in the government is very low. (In another Rasmussen poll, 70% think that government and big business often work together against consumers and investors. According to Gallup, trust in government is lower than during Watergate.) But it's worse than that.

Believing that government officials break the law is one thing; believing that they face no consequences when they're caught and it becomes public is another. Not only is this a sort of "broken windows" signal to other bureaucrats -- hey, you can break the law and get away with it -- but it's particularly damaging where the IRS is concerned.

America's tax system, despite the feared IRS audit, is fundamentally based on voluntary compliance. If everyone starts cheating, there aren't enough IRS agents to make a dent. Beyond taxes, that's true regarding compliance with the law in general. Moral legitimacy is what makes honest people obey the law even when they can get away with breaking it. Undermine that and you get a country like, say, Italy, where tax evasion is a national sport.

Meanwhile, there's another bit of bad news buried in that poll, this time for Democrats. The bad news is that a majority of Americans thinks the IRS broke the law even though the news media have consistently downplayed the scandal. But as the scandal has dragged on for months, word has filtered out anyway. Come 2014, the government's damaged brand will reflect poorly on members of the president's party, regardless of media efforts to protect them.

Beyond that, the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has begun calling President Obama "President Asterisk," saying that IRS efforts to weaken his opposition in the run-up to the 2012 election devalue Obama's victory the way illegal steroid use devalues an athlete's record-book standing. Taranto writes that this puts Obama in a situation that is in some ways worse than Nixon after Watergate: "We now know that government corruption -- namely IRS persecution of dissenters -- was a factor in Obama's re-election.

To be sure, Obama himself has not, at least so far, been implicated in the IRS wrongdoing as Nixon ultimately was in Watergate. On the other hand, Nixon's re-election victory was so overwhelming that no one could plausibly argue Watergate was a necessary condition for it. The idea that Obama could not have won without an abusive IRS is entirely plausible."

Of course, the press hated Nixon, while it is still doing everything it can to protect Obama. But, as we see, word filters out. Stay tuned.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee and the author ofThe New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.
Title: Ben Carson: ‘I had my first encounter with the IRS’ after challenging Obama
Post by: G M on October 01, 2013, 05:05:41 PM
- The Daily Caller - http://dailycaller.com -
 


Ben Carson: ‘I had my first encounter with the IRS’ after challenging Obama

Posted By Jeff Poor On 9:47 AM 10/01/2013 In Politics | No Comments


At an event in Birmingham, Ala. Monday night, former Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Ben Carson revealed that he had received a visit from the Internal Revenue Service following his much-noted remarks at a National Prayer Breakfast earlier this year.
 
“I had my first encounter with the IRS this year, unsurprisingly after the prayer breakfast,” Carson told an audience that at the annual Business Council of Alabama Chairman’s Dinner, according to a report from Cliff Sims of the Montgomery, Ala.-based Yellowhammer News.
 
Carson’s February speech February made him a conservative darling for criticizing President Barack Obama’s 2010 health-care reform law, while Obama was sitting just a few feet away.
 
During the event, which also featured former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Carson spoke about the potential presidential candidacy of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. relations with Russia and the Environmental Protection Agency.
 
(h/t Cliff Sims, Yellowhammer News)
 
Follow Jeff on Twitter
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Article printed from The Daily Caller: http://dailycaller.com

URL to article: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/01/ben-carson-i-had-my-first-encounter-with-the-irs-following-the-national-prayer-breakfast/
Title: BP's books are cooked says BP union
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 01, 2013, 05:44:56 PM
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/30/Exclusive-Feds-Cooking-Books-on-Illegal-Immigration-says-Border-Patrol-Union
Title: Gomer Pyle enforces the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2013, 09:49:49 PM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwEvysDpNm0&noredirect=1
Title: OFF: ATF tries to stop book by whistleblower
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 07, 2013, 08:56:40 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/6/atf-tries-block-whistleblowing-agents-fast-and-fur/
Title: DV Police Chief & Sen. Feinstein; 0 chance of DOJ going after CA immigration law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 09, 2013, 09:26:34 AM
http://ht.ly/pE1EI

Cover up of how Feinstein got those illegal assault weapons she brandished at the press conference.
=======================

For the Record
Columnist Arnold Ahlert: "On Saturday, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Trust Act. It prohibits illegal aliens from being turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities for possible deportation unless they have been charged with or convicted of a serious offense. ... The federal government's priorities are tellingly selective. When the state of Arizona passed SB 1070, a law that allowed law enforcement officials to inquire about proof of residence from those detained for other legitimate reasons, Eric Holder's Department of Justice (DOJ) sued the state. The DOJ won a partial victory when the Supreme Court ruled that asking people to produce proof they are in the country legally if they have been stopped for another legitimate reason is constitutional, but Justice Anthony Kennedy determined that immigration law per se -- including the decision not to enforce the law -- remains exclusively under federal jurisdiction. The likelihood that the DOJ will file a similar lawsuit against California for its decision to openly defy federal immigration law? Zero."
Title: IRS gave WH confidential data
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 11, 2013, 06:59:05 AM
http://washingtonexaminer.com/house-investigators-irs-gave-white-house-confidential-data-in-order-to-fight-hhs-mandate-lawsuits/article/2537049
Title: Re: IRS gave WH confidential data
Post by: DougMacG on October 11, 2013, 09:50:55 AM
"House investigators: IRS gave White House confidential data in order to fight HHS mandate lawsuits"

This surprises no one, doesn't even offend liberals, and there is no indication that the perpetrators will face criminal prosecution.  Instead, our answer is to have more agencies gather and enter even more personal information into these corrupt, insecure networks.

When they look deeper, they will also find that the agencies effectively shared information with the swing state, get out the liberal vote campaigns, enabling these programs.
Title: Death of the Hatch Act
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 20, 2013, 09:08:04 AM
http://nationalreview.com/corner/361267/moment-silence-hatch-act-party-government-merges-government-andrew-c-mccarthy
Title: Housing Grant to ACORN
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 21, 2013, 09:11:52 AM
Judicial Watch: Feds give housing grant to ACORN affiliate despite federal ban

http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2534326
Title: Obamacare-ACORN graft
Post by: G M on October 21, 2013, 03:56:27 PM
http://michellemalkin.com/2013/10/17/what-a-coincidence-acorn-founders-organization-serving-as-obamacare-navigators/

What a coincidence: ACORN founder’s organization serving as Obamacare navigators








By Doug Powers  •  October 17, 2013 11:35 PM


**Written by Doug Powers
 





There was $67 million doled out in Obamacare navigator grants, and the organization below doesn’t appear on the list of “navigators” receiving that money. The other options are that they are being subcontracted, or that they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. You decide:
 

A community organization established by Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN, will be participating in a “navigator” drive aiding people attempting to sign up for health-care coverage under the Affordable Care Act, according to a Fox News report. The organization, United Labor Unions Council Local 100, is based in New Orleans and was created by Rathke after ACORN went bankrupt amidst widespread scandal.
 
United Labor Unions Council Local 100’s website links to ACORN International, another offshoot of the now defunct ACORN, on their website.
 [...]
 Though Local 100 is not officially related to ACORN, former ACORN administrators, including Wade Rathke and Bertha Lewis, have reconstituted the scandal-plagued community-organizing group in the form of a multiplicity of local organizations.
 
The Obamacare site at HealthCare.gov includes this option:
 

(http://michellemalkinblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/voteobamacare.jpg)



Your ACORN-ish “navigator” will no doubt be happy to assist you with that. It’s probably the only part of the website that actually works.
Title: DOJ walks grenades into Mexico
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 21, 2013, 04:20:45 PM
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/
Title: Re: DOJ walks grenades into Mexico
Post by: G M on October 21, 2013, 04:22:43 PM
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/

But they were just undocumented grenades seeking work...
Title: The war on the rule of law, Obama’s fingerprints all over IRS Tea Party scandal
Post by: DougMacG on October 22, 2013, 10:01:31 AM
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/10/20/obamas-fingerpints-all-over-irs-tea-party-scandal/

Obama’s fingerprints all over IRS Tea Party scandal
by Jay Sekulow

It’s past time for the media to begin asking President Obama tough questions about the IRS conservative targeting scandal.  After all he was involved, publicly, from the beginning.

Last Friday, the American Center for Law and Justice (where I serve as Chief Counsel) filed its Second Amended Complaint against the United States, the IRS, and a legion of IRS officials.  This Complaint, in which we represent 41 organizations in 22 states, presents perhaps the most complete story yet of the IRS conservative targeting scandal.  http://media.aclj.org/pdf/second-amended-complaint-filed-redacted.pdf

And it is an ugly story indeed.

What was sold to the American public as a low-level scandal perpetrated by a few rogue employees – a scandal stopped after senior officials became aware and asserted control – is now (to borrow a Watergate phrase) “no longer operative.”

    Was Obama involved in the IRS scandal?  He was the one who identified the targets – in the most public manner possible.

Instead, we detail a long-running assault on the Tea Party, beginning shortly after its emergence in 2009, that is empowered, encouraged, and orchestrated not only by senior IRS officials in Washington, but also through outright targeting by the White House, Congressional Democrats, and the mainstream media.

In fact, the IRS was doing little more than focusing its attention exactly where the president of the United States told it to focus – on the groups the president himself identified as a “threat to democracy.”

Consider President Obama’s aggressive public statements – made just as we now know senior IRS officials were intentionally and aggressively scrutinizing conservative groups’ applications for tax exemption.

On August 9, 2010 the president warned of “attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names” during his weekly radio address.  The President said:  We don’t know who’s behind these ads and we don’t know who’s paying for them . . . you don’t know if it’s a foreign controlled corporation. ... The only people who don’t want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.”

On September 16, 2010, President Obama once again warned that some unidentified “foreign-controlled entity” could be providing “millions of dollars” for “attack ads.”  Less than one week later, he complained that “nobody knows” the identities of the individuals who support conservative groups.

On September 22, 2010, President Obama warned of groups opposing his policies “pos[ing] as non-for-profit social and welfare trade groups” and he claimed such groups were “guided by seasoned Republican political operatives” and potentially supported by some unidentified “foreign controlled entity.”

On October 14, 2010, President Obama called organizations with “benign sounding” names “a problem for democracy”; the next week he complained about individuals who “hide behind those front groups,” called such groups a “threat to our democracy,” and claimed such groups were engaged in “unsupervised” spending.

Next, consider the IRS’s actions following those statements.  Not only did the IRS continue its targeting, it issued broad questionnaires that made unconstitutionally-intrusive inquiries designed to get answers to exactly the questions President Obama posed.

Who are your donors?

What is the political activity of your family and associates?

What are the passwords for your websites?

After all, according to the president, you’re only afraid to answer these questions if “you’ve got something to hide.”

The demagoguery is breathtaking.  Not only does he raise the wholly-unsubstantiated possibility of shadowy “foreign” involvement in the Tea Party groups, a charge incredible on its face, but he goes the extra mile of calling such groups, a “threat to our democracy.”

When the president of the United States declares these groups a “threat to our democracy” is it any surprise that his enthusiastic supporters (and donors) within the IRS responded with an unprecedented campaign of selective targeting, intimidation, and governmental intrusion?

One grows weary of stating the obvious, but if President Bush had declared a specific category of citizen groups a “threat to democracy” potentially run by “political operatives” or “foreign-controlled,” and the IRS launched an unprecedented campaign of targeting and intrusive questioning, the mainstream media would have been relentless not only in its independent investigations but in its calls for accountability – at the highest levels.

Was the president of the United States involved in the IRS scandal?  He was the one who identified the targets – in the most public manner possible.

A president singling out citizens groups for targeting and intrusive questioning merely because he dislikes their message and fears their political influence?

Now that is a “threat to democracy.”

Jay Sekulow is Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice
Title: LAPD ‘Special Order 7′ a Godsend for Unlicensed Illegal Alien Drivers
Post by: G M on October 23, 2013, 05:06:52 PM
http://pjmedia.com/blog/lapd-special-order-7-a-godsend-for-unlicensed-illegal-alien-drivers/?singlepage=true

LAPD ‘Special Order 7′ a Godsend for Unlicensed Illegal Alien Drivers

No license? No insurance? No problem!



by
Jack Dunphy



Suppose as you read this that Officer Dunphy is out on patrol somewhere in Los Angeles.  As he keeps an eye out for signs of crime and villainy, he also seeks to maintain good order on the roads through enforcement of the traffic laws.  And what should he see directly in front of him but a flagrant violation of those laws, to wit, someone driving 45 miles per hour in a 25-miles-per-hour zone on a quiet residential street.  Officer Dunphy pulls over the errant driver and, after cautiously approaching the car (because you never know), discovers that the driver speaks no English, only Spanish.
 
This is no impediment to Officer Dunphy, as he has learned a good deal of Spanish over the years, a necessity for police officers working in many parts of Southern California.  So, in the driver’s native tongue, Officer Dunphy asks him for his driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance, all of which California law requires him to carry.  The driver replies that he has none of these things, and that the car belongs to a friend of his whom he knows only as “Francisco.”

 



And now the question: What should Officer Dunphy do now?  Of course he issues a citation to the driver for the speeding violation as well as for being unlicensed and uninsured, but what should happen to the car?  California law allows for its impoundment for 30 days, which in this case would serve as a deterrent both to our driver, for being unlicensed, and to Francisco, for allowing the unlicensed man to drive.
 
“Yes, Officer Dunphy,” you say, “summon the tow truck immediately.  Unlicensed drivers are a menace and the full weight of the law should be brought to bear upon them.”
 
Ah, but if that is indeed your response, you haven’t been paying attention to the news here in Los Angeles.  What I must do, under the terms of the LAPD’s Special Order 7 (PDF), is allow the unlicensed driver to contact Francisco and allow him time to come to the scene and, assuming he has a driver’s license, take charge of the car.  If Francisco does not have a license, he must be allowed to ask someone who does have one to come and take the car.  In the event no qualified person is able to come, I can still impound the car, but only for one day, not thirty.
 
You see, the law authorizing police to impound cars driven by unlicensed drivers was enacted in the bad old days, when legislators and police officers alike considered it a duty to discourage and punish affronts to public safety.  This of course was before enlightened Democrats, who now enjoy super-majorities in both houses of the California legislature, set to the task of making the state more hospitable to illegal immigrants.  Under a law recently passed, illegal immigrants in California will soon be granted driver’s licenses, so the question of impounding their cars when they’re found to be driving without a license will become a bit trickier.  But you can bet there will be those who will look to cut them even more slack than the new law requires.
 
Among those surely will be LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, under whom Special Order 7 came to be implemented.  Appointed by former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Chief Beck was and remains a willing servant in Villaraigosa’s effort to make Los Angeles more friendly to immigrants, legal or not.  Special Order 7 has been challenged in court, both by the police officers labor union and by Judicial Watch, and in August a Superior Court judge ruled that it was preempted by state law.  This forced Beck to rescind the order, but last week an appeals court set aside that ruling, allowing Beck once again to implement his order.  Beck has called it an issue of “fairness,” saying that the fees attendant to lengthy impounds were too high for many illegal immigrants to pay, resulting in the permanent loss of their cars.
 
Someone with a different perspective on “fairness” is Don Rosenberg, whose son Drew was killed by an unlicensed illegal immigrant in a San Francisco traffic collision in 2010.  Rosenberg, who has since become an activist on the issue, says unlicensed drivers are killing over 7,000 people a year in the United States.  “About 4,000 of those deaths are illegal aliens that are causing them,” he says, “so, I don’t see it as some minor offense.”
 
But why let a few thousand deaths stand in the way of social justice?  For Chief Beck and his like-minded allies on the issue, it is somehow “fair” to allow people who should not be here to drive the cars they should not drive to the jobs they should not have.
 
There are neighborhoods in Los Angeles where, if a police officer pulls over a driver and finds that he has a driver’s license and insurance, and that his car is properly registered at his current address, the officer is so moved at the rarity of the event he is tempted to take a picture with the man so he can show it to his friends.
 
When people ask me why I moved out of Los Angeles, the city where I was born and lived most of my life, the city where my father was born and lived most of his life, I have a long list of reasons.  You’ve just read about the latest one.
Title: Patriot Post: IRS' Lerner and the FEC
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2013, 07:13:11 AM


Lerner Leaked Secret Info
More emails reveal that the IRS gave confidential Tea Party tax information upon request to the Federal Election Commission. And -- brace yourselves -- you'll never guess who allegedly approved the leak. According to Washington Times reporter Paul Bedard, "The public watchdog group Judicial Watch [says] … it was former scandal boss Lois Lerner who shared the information on groups including the American Future Fund and the American Issues Project." Additionally, "The emails also revealed the exact working of the prying political questions the IRS wanted the groups to reveal, such as their goals and the requests for brochures and ads." But despite breaking federal law, Congress is undoubtedly in no hurry to get to to the bottom of this scandal, either.
Title: VDH: The rule of law?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 17, 2013, 07:17:35 AM
The Rule of Law?
By Victor Davis Hanson
November 14, 2013 1:55 PM
 

When his pet businesses did not like elements of the Affordable Care Act, Obama simply exempted them. When employers objected that their mandate would unduly hamper job creation, the president simply ignored the settled law and exempted them. Now, when millions have lost their coverage, the president is said to be ready to again reinterpret settled law and no longer demand that private insurance plans conform to the ACA statute, at least for a year.

Aside from the question of whether it is legal or right for the president to decide arbitrarily which elements of legislation to faithfully execute, it is also a sort of new way of ad hoc governing: The president grandly introduces a new piece of unworkable legislation, does not know or care much about the consequences of implementing it, demagogues the bill, demonizes the opposition, gets it passed, uses the passage for political purposes, and then waits to see what happens in the real world.

When more than 50 percent of the country is outraged, he scraps what he finds politically useful to scrap (“enforcement discretion”). Apparently, Obama believes that after such trial and error he will work the bugs out of the ACA and end up with what he can call a success — too bad for those who lose coverage or pay more in the meantime and for the legalists who worry that what he is doing is against the law.

All this is right out of the radical Athenian assembly, which on any given day could do whatever its majority wished and then the next undo whatever it wished. But such governance is not what the framers had in mind when they established the checks and balances of a republican tripartite government and entrusted the president with faithfully executing all the laws passed by congress and signed by him.
Title: AG Holder asks for appeal in Fast and Furious case holding him in contempt
Post by: DougMacG on November 17, 2013, 08:01:39 AM
Lawless administration continued...

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/11/16/ag-holder-asks-for-appeal-in-fast-and-furious-case-holding-him-in-contempt/

AG Holder asks for appeal in Fast and Furious case holding him in contempt

Attorney General Eric Holder wants to appeal a recent judge’s ruling that allows the House to continue with its contempt case, related to Holder’s refusal to turn over documents concerning the Justice Department’s failed Operation Fast and Furious gun-tracking program.

Holder made the request Friday night to U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, asking that the Justice Department be allowed to put the case in front of a federal appeals court before Jackson makes any final decisions.

In September, Jackson rejected the Obama administration’s request to have the case dismissed.
Title: IRS Targeting, Wilkins Testifies: I Don't Recall - 80 Times
Post by: DougMacG on November 27, 2013, 07:38:23 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/365080/william-wilkins-irs-chief-counsel-testfies-targeting-tea-party-groups-eliana-johnson

expressing gross dissatisfaction with Wilkins’s testimony and, in a letter sent to him on Wednesday, offering him the opportunity to amend it. “In your testimony, you stated ‘I don’t recall’ a staggering 80 times in full or partial response to the Committee’s questions,” committee chairman Darrell Issa and Ohio representative Jim Jordan wrote. “Your failure to recollect important aspects of the Committee’s investigation suggests either a deliberate attempt to obfuscate your involvement in this matter or gross incompetence on your part.”

The most pertinent subject on which Wilkins’s memory failed him was the nature of his communications with Treasury Department officials: in particular, whether he discussed the applications of tea-party groups with anybody at the Treasury Department, whether he discussed with Treasury Department officials regulatory guidance for 501(c)(4) entities engaged in political activities, and whether he discussed with them the inspector general’s report that blew the lid off of the targeting scandal in mid May.

In the summer of 2011, former IRS official Lois Lerner and her senior adviser sought guidance from lawyers in Wilkins’s office on the processing of two “test” applications from conservative groups, whose treatment was intended to guide how Cincinnati agents would process the bulk of the tea-party cases. Wilkins told the committee he was unaware of their involvement in the issue but did know about the draft guidance on the treatment of tea-party applications that, on April 25, 2012, emerged from Lerner’s meetings with lawyers reporting to him. (The guidance was never finalized.)

Wilkins met with President Obama on April 23, two days before the guidance was provided.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 27, 2013, 08:20:26 PM
Coincidentally it was announced today that the IRS is working on new regs yanking the leash of 501(c) groups , , ,
Title: Charles Krauthammer: An outbreak of lawlessness
Post by: DougMacG on November 29, 2013, 09:16:27 AM
Charles Krauthammer

An outbreak of lawlessness     November 28, 2013

For all the gnashing of teeth over the lack of comity and civility in Washington, the real problem is not etiquette but the breakdown of political norms, legislative and constitutional.

Such as the one just spectacularly blown up in the Senate. To get three judges onto a coveted circuit court, frustrated Democrats abolished the filibuster for executive appointments and (non-Supreme Court) judicial nominations.

The problem is not the change itself. It’s fine that a president staffing his administration should need 51 votes rather than 60. Doing so for judicial appointments, which are for life, is a bit dicier. Nonetheless, for about 200 years the filibuster was nearly unknown in blocking judicial nominees. So we are really just returning to an earlier norm.

The violence to political norms here consisted in how that change was executed. By brute force — a near party-line vote of 52 to 48 . This was a disgraceful violation of more than two centuries of precedent. If a bare majority can change the fundamental rules that govern an institution, then there are no rules. Senate rules today are whatever the majority decides they are that morning.

What distinguishes an institution from a flash mob is that its rules endure. They can be changed, of course. But only by significant supermajorities. That’s why constitutional changes require two-thirds of both houses plus three-quarters of the states. If we could make constitutional changes by majority vote, there would be no Constitution.

As of today, the Senate effectively has no rules. Congratulations, Harry Reid. Finally, something you will be remembered for.

Barack Obama may be remembered for something similar. His violation of the proper limits of executive power has become breathtaking. It’s not just making recess appointments when the Senate is in session. It’s not just unilaterally imposing a law Congress had refused to pass — the Dream Act — by brazenly suspending large sections of the immigration laws.

We’ve now reached a point where a flailing president, desperate to deflect the opprobrium heaped upon him for the false promise that you could keep your health plan if you wanted to, calls a hasty news conference urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions of such plans.

Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not.

The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.

That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.

Remember how for months Democrats denounced Republicans for daring to vote to defund or postpone Obamacare? Saboteurs! Terrorists! How dare you alter “the law of the land.”

This was nonsense from the beginning. Every law is subject to revision and abolition if the people think it turned out to be a bad idea. Even constitutional amendments can be repealed — and have been (see Prohibition).

After indignant denunciation of Republicans for trying to amend “the law of the land” constitutionally (i.e. in Congress assembled), Democrats turn utterly silent when the president lawlessly tries to do so by executive fiat.

Nor is this the first time. The president wakes up one day and decides to unilaterally suspend the employer mandate, a naked invasion of Congress’s exclusive legislative prerogative, enshrined in Article I. Not a word from the Democrats. Nor now regarding the blatant usurpation of trying to restore canceled policies that violate explicit Obamacare coverage requirements.

And worse. When Congress tried to make Obama’s “fix” legal — i.e., through legislation — he opposed it. He even said he would veto it. Imagine: vetoing the very bill that would legally enact his own illegal fix.

At rallies, Obama routinely says he has important things to do and he’s not going to wait for Congress. Well, amending a statute after it’s been duly enacted is something a president may not do without Congress. It’s a gross violation of his Article II duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

A Senate with no rules. A president without boundaries. One day, when a few bottled-up judicial nominees and a malfunctioning health-care Web site are barely a memory, we will still be dealing with the toxic residue of this outbreak of authoritative lawlessness.
Title: Mark Steyn, always funny, Dissent is the Highest Form of Tax Bracket
Post by: DougMacG on December 01, 2013, 07:43:40 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/365151/dissent-highest-form-tax-bracket-mark-steyn

In Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger, the eponymous Auric Goldfinger observes:

    Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it’s enemy action.

That may be overly generous.

A couple of weeks back, cancer patient Bill Elliot, in a defiant appearance on Fox News, discussed the cancelation of his insurance and what he intended to do about it. He’s now being audited.

Insurance agent C Steven Tucker, who quaintly insists that the whimsies of the hyper-regulatory bureaucracy do not trump your legal rights, saw the interview and reached out to Mr Elliot to help him. And he’s now being audited.

As the Instapundit likes to remind us, Barack Obama has “joked” publicly about siccing the IRS on his enemies. With all this coincidence about, we should be grateful the President is not (yet) doing prison-rape gags.

Meanwhile, IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, in his testimony to the House Oversight Committee over the agency’s systemic corruption, answers “I don’t recall” no fewer than 80 times. Try giving that answer to Wilkins’ colleagues and see where it gets you. Few persons are fond of their tax collectors, but, from my experience, America is the only developed nation in which the mass of the population is fearful of its revenue agency. This is unbecoming to a supposedly free people.
Title: The Conspiracy behind the Fraud
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2013, 12:22:48 PM
http://nationalreview.com/article/364667/scheme-behind-obamacare-fraud-andrew-c-mccarthy
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on December 01, 2013, 04:11:27 PM
Mr. McCarthy certainly connects all the dots.

Obama is clearly on record as stating "single payer" total government controlled national health system is in his mind the best.

So are probably most if not all of the academic politburo members who are behind the present AHA.  Berwick for example is well known for admiring the British system.

I am not totally convinced the flawed AHA was part of scheme to insure its own failure thus creating the vacuum for the government statists to move in a fill the void as though they were rescuing us with a mandatory single national health system.

It certainly could be.  I just don't know if they are that clever.

I am not sure it would matter if this was preplanned or just bumbling.   

We know they will never stop till they get to their goal of total control over our lives.

One question I have.  I wonder how many Americans would be just fine if we do have a government only health system. 

Socialism, communism, fascism, are not dirty words anymore. 
 
Title: war on the rule of law: Sensenbrenner calls for prosecution of Clapper
Post by: DougMacG on December 08, 2013, 10:15:03 AM
Clapper, who is the Director of National Intelligence who famously said the Muslim Brotherhood is a secular group, might take the insanity plea.
-------------------
Patriot Act author: Obama’s intel czar should be prosecuted

"Lying to Congress is a federal offense, and Clapper ought to be fired and prosecuted for it," the Wisconsin Republican said in an interview with The Hill.

He said the Justice Department should prosecute Clapper for giving false testimony during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March.

During that hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper whether the National Security Agency (NSA) collects data on millions of Americans. Clapper insisted that the NSA does not — or at least does "not wittingly" — collect information on Americans in bulk.

After documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA collects records on virtually all U.S. phone calls, Clapper apologized for the misleading comment.

The intelligence director said he tried to give the "least untruthful" answer he could without revealing classified information.

Sensenbrenner said that explanation doesn’t hold water and argued the courts and Congress depend on accurate testimony to do their jobs.

"The only way laws are effective is if they're enforced," Sensenbrenner said. "If it's a criminal offense — and I believe Mr. Clapper has committed a criminal offense — then the Justice Department ought to do its job."
------------------------
The Eric Holder, ends justify means, Justice Dept will get to this right after it prosecutes Attorney General Eric Holder for Contempt of Congress in Fast and Furious, after the Benghazi video maker is brought to justice, after closing Guantanamo, and after every American who likes their plan, keeps their plan.  These are busy times; they can't prosecutor every Obama administration official lie.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 09, 2013, 08:39:15 AM
Respect to Sensenbrenner!
Title: The war on the rule of law, NY Post: Jobless rate may be rigged
Post by: DougMacG on December 09, 2013, 08:22:40 PM
http://nypost.com/2013/12/07/warning-jobless-rate-may-be-rigged/
By John Crudele, NY Post Business Writer

December 7, 2013
Warning: Jobless rate may be rigged

The most curious thing of all about the November jobs report released on Friday was the huge drop in the unemployment rate — and the fact that the Labor Department chose not to disclose that the data going into that figure are under investigation for falsification.

On Nov. 19, I broke the news in my column that the Census Bureau, which collects data that goes into the jobless rate on behalf of Labor, had caught one of its enumerators fabricating interviews in 2010.

The culprit said back then (and to me during an interview) that he was told to do so by Census supervisors who were in the position to instruct others to make similar fabrications.

In fact, a source who I haven’t named but who is familiar with the Census data accumulation process has told me that falsifications have been occurring on a regular basis.

The Census Department surveys that went into the November jobless rate actually took place during the week that included Nov. 5 instead of the normal Nov. 12 week.

The Labor Department did put in a note about the survey week change in its November report.

But it should also have included another line that said: “The data for the unemployment rate may have been compromised. Lots of people are looking into the matter right now. We’ll get back to you on whether you should believe these numbers or not.”

Why didn’t the Labor Department include a note like that? A source who knows the department well says the concept of data being falsified is so unprecedented that the bureaucrats just don’t know how to react.

They had better figure it out soon. That drop in the unemployment rate might be the straw that sends the Fed into tightening mode.
Title: Turley: Obama's "Become The Very Danger The Constitution Was Designed To Avoid"
Post by: G M on December 11, 2013, 05:31:41 PM
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/12/04/turley_obamas_become_the_very_danger_the_constitution_was_designed_to_avoid.html

Turley: Obama's "Become The Very Danger The Constitution Was Designed To Avoid"








REP. BOB GOODLATTE (R-VA): Professor Turley, the constitution, the system of separated powers is not simply about stopping one branch of government from usurping another. It's about protecting the liberty of Americans from the dangers of concentrated government power. How does the president's unilateral modification of act of Congress affect both the balance of power between the political branches and the liberty interests of the American people?

JONATHAN TURLEY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The danger is quite severe. The problem with what the president is doing is that he's not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system. He's becoming the very danger the Constitution was designed to avoid. That is the concentration of power in every single branch.

This Newtonian orbit that the three branches exist in is a delicate one but it is designed to prevent this type of concentration. There is two trends going on which should be of equal concern to all members of Congress. One is that we have had the radical expansion of presidential powers under both President Bush and President Obama. We have what many once called an imperial presidency model of largely unchecked authority. And with that trend we also have the continued rise of this fourth branch. We have agencies that are quite large that issue regulations. The Supreme Court said recently that agencies could actually define their own or interpret their own jurisdiction. (House hearing, December 3, 2013)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2013, 09:16:49 AM
"Without justice being freely, fully, and impartially administered, neither our persons, nor our rights, nor our property, can be protected. And if these, or either of them, are regulated by no certain laws, and are subject to no certain principles, and are held by no certain tenure, and are redressed, when violated, by no certain remedies, society fails of all its value; and men may as well return to a state of savage and barbarous independence." --Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2013, 01:57:37 PM
Second post

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/17/troubling-federal-judge-orders-obama-admin-to-disclose-document-its-been-trying-to-keep-hidden/
Title: Fed judge says DHS engages in smuggling illegal aliens into US
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2013, 12:15:14 PM
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2013/12/20/judge-us-government-assisting-child-smuggling/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 07, 2014, 07:57:35 AM
http://gunsnfreedom.com/caught-this-ny-gun-owner-set-up-a-camera-after-his-pro-2nd-amendment-sign-kept-getting-stolen/
Title: Issa catches fox in the IRS Tea Party hen house
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 10, 2014, 11:14:08 AM


http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/08/covert-cronies-obamas-attorney-general-appoints-obama-donor-to-investigate-obamas-irs/#ixzz2pvEFA9ON
Title: Hillary and the NSA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 12, 2014, 11:35:23 AM
posted on the Clinton thread as well

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvxUuAl85ho
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 15, 2014, 12:03:08 AM
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2014/01/15/
Title: Chicago thug style
Post by: G M on January 22, 2014, 04:09:43 PM
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/22/report-tim-geithner-threatened-sp-after-it-downgraded-americas-credit-rating-in-2011/

Report: Tim Geithner threatened S&P after it downgraded America’s credit rating in 2011


posted at 6:01 pm on January 22, 2014 by Allahpundit






My favorite part of this is a DOJ official wondering why no one had made this allegation publicly until now, more than two and a half years after it supposedly happened. Any theories on why a business that had already been threatened by a cabinet member but couldn’t prove it might want to keep mum lest it piss him off further? How many minor or major threats are government officials involved in daily, do you suppose, and how many get reported? (Timothy Carney cites a few examples from Hopenchange’s first term in his post about this.) Sometimes they don’t even bother to hide it: Remember, one of the reasons HHS was able to “convince” insurance companies to start moving ObamaCare deadlines around is because Sebelius threatened to boot companies from the exchanges next year if they didn’t comply. When you can strong-arm private industry in public, without fear of reprisal, that’s when you know you’re on the road to a de facto, if not de jure, government takeover.
 
Not all cabinet officers are so lucky, though, so some have to resort to this:
 

Harold McGraw, the chairman of McGraw-Hill Financial Inc, made the statement in a declaration filed by S&P on Monday, as it defends against the government’s $5 billion fraud lawsuit over its rating practices prior to the 2008 financial crisis.
 
McGraw said he returned a call from Geithner on Aug. 8, 2011, three days after S&P cut the U.S. credit rating to “AA-plus,” and that Geithner told him “you are accountable” for an alleged “huge error” in S&P’s work.
 
“He said that ‘you have done an enormous disservice to yourselves and to your country,’” and that S&P’s conduct would be “looked at very carefully,” McGraw said. “Such behavior could not occur, he said, without a response from the government.”
 
There was in fact an error — a $2 trillion one — in S&P’s calculations related to the downgrade, but the company swore afterward that it didn’t affect their decision to drop the U.S. from AAA to AA+. Meanwhile, a few days after Geithner’s phone call, news broke about the SEC launching a preliminary investigation of S&P for insider trading related to the downgrade assessment. Geithner himself was scathing about the company when he addressed the downgrade publicly. Now they’re being sued by the feds for fraud. Maybe those things are unrelated or maybe not — even S&P probably doesn’t know for sure — but this is why scrupulous government officials tend not to dial up antagonists to warn them they’re being “looked at.” Given the power they wield, it’s easy to draw the wrong conclusion about retaliation even if it’s not intended. You don’t suppose a mellow, easygoing guy like Tim Geithner intended it, do you?
 
By the way, it was the first debt-ceiling standoff between the parties in 2011 that helped trigger that downgrade. According to Jack Lew’s letter to Boehner today, the next standoff is coming next month. I wonder if S&P’s learned its lesson.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 22, 2014, 05:16:55 PM
With regard to this interesting little story there is also the matter of why Moody's, which arguably was as inaccurate as S&P but did not downgrade, did NOT catch excrement from Geithner.
Title: Dinesh D'Souza indicted
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2014, 06:18:17 AM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/23/maker-of-highly-successful-anti-obama-documentary-indicted-for-allegedly-violating-u-s-election-law/
Title: Re: Dinesh D'Souza indicted
Post by: G M on January 24, 2014, 06:26:25 AM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/23/maker-of-highly-successful-anti-obama-documentary-indicted-for-allegedly-violating-u-s-election-law/

Pure coincidence. Just like the IRS audits of conservative groups. How many indictments/arrests for the murders of Americans in Benghazi, Libya?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2014, 06:48:06 AM
The mind boggles at what is becoming of our country.

Sen. Ted Cruz addresses this here with Mark Levine:

http://therightscoop.com/ted-cruz-obamas-consistent-pattern-of-lawlessness-is-the-most-dangerous-of-all-his-actions/
Title: Schumer calls for IRS attack on Tea Party
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 27, 2014, 07:12:50 AM
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/lawmaker-news/196362-irs-attack-on-tea-party-urged
Title: Baraq Milhous Obama
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 11, 2014, 09:29:08 AM


Another extra-legal postponement by the president of Obamacare?!? :x :x :x

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvyDn1TPr8

President Obama has decreed that another piece of his life-saving legislation is so important that it has to wait to be implemented until he left office.
Title: Obama Frees America From the Tyranny of Law
Post by: G M on February 12, 2014, 03:23:39 PM
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com           

February 11, 2014 5:00 PM

Obama Frees America From the Tyranny of Law
Executive orders aim to prevent ‘Constitution-lock.’
By Charles C. W. Cooke

‘That’s the good thing as president,” President Obama half-joked yesterday at Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello, Virginia. “I can do what I want.” And, as if signaling that he had finally transcended all of those antediluvian “I’m not a king/emperor/dictator” reassurances, a few hours later the news broke that he had, once again, done what he wanted — this time delaying part of Obamacare’s employer mandate until 2016.

“Now,” ventured the Volokh Conspiracy’s Eugene Kontorovich, “Obama really is bypassing Congress”:

 
Manipulating large-scale legislative policies, duly enacted, around election schedules goes beyond the parameters of executive discretion. Nor can this be justified by the dubious claim of “transition relief” from tax obligations. The employers are not being relieved just from taxes, but from direct primary legal obligations to provide insurance. Every year the administration delays large portions of ObamaCare, it says it is no big deal, because it is “temporary.” But a few temporary fixes in a row becomes a new permanent form of executive lawmaking.
 
“Executive lawmaking” sounds so harsh, don’t you think? Perhaps conceive of it instead as the executive branch’s “liberating“ itself from that pesky “Constitution-lock” we’ve heard so much about. After all, the alternative is just too depressing: “Whatever the stated reason for the new delay,” Kontorovich’s colleague at Volokh, Jonathan H. Adler, adjudged candidly, “it is illegal,” and “the increasing brazenness with which the Administration is disregarding inconvenient or ill-conceived portions of its signature legislative achievement lowers the bar to a disturbing degree.” Fair enough. But how rich and how various have been those reasons! “Why do you care: you like the outcome?” the president’s critics have been asked, just one among a host of unconvincing defenses that have included, “well, I don’t like Congress,” “think of it more as that the White House is improving the law,” “this is too important for the rules,” “look, Obama won,” and, perhaps my all-time favorite, “what are you going to do about it anyway?”

In court? Not too much, in all likelihood. As so often, nobody seems to have standing. Legally, though, this isn’t even a close one. Obamcare’s text clearly instructs that the employer mandate is to come into effect on January 1 of this year, and, as Adler adroitly demonstrates, the established rule is that if Congress explicitly enacts a deadline without including the means by which that deadline may be changed, the president is required to enforce the law as written. “The Executive Branch is supposed to faithfully execute the laws Congress enacts, not rewrite them,” Adler concludes — a sentiment that should surprise nobody who has even a rudimentary grasp of American civics. Obamacare contains no exception to that rule.

Still, with his signature legislation on the line and the ghastly prospect of a fully Republican Congress presiding over his final two years, this is all proving a touch restrictive for our intrepid, transforming hero. Thus have we been treated to an intriguing paradox: When Congress wishes to delay or amend Obamacare, it risks upsetting the entire American settlement — nullifying a law that was apparently set in aspic, never to be touched; but when Obama wishes to delay or amend Obamacare, he is merely ensuring that it works properly. Indeed, if Congress so much as hints that it would be willing to pass an alteration to the law, the administration takes it as read that it has been granted the moral permission to act on its own; but if Congress wouldn’t be willing to pass a change, then the president is forced to act in order to counter what we are reliably informed is unprecedented obstruction. It’s awfully clever.

This approach seems to have convinced the press corps, even in such cases as it is patently obvious that the government’s changes have nothing to do with the government and everything to do with politics. Almost every media outlet openly acknowledged yesterday that the newest delay was the product of electoral expedience — “in a midterm election year, the WH simply did not need any more healthcare headaches,” CBS’s Major Garrett averred, his eyebrows remaining level — and yet in not a single case did anybody ask the next question, “how is this remotely acceptable?” Certainly, I comprehend the temptation toward cynicism that the abject hypocrisy of politics can yield. I empathize, too, with those who have come to the resigned conclusion that all legal opinions are driven by partisan preference and that each and every challenge to the process by which things are achieved is ultimately a cloaked objection to the outcome at hand. As conservatives had a poor record of calling out executive overreach when George W. Bush was president, the progressive response to Obama’s accelerating domestic imperialism has thus far been to cheer and ask for more. But are we to conclude that this make it acceptable? Of course not.

“They seem to not understand that it’s not the delay we oppose,” Red Alert’s Allen Ginzburg sighed yesterday, “but the President circumventing the legislature to do it.” Quite so. And they seem not to understand, either, that the system, which is supposed to sit above the politics of the day, is the product not of the last election cycle but of a centuries-old struggle between lawmakers and executives — one that runs through the Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the drafting of the Constitution and the consequent fight between the federalists and anti-federalists, a fight that set the stage for the political cleavages with which we still contend today.

In the heat of battle, it might appear to its apologists as if Obamacare is worth the destruction of the established order. But it won’t look that way in a few years time, when, as the pendulum always guarantees that it is, the shoe is on the other foot. George Washington walked away after two terms not because he did not trust himself to rule indefinitely, but because he did not trust the guy twenty or thirty years down the line to do so. Obama would do well to follow Washington’s example. He doesn’t even need the permission of Congress . . .

— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.
Title: Newt on BO's lawlessness
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 12, 2014, 07:55:32 PM
Obama Abandoning the Rule of Law
"That's the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want." - President Obama at Monticello, February 10, 2014

The administration’s catastrophic incompetence implementing Obamacare has done far worse than simply cripple our health system. It is undermining the very foundation of our society, too. It’s eroding the rule of law.

We are a nation that was founded on the rule of law. The king’s violation of the rule of law, in fact, was one of the chief justifications for the American Revolution. And for most of our history, we understood that clear rules applied predictably are what stand between freedom and an arbitrary government that protects its friends and punishes its enemies.

This commitment to limited government under the rule of law was a big part of what made America the leading nation in the world. We provided the freest, most stable place on the planet for innovators to innovate, a fair playing field with fair rules. As a result we saw the greatest leap in quality of life and economic growth in history.
The Obama administration, however, has led the way in dismantling one of America’s greatest strengths. After passing unworkable health care legislation, it is slowly replacing the rule of law with capricious rule by bureaucrats. Evidently it views this institutional damage as preferable to the political damage that would result from admitting its policies have failed.

So untethered from legal authority, the administration has made change after change to Obamacare without returning to Congress for approval. The President and his appointed staff are simply making up key provisions of the law as they go along.

The most recent example came this week, when the administration announced it would again delay the employer mandate. Now businesses with 50 to 99 employees will not have to comply with the law until 2016, and larger companies, too, will be getting an extralegal break for another year. The mandate applies to the employers of 72 percent of the country, so this is not a minor change. It’s a rewrite of a fundamental component of the law.

This is hardly the first time President Obama has modified its signature policy initiative illegally, however. In addition to its decision last year to postpone the employer mandate for all of 2014, the administration extended the individual mandate until the end of March. And without any legal authority, it gave exemptions to individuals whose plans had been cancelled. It delayed the exchange for small businesses by a full year, as well, and postponed the cap on out-of-pocket costs for consumers until 2015. And most cynical of all, it pushed off the 2014 enrollment period for the Obamacare exchanges until after the midterm elections this fall.

Many Americans might be inclined to give the Obama administration a break as it struggles to implement a complex policy. We cannot ignore, however, that the administration is making many of these illegal modifications for nakedly political reasons. President Obama is trying to delay the most painful effects of the law until after election day. But make no mistake: he still intends to inflict the pain--he just prefers to do it after it’s too late for voters to register their disapproval at the polls.
Using executive orders to get around working with Congress is also extremely unpopular with voters. A recent Fox News poll found 74 percent of Americans oppose Obama circumventing Congress this way.

The President’s improvisational rulemaking for political purposes sets a terrible precedent. Democrats would never tolerate this behavior from a Republican chief executive, and they’d be right to object. They shouldn’t accept it from a president of their own party, either. It does real and lasting damage.

As Americans, most of us work hard and play by the rules. It’s only fair for the government class to do the same.

Your Friend,
Newt
Title: war on the rule of law, Ben Carson, family and associates targeted by IRS
Post by: DougMacG on February 14, 2014, 06:56:07 AM
http://www.examiner.com/article/ben-carson-family-and-friends-target-of-irs-harassment-for-criticizing-obama
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-10-03/news/bs-md-ben-carson-irs-20131003_1_irs-audit-irs-controversy-ben-carson

Search NY Times, Wash Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN Huffington Post for this story, "Carson IRS target"...  I don't see it.

1) The president said (joked?) he would target opponents with the IRS.
2) He did exactly that.  Lead officials have taken the fifth.  Stonewall and coverup is in full force.  Stench path leads to the top.
3) Critics like D'Souza and Carson feel extreme heat.
4) Very funny? No. These are Nixonian, Soviet, Nazi, treason, impeachment, take up arms level accusations, if valid.
5) Real consequences: Opponents were prevented from legally organizing, while the administration co-mingled private government data with campaign data 'mining' to get out the vote and win the last election. Fun to criticize anonymously, but I would not consider putting my name out publicly for enemies list scrutiny.  And I am a law abiding citizen!

Ben Carson, family and friends target of IRS harassment for criticizing Obama

Dr. Ben Carson says he's been targeted by IRS for criticizing Obama

February 11, 2014

On Monday, Dr. Benjamin Carson, the former director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, said he and his family were targeted by the IRS in retribution for comments critical of Barack Obama, Newsmax reported.

According to Carson, audits and other harassment began in May or June of 2013, just a few months after his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. Gradually, he added, the harassment expanded to include family members, associates, and his charitable endeavors.

"I’ve been quite -- I would say astonished at the level of hostility that I have encountered," he told Newsmax TV's John Bachman.

"The IRS has investigated me. They said, ‘I want to look at your real estate holdings.’ There was nothing there. ‘Well, let’s expand to an entire [year], everything.’ There was nothing there. ‘Let’s do another year.’ Finally, after a few months, they went away. But they’ve come after my family, they’ve come after my friends, they’ve come after associates," he added.
Title: President Kafka
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2014, 11:12:55 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/370909/obama-adds-irrationality-lawlessness-while-threatening-prosecution-andrew-c-mccarthy
Title: WSJ: FCC Wades Into the Newsroom...
Post by: objectivist1 on February 20, 2014, 11:52:29 AM
The FCC Wades Into the Newsroom
Why is the agency studying 'perceived station bias' and asking about coverage choices?


By AJIT PAI

Feb. 10, 2014 7:26 p.m. ET

News organizations often disagree about what Americans need to know. MSNBC, for example, apparently believes that traffic in Fort Lee, N.J., is the crisis of our time. Fox News, on the other hand, chooses to cover the September 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi more heavily than other networks. The American people, for their part, disagree about what they want to watch.

But everyone should agree on this: The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories.

Unfortunately, the Federal Communications Commission, where I am a commissioner, does not agree. Last May the FCC proposed an initiative to thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country. With its "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs," or CIN, the agency plans to send researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. A field test in Columbia, S.C., is scheduled to begin this spring.

The purpose of the CIN, according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about "the process by which stories are selected" and how often stations cover "critical information needs," along with "perceived station bias" and "perceived responsiveness to underserved populations."

How does the FCC plan to dig up all that information? First, the agency selected eight categories of "critical information" such as the "environment" and "economic opportunities," that it believes local newscasters should cover. It plans to ask station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters to tell the government about their "news philosophy" and how the station ensures that the community gets critical information.

The FCC also wants to wade into office politics. One question for reporters is: "Have you ever suggested coverage of what you consider a story with critical information for your customers that was rejected by management?" Follow-up questions ask for specifics about how editorial discretion is exercised, as well as the reasoning behind the decisions.

Participation in the Critical Information Needs study is voluntary—in theory. Unlike the opinion surveys that Americans see on a daily basis and either answer or not, as they wish, the FCC's queries may be hard for the broadcasters to ignore. They would be out of business without an FCC license, which must be renewed every eight years.

This is not the first time the agency has meddled in news coverage. Before Critical Information Needs, there was the FCC's now-defunct Fairness Doctrine, which began in 1949 and required equal time for contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues. Though the Fairness Doctrine ostensibly aimed to increase the diversity of thought on the airwaves, many stations simply chose to ignore controversial topics altogether, rather than air unwanted content that might cause listeners to change the channel.

The Fairness Doctrine was controversial and led to lawsuits throughout the 1960s and '70s that argued it infringed upon the freedom of the press. The FCC finally stopped enforcing the policy in 1987, acknowledging that it did not serve the public interest. In 2011 the agency officially took it off the books. But the demise of the Fairness Doctrine has not deterred proponents of newsroom policing, and the CIN study is a first step down the same dangerous path.

The FCC says the study is merely an objective fact-finding mission. The results will inform a report that the FCC must submit to Congress every three years on eliminating barriers to entry for entrepreneurs and small businesses in the communications industry.

This claim is peculiar. How can the news judgments made by editors and station managers impede small businesses from entering the broadcast industry? And why does the CIN study include newspapers when the FCC has no authority to regulate print media?

Should all stations follow MSNBC's example and cut away from a discussion with a former congresswoman about the National Security Agency's collection of phone records to offer live coverage of Justin Bieber's bond hearing? As a consumer of news, I have an opinion. But my opinion shouldn't matter more than anyone else's merely because I happen to work at the FCC.

Mr. Pai is a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.
Title: WSJ: Connecting the dots in the IRS Scandal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2014, 05:26:10 PM
Bradley A. Smith: Connecting the Dots in the IRS Scandal
The 'smoking gun' in the targeting of conservative groups has been hiding in plain sight.
By Bradley A. Smith
Feb. 26, 2014 7:47 p.m. ET

The mainstream press has justified its lack of coverage over the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups because there's been no "smoking gun" tying President Obama to the scandal. This betrays a remarkable, if not willful, failure to understand abuse of power. The political pressure on the IRS to delay or deny tax-exempt status for conservative groups has been obvious to anyone who cares to open his eyes. It did not come from a direct order from the White House, but it didn't have to.

First, some background: On Jan. 21, 2010, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Citizens United v. FEC upholding the right of corporations and unions to make independent expenditures in political races. Then, on March 26, relying on Citizens United, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the rights of persons (including corporations) to pool resources for political purposes. This allowed the creation of "super PACs" as well as corporate contributions to groups organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code that spend in political races.

The reaction to Citizens United was no secret. Various news outlets such as CNN noted that "Democrats fear the decision has given the traditionally pro-business GOP a powerful new advantage."

The 501(c)(4) groups in question are officially known as "social-welfare organizations." They have for decades been permitted to engage in political activity under IRS rules, so long as their primary purpose (generally understood to be less than 50% of their activity) wasn't political. They are permitted to lobby without limitation and are not required to disclose their donors. The groups span the political spectrum, from the National Rifle Association to Common Cause to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. If forced out of 501(c)(4) status, these nonprofit advocacy groups would have to reorganize as for-profit corporations and pay taxes on donations received, or reorganize as "political committees" under Section 527 of the IRS Code and be forced to disclose their donors.

Now consider the following events, all of which were either widely reported, publicly released by officeholders or revealed later in testimony to Congress. These are the dots the media refuse to connect:

• Jan. 27, 2010: President Obama criticizes Citizens United in his State of the Union address and asks Congress to "correct" the decision.

• Feb. 11, 2010: Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) says he will introduce legislation known as the Disclose Act to place new restrictions on some political activity by corporations and force more public disclosure of contributions to 501(c)(4) organizations. Mr. Schumer says the bill is intended to "embarrass companies" out of exercising the rights recognized in Citizens United. "The deterrent effect should not be underestimated," he said.

• Soon after, in March 2010, Mr. Obama publicly criticizes conservative 501(c)(4) organizations engaging in politics. In his Aug. 21 radio address, he warns Americans about "shadowy groups with harmless sounding names" and a "corporate takeover of our democracy."

• Sept. 28, 2010: Mr. Obama publicly accuses conservative 501(c)(4) organizations of "posing as not-for-profit, social welfare and trade groups." Max Baucus, then chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, asks the IRS to investigate 501(c)(4)s, specifically citing Americans for Job Security, an advocacy group that says its role is to "put forth a pro-growth, pro-jobs message to the American people."

• Oct. 11, 2010: Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) asks the IRS to investigate the conservative 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS and "other organizations."

• April 2011: White House officials confirm that Mr. Obama is considering an executive order that would require all government contractors to disclose their donations to politically active organizations as part of their bids for government work. The proposal is later dropped amid opposition across the political spectrum.

• Feb. 16, 2012: Seven Democratic senators— Michael Bennet (Colo.), Al Franken (Minn.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Mr. Schumer, Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Tom Udall (N.M.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.)—write to the IRS asking for an investigation of conservative 501(c)(4) organizations.

• March 12, 2012: The same seven Democrats write another letter asking for further investigation of conservative 501(c)(4)s, claiming abuse of their tax status.

• July 27, 2012: Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) writes one of several letters to then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman seeking a probe of nine conservative groups, plus two liberal and one centrist organization. In 2013 testimony to the HouseOversight and Government Reform Committee, former IRS Acting Commissioner Steven Miller describes Sen. Levin as complaining "bitterly" to the IRS and demanding investigations.

• Aug. 31, 2012: In another letter to the IRS, Sen. Levin calls its failure to investigate and prosecute targeted organizations "unacceptable."

• Dec. 14, 2012: The liberal media outlet ProPublica receives Crossroads GPS's 2010 application for tax-exempt status from the IRS. Because the group's tax-exempt status had not been recognized, the application was confidential. ProPublica publishes the full application. It later reports that it received nine confidential pending applications from IRS agents, six of which it published. None of the applications was from a left-leaning organization.

• April 9, 2013: Sen. Whitehouse convenes the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism to examine nonprofits. He alleges that nonprofits are violating federal law by making false statements about their political activities and donors and using shell companies to donate to super PACs to hide donors' identities. He berates Patricia Haynes, then-deputy chief of Criminal Investigation at the IRS, for not prosecuting conservative nonprofits.

• May 10, 2013: Sen. Levin announces that the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will hold hearings on "the IRS's failure to enforce the law requiring that tax-exempt 501(c)(4)s be engaged exclusively in social welfare activities, not partisan politics." Three days later he postpones the hearings when Lois Lerner (then-director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division) reveals that the IRS had been targeting and delaying the applications of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

• Nov. 29, 2013: The IRS proposes new rules redefining "political activity" to include activities such as voter-registration drives and the production of nonpartisan legislative scorecards to restrict what the agency deems as excessive spending on campaigns by tax-exempt 501(c)(4) groups. Even many liberal nonprofits argue that the rule goes too far in limiting their political activity—but the main target appears to be the conservative 501(c)(4)s that have so irritated Democrats.

• Feb. 13, 2014: The Hill newspaper reports that "Senate Democrats facing tough elections this year want the Internal Revenue Service to play a more aggressive role in regulating outside groups expected to spend millions of dollars on their races."

In 1170, King Henry II is said to have cried out, on hearing of the latest actions of the Archbishop of Canterbury, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Four knights then murdered the archbishop. Many in the U.S. media still willfully refuse to see anything connecting the murder of the archbishop to any actions or abuse of power by the king.

Mr. Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, is chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 27, 2014, 11:26:44 AM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/02/27/the-moment-a-prof-warned-that-america-is-at-a-constitutional-tipping-point/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 28, 2014, 04:25:51 PM
http://tpnn.createsend4.com/t/ViewEmail/d/E6B5BBEF42ADE48A/2DAA89B788D574E0
Title: George Will keeping the spotlight on the outrageous behavior of the IRS
Post by: DougMacG on March 09, 2014, 09:03:23 AM
"The rules that Obama says befuddled the IRS boneheads — to his benefit — read today exactly as they have read since 1959. For half a century they did not prevent the IRS from processing applications for tax-exempt status in less than three months."

"[Obama] After calling the IRS behavior “outrageous,” he now says there is not a “smidgen” of evidence of anything to be outraged about. He knows this even though the supposed investigation of the IRS behavior has not been completed, or perhaps even begun. The person he chose to investigate his administration is an administration employee and a generous donor to his campaigns."

The IRS’s behavior taxes credulity

By George F. Will,  March 7 2014

What’s been said of confession — that it is good for one’s soul but bad for one’s reputation — can also be true of testifying to Congress, so Lois Lerner has chosen to stay silent. Hers, however, is an eloquent silence.

The most intrusive and potentially most punitive federal agency has been politicized; the IRS has become an appendage of Barack Obama’s party. Furthermore, congruent with exhortations from some congressional Democrats, it is intensifying its efforts to suffocate groups critical of progressives, by delaying what once was the swift, routine granting of tax-exempt status.

So, the IRS, far from repenting of its abusive behavior, is trying to codify the abuses. It hopes to nullify with new rules the existing legal right of 501(c)(4) groups, many of which are conservative, to participate in politics. The proposed rules have drawn more than 140,000 comments, most of them complaints, some from liberals wary of IRS attempts to broadly define “candidate-related political activity” and to narrow the permissible amount of this.

Lerner is, so far, the face of this use of government to punish political adversaries. She knows what her IRS unit did and how it intersects with the law, and for a second time she has exercised her constitutional right to remain silent rather than risk self-incrimination. The public has a right to make reasonable inferences from her behavior.

And from Obama’s. After calling the IRS behavior “outrageous,” he now says there is not a “smidgen” of evidence of anything to be outraged about. He knows this even though the supposed investigation of the IRS behavior has not been completed, or perhaps even begun. The person he chose to investigate his administration is an administration employee and a generous donor to his campaigns.

Obama breezily says there was nothing more sinister than “boneheaded decisions” by wayward and anonymous IRS underlings. Certainly boneheadedness explains much about this administration. Still, does he consider it interesting that the consequences of IRS boneheadedness were not randomly distributed but thwarted conservatives?

The rules that Obama says befuddled the IRS boneheads — to his benefit — read today exactly as they have read since 1959. For half a century they did not prevent the IRS from processing applications for tax-exempt status in less than three months. Some conservative group should offer $10,000 to anyone who can identify a liberal group that had the experience scores of conservative groups have had — an application delayed more than three years and receipt of an IRS questionnaire containing at least 60 questions.

Speaking of questions: Can anyone identify a Democratic Senate candidate whose tax records were leaked, as Christine O’Donnell’s were when she was the Republican candidate in Delaware in 2010? Is it a coincidence that in January 2011, after Catherine Engelbrecht requested tax-exempt status for two conservative groups she founded in Texas — King Street Patriots and True the Vote — the Engelbrecht family business was notified of its first IRS audit? Does James Comey wonder why (this was before he became FBI director), five months after Engelbrecht’s tax-exemption request, FBI agents appeared seeking information about attendees at the King Street Patriots meetings? Were five subsequent FBI contacts “checking in” for “updates” on the group’s activities really necessary? Why did the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives show a sudden intrusive interest in the Engelbrechts’ business, which has nothing to do with alcohol or tobacco or firearms or explosives?

The idea that politicians should write laws restricting people critical of them is as perverse as the idea that the sprawling, opaque IRS bureaucracy should be assigned to construe and apply such laws. It is bad enough that there is the misbegotten Federal Election Commission to do what the First Amendment forbids — government regulation of the quantity, content and timing of political speech.

This column has previously noted that in 1996 a Republican Senate candidate called the FEC to dispute campaign finance charges made by Democrats. The head of the FEC’s enforcement division told the Republican: “Promise me you will never run for office again, and we will drop this case.” So spoke Lois Lerner.

There almost certainly are people, above her and beyond the IRS, who initiated or approved the IRS’s punitive targeting of conservative groups and who hope Lerner’s history of aggressive partisanship will cause investigators to conclude that she is as high as responsibility for the targeting rises. Those people should hire criminal defense attorneys.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-the-irs-has-a-one-sided-interest-in-politics/2014/03/07/a545366a-a56c-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html
Title: Lerner lied
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 12, 2014, 09:21:17 AM
Patriot Post
Lerner Lied

Infamous and former IRS official Lois Lerner intentionally misled Congress, says a new House report. Among the report's findings are that Lerner sought ways to publicize scrutiny of the Tea Party by provoking lawsuits; that she sought unprecedented "multi-tier review" for conservative tax-exempt applications; that she used her personal email account when managing taxpayer information; that she thought the "fabulously rich and hugely influential" Koch brothers were sufficient reason to crack down on the Tea Party; and that she intended for the IRS to "fix the problem" of the Supreme Court's errant Citizens United decision overturning some campaign finance restrictions. All in all, it's no wonder she pleaded the Fifth -- it's the only part of the Constitution that was useful to her.
Title: PP: CIA spied on Senate Intel Committee
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 12, 2014, 09:22:38 AM


Feinstein Accuses CIA
Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, spoke Tuesday about allegations the CIA illegally tampered with the committee members' computers, saying, "I am not taking it lightly." The evidence, derived from an internal investigation, now goes to the Justice Department, which will review the case and weigh criminal charges. Feinstein said the CIA's alleged tactics were in violation of the Fourth Amendment, adding, "I have received neither" an apology nor acknowledgement of the actions. (CIA director John Brennan denies any wrongdoing.) Certainly, if such charges prove true, those accountable should be prosecuted. However, Feinstein would do well to apologize herself to all Americans for defying her oath to support and defend the Constitution, most egregiously by exploiting tragic mass shootings in hopes of stripping our Second Amendment rights.
Title: Chutzpah exemplified
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 13, 2014, 06:08:24 PM
Executive Power Struggle

On Wednesday, the House passed a bill called the Executive Needs to Faithfully Observe and Respect Congressional Enactments of the Law (ENFORCE the Law) Act of 2014. Five Democrats joined Republicans in a 233-181 vote. It does just what the titles suggests and calls on Barack Obama to enforce the law, not to rewrite or ignore it. Naturally, the president threatened a veto, but his reason is laughable -- it supposedly violates the separation of powers. That claim takes some chutzpah since Congress is merely trying to stop Obama's legislating from the White House. Remember, even leftist law professor Jonathan Turley says Obama's actions have brought us to a "constitutional tipping point." He's right.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on March 13, 2014, 06:25:36 PM
The constitutional answer to a lawless president is impeachment.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 13, 2014, 07:42:51 PM
Works for me, even though the notion of President Biden leaves me looking like a Jewish Don King.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on March 13, 2014, 07:44:40 PM
Works for me, even though the notion of President Biden leaves me looking like a Jewish Don King.


Stupid hurts. We all are going to pay the price one way or another.
Title: VDH: Nixon=Obama
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 16, 2014, 10:08:04 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373218/following-trail-nixon-blazed-victor-davis-hanson
Title: PP: Amnesty by executive order
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 17, 2014, 09:07:30 AM
Amnesty by Executive Order
Amnesty may be coming without Congress. According to a White House release, Barack Obama is looking at how to manage the deportation system "more humanely within the confines of the law." The White House announced the shift after the president met with three leading members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The statement said, "The president emphasized his deep concern about the pain too many families feel from the separation that comes from our broken immigration system." Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) in particular couldn't understand why Obama could issue waivers and delays on ObamaCare and yet not change the immigration system on his own. A fair point -- when the "confines of the law" don't actually confine a president, where is the line?
Title: Cong. Jordan calls for Special Prosecutor for IRS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 19, 2014, 09:26:33 PM
A Special Prosecutor for the IRS
Despite her denials, it's now plain that Lois Lerner was deeply involved in targeting conservative nonprofit groups.
By Jim Jordan
March 19, 2014 7:22 p.m. ET

The House Oversight Committee's investigation of the IRS is at an inflection point. The president's congressional supporters realize that the administration's version of the agency's targeting of conservative nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status—such as blaming local officials in the Cincinnati office or claiming that liberal groups were victimized along with conservative groups—is nonsense. Instead of debating the substance, they have resorted to procedural antics and misleading rhetoric.

I have spent a considerable amount of time and energy on the investigation—which included 38 daylong interviews of IRS and Treasury employees ranging from line employees in Cincinnati to the IRS commissioner to the chief of staff of the U.S. Treasury. The real news has been revealed at the Lois Lerner hearing on March 5 and in the report of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on March 11: "Lois Lerner's Involvement in the IRS Targeting of Tax-Exempt Organizations."

The evidence brought to light in that hearing and report completely discredited Ms. Lerner's claims about her involvement in what went on. It also eviscerated the notion that liberal and conservative groups were targeted.
Enlarge Image

Former IRS official Lois Lerner at a March 5 congressional hearing where she declined to testify. Associated Press

When Ms. Lerner appeared before Congress in May 2013, she made this statement: "I have done nothing wrong. I have not broken any laws. I have not violated any IRS rules or regulations." But Ms. Lerner, we discovered, forwarded confidential taxpayer information to her personal email account in early May 2013, which is a violation of IRS rules. About the infamous "Be on the Lookout" targeting list—a document used to identify conservative groups for additional scrutiny—she told Congress that the criteria for screening tax-exempt groups for extra scrutiny never changed. In fact, she personally ordered it changed in July 2011 according to documents and testimony received by the committee.

Ms. Lerner was most certainly driven by politics. One email of June 11, 2011, shows that she directed her subordinate to focus on the issues surrounding the application of Karl Rove's group, Crossroads GPS. In another email of Feb. 1, 2011, she frets about the Supreme Court "overturning the ban on corporate spending" as it applies to nonprofits. (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission also overturned the ban on union political spending, but she expressed no concern about that.)

Emails and testimony that we confronted Ms. Lerner with showed her saying that the tea party is "very dangerous," ordering a "multitiered review" (read: delay) of the cases, and managing the optics of her operation so it would not be revealed as a political project.

Last May, and again on March 5 of this year, Ms. Lerner refused to answer the committee's questions about the IRS treatment of tax-exempt groups, asserting her right under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Yet we learned on March 6 in reporting by this newspaper that she had previously given an interview to the Justice Department and, according to her lawyer, spoke with no grant of immunity.

Ms. Lerner's lawyer claims she gave an interview to the Justice Department because she did not believe the Oversight Committee would treat her fairly. More likely, the reason is because Justice is friendly territory. The lead investigator is a substantial Obama campaign contributor, and Justice has already leaked that it doesn't expect to prosecute anyone. As to the claim that liberal groups were also victimized, our committee investigation has yet to hear from a single progressive group that received the systematic scrutiny and harassment faced by the tea party and other conservative groups.

Congress is charged with oversight of the executive branch. The House Oversight Committee will not stop until we have all the answers, although I fully expect continued obstruction from the Obama administration and its foot soldiers in the House.

When Congress is thwarted in our attempts to get answers—as is clearly the case given Ms. Lerner's willingness to speak with the Justice Department but not to the public's elected representatives—we have an obligation to hold accountable those hiding the facts. Contempt of Congress is a power the House of Representatives exercised toward only five individuals in the last 30 years. The relevant statute states that any person who "willfully makes default, or who, having appeared, refuses to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry" may be held in contempt. Ms. Lerner's actions easily rise to a level worthy of contempt and Congress's institutional integrity demands nothing less.

Additionally, it is necessary to appoint a special prosecutor. Mr. Holder called the IRS matter "outrageous and unacceptable" and ordered a Justice Department investigation to be conducted in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. No one can have confidence in this investigation, started by a politically appointed attorney general and led by a campaign contributor to his boss.

A special prosecutor, uncompromised by partisan political winds, provides hope of uncovering what happened at the IRS. As Elijah Cummings, my Democratic colleague on the Oversight Committee, said on May 22, 2013—the day of the committee's first IRS hearing—getting the truth and restoring trust must be paramount. "This is more important than one election," he explained. "The revelations that have come forward so far provides us with a moment pregnant for transformation; not transformation for a moment, but for generations to come and generations yet unborn."

I hope Mr. Cummings and fellow members of his party will join me in acknowledging the time has come for the appointment of an independent and unbiased special prosecutor.

Mr. Jordan, a Republican congressman from Ohio, serves on the House Committee on Oversight and Government. He is also chairman of its subcommittee on Economic Growth, Job Creation and Regulatory Affairs.
Title: IRS employs cop convicted of FBI snooping
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 21, 2014, 06:36:31 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/20/irs-employs-former-cop-convicted-of-fbi-snooping/
Title: Re: IRS employs cop convicted of FBI snooping
Post by: G M on March 21, 2014, 10:26:49 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/20/irs-employs-former-cop-convicted-of-fbi-snooping/

No worries, he'll only work on the returns on conservatives...
Title: WSJ: Obamacare's Latest Legal Challenge
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 24, 2014, 04:50:07 PM
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303775504579395231042008894?mod=Opinion_newsreel_3
Title: Philly DA Blows the Whistle on Pennsylvania’s State AG
Post by: G M on March 25, 2014, 04:03:07 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/374003/philly-da-blows-whistle-pennsylvanias-state-ag-john-fund#!

Philly DA Blows the Whistle on Pennsylvania’s State AG
 Why did the AG drop a case that exposed Democratic corruption?

By John Fund







Prosecutors almost never go to war against each other. But in Pennsylvania, Democratic attorney general Kathleen Kane is being brutally criticized by Seth Williams, Philadelphia’s district attorney and a fellow Democrat. Williams is upset that last year one of Kane’s first acts in office was to decline to prosecute four Philadelphia state legislators and other government officials. In a sting operation, all had been caught accepting cash or Tiffany jewelry in exchange for votes or favors. Kane, who is white, has defended herself, saying that the investigation was badly managed and tainted by racism. She claims the criticism comes from what she calls the “Good Ol’ Boys Club.” Williams, who is African American, has shot back: “I have seen racism. I know what it looks like. This isn’t it.”




 
The sting operation followed pretty much the same playbook as the federal Abscam investigation of the 1970s. Begun in 2010, the Philly probe was conducted under Kane’s three immediate predecessors as attorney general, and it resulted in more than 400 hours of video and audio recordings. Tyron B. Ali, a lobbyist originally from Trinidad, served as the undercover agent; after he was charged with fraud, he agreed to wear a wire in exchange for lenient treatment. Word of his cash offers eventually got around and prompted some elected officials to call him first. “Sources with knowledge of the sting said the investigation made financial pitches to both Republicans and Democrats, but only Democrats accepted the payments,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported last week.

Attorney General Kane inherited the investigation when she took office in January 2013. She told the Inquirer that she stopped it without filing any charges because it was “poorly conceived, badly managed, and tainted by racism.” She quoted Claude Thomas, the chief investigator in the case, as saying he had been ordered to target “only members of the General Assembly’s Black Caucus” and to ignore “potentially illegal acts by white members.”

In response, Williams issued an angry statement and penned an op-ed in Sunday’s Inquirer. “The notion that they would target anyone based on race is ridiculous,” Williams said in a statement. “I am confident they are not racist, and it is regrettable that the attorney general would casually throw around such an explosive accusation.” Thomas, who is also African American, now works for Williams and denies he ever made such a statement.

What is clear is just how damning some of the collected evidence is. The Inquirer reported this exchange between Ali, the lobbyist, and state representative Vanessa Brown:


Ali went to Brown’s office and handed her an envelope with $2,000, according to people who have reviewed a transcript of a tape Ali made on that day.

As Brown accepted the money, they said, she put it in her purse and said: “Yo, good looking and Ooowee. . . . Thank you twice.”

After he gave Brown the money, Ali urged her to vote against a bill that would require voters to show identification at the polls, the sources said.

Kane’s supporters say that federal law-enforcement officials she consulted believed the probe had suffered from a lack of “quality control” and could be viewed as entrapment. “Is the acceptance of cash alarming? Absolutely,” one person close to Kane told the Inquirer. “But you’ve got to think: I’ve got to try this case.”

It certainly may have been politically awkward for Kane, as a Democrat, to prosecute only African-American defendants, but a conviction on something should have been a slam dunk. Even if prosecutors couldn’t prove a quid pro quo, it is illegal for politicians to accept payments to enrich themselves and also illegal not to report the income. Further, the prosecutors in this case have a sterling track record in securing convictions against the leadership of both parties in the legislature, winning 21 convictions in the 2010 “Bonusgate” scandal, which involved illegal payments to legislative staffers who performed political work. All of those convicted were white.

Kane has declined to answer detailed questions about why she dropped the investigation. Her critics, she says, are “playing political games to discredit me in order to fulfill their own selfish and improper agenda.” When she met with Inquirer editors last Thursday, she brought her personal attorney and on his advice declined to answer any questions after the meeting. Her attorney says she may file a defamation suit against the paper, a ploy frequently used by public figures to intimidate journalists.

Williams says he is tired of Kane’s “escalating excuses.” He points out that when she took office, the files on the probe were with federal prosecutors who hadn’t yet concluded whether they wanted to pursue their own case. “All she had to do was leave the investigation in the hands of federal authorities,” Williams wrote in Sunday’s Inquirer. “But she didn’t do that. Instead, she asked for the files back. And then, after going out of the way to reclaim the investigation, she shut it down.”

One bit player in the drama, who had dealings with Ali and was shocked to learn later that Ali was a government agent, says the whole thing reminds him of a John Grisham novel. My vote is for House of Cards. And from what we know so far, it shouldn’t be too hard to start matching up some of the Philadelphia players with their dramatic counterparts in the Netflix series.

— John Fund is a national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.
Title: Cooking the books
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 27, 2014, 01:00:24 PM
 The Right Opinion
Massaging of Critical Data Undermines Our Society
By Victor Davis Hanson · Mar. 27, 2014
11 Comments
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Transparency and truth are the fuels that run sophisticated civilizations. Without them, the state grinds to a halt. Lack of trust – not barbarians on the frontier, global warming or cooling, or even epidemics – doomed civilizations of the past, from imperial Rome to the former Soviet Union.

The United States can withstand the untruth of a particular presidential administration if the permanent government itself is honest. Dwight Eisenhower lied about the downed U-2 spy plane inside the Soviet Union. Almost nothing Richard Nixon said about Watergate was true. Intelligence reports of vast stockpiles of WMD in Iraq proved as accurate as Bill Clinton's assertion that he never had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.

Presidents fib. The nation gets outraged. The independent media digs out the truth. And so the system of trust repairs itself.

What distinguishes democracies from tin-horn dictatorships and totalitarian monstrosities are our permanent meritocratic government bureaus that remain nonpartisan and honestly report the truth.

The Benghazi, Associated Press and National Security Agency scandals are scary, but not as disturbing as growing doubts about the honesty of permanent government itself. It is no longer crackpot to doubt the once impeccable and nonpartisan IRS. When it assured the public that it was not making decisions about tax-exempt status based on politics, it lied. One of its top commissioners, Lois Lerner, resigned and invoked the Fifth Amendment.

A system of voluntary tax reporting rests on trust. If the IRS itself is untruthful, will it be able to expect truthful compliance from taxpayers?

Many doubt the officially reported government unemployment rates. That statistic is vital in assessing economic growth and is of enormous political importance in the way citizens vote.

It was reported in November that the Census Bureau may have fabricated survey results during the 2012 presidential campaign, sending false data to the Labor Department that could have altered official employment statistics.  In the 1990s, the method of assessing the official unemployment rate was massaged to make it seem lower than it actually was. Rules were changed to ignore millions who had been out of work longer than 52 weeks. They were suddenly classified as permanent dropouts and not part of the idled workforce.

Does the government release an accurate report on quarterly Gross Domestic Product growth – another vital barometer of how the economy is doing? Maybe not. Last year, the Bureau of Economic Analysis for the first time factored research and development costs of businesses into statistics on investment growth.

Suddenly, a cost became proof of business output and thus was added into the business investment contribution to GDP. That new accounting gimmick may have added hundreds of billions of dollars into the equation of figuring GDP growth last year alone. Not surprisingly, the government reported unexpectedly high 2.8 percent GDP growth after the changes.

Is inflation really as low as the government insists? In recent times the government has not just counted the increase in the prices of goods, but also factored into its calculus theories about changing consumer buying habits when prices increase. The changes have resulted in officially lowered inflation rates.

No one knows how many Americans have now bought and paid for Affordable Care Act health insurance policies. There is no accurate information about how many young people have enrolled – critical to the success of Obamacare. Nor do Americans know how many enrollees were previously uninsured. Nor does the public know how many enrollees simply switched insurance from Medicaid to the Affordable Care Act. There is no information about how many actually have paid their premiums.

No one knows how many foreign citizens who entered the U.S. illegally were apprehended inside the United States and returned to their country of origin last year – a figure vital for any compromise on passing comprehensive immigration reform.

The Obama administration claims near-record numbers of deportations. In fact, once again government agencies – in this case the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – have mysteriously changed the way they compile statistics. The ICE now counts as deportations those foreign nationals whom the Border Patrol immediately stops or turns away at the border. Such detentions were not previously counted as deportations.

The result is that bureaucrats can report near-record numbers of deportations, while privately assuring the administration that immigration enforcement has been greatly relaxed.

There is a pattern here. Changes in data collection seem to have a predictable result: Inflation and unemployment rates become lower. Economic growth becomes greater. The IRS focuses on government skeptics. The Affordable Care Act is not in trouble. Illegal immigration is not such a problem.

If the people increasingly believe that bureaucrats try to alter realty to reflect preconceived ideologies or the goals of the particular regime in power, then America as we know it is finished.

© 2014 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
Title: DC man convicted for dud bullets
Post by: G M on March 31, 2014, 01:43:32 PM
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/03/28/former-dc-resident-found-guilty-for-violating-city-gun-laws-for-owning-fake/?intcmp=trending

Some animals are more equal than others.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 31, 2014, 08:37:06 PM


http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2014/03/31/

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2014/04/01/
Title: Catch & Release of 68,000 criminals
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 01, 2014, 07:56:58 AM
http://cis.org/catch-and-release
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2014, 10:33:25 AM
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/04/09/more-irs-pro-obama-corruption-revealed/
Title: Cummings white as a sheet as the noose tightens
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2014, 07:25:04 PM


http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/04/09/new-emaisl-show-lois-lerner-fed-information-about-true-the-vote-to-democrat-elijah-cummings-n1822247
Title: The noose continues to tighten?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 10, 2014, 08:49:24 AM
April 10, 2014
A Key IRS Manager, Dreaming of Working for the Obama Campaign

Remember that IRS investigation that seemed to have gone dormant? It woke up with a start Wednesday:

A House committee voted to refer a former top Internal Revenue Service official to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution, charging that she personally engineered crackdowns on large conservative organizations such as Crossroads GPS in addition to smaller tea-party groups.

Republicans also said the official, Lois Lerner, cooperated with a Democratic lawmaker in scrutinizing a conservative Texas group…

The referral letter, approved Wednesday by the committee in a party-line vote, says Ms. Lerner pushed IRS officials to deny an application for tax-exempt status by Crossroads in 2013. Around the same time, she also pushed other officials to audit Crossroads's activities to date.

"The evidence shows that without Lerner's intervention, neither adverse action would have been taken against Crossroads," the letter states.

Crossroads President Steven Law said the investigation "confirms that there was an organized high-level effort within the IRS to subvert the agency's own standards and procedures in order to harass law-abiding conservative advocacy groups like Crossroads GPS."

Ms. Lerner also asked for an internal IRS meeting concerning applications by other conservative groups, according to the letter.

Committee Republicans said Ms. Lerner appeared to show no interest in cracking down on liberal groups also seeking to operate as 501(c)(4) social-welfare organizations. According to emails the committee reviewed, Ms. Lerner emailed a colleague in response to a news story about the formation of Organizing for Action, an offshoot of President Barack Obama's campaign: "Oh--maybe I can get the DC office job!"

Until now, the focus of congressional investigations has been on IRS treatment of grass-roots tea-party groups. The new angle of the investigation suggests lawmakers believe IRS officials targeted higher-profile conservative groups that have emerged as important players in campaigns.

Then there's this potential explanation for why Democrats on the Government Reform Committee fought Issa every step of the way:

Issa on Wednesday accused the Maryland Democrat of colluding with the Internal Revenue Service in its targeting of the conservative nonprofit group True the Vote, whose founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, said she received multiple letters from Cummings in 2012 and personal visits from the IRS and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Explosives. Engelbrecht's True the Vote is one of the many conservative groups that claims to have been improperly targeted by the IRS while it scrutinized the applications of tea-party groups. 

In a letter signed by his five subcommittee chairmen, Issa raised the possibility that Cummings coordinated with the IRS, "surreptitiously" contacting the agency to request information about True the Vote.

Get ready for more fireworks today: "The Oversight Committee will convene on Thursday morning to vote on whether to hold Lerner in contempt for her refusal to testify before the panel and House speaker John Boehner has indicated he will take the matter before the full House."
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on April 10, 2014, 10:21:52 AM
I wonder if Pres Obama knows how Nixon's second term went.
Title: Looking for Deep Throat
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 10, 2014, 05:50:35 PM
WSJ

April 10, 2014 6:53 p.m. ET

Nearly a year into the IRS scandal, we still don't know exactly what happened—though we are finally getting an inkling. That's thanks to the letter House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp sent this week to the Justice Department recommending a criminal probe of Lois Lerner.

The average citizen might be dizzied by the torrent of confusing terms—BOLO lists, Tigta, 501(c)(4)—and the array of accusations that have made up this IRS investigation. Mr. Camp's letter takes a step back to remind us why this matters, even as it provides compelling new information that goes to motive and method—and clarifies some of the curious behavior of Democrats during the investigation.

Motive: Republicans began this investigation looking for a direct link between the White House and IRS targeting. The more probable explanation all along was that Ms. Lerner felt emboldened by Democratic attacks against conservative groups to do what came naturally to her. We know from the record that she disdained money in politics. And we know from her prior tenure at the Federal Election Commission that she had a particular animus against conservative organizations.

As the illuminating timeline accompanying the Camp letter shows, Ms. Lerner's focus on shutting down Crossroads GPS came only after Obama adviser David Axelrod listed Crossroads among "front groups for foreign-controlled companies"; only after Senate Democrats Dick Durbin, Carl Levin, Chuck Schumer and others demanded the IRS investigate Crossroads; only after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched a website to "expose donors" of Crossroads; and only after Obama's campaign lawyer, Bob Bauer, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission about Crossroads.

The information in Mr. Camp's letter shows that Ms. Lerner sprang to action following a January 2013 meeting with Democracy 21, a campaign-finance outfit petitioning for a crackdown on Crossroads and the liberal big-dollar Priorities USA. (She never touched Priorities, run by former Obama aides.) The Camp outline suggests cause and effect, and that's new.


Method: The general prohibition on releasing taxpayer information has meant that—up until Ways and Means voted Wednesday to release this info—it was impossible to know what precise actions Ms. Lerner had taken against whom. We now know that she took it upon herself to track down the status of Crossroads, to give grief to an IRS unit for not having audited it, to apparently direct another unit to deny it tax-exempt status, and to try to influence the appeals process.

We know, too, that Ms. Lerner did some of this in contravention of IRS policy, for instance involving herself in an audit decision that was supposed to be left to a special review committee. We have the story of a powerful bureaucrat targeting an organization and circumventing IRS safeguards against political or personal bias. That ought to mortify all members of Congress. That Democrats seem not to care gets to another point.

Aftermath: Democrats quickly dropped any feigned outrage over IRS targeting and circled the wagons around the agency. Why? The targeting was outrageous, the public was fuming, and nobody likes the IRS. Joining with Republicans would have only been right and popular.

That is, unless Democrats are worried. As the Camp timeline and details show, the IRS responded to liberal calls to go after conservative groups. Democrats weren't just sending letters. Little noticed in the immediate aftermath of the IRS scandal was a letter sent May 23, 2013, by Carl Levin and (Republican) John McCain to the new acting director of the IRS disguised as an expression of outrage over IRS targeting. Artfully hidden within it was Mr. Levin's acknowledgment that his subcommittee on investigations had for a full year been corresponding and meeting with IRS staff (including Ms. Lerner) to ask "why it was not enforcing the 501(c)(4) statute."

What was said in the course of that year? How much specific information was demanded on conservative groups, and how many demands dispensed on how to handle them? Good questions.

In 2012, both the IRS and Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings were targeting the group True the Vote. We now have email showing contact between a Cummings staffer and the IRS over that organization. How much more contact was there? It's one thing to write a public letter calling on a regulator to act. It's another to haul the regulator in front of your committee, or have your staff correspond with or pressure said regulator, with regard to ongoing actions. That's a no-no.

The final merit of Mr. Camp's letter is that he's called out Justice and Democrats. Mr. Camp was careful in laying out the ways Ms. Lerner may have broken the law, with powerful details. Democrats can't refute the facts, so instead they are howling about all manner of trivia—the release of names, the "secret" vote to release taxpayer information. But it remains that they are putting themselves on record in support of IRS officials who target groups, circumvent rules, and potentially break the law. That ought to go down well with voters.
Title: We win one!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 15, 2014, 01:00:54 PM
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304512504579491340045747178?mg=reno64-wsj

Wisconsin Civil-Rights March
Prosecutors targeting conservatives lose in federal court.
April 11, 2014 6:49 p.m. ET

Score another one for free political speech. On Tuesday, Federal District Judge Rudolph Randa soundly rejected a motion to dismiss a federal civil-rights lawsuit against Wisconsin prosecutors who are investigating the political activities of conservative groups (but not liberals).

In a 19-page ruling, Judge Randa wrote that Wisconsin Club for Growth Director Eric O'Keefe's claim that the unlawful investigation violates his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights may proceed. Mr. O'Keefe has standing to bring the lawsuit because "chilled speech is, unquestionably, an injury supporting standing" and that claim doesn't depend on whether he is charged with a crime; "the threat of prosecution is enough."

Prosecutors argued that the federal suit couldn't proceed under the 1971 Supreme Court ruling in Younger v. Harris, which prevents federal courts from intervening in a criminal prosecution. That precedent doesn't apply here, Judge Randa wrote, because the state's secretive John Doe proceeding is not a prosecution but "an investigatory device, similar to a grand jury proceeding, but lacking the oversight of a jury."

The Younger exemption also does not apply, the judge added, when the plaintiffs allege that the prosecution was "brought in bad faith for the purpose of retaliating for or deterring the exercise of constitutionally protected rights." Mr. O'Keefe's claim easily satisfies that requirement with its assertion that the John Doe investigation into possible campaign finance violations has been selectively used as a "pretext" to target conservative groups and deter their political engagement.

"The success or failure of O'Keefe's claims do not depend upon the state court's interpretation of its own campaign finance laws," Judge Randa wrote. "O'Keefe's rights under the First Amendment are not outweighed by the state's purported interest in running a secret John Doe investigation that targets conservative activists."

The ruling means that those named in the lawsuit, including special prosecutor Francis Schmitz, Democratic prosecutors John Chisholm, Bruce Landgraf, David Robles and Government Accountability Board contractor Dean Nickel can be held personally liable. The judge rejected their claims of immunity, noting that a prosecutor's absolute immunity is "limited to the performance of his prosecutorial duties, and not to other duties to which he might to assigned by his superiors or perform on his own initiative, such as investigating a crime before an arrest or indictment."

The John Doe probe has been a one-sided investigation conducted against political opponents to chill their ability to influence elections, and now the prosecutors will have to defend themselves in open court.
Title: More emails from Lois Lerner
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2014, 10:17:16 AM
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/04/16/bombshell-lois-lerner-tried-to-get-obama-doj-and-fec-to-also-attack-tea-party-groups/
Title: The Rule of the Lawless
Post by: DougMacG on April 16, 2014, 11:10:45 AM
I wonder if we will ever know why this suddenly heated up and why they suddenly backed down.  Why does the federal government still own 80% of Nevada?  How do we have armed resources available for this but can't defend our country 75 miles inside our southern border?  Will we waive the turtle protection when solar panels become the encroachment?  Again and again, it is whom you know (Harry Reid?), not what the law saws.

APRIL 16, 2014 4:00 AM
The Rule of the Lawless
Armed federal agents defend turtle habitat but fail to secure our national borders.
By Kevin D. Williamson
"our national borders are a joke, but the borders of that arid haven upon which ambles the merry Mojave desert tortoise are sacrosanct"
(http://c2.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/uploaded/pic_giant_041614_SM_The-Rule-of-the-Lawless.jpg)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/375851/rule-lawless-kevin-d-williamson

The relevant facts are these: 1) Very powerful political interests in Washington insist upon the scrupulous enforcement of environmental laws, and if that diminishes the interests of private property owners, so much the better, in their view. 2) Very powerful political interests in Washington do not wish to see the scrupulous enforcement of immigration laws, and if that undercuts the bottom end of the labor market or boosts Democrats’ long-term chances in Texas, so much the better, in their view.  This isn’t the rule of law. This is the rule of narrow, parochial, self-interested political factions masquerading as the rule of law.
Title: Chilling
Post by: G M on April 17, 2014, 02:20:36 AM
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/04/16/the-terrifying-implications-of-the-irs-abuse-doj-connection/?singlepage=true
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on April 17, 2014, 07:27:56 AM
And what does the administration do?  Reduce funding to law enforcement on corruption and white collar crime and divert more to terrorism.

Title: Why Rahm Emanuel put Census Bureau under WH control
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 17, 2014, 08:09:25 AM
I don't have a citation for it, but I have seen in several usually sound sources reports that the Census Bureau is changing the questions it asks with regard to health care and that the net effect will be that it will eliminate a consistent basis for data with regards to how many people do not have health insurance and that Team Obama will be able to, yet again, lie.

In other words, yet again the non-political agencies of our government are being politicized.
Title: Even POTH admits Deporter in Chief isn't
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 17, 2014, 08:53:40 AM
second post

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/17/us/us-deportations-drop-43-percent-in-last-five-years.html?emc=edit_th_20140417&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193

(Do note POTH failing to mention to dishonesty of the numbers being used by inflating them with at border deportations.)
Title: Latest on IRS Scandal Makes Nixon look like a shoplifter at a dollar store.
Post by: objectivist1 on April 17, 2014, 10:18:36 AM
Truly horrifying, treasonous behavior by this administration and colluding Democrats.  Meanwhile - the Republicans sit on their asses...

http://pamelageller.com/2014/04/documents-irs-leadership-colluded-holder-justice-department-jail-political-opponents-obama.html/
Title: Re: Why Rahm Emanuel put Census Bureau under WH control
Post by: DougMacG on April 17, 2014, 10:29:41 AM
I don't have a citation for it, but I have seen in several usually sound sources reports that the Census Bureau is changing the questions it asks with regard to health care and that the net effect will be that it will eliminate a consistent basis for data with regards to how many people do not have health insurance and that Team Obama will be able to, yet again, lie.

In other words, yet again the non-political agencies of our government are being politicized.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/us/politics/census-survey-revisions-mask-health-law-effects.html?_r=0
WASHINGTON — The Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data for more than three decades, is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report, due this fall, census officials said.
Title: WSJ: Standing to sue the President
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 05, 2014, 09:06:57 AM
Standing to Sue Obama
Congress should challenge his refusal to enforce the law.
May 4, 2014 6:54 p.m. ET

The legal left and media are always last to know, but there are the makings of a correction in how the courts police conflicts between the political branches. President Obama's serial executive power abuses—on health care, immigration, marijuana and much else—may be inspiring a heathy rejoinder.

Under the Constitution, Congress is supposed to create and amend laws and the President to faithfully execute them, but Mr. Obama has grabbed inherent Article I powers by suspending or rewriting statutes he opposes. The President has usurped Congress with impunity because he assumes no one has the legal standing to challenge him.

Most of the time people who are exempted from laws do not suffer the concrete injuries that the judiciary can redress, while the courts maintain a presumption that Members of Congress also lack such standing. In 1997's Raines v. Byrd, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit against the line-item veto brought by six Congressmen because the loss of legislative power they challenged was a "wholly abstract and widely dispersed" injury.

But that doesn't mean that conduct that marginalizes the legislative branch is absolved of judicial review. In one notable case, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson is suing the White House over the ObamaCare regulatory carve-out that conjured up special subsidies for Members and staffers who were supposed to give up federal employee health benefits to join the insurance exchanges.

Mr. Johnson argues that because Members must designate which staffers do and don't participate, the rule imposes a nontrivial administrative burden—i.e., he has standing to sue because the rule harms his office, not because he is a U.S. Senator. More to the point, Mr. Johnson claims that the rule forces him to become personally complicit in law breaking and thus damages his political reputation. Several appeals court precedents hold that elected officials who must maintain the public trust suffer injuries when their credibility is undermined, including a 1993 D.C. Circuit ruling by now-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The White House claims Mr. Johnson lacks standing, but that's because the lawyers don't want to get near the merits. The real import of his lawsuit is that it invites the courts to restore the proper separation of powers amid executive encroachment.

The Washington lawyer David Rivkin and Florida International University law professor Elizabeth Foley suggest a broader approach that doesn't require legislators to act as individuals. They're trying to persuade House leaders to mount an institutional challenge to the White House rewrite of ObamaCare's employer mandate. Here the President is defying the plain language of laws and undermining legislative power. The courts ought to extend standing to the House as an institution to vindicate this injury. Short of impeachment, there is no other way for Congress to defend its constitutional prerogatives and the rule of law.

Earlier this year the Tenth Circuit used this theory to grant legislative standing to a group of liberal Colorado representatives to challenge that state's taxpayer bill of rights. Last year the Supreme Court also granted standing to Congress's Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.

The White House had refused to advocate for DOMA based on a constitutional theory that then had no established judicial precedent. The Court ruled in Windsor that deliberately making the Defense of Marriage Act a legal orphan "poses grave challenges to the separation of powers for the Executive at a particular moment to be able to nullify Congress's enactment solely on its own initiative and without any determination from the Court."

All this recalls the revival of federalism under the William Rehnquist Supreme Court. From the New Deal to the late 20th century there were few tangible protections of the powers the Constitution reserves to the states or the people, and any doctrine that limited federal incursion was assumed a dead letter.

But beginning with the 1992 landmark New York v. United States, the Court began to rediscover the government of enumerated powers that the framers envisioned. A 6-3 majority overturned a 1985 federal law that ordered states to dispose of radioactive waste within their own borders because "the accountability of both state and federal officials is diminished."

The ballot box is the most important constitutional check on government, but voters can't know whom to reward or punish if Congress impresses states into federal service. Political actors must "suffer the consequences," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor held in N.Y. v. U.S., if their decisions turn out to be "detrimental or unpopular. But where the federal government directs the states to regulate, it may be state officials who will bear the brunt of public disapproval, while the federal officials who devised the regulatory program may remain insulated from the electoral ramifications of their decision."

This jurisprudence turned on the "vertical" separation of federal and state power. Mr. Obama's suspension adventures pose precisely the same questions about the "horizontal" division of powers, and the same logic applies. If the executive branch is allowed to rewrite or suspend statutes, it is harder and in some cases impossible for voters to know which parties and spheres of the government to hold responsible. Political accountability is undermined.

The legal establishment will dismiss Messrs. Johnson and Rivkin as cranks with no hope of success, but it has been wrong before. The President thinks he can disregard the laws, but judges are paid to defend them.
Title: Obama lies yet again: murderers and other bad felons released
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 12, 2014, 02:19:27 PM


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/12/feds-released-hundreds-immigrant-murderers-drunken/
Title: IRS Scandal, What Nixon never dared to do!
Post by: DougMacG on May 13, 2014, 06:54:32 AM
If you gave to the tea party, you are 1000% more likely to be audited.
http://www.conservative-daily.com/2014/05/10/tea-party-donors-1000-more-likely-to-be-audited/

Nice country we live in.  With so many scandals and deceptions, people forget that this one is outrageous!  Especially the people who not at all politically aligned with the tea party are not feeling or expressing enough outrage (IMHO).  Do people think your government will only take freedom away from others?

A nice recap of the scandal here:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/05/12/president-obama-irs-scandal-watergate-column/8968317/

The timeline of the Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups reveals nothing less than a scandal. It is a scandal that blew into public view a year ago this week and about which the press has been far from curious.

In 2009, the president of the United States commented in a commencement address that the IRS would soon be auditing the president of the university and the Board of Regents for refusing to grant him an honorary degree. Supporters of the president dismissed critics who worried that the "joke" was a "dog whistle" intended to declare open season on the president's political opponents.

In January 2010, the president in his State of the Union Address publicly berated the six Supreme Court justices in attendance for their decision in Citizens United, which held that the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and labor unions.

In the wake of Citizens United, many political groups formed in opposition to the president applied to the IRS for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, which does not require the disclosure of donors. Senators of the president's party called on the IRS to investigate these groups.

In March 2010, employees in the IRS branch office tasked with reviewing applications for tax-exempt status were instructed to give special scrutiny to certain applications for 501(c)(4) status, later memorialized in a "Be on the Look Out" (BOLO) list of targeted terms. Over the next two years, the IRS slow-walked the applications of many such groups, limiting their ability to participate in the 2010 and 2012 political campaigns.

In March 2012, the IRS commissioner testified before a House committee that there was "absolutely no targeting" by the IRS of political organizations opposed to the president. The subcommittee chairman requested the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) to investigate. The IRS commissioner resigned later that year.

On May 10, 2013, four days before the public release of the TIGTA report, the IRS director Exempt Organization Director (IRS director) apologized for the "absolutely inappropriate" actions of low-level IRS branch office employees and denied any involvement by high-level IRS officials in Washington, D.C.

On May 14, 2013, TIGTA publicly released its report detailing the IRS' inappropriate targeting of the president's political opponents. The president directed the secretary of the Treasury to hold accountable those IRS employees responsible for the targeting, and the attorney general announced that the Department of Justice would launch a criminal investigation. The following day, the acting IRS commissioner resigned.

On May 22, 2013, the IRS director asserted her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and refused to testify before a House committee. She was placed on administrative leave. The following month, it was revealed that she received a $42,000 bonus. She retired in September.

On Jan. 9, 2014, it was revealed that the Department of Justice attorney leading the investigation was a donor to the president's campaigns. A week later, the Justice Department revealed it would not bring any criminal charges. Attorneys for many of the targeted political groups complained that they had never been contacted in the investigation.

On Feb. 2, 2014, the president stated in a televised interview before the Super Bowl that although there "were some bone-headed decisions out of a local (IRS) office ... (there was) not even a smidgen of corruption."

On May 7, 2014, the House voted 231-187 to hold the former IRS director in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate in its investigation (six members of the president's party voted with the majority). The House also voted 250-168 to request the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate (26 members of the president's party voted with the majority).

To paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in A Time to Kill: Now imagine the president is a Republican.

We've already seen that movie, and it was called Watergate.

In that scandal, aggressive reporting by the media and thorough investigations by the FBI, Justice Department and a Senate Select Committee painstakingly uncovered the facts of the illegal break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters months before the 1972 presidential election. One of the three articles of impeachment charged that President Nixon had attempted to use the IRS against his political opponents.
*more at link*

Paul L. Caron is professor of law at Pepperdine University. He blogs at TaxProf Blog
Title: How do we answer this?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2014, 08:44:24 AM
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-records-tea-party/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: objectivist1 on May 15, 2014, 08:49:58 AM
My first reaction is that it is an outright lie.  I'm sure that this can be demonstrated with a little research.  ThinkProgress is a hard-core leftist pro-Democrat organization, and is notorious for putting out garbage, not unlike Jay Carney.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2014, 08:54:26 AM
I'm engaged in a conversation with FB friend on this.

=========================

IRS Targeting Was Washington Directed
 

It is well established that the Internal Revenue Service targeted Tea Party and Patriot groups before the 2012 presidential election. Conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status were delayed and denied using special scrutiny from the IRS. At first, officials blamed "low-level employees" in the Cincinnati IRS office for the misconduct, but as more information came to light, it is evident the targeting was broader and instructions came from higher up. New emails revealed this week show it was indeed political and directed from Washington.

Judicial Watch secured the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request. It's not the first time the group has discovered a bombshell -- they reported previous IRS revelations, as well as the Benghazi smoking gun.

"One key email string from July 2012 confirms that IRS Tea Party scrutiny was directed from Washington, DC," Judicial Watch reports. "On July 6, 2010, Holly Paz (the former Director of the IRS Rulings and Agreements Division and current Manager of Exempt Organizations Guidance) asks IRS lawyer Steven Grodnitzky 'to let Cindy and Sharon know how we have been handling Tea Party applications in the last few months.' Cindy Thomas is the former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations office in Cincinnati and Sharon Camarillo was a Senior Manager in their Los Angeles office. Grodnitzky, a top lawyer in the Exempt Organization Technical unit (EOT) in Washington, DC, responds:

'EOT is working the Tea party applications in coordination with Cincy. We are developing a few applications here in DC and providing copies of our development letters with the agent to use as examples in the development of their cases. Chip Hull [another lawyer in IRS headquarters] is working these cases in EOT and working with the agent in Cincy, so any communication should include him as well. Because the Tea party applications are the subject of an SCR [Sensitive Case Report], we cannot resolve any of the cases without coordinating with Rob [Choi, then-Director of Rulings and Agreements in the IRS's DC, headquarters].'"

Not only that, but Democrats in Congress were involved. Judicial Watch reports, "A series of letters between Senator Levin (D-MI), chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations, and top IRS officials throughout 2012 discuss how to target conservative groups the senator claimed were 'engaged in political activities.'" Levin demanded scrutiny for conservative groups like Club for Growth, Americans for Tax Reform, the 60 Plus Association and the Susan B. Anthony List.

Last week, Congress held retired IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt for her refusal to answer any questions about her sizeable role in the scrutiny. But it's doubtful she or anyone else involved in this scandal will face any real consequences.

As with Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and every other scandal of this administration, their primary goal has been to cover it up and then treat it as old news when facts confront them. As commentator Charles Krauthammer put it, "This a major abuse of power. They covered up for two years and now they say, 'Hey, dude, two-year-old story.' So it's old news. Let's see if the mainstream media will treat it as old news or what it really is -- new news of misleading America and covering it up." We think the answer on that last part is obvious. How high does the scandal go? We still don't and may never know.
Title: Re: How do we answer this?
Post by: DougMacG on May 15, 2014, 01:36:32 PM
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2014/04/23/3429722/irs-records-tea-party/

Comparing tea party scrutiny to scrutiny of ACORN??  Those are convicted felons who co-mingled taxpayer monies with their political causes.  What did the tea party do to deserve what they got? 

"...at least some additional scrutiny was required for groups of all types that had names that sounded political"

  - Were the donors to progressive groups TEN TIMES AS LIKELY, compared to non-donors, TO BE PERSONALLY AUDITED BY THE IRS LAST YEAR?? http://www.conservative-daily.com/2014/05/10/tea-party-donors-1000-more-likely-to-be-audited/  I don't think so.  Were they intimidated, as I am, to never give money to those groups?  I don't think so.

Nothing on progressive donors being be personally more likely to receive a full IRS audit in the article.  Nothing on the delays to get certified that cost tea party the right to participate in the 2012 election.  Perhaps progressive groups  were given 'some scrutiny as legal cover for the worst abuse of power since - well - before Nixon and Watergate. 

Were progressive groups asked the same intrusive questions asked of the tea party groups?
(If they were asked all of these, why did they NOT speak up at the time?)

“Provide a list of all issues that are important to your organization. Indicate your position regarding each issue.”
“Please explain in detail the derivation of your organization’s name.” (in a letter to the Ohio-based 1851 Center for  Constitutional Law)
“Please explain in detail your organization’s involvement with the Tea Party.”
“Provide details regarding your relationship with Justin Binik-Thomas.” (a Cincinnati-area Tea-Party activist)
“Provide information regarding the Butler County Teen Age Republicans and your relationship.”
“Submit the following information relating to your past and present directors, officers, and key employees: a) Provide a resume for each.”
“The names of the donors, contributors, and grantors. … The amounts of each of the donations, contributions, and grants and the dates you received them.”
“The names of persons from your organization and the amount of time they spent on the event or program.” (for events)
“Provide copies of the handbills you distributed at your monthly meetings.”
“Fully describe your youth outreach program with the local school.”
“Please provide copies of all your current web pages, including your Blog posts. Please provide copies of all of your newsletters, bulletins, flyers, newsletters or any other media or literature you have disseminated to your members or others. Please provide copies of stories and articles that have been published about you.”
“Are you on Facebook or other social networking sites? If yes, provide copies of these pages.”
“Provide copies of the agendas and minutes of your Board meetings and, if applicable, members ship meetings, including a description of legislative and electoral issues discussed, and whether candidates for political office were invited to address the meeting.”
“Do your issue-related advocacy communications compare to the positions of candidates or slates of candidates on these issues with your positions? Provide copies of these communications. What percentage do these constitute of your issue-related advocacy communications?”
“Do you have a close relationship with any candidate for political office or political party? If so describe fully the nature of that relationship.”
“Apart from your responses to the preceding, estimate the percentage of your time and what percentage of your resources you will devote to activities in the 2012 election cycle, in which you will explicitly or implicitly support or oppose a candidate, candidates or slates of candidates, for public office.”
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/05/weirdest-irs-questions-for-the-tea-party-views-donors-and-etymology/
http://media.aclj.org/pdf/issa-jordan-letter-to-irs-regarding-intrusive-tea-party-questionnaires.pdf
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/10/10-crazy-things-the-irs-asked-tea-party-groups/
http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/4-7-2014-IRS-Staff-Report-w-appendix.pdf
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 22, 2014, 08:39:00 PM
http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2014/05/22/
Title: CA illegally recruiting illegals for Obamacare
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 26, 2014, 08:19:46 AM
http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/covered-california-illegally-recruited-illegal-aliens-to-enroll-in-program/
Title: Illegals dropped off in AZ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2014, 04:03:32 PM


http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/2014/05/29/scores-undocumented-migrants-dropped-arizona/9707503/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2014, 07:42:58 PM


http://www.bizpacreview.com/2014/06/01/pows-dad-praises-allah-at-suspicious-rose-garden-press-conference-with-obama-122631
Title: CNN analyst: Baraq broke law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2014, 05:14:42 PM


http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/06/02/cnn-legal-analyst-calls-out-obama-on-the-air-youre-accusing-the-president-of-the-united-states-of-breaking-the-law/
Title: Re: CNN analyst: Baraq broke law
Post by: G M on June 03, 2014, 05:36:08 PM


http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/06/02/cnn-legal-analyst-calls-out-obama-on-the-air-youre-accusing-the-president-of-the-united-states-of-breaking-the-law/

Almost like there is a pattern of behavior.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: objectivist1 on June 03, 2014, 05:40:42 PM
O'Reilly said tonight on his program that he spoke with an anonymous source close to the White House who said Obama has concluded public opinion no longer matters, and he is simply going to do what he wants going forward without regard to public opinion.  My question to O'Reilly is this: "Excuse me, Captain Obvious - but since when has Obama cared about the law or public opinion?  What has changed?  How dense are you that you are just realizing this now?  You had to have some source close to the White House tell you this?"
Title: Trading Private Bergdahl
Post by: G M on June 04, 2014, 12:33:18 AM
(http://media.dcentertainment.com/sites/default/files/imce/2014/06-JUN/MAD-Magazine-Trading-Private-Bergdahl_538e1730c295a6.07331124.jpg)
Title: Re: CNN analyst: Baraq broke law
Post by: DougMacG on June 04, 2014, 03:44:26 PM
Two Americans walked off their post in the POW scandal, one in Afghanistan in 2009 and one in the Oval Office this week.
Title: Re: CNN analyst: Baraq broke law
Post by: G M on June 04, 2014, 08:47:08 PM
Two Americans walked off their post in the POW scandal, one in Afghanistan in 2009 and one in the Oval Office this week.

Kindred souls.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on June 05, 2014, 08:17:00 AM
Bamster:  no apologies.  We leave no soldier behind.

Yeah right.  Suddenly now this happens when this was all known going back to 2009.

Right after the VA scandal breaks.  We can see the WH is being run by Podesta, the Clinton fixer.

Same diversion tactics and rapid fill the news with spin.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2014, 08:42:28 AM
Well, there is a certain US Marine who saw combat honorably for his country currently left behind in a Mexican jail, , , but I digress.  On the subject of the legality of it all, this may be relevant:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/4/congress-twice-rejected-release-of-taliban-from-gi/ 
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on June 05, 2014, 09:23:51 AM
He knows he could never be impeached.  He knows he has no more personal elections to play with after this November.

He is going to be unleashed.   What we have been seeing is just for openers.  We better win the Senate. 

We better win all three WH, C , and S by 2016.   And start packing all the courts with Conservatives - not just talent.  Cynical yes.  But practical and realistic too.

I hope Conservative Supremes have good doctors.  I hope Ginsberg stays alive till 2016 but I bet she retires if WH goes Republican in '16.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on June 05, 2014, 09:45:22 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/4/congress-twice-rejected-release-of-taliban-from-gi/

That is why he went around Congress, not some unknown health issue.  

The Framers had it wrong on checks and balances.  As he has clearly and directly said, I will go through Congress when they agree with me and go around them otherwise.  

The law he signed was unconstitutional and the release was illegal.  Who cares, right?  No consequence.  It's not like we're a nation of laws.  Yes, he cannot be impeached; iImpeachment like everything else including the Court is political.
--------------------------------

Cap and Trade was also rejected by congress and a Dem Senate:
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2008/08/01/us-senate-rejects-lieberman-warner-cap-and-trade-bill
17 years and 9 months counting with no warming:  
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/04/the-pause-continues-still-no-global-warming-for-17-years-9-months/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/06/02/lake-superior-winter-ice/9878461/
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2014/06/01/a-basin-extends-season-hopes-to-stay-open-until-the-fourth-of-july/

But the planet cannot wait for Congress, checks and balances or consent of the governed!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on June 05, 2014, 02:45:42 PM
Well, there is a certain US Marine who saw combat honorably for his country currently left behind in a Mexican jail, , , but I digress.  On the subject of the legality of it all, this may be relevant:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/4/congress-twice-rejected-release-of-taliban-from-gi/ 

I'm pretty sure some were left behind in Benghazi as well.
Title: IRS gave FBI MILLION pages of taxpayer data to prosecute conservatives
Post by: DougMacG on June 12, 2014, 06:39:35 AM
IRS GAVE FBI 1.1 MILLION PAGES OF TAXPAYER DATA TO ENCOURAGE PROSECUTION OF CONSERVATIVES  By John Hinderacker, Powerlineblog
It is just about impossible to keep up with all of the Obama administration scandals, but the corruption of the Internal Revenue Service ranks near the top. Unfortunately, it has gone hand in hand with Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s corruption of the Department of Justice. The perversion of law enforcement agencies for political ends is starkly revealed by the fact that in 2010, as part of its effort to stem the Tea Party movement, the IRS gave the FBI disks containing more than 1.1 million pages of documents on Section 501 non-profits, so that the FBI could selectively prosecute conservative groups and donors.

The facts, as we know them so far, were laid out yesterday in a letter from Congressmen Darrell Issa and Jim Jordan to John Koskinen, Commissioner of the IRS. The letter includes a series of emails that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has finally obtained, after more than a year of stonewalling by the Obama administration. The IRS originally told the House committee–falsely–that the disks contained only publicly available filings by the non-profit organizations. But the IRS later admitted that it had illegally transferred confidential taxpayer information to the FBI.

The IRS’s purpose was explicitly political. Sarah Ingram, Lois Lerner’s predecessor in charge of tax-exempt organizations at the IRS, wrote in a September 21, 2010 email, the subject of which was a favorable front-page story in the New York Times:

Thanks, as always, for the excellent support from Media. I do think it came out pretty well. The “secret donor” theme will continue–see Obama salvo today and Diane Reehm (sp).

The reference is to Diane Rehm, an NPR radio host. So the IRS, at its highest levels, was trying to advance the Democratic Party’s “secret donor” theme on the eve of the 2010 election, and breaking the law to do so. Could someone maybe go to jail one of these days?

When will Obama administration criminals pay the price?

Here is the Issa/Jordan letter in its entirety. You really should read it; hardly anyone will. It tells a sad story of government corruption and stonewalling, the hallmarks of the Obama administration. It also reminds us that there are Republicans in Washington who are doing great work, trying to sustain the rule of law under very difficult conditions. One more thought about that in a moment; first, the letter:  (below)

A final thought: I [John Hinderacker, Powerline] have spent my entire adult life in the world of litigation. It is not unusual for parties to lawsuits to stonewall, to obfuscate, sometimes even to lie, as the Obama administration did here, in order to prevent damaging facts from coming to light. Yet litigants rarely succeed in their stonewalling in the way the Obama administration has successfully stonewalled, time after time.

Why is that? The answer is simple: in a lawsuit, the discovery process is supervised by a judge or (in the federal system) a magistrate. A party that refuses to answer questions or produce documents on the basis of flimsy objections, as happened here–the objections quoted in the Issa/Jordan letter are laughable–will be ordered by the court to comply, and may have sanctions assessed against it. The problem that Congressional investigators face is that there is no judge. Legal process can be invoked, of course, as a last resort, as happens on rare occasions. But that takes years; no judge sits ready to rule on frivolous positions like those so often taken by the Obama administration. In the political realm, the only real judge is the electorate. So far, at least, that is not a reassuring thought.

If posted images come out scrambled, read it at: 
http://www.scribd.com/doc/229059954/2014-06-09-DEI-Jordan-to-Koskinen-IRS-DOJ-Disks-Tax-Exempt-Applications

(http://htmlimg1.scribdassets.com/73s5qqrwg03uz3f8/images/1-f2b1f340db.jpg)
(http://htmlimg2.scribdassets.com/73s5qqrwg03uz3f8/images/2-b6fe3cfc04.jpg)
(http://htmlimg1.scribdassets.com/73s5qqrwg03uz3f8/images/3-feeb6c17da.jpg)
(http://htmlimg1.scribdassets.com/73s5qqrwg03uz3f8/images/5-eb05ffa584.jpg)
(http://htmlimg4.scribdassets.com/73s5qqrwg03uz3f8/images/6-cabcbe005c.jpg)

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/irs-gave-fbi-1-1-million-pages-of-taxpayer-data-to-encourage-prosecution-of-conservatives.php
http://htmlimg1.scribdassets.com/73s5qqrwg03uz3f8/images/1-f2b1f340db.jpg
http://htmlimg2.scribdassets.com/73s5qqrwg03uz3f8/images/2-b6fe3cfc04.jpg
http://htmlimg1.scribdassets.com/73s5qqrwg03uz3f8/images/3-feeb6c17da.jpg
http://htmlimg1.scribdassets.com/73s5qqrwg03uz3f8/images/5-eb05ffa584.jpg
http://htmlimg4.scribdassets.com/73s5qqrwg03uz3f8/images/6-cabcbe005c.jpg
http://www.scribd.com/doc/229059954/2014-06-09-DEI-Jordan-to-Koskinen-IRS-DOJ-Disks-Tax-Exempt-Applications
Title: WSJ: IRS loses Lerner's emails
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2014, 09:41:49 AM


The IRS Loses Lerner's Emails
And other news that the Beltway press corps won't cover.


June 13, 2014 7:02 p.m. ET

The IRS—remember those jaunty folks?—announced Friday that it can't find two years of emails from Lois Lerner to the Departments of Justice or Treasury. And none to the White House or Democrats on Capitol Hill. An agency spokesman blames a computer crash.

Never underestimate government incompetence, but how convenient. The former IRS Director of Exempt Organizations was at the center of the IRS targeting of conservative groups and still won't testify before Congress. Now we'll never know whose orders she was following, or what directions she was giving. If the Reagan White House had ever offered up this excuse, John Dingell would have held the entire government in contempt.

The suspicion that this is willful obstruction of Congress is all the more warranted because this week we also learned that the IRS, days before the 2010 election, shipped a 1.1 million page database about tax-exempt groups to the FBI. Why? New emails turned up by Darrell Issa's House Oversight Committee show Department of Justice officials worked with Ms. Lerner to investigate groups critical of President Obama.

How out of bounds was this data dump? Consider the usual procedure. The IRS is charged with granting tax-exempt status to social-welfare organizations that spend less than 50% of their resources on politics. If the IRS believes a group has violated those rules, it can assign an agent to investigate and revoke its tax-exempt status. This routinely happens and isn't a criminal offense.
Enlarge Image

U.S. Director of Exempt Organizations for the Internal Revenue Service Lois Lerner Reuters

Ms. Lerner, by contrast, shipped a database of 12,000 nonprofit tax returns to the FBI, the investigating agency for Justice's Criminal Division. The IRS, in other words, was inviting Justice to engage in a fishing expedition, and inviting people not even licensed to fish in that pond. The Criminal Division (rather than the Tax Division) investigates and prosecutes under the Internal Revenue Code only when the crimes involve IRS personnel.

The Criminal Division knows this, which explains why the emails show that Ms. Lerner was meeting to discuss the possibility of using different statutes, specifically campaign-finance laws, to prosecute nonprofits. A separate email from September 2010 shows Jack Smith, the head of Justice's Public Integrity Unit (part of the Criminal Division) musing over whether Justice might instead "ever charge a 371" against nonprofits. A "371" refers to a section of the U.S. Code that allows prosecutors to broadly claim a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. You know, conspiracies like exercising the right to free political speech.

The IRS has admitted that this database included confidential taxpayer information—including donor details—for at least 33 nonprofits. The IRS claims this was inadvertent, and Justice says neither it nor the FBI used any information for any "investigative purpose." This blasé attitude is astonishing given the law on confidential taxpayer information was created to prevent federal agencies from misusing the information. News of this release alone ought to cause IRS heads to roll.

The latest revelations are a further refutation of Ms. Lerner's claim that the IRS targeting trickled up from underlings in the Cincinnati office. And they strongly add to the evidence that the IRS and Justice were motivated to target by the frequent calls for action by the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats.

One email from September 21, 2010 shows Sarah Hall Ingram, a senior IRS official, thanking the IRS media team for their work with a New York Times NYT -2.44% reporter on an article about nonprofits in elections. "I do think it came out pretty well," she writes, in an email that was also sent to Ms. Lerner. "The 'secret donor' theme will continue—see Obama salvo and today's [radio interview with House Democratic Rep. Chris Van Hollen ]."

Several nonprofit groups have recently filed complaints with the Senate Ethics Committee against nine Democratic Senators for improperly interfering with the IRS. It's one thing for Senators to ask an agency about the status of a rule or investigation. But it is extraordinary for Illinois's Dick Durbin to demand that tax authorities punish specific conservative organizations, or for Michigan's Carl Levin to order the IRS to hand over confidential nonprofit tax information.

And it's no surprise to learn that Justice's renewed interest in investigating nonprofits in early 2013 immediately followed a hearing by Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse in which he dragged in officials from Justice and the IRS and demanded action.
***

It somehow took a year for the IRS to locate these Lerner exchanges with Justice, though they were clearly subject to Mr. Issa's original subpoenas. The Oversight Committee had to subpoena Justice to obtain them, and it only knew to do that after it was tipped to the correspondence by discoveries from the watchdog group Judicial Watch. Justice continues to drag its feet in offering up witnesses and documents. And now we have the two years of emails that have simply vanished into the government ether.

New IRS Commissioner John Koskinen promised to cooperate with Congress. But either he is being undermined by his staff, or he's aiding the agency's stonewalling. And now that we know that Justice was canoodling with Ms. Lerner, its own dilatory investigation becomes easier to understand. Or maybe that was a computer crash too.
Title: Congressman pushes to impeach AG Holder
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2014, 10:18:59 AM
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/06/16/congressman-pushes-for-eric-holders-impeachment/
Title: WSJ: Standing to sue the President
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2014, 01:50:21 PM
The Standing to Sue Obama
Members should let Boehner take the lead against executive excess.
June 15, 2014 5:48 p.m. ET

President Obama is setting a dangerous precedent by suspending his enforcement of laws on health care, immigration, drugs, banking and so much else, but the courts may soon be asked to throw a brushback pitch. That is, unless a rump group of backbenchers undermines the legal challenge.

Mr. Obama's practice of unilaterally waiving his duty to faithfully execute statutes has been abetted by a presumed lack of legal "standing" to contest his suspension. To the extent individuals have not suffered concrete injuries that the courts traditionally redress, he feels he can act without consequence to create whole-cloth regulatory regimes. This makes the inherent Article I powers of Congress irrelevant, with perhaps permanent damage to the separation of powers and political accountability. If Mr. Obama gets away with it, the next President probably will too.

President Barack Obama Associated Press

But Congress may yet have a way to challenge this usurpation in court. The Washington constitutional litigator David Rivkin and Florida International University law professor Elizabeth Price Foley have developed a legal theory that would allow for judicial review to resolve this dispute between the political branches on the merits. Members of Congress as individuals cannot sue as individuals over passing political disputes. But when the President is usurping core legislative powers, Congress as an institution can sue to vindicate this constitutional injury.

Short of impeachment, there is no other way for Congress to defend its rights, and the Rivkin-Foley case is narrow and limited—and should survive judicial scrutiny. The idea has secured the interest of the GOP leadership, which may soon authorize a House-led lawsuit.

The problem is that a handful of junior Members may move to pre-empt the House challenge with their own claim in a way that could undermine House leaders. As a legal matter, the formal imprimatur of Congress is important and serves as a limiting principle. Institutional challenges will be rare for only the gravest suspensions of law and keep sealed the Pandora's box that would be the endless deluge of ad hoc political lawsuits against the White House.

Backbench fervor may also get the better of legal precision. The Rivkin-Foley theory would itself set a precedent and depends on careful arguments. Mr. Rivkin was the legal innovator behind the challenge to ObamaCare's individual mandate and his ideas persuaded a majority of the Supreme Court, even if Chief Justice John Roberts ultimately got cold feet and called it a tax.

But that case was harmed in the lower courts—and in the court of public opinion—by sloppy reasoning from politically ambitious litigators. Rump litigation could interfere by casting doubt on this case too.

The courts have long turned back flailing suits from individual legislators, from attempts in the 1970s to police the conduct of the Vietnam war to more recent efforts by Dennis Kucinich and others over Iraq. But personal pique as much as conviction seems to be a motivation in this dispute. Some Members just don't like Speaker John Boehner and prefer to sabotage him at every turn, even in this case when he would be doing a public service by hazarding his own reputation and office.

More judges are pushing back against Mr. Obama's abuses when individuals with standing have sued, and the courts may be open to a larger challenge that resolves the dispute in a constitutionally peaceful way. But defending Congress's prerogatives requires Congress.
Title: Flood of Undocumented Democratic Voters crossing border; crims released
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2014, 09:02:45 AM


http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/06/16/Report-1000-Immigrants-Crossing-Rio-Grande-Daily-Criminals-Released
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: prentice crawford on June 17, 2014, 11:03:06 AM
Practice run on the border from a year ago? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arb_YCZgra8
Title: 9 Questions to Ask the IRS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2014, 03:23:52 PM


Charles Krauthammer made an excellent point last night when he said of this scandal: “Forty years ago Nixon was crucified by the press and forced to resign - partly over an 18-minute gap on one of his White House tapes.  NOW - this administration is claiming they lost 26 MONTHS of e-mails from this woman at the center of the scandal" - and ONLY Fox News reported this story on Friday.  Not a peep from any of the other major networks.  Sickening.
www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/15/curl-irs-scandal-gets-nixonian-the-18-minute-or-26/?page=all#pagebreak


Attkisson: 9 Requests Lawmakers Should Make About Lois Lerner’s Missing Emails
Melissa Quinn / @MelissaQuinn97 / June 16, 2014 / 0 comments


As congressional investigators ponder how a computer crash caused two years of Lois Lerner’s emails to disappear, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkissonoutlined several questions lawmakers should be asking the Internal Revenue Service.

During Lerner’s tenure at the IRS, tea party groups applying for tax-exempt status routinely were subjected to additional scrutiny and delays in their applications. The IRS informed Congress last week that it had lost an unknown number of emails from Lerner.

Now, as congressional Republicans call on the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the computer crash, Attkisson, a Daily Signal senior independent contributor, explained exactly what information investigators should seek regarding Lerner’s missing emails:

Please provide a timeline of the crash and documentation covering when it was first discovered and by whom; when, how and by whom it was learned that materials were lost; the official documentation reporting the crash and federal data loss; documentation reflecting all attempts to recover the materials; and the remediation records documenting the fix. This material should include the names of all officials and technicians involved, as well as all internal communications about the matter.

Please provide all documents and emails that refer to the crash from the time that it happened through the IRS’ disclosure to Congress Friday that it had occurred.

Please provide the documents that show the computer crash and lost data were appropriately reported to the required entities including any contractor servicing the IRS. If the incident was not reported, please explain why.

Please provide a list summarizing what other data was irretrievably lost in the computer crash. If the loss involved any personal data, was the loss disclosed to those impacted? If not, why?

Please provide documentation reflecting any security analyses done to assess the impact of the crash and lost materials. If such analyses were not performed, why not?

Please provide documentation showing the steps taken to recover the material, and the names of all technicians who attempted the recovery.

Please explain why redundancies required for federal systems were either not used or were not effective in restoring the lost materials, and provide documentation showing how this shortfall has been remediated.

Please provide any documents reflecting an investigation into how the crash resulted in the irretrievable loss of federal data and what factors were found to be responsible for the existence of this situation.

I would also ask for those who discovered and reported the crash to testify under oath, as well as any officials who reported the materials as having been irretrievably lost.
In testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in March, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told lawmakers agency emails “get taken off and stored in servers.” Yet the IRS  said Lerner’s correspondence, sent between January 2009 and April 2011, is irretrievable.

Congressional investigators are working to determine whether Lerner acted alone or on orders handed down by the White House. House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., said in a statement Friday the IRS’ loss of documents makes it more difficult for investigators to determine who, besides Lerner, was involved in the scandal.
Lerner testified twice on Capitol Hill about the targeting, but invoked the Fifth Amendment both times. In May, the House voted to hold her in contempt for refusing to cooperate with investigations.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on June 17, 2014, 08:13:56 PM
Hillary calls the IRS issue not a scandal but a partisan "circus".  :x
Title: IRS manages to vaporize Lerner's emails.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2014, 09:31:35 AM


Lerner Emails (Really) Gone
How green! The IRS recycled former-IRS official Lois Lerner's computer hard drive, making it impossible to retrieve the lost emails that would undoubtedly be another smoking gun on the Tea Party targeting scandal. An IRS spokesman said, "We believe the standard IRS protocol was followed in 2011 for disposing of the broken hard drive. A bad hard drive, like other broken Information Technology equipment, is sent to a recycler as part of our regular process." Furthermore, the magnetic tapes -- the backup system the IRS uses -- only keeps information for six months before it's written over with new information. In other words, they did a thorough job of "losing" those emails. Meanwhile, ABC and NBC ignored the story while making room for a report that Britain's royal baby, Prince George, was learning how to walk. More...


For fuller coverage see http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/irs-lois-lerner-emails-108044.html
Title: Re: IRS manages to vaporize Lerner's emails.
Post by: DougMacG on June 19, 2014, 10:51:18 AM
Lerner Emails (Really) Gone
How green! The IRS recycled former-IRS official Lois Lerner's computer hard drive, making it impossible to retrieve the lost emails that would undoubtedly be another smoking gun on the Tea Party targeting scandal. An IRS spokesman said, "We believe the standard IRS protocol was followed in 2011 for disposing of the broken hard drive. A bad hard drive, like other broken Information Technology equipment, is sent to a recycler as part of our regular process." Furthermore, the magnetic tapes -- the backup system the IRS uses -- only keeps information for six months before it's written over with new information. In other words, they did a thorough job of "losing" those emails. Meanwhile, ABC and NBC ignored the story while making room for a report that Britain's royal baby, Prince George, was learning how to walk. More...
For fuller coverage see http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/irs-lois-lerner-emails-108044.html

The irony (and elephant in the room) is that this is the agency that controls the record keeping of all Americans with its enormous federal powers.  It galls me that you have to be a right winger to feel outrage over this.

The IRS is part of the executive branch of the federal government.  Over the months they have been trying to hide find the Lois Lerner emails, all the chief executive above them had to do was order all of his government, the White House in particular, to release to the committee their copy of whatever email exchanges with Lois Lerner that they had.  Part of his deny, delay, deflect, and divert attention strategy is that: HE DID NOT DO THAT. 

This scandal and coverup goes all the way to the top!  If the IRS knew for months, he knew for months (or should have know, same thing).  Administration of the IRS is part of his sworn responsibilities.  He chose to have his White House NOT cooperate with this investigation.  Delay as long as possible and then not disclose is not what people thought they were choosing with "the most transparent administration ever".

IRS, ATF, INS, NSA, DOJ etc., without oversight, eventually will evoke some nazi analogies...

My latest thought is that the House and Senate should take up impeachment after the 2016 election and before the end of his term, out of principle, leaving not enough time on the clock to swear in the Vice President as his replacement.  Appoint the special investigators now, get all the information now, and mark history with the precedent that this country does not tolerate this kind of governance.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 19, 2014, 12:07:34 PM
We stand at the precipice of Orwell's memory hole.  :cry: :x :x
Title: Gowdy takes on IRS's Koskinen
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2014, 10:46:13 AM


Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) hit IRS Commissioner John Koskinen with a question the bureaucrat couldn't answer Monday: "You have already said multiple times today that there was no evidence that you found of any criminal wrongdoing," Gowdy said. "I want you to tell me what criminal statutes you have evaluated." Befuddled, Koskinen replied, "I have not looked at any." Gowdy fired back, "Well then how can you possibly tell our fellow citizens that there's not criminal wrongdoing if you don't even know what statutes to look at?" Gowdy repeated the question, and Koskinen again admitted, "I reviewed no criminal statutes." The only hope for the IRS is smoke and mirrors. We're glad at least Gowdy isn't going to take it.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on June 24, 2014, 11:50:42 AM
Thank god for Gowdy.
Title: Sen. Cruz: Special Prosecutor or Impeach Holder
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 26, 2014, 09:58:45 PM


http://www.tpnn.com/2014/06/26/ted-cruz-to-eric-holder-appoint-prosecutor-for-irs-scandal-or-face-impeachment/
Title: When the IRS had integrity
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 27, 2014, 01:47:22 PM
Johnnie Walters, RIP
Remembering when the IRS had integrity.
James Taranto
connect
June 27, 2014

(Best of the tube tonight: Catch us on "Lou Dobbs Tonight," 7 p.m. ET on Fox Business, with repeat showings at 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.)

In the scandal involving the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS commissioner refused to play along with a corrupt administration, the New York Times reports. A White House aide handed him a list of 200 political "enemies" the president wanted investigated. In response, the commissioner asked: "Do you realize what you're doing?" Then, he answered his own rhetorical question: "If I did what you asked, it'd make Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic."

The White House aide's reply was "emphatic," according to the Times: ""The man I work for doesn't like somebody to say 'no.' "

The commissioner went to his boss, the Treasury secretary, "showed him the list and recommended that the I.R.S. do nothing." The secretary "told him to lock the list in his safe." Later, he retrieved the list and turned it over to congressional investigators.

Johnnie Walters testifies before a Senate subcommittee, March 1973. Corbis

It's enough to restore your trust in the government--except that it happened more than 40 years ago. The corrupt order was delivered by John Dean in September 1972. The commissioner, Johnnie Walters, eventually "testified to various committees investigating alleged Nixon misdeeds," the Times reports. "He left office in April 1973." He died Tuesday; the Times article we've been quoting is his obituary.

Walters wasn't the first IRS commissioner to resist President Nixon's political pressure. His predecessor, Randolph Thrower, was fired "for resisting White House pressure to punish political opponents," as the Times notes. Thrower died this March at 100. When Walters took office in 1971, "his stated goals were simplifying the tax process and catching tax cheats," but his job "had grown more complex" when Nixon imposed wage-and-price controls in an economically ignorant effort to curb inflation.

But the obituarist dryly notes that "Mr. Walters had not been told of Nixon's other job requirements," which surfaced in a recorded Oval Office conversation: "I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he's told, that every income-tax return I want to see I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends." When Nixon learned that Walters had refused to follow the wrongful order, he asked: "Why the hell did we promote him?"

Later, he told the aforementioned White House aide, John Dean: "You've got to kick Walters's ass out first and get a man in there." He added that the Treasury secretary, George Shultz, "needed to make sure that Mr. Walters left if he wanted to keep his own job," in the Times's paraphrase. Shultz remained in office until May 1974, three months before Nixon's resignation, and later served as President Reagan's secretary of state. He's still alive at 93.

This Wednesday, as Mediaite.com notes, Barack Obama's Treasury secretary, Jack Lew, testified before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, pressed him about the purported harmonic convergence of crashed computers that caused seven IRS employees' emails to go missing. "Sometimes a broken hard drive is just a broken hard drive," Lew said.

As far as we know, even Bill Clinton never said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

One group of experts, the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers, apparently disagrees with Lew and the current IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, as The Weekly Standard's Jim Swift reports:

    IAITAM administers internationally accepted certifications for information technology professionals. According to the group's standards, if Lerner's supposedly malfunctioning hardware was properly destroyed, there would be records of it.

    Dr. Barbara Rembiesa, president of IAITAM, questions whether there is documentation of the destruction of the files. Who performed the work, says Rembiesa, is important because not all IT professionals are IAITAM certified.

    "The notion that these emails just magically vanished makes no sense whatsoever. That is not how IT asset management at major businesses and government institutions works in this country. When the hard drive in question was destroyed, the IRS should have called in an accredited IT Asset Destruction (ITAD) professional or firm to complete that process, which requires extensive documentation, official signoffs, approvals, and signatures of completion. If this was done, there would be records. If this was not done, this is the smoking gun that proves the drive or drives were destroyed improperly – or not at all."

Also on Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee released an eyebrow-raising email exchange from December 2012 (that is, postdating the alleged computer crashes). It seems that Lois Lerner, the IRS's since-ousted head of tax-exempt organizations, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican member of the Senate Finance Committee, were invited to appear together at a conference.

Lerner turned down the invitation, emailing Matthew Giuliano, a lawyer then employed as a manager at the IRS: "Don't think I want to be on stage with Grassley on this issue." (The "issue" and the identity of the conference sponsor are redacted from the email exchange.) But she observed: "Looked like they were inappropriately offering to pay for [Grassley's] wife. Perhaps we should refer to Exam?"

"We have seen a lot of unbelievable things in this investigation, but the fact that Lois Lerner attempted to initiate an apparently baseless IRS examination against a sitting Republican United States Senator is shocking," Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp said in a press release. "At every turn, Lerner was using the IRS as a tool for political purposes in defiance of taxpayer rights."

Giuliano gingerly replied to Lerner that he was "not sure we should send to exam. I think the offer to pay for Grassley's wife is income to Grassley, and not prohibited on its face."

There's no indication that Lerner pressed the matter further, and the email exchange alone is consistent with the hypothesis that she was an overzealous enforcer but not a partisan one. That is the claim administration apologists have been making, though when you stop and think about it, that means their defense is that the IRS is indiscriminate in opportunistically snooping on private correspondence.

Anyway, everything else we know about Lerner and Obama-era IRS practices argues against that defense. "If this were a Republican administration," former Clinton aide Lanny Davis tells radio host Larry O'Connor, who quotes him in the Washington Free Beacon, "I'd be saying when hard drives have been obliterated and this recent Lois Lerner--I think very inappropriate, maybe innocent but completely inappropriate--'maybe we should look at Mr. Grassley' . . . there's no Democrat that I know of that wouldn't be asking a Republican administration to conduct an independent investigation."

Four decades ago, during a Republican administration that was brought down by corruption, the IRS turned out to be a bulwark of government integrity. Today the possibility remains that the IRS itself is the source of the corruption. As we've repeatedly argued, that would be even worse than an IRS that follows corrupt orders from the president. A corrupt administration can be replaced, as Nixon's was. It's harder to see what can be done if a vital and permanent institution of the administrative state has been corrupted.
Title: Impeach corrupt officials, not seek special counsel; Boener's plan is feckless
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2014, 08:17:01 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381089/no-special-counsel-irs-scandal-just-impeach-corrupt-officials-andrew-c-mccarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/381244/boehner-issues-memo-explaining-his-feckless-plan-sue-obama-andrew-c-mccarthy
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on June 29, 2014, 09:47:05 AM
"and those who have protected those officials — need to be removed from office now, not two or three years from now when we may finally have a scrupulous attorney general. This is why the Constitution’s impeachment clause makes clear that the political process of removing malfeasant officials from power provides no double-jeopardy protection against a later criminal prosecution for the same misconduct"

So what does it take to impeach these officials?

And won't impeachment simply die in the Senate?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on June 29, 2014, 11:58:24 AM
"and those who have protected those officials — need to be removed from office now, not two or three years from now when we may finally have a scrupulous attorney general. This is why the Constitution’s impeachment clause makes clear that the political process of removing malfeasant officials from power provides no double-jeopardy protection against a later criminal prosecution for the same misconduct"

So what does it take to impeach these officials?

And won't impeachment simply die in the Senate?

I believe impeachment requires only a simple majority in the House.  Removal from office requires 2/3 majority of the Senate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermajority

It would die in the Senate, yes, but if they take their responsibilities seriously it would require them to take it up seriously in a trial and conduct a vote.  If done before the election, there are several hot-seat Dems who would have to give it careful consideration, Landreau, Begich, Hagan, Prior?  And there are others who may be sick and tired of this administration bringing down the good name of transparency and liberalism, lol.  After the election it still cannot be done on a party line vote.  As intended, impeachment of anyone requires significant support from both sides.

The impeachment proceedings would cause SOME press coverage of the case against them, and the trial in the Senate could get quite testy.  )

This is all time and energy not devoted to the administration's transformation project so in that sense we all win no matter the outcome.

Obviously if R's bring a weak case and get no crossover support it could easily backfire on them too, like budget showdowns, etc.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on June 30, 2014, 05:27:32 AM
Thanks for response.

OF course you know all this too....

It doesn't help that in Nixon's day the media was gunning for the Republican and now the vast majority is protecting the President.  Public opinion counts for everything in this kind of thing. 

Such a victory would be weak.  Obama will continue to do whatever he wants.   Ultimately he will pardon all the illegals.  That is his way of giving the Right the finger.
Title: Baraq will bypass Congress , , , again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 30, 2014, 05:27:26 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/30/obama-i-will-bypass-congress-fix-immigration/ 
Title: The latest on the war on immigration law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 01, 2014, 10:13:30 AM
http://patriotpost.us/articles/27011
Title: Don't make me violate the constitution again...
Post by: G M on July 01, 2014, 12:30:45 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/381590/obama-i-dont-prefer-taking-executive-action-congress-forces-me-andrew-johnson
Title: What would happen to you if you did this?
Post by: G M on July 02, 2014, 02:01:06 AM
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/more-on-the-irss-illegal-destruction-of-evidence.php
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 02, 2014, 02:55:46 AM
That is a very interesting legal point GM.
Title: When I worked for the USG, I got similar training
Post by: G M on July 05, 2014, 11:54:19 AM
http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/07/05/5949203/federal-government-email-from.html?rh=1
Title: McCarthy: Boener bringing whistle to a gunfight
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2014, 08:37:09 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381453/boehner-bringing-whistle-gunfight-andrew-c-mccarthy
Title: Re: McCarthy: Boener bringing whistle to a gunfight
Post by: DougMacG on July 06, 2014, 02:30:18 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381453/boehner-bringing-whistle-gunfight-andrew-c-mccarthy

I disagree with Andrew McCarthy.  They are not willing to  de-fund or impeach so  compare  blowing the  whistle only with not blowing the whistle.  What he does not say with certainty is that this will fail on standing. The lawsuit keeps the over reaches of power in the news.  McCarthy says correctly, this is about public opinion.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2014, 09:45:55 PM
I can envision it failing for reasons other than standing with a practical result of giving Obama a chance to pretend his lawless rampage has been upheld.

If the Reps can't make the case for defunding in the court of public opinion, how can they succeed in an effort to take it to SCOTUS?  Do we want SCOTUS as the arbiter of these things?  What if Hillary is elected and she gets to appoint some justices?  We'll be fuct.


I wish I had the time to read McCarthy's book on the case for impeachment.  Anyone here know of any serious reviews of it?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on July 07, 2014, 04:12:20 AM
Will try to find a good review- summary.

No matter how right the case for impeachment is, it still:

a) fails without Dem support, and

b) installs Joe Biden as President.

The two strategies are not mutually exclusive.  As you argue the merits of the lawsuit,  you are building the case for impeachment.

   
The main remedy is the next election.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law, House Lawsuit
Post by: DougMacG on July 09, 2014, 05:07:49 AM
THE BOEHNER LAWSUIT AGAINST OBAMA IS BEGINNING TO TAKE SHAPE
The Boehner Lawsuit Against Obama Is Beginning to Take ShapeA vote on the resolution to authorize the legal action is set for the week before August break.

July 8, 2014
Starting next week, House Republicans will launch a highly visible—and likely tumultuous—three-week process of bringing to the floor legislation to authorize their promised lawsuit against President Obama over his use of executive actions.

"In theory, you could report out a resolution tomorrow and vote on it," said a House GOP aide on Tuesday. "But that is not the approach [the leaders] want to take."

Rather, the aim is to display—if not actually engage in—a more deliberative process, even if amid controversy. This drawn-out script builds toward a potentially dramatic floor vote held just days, or even hours, before the House adjourns on July 31 for its August-long summer break.  more at link)

http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/the-boehner-lawsuit-against-obama-is-beginning-to-take-shape-20140708
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: MikeT on July 10, 2014, 05:24:16 PM
Personally, while I think it would be highly satisfying to me personally as a conservative, I hope that conservatives WON'T try to impeach Obama.  My own preference is that they simply attempt to turn him into a post-November lame duck legislatively (presuming that conservatives get enough seats back to overide a veto).  My reason being that O still has a... let's just say 'zealous' in the religious sense of the word... 25-40% base that is going to become very, very (very) galvanized if Conservatives make that move, either after, or especially, before November.

Please don't misconstrue-- I think this president is an overt liar, he is a terrible president, he is actively trying to sink the country, and  he is ENTIRELY impeachable, quality wise.  I just think it would be a bad idea.... imagine how twirled up the media will get about it.  It will just pour political gas on the fire, whereas I think Obama can be just as effectively neutered legislatively, *assuming* conservatives gain that super majority.   A two-year impeachment trial portrayed for that duration by MSNBC as 'white racist conservatives gunning for the black guy' every night on  the news running up to 2016 is a mistake.

Eric Holder, now, HIM I hope they tar and feather after November.  I understand that he is also impeachable. ( :-D)  If Conservatives win back the Congress, I will wager a digital beer that he simply resigns in the face of what is likely to be a very swift campaign to unseat him.

But, I'm open to opposing vp's.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 10, 2014, 11:34:47 PM
Politically I'm thinking it would be a bridge too far, even though both he and the nation thoroughly deserve it.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on July 11, 2014, 12:15:02 PM
Politically I'm thinking it would be a bridge too far, even though both he and the nation thoroughly deserve it.

For one thing, we don't have direct proof tying the President to some of the worst offenses.  Hard to say if willful neglect in governing equals high crimes and misdemeanors.

Impeachment is a political solution that would fail, install Biden as President if successful, and  most certainly backfire on Republicans. 

Republicans have a public perception problem.  They need to be seen as relentlessly advancing real solutions to real problems - every time they get a camera or microphone to their podium.  They need to change hearts and minds and they need to win races.

People are seeing how bad Democratic policies and governing can be, but haven't fully jumped over to conservative governing principles.  This is an enormous and historic opportunity to win people over and change directions.  The over-reaches of power and lawless governing are abominable, but side issues to being on the wrong track headed the wrong direction.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 11, 2014, 04:23:02 PM
Exactly so.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on July 11, 2014, 07:34:23 PM
Exactly so.

We won't impeach, but if we did, what would be the articles of impeachment against him?  Will anyone add, correct or fill in details to make the case:

1)  Fast and Furious, what exactly are we charging them with doing there?

2) IRS Targeting, applying the laws and enforcement mechanism unequally under the law with the intention of stifling opposition gaining unfair advantage in the election.

3) A long list of 'passing' laws by administrative decree when he couldn't get the votes to pass in congress, as required by the constitution.  EPA rules, for one example.  Removing the work requirement for welfare, for another.

4) 13 Unanimous rulings in the Supreme Court against the administration for over-reach of executive power.  http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/381296/supreme-court-rules-unanimously-against-obama-12th-and-13th-time-2012-john-fund

5) Benghazi:  Putting Americans in harm's way, not sending help, then deliberately misleading the American people about what happened.

6) Immigration and border unenforcement.

7)  ...


Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2014, 09:13:35 AM
A number of those have yet to be traced to him personally , , ,
Title: Sen. Sessions warns Obama plans to pardon illegals
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2014, 10:29:29 AM
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/07/14/EXCLUSIVE-Sessions-Warns-All-Of-Congress-Obama-s-New-Immigration-Strategy-Threatens-Foundation-Of-Our-Constitutional-Republic?utm_source=e_breitbart_com&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+July+15%2C+2014&utm_campaign=20140715_m121344458_Breitbart+News+Roundup%2C+July+15%2C+2014&utm_term=More
Title: Another crashed hard drive destroyed?!?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2014, 10:34:20 AM
Second post

http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/07/14/would-you-believe-another-crashed-hard-drive/
Title: Re: Another crashed hard drive destroyed?!?
Post by: G M on July 15, 2014, 12:28:15 PM
Second post

http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/07/14/would-you-believe-another-crashed-hard-drive/

Nixon was a beacon of integrity in comparison.
Title: Mark Levin lawsuit against EPA claims emails destroyed
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2014, 12:27:45 PM
http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2551237/
Title: Umm , , , well , , , ummm , , , maybe they were not vaporized after all , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2014, 01:17:50 PM
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/07/23/tale-tapes-irs-head-confirms-investigators-have-found-backup-tapes-in-lerner/
Title: Obama plans to bring Hondurans here directly
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 25, 2014, 10:13:49 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/25/world/americas/administration-weighs-plan-to-move-processing-of-youths-seeking-entry-to-honduras-.html?
Title: Halbig and Hammurabi
Post by: G M on July 28, 2014, 04:44:00 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383791/halbig-and-hammurabi-kevin-d-williamson
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law -Does Obama WANT impeachment
Post by: MikeT on July 28, 2014, 01:44:52 PM
Personally, I think this is EXACTLY what he wants, and is the only thing that is likely to reinvigorate his presidency...

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/383898/does-obama-want-get-impeached-rich-lowry
Title: Couirt says Obama-Holder must turn over OFF documents
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 31, 2014, 07:25:20 PM


http://www.tpnn.com/2014/07/31/breaking-court-says-obama-admin-must-turn-over-fast-and-furious-documents/
Title: Gowdy starts warming up
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 01, 2014, 02:28:45 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/07/31/trey-gowdy-interrogates-democrat-invited-law-prof-on-irs-scandal-watch-what-happens-when-the-witness-doesnt-answer-his-questions/
Title: AG Holder sees himself as an activist
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 04, 2014, 06:13:49 PM
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/08/04/eric-holder-makes-a-startling-admission-that-will-surprise-no-one/
Title: Re: AG Holder sees himself as an activist
Post by: G M on August 04, 2014, 07:44:45 PM
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/08/04/eric-holder-makes-a-startling-admission-that-will-surprise-no-one/

Shocking!
Title: WaPo warns Baraq not to tear up Constitution
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 06, 2014, 03:29:46 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/08/06/liberal-newspaper-warns-obama-dont-tear-up-the-constitution-with-executive-action-on-immigration/
Title: Walgreen intimidated from moving to Switzerland
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 07, 2014, 09:57:58 AM
A friend writes:


We have met the enemy and he is us. Yesterday, in a series of hits as operatic and brutal as the last 15 minutes of the Godfather, the government effectively made inversion through corporate merger an offense punishable by corporate death.

Using the threat of an unlimited Treasury investigation, the President and Senator Dick Durbin stopped Walgreen ( WAG) from moving to Switzerland. The wreckage of some $10 billion in lost stock value for mostly Main Street investors was left as a grim reminder not to cross the government by, in this case, following the letter of our own stupid laws.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/walgreens-becomes-government-whipping-boy-121835957.html

This is a mighty fine way to discourage foreign as well as domestic entrepreneurs from founding and keeping companies in the USA. Think about it -- "Using the threat of an unlimited Treasury investigation". This is becoming the standard modus operandi -- remember the IRS "investigations" of political activists.

===============

other friends comment:

Absolutely consistent with every other Federal policy, foreign and domestic. The US government is not only a colossus now, but has become a bully. It's acting more and more like an organized criminal enterprise.

We can also see, now, how a democracy gives us essentially zero control over the government machine. Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that democracy tends to increase the power of government and ultimately ensures that we have the worst societal members in positions of power. See http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=199

That's why our founding fathers advocated a Republic and abhorred democracy.

=============

Obamacare was arguably the most stupid thing the Obama administration has done to date. Trying to stop corporate inversions might be the second most stupid thing. Not only are the Dems showing themselves to be very anti-business, they are displaying supreme ignorance of how business and taxation interact. Instead of trying to stop inversions they should simply fix the tax code. But no, they want to force things to work their way, giving top priority to government's claim on profits. This will keep the economy weaker than it otherwise could have been for the next few years.
Title: Treasury and Inversion
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 07, 2014, 04:41:17 PM
http://online.wsj.com/articles/obamas-tax-law-rewrite-1407368237
Title: More than 20 Obama officials have lost or destroyed emails after probes launched
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 08, 2014, 12:53:18 PM
Issa: More Than 20 Obama Officials ‘Lost or Destroyed’ E-mails After House Launched Probes
By Joel Gehrke
August 7, 2014 5:27 PM



The revelation that Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Marilynn Tavenner did not retain her e-mails means that more than 20 witness in the Obama administration to lose or delete e-mails without notifying Congress, according to the top House investigator.

“The Obama administration has lost or destroyed e-mails for more than 20 witnesses, and in each case, the loss wasn’t disclosed to the National Archives or Congress for months or years, in violation of federal law,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) said of Tavenner’s lost e-mails.

“It defies logic that so many senior Administration officials were found to have ignored federal recordkeeping requirements only after Congress asked to see their e-mails,” he continued. “Just this week, my staff followed up with HHS, who has failed to comply with a subpoena from ten months ago. Even at that point, the administration did not inform us that there was a problem with Ms. Tavenner’s e-mail history. Yet again, we discover that this administration will not be forthright with the American people unless cornered.”

From February of 2010 to November of 2013 — one month after the launch of the HealthCare.gov website, as the Daily Caller’s Patrick Howley noted — Tavenner didn’t maintain copies of her e-mails as required.

“During her entire tenure at CMS, Ms. Tavenner’s CMS e-mail address, which is accessible to both colleagues and the public, has been subject to write-in campaigns involving thousands of e-mails from the public,” CMS wrote to the National Archives and Records Administration, per Howley.

“Therefore, she receives an extremely high volume of e-mails that she manages daily. To keep an orderly e-mail box and to stay within the agency’s e-mail system capacity limits, the administrator generally copied or forwarded e-mails to immediate staff for retention and retrieval, and did not maintain her own copies,” CMS said.

Issa subpoenaed the missing e-mails ten months ago. “The evidence is mounting that the website did not go through proper testing, including critical security testing, and that the Administration ignored repeated warnings from contractors about ongoing problems,” he said at the time. “The American people deserve to know why the administration spent significant taxpayer money on a product that is entirely dysfunctional and puts their personal information at risk.”
Title: Strange how this keeps happening...
Post by: G M on August 12, 2014, 12:11:26 PM
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/214864-more-lost-emails-when-will-democrats-have-enough
Title: Injustice
Post by: G M on August 12, 2014, 01:14:19 PM
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/214864-more-lost-emails-when-will-democrats-have-enough
Title: OFF: DOJ must provide list of documents
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2014, 11:06:45 AM
http://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Judge-Justice-Dept-must-provide-list-of-documents-5701446.php
Title: The war on cops
Post by: G M on August 22, 2014, 06:53:17 AM
http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/08/20/radical-doj-unit-ferguson/

A society that makes war on it's cops better learn to make friends with it's criminals.

Title: Inviting the rule of guns
Post by: G M on August 27, 2014, 06:05:11 AM
http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2014/08/25/untitled-n1882001/page/full
Title: Most transparent, ethical administration Evah! Conflict DOJ Lawyer rep'g IRS
Post by: G M on August 27, 2014, 10:16:06 AM
http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2014/08/conflict-doj-lawyer-representing-irs-in.html

Of course the MSM is all over this, right?
Title: Lawfare
Post by: G M on August 27, 2014, 10:26:04 AM
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/08/revealed-wisconsin-john-doe-investigation-was-full-blown-anti-conservative-fishing-expedition/
Title: Where have the unaccompanied illegal alien children gone?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2014, 11:44:34 AM


Where Have the Unaccompanied Alien Children Gone?
The government has shut down three shelters at U.S. military bases holding the unaccompanied alien children that streamed across the southern border earlier in the year. The government has released 37,477 of the children across the states, but exactly where they won't say. Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said, "It's outrageous. Now, this administration is telling the American people -- and Congress -- that we're not even entitled to know where these people are, where they're being held, what communities are going to be impacted." HHS has released a list of where 29,890 of the unaccompanied alien children were sent by county. But it doesn't show what towns are affected, whether the children are sent into a group home, or whether they are united with their families or are now in the foster care system. According to the Washington Examiner, only 280 were deported
Title: Secret IRS research project
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 09, 2014, 09:05:49 PM


http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-new-irs-documents-show-lerner-need-conservative-group-donor-lists-emails-mention-secret-research-project-top-irs-official/
Title: Enemy of the state
Post by: G M on September 14, 2014, 04:59:10 PM
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/09/feds-prison-dinesh-dsouza/
Title: IRS goes after Breitbart
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2014, 09:47:58 AM
http://www.darrellissa.com/view/?u=12109
Title: IRS, Justice Dept, corruption, collusion
Post by: DougMacG on September 17, 2014, 09:01:34 AM
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/justice-635165-department-irs.html

Boy, did he get a wrong number
Justice Dept. official offers conditional leak of IRS documents, to House GOP staffers.

ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Published: Sept. 15, 2014 Updated: 4:34 p.m.

The staff of the House Oversight Committee’s Republican majority received a curious phone call two Fridays ago from Brian Fallon, director of the Justice Department’s office of public affairs.

Mr. Fallon confided that he had certain documents pertaining to the Internal Revenue Service scandal, which had been requested by Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa.

He asked that staff leak the documents to “selected reporters” – affording Attorney General Eric Holder’s spokesman an opportunity to publicly downplay their significance – before he handed them over to Rep. Issa.

It was an artful plan by Mr. Fallon, which he almost certainly would have pulled off but for one slip up: He called Rep. Issa’s staff when he meant instead to call staff for Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking Democratic member. Mr. Fallon’s phone call confirmed suspicions that Rep. Cummings has been running interference for the Justice Department.

It also suggests to us that the President Obama’s attorney general is less interested in getting to the bottom of the IRS scandal – in which conservative groups were targeted for special scrutiny when applying for tax-exempt status routinely conferred to liberal groups – than he is in containing the episode’s political fallout.

The documents that prompted Mr. Fallon’s misdialed phone call concerned former Justice Department lawyer Andrew Strelka, who previously worked for Lois Lerner, who headed the scandalized IRS office that placed conservative groups on the agency’s “Be on the Lookout List.”

One of those groups was Z Street, a Philadelphia-based pro-Israel organization, which was informed by Ms. Lerner’s shop that it was targeted for special scrutiny because its views “contradict those of the administration,” Z Street founder Lori Lowenthal charges.

Ms. Lowenthal’s group filed a lawsuit in 2010 against the IRS – Z Street v. Koskinen. And of all the attorneys the Justice Department could have assigned to represent the IRS in the suit, Mr. Strelka was one of those chosen.  Mr. Issa’s committee is understandably interested in speaking to Mr. Strelka, who worked directly for Ms. Lerner, and whose participation on the Justice Department’s defense team in Z Street constituted an obvious conflict of interest.  But Mr. Strelka has been nowhere to be found. The Justice Department told Oversight Committee staff – the same staff Mr. Fallon mistakenly phoned – that Mr. Strelka is no longer on the payroll. But Justice has not provided contact information for its former counsel of record in the Z Street suit.

That’s the kind of ducking and dodging – in legal parlance, a better term would be “obstruction of justice” – that has marked the Justice Department’s investigation of the IRS scandal since Mr. Holder announced it 15 months ago.

Indeed, about the only things we know at this point is that Mr. Holder decided more than six months ago that no one would face criminal charges stemming from the IRS scandal – not even Ms. Lerner. And that the attorney general sees no need to turn over the investigation to an independent counsel.

Well, we take issue with Mr. Holder on both counts.

We think the suspicious loss of Ms. Lerner’s emails, as well as the destruction of her BlackBerry after a congressional investigation was launched, could very well be evidence of a criminal cover-up.  We also think that the Justice Department investigation of the IRS scandal is so compromised – as evidenced by Mr. Fallen’s unwtting phone call – that Mr. Holder needs to turn it over to an independent counsel.
Title: Holder stalling on OFF
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2014, 01:13:00 PM


http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2014/09/holder-presses-delay-on-fast-and-furious-documents-195556.html
Title: IRS targets for teaching the constitution
Post by: G M on September 24, 2014, 07:15:40 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/09/23/targeting-the-constitution/
Title: Questions for AG nominee
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 03, 2014, 02:05:12 PM


http://www.teapartypatriots.org/all-issues/news/tea-party-patriots-details-priority-issues-for-next-attorney-general/
Title: Morris on AG Holder and plugs his new book.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2014, 07:41:58 AM


http://www.dickmorris.com/attorney-general-corruption-u-s-history-dick-morris-tv-history-video/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
Title: Mass Amnesty appears to be under way.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 21, 2014, 03:47:03 PM
Don’t Be Fooled: Obama’s Agenda for Amnesty Has Already Begun
 

It would be refreshing if the Obama administration would do something right on the issue of immigration. Unfortunately for America, some hopes never result in change. Lawlessness continues to dominate White House policy.

To be clear, Barack Obama continues to completely disregard Rule of Law when it comes to immigration. He has usurped authority in order to keep our borders open to whoever wants to enter. He has refused to pressure the agencies tasked with enforcing laws on immigration to find and deport those who are here illegally. He has not only allowed tens of thousands of children from Central America to be transported into America illegally, but he has then redistributed them to cities throughout the U.S.
Last month, we reported that Obama, at the request of several prominent Democrats, delayed action on immigration reform (read: amnesty) because too many congressional seats might be lost over the issue come November. For the moment, it's on the backburner with the timer set to ring after the election. Yet the issue of immigration, specifically illegal immigration, is on the minds of voters who love this country enough to try and save it from a rogue administration bent on permanently changing the demographics of the nation in order to ensure a permanent Democrat voting bloc.

The president has every intention to move forward with his agenda of allowing illegal immigrants to flood the country. A new report highlights actions the Obama administration has already undertaken.

Recently, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) started soliciting bids for a contractor to produce nine million identification cards in one year -- five million more than the annual requirement so as to meet a possible “surge” scenario of new immigrants. The new ID cards will consist of Permanent Residency Cards (also known as green cards) or Employment Authorization Documentation cards, which, according to the report, “have been used to implement President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.”

The request for so many new ID cards to accommodate the “surge” indicates Obama is planning executive action. But the immigration reform policies he wants to impose on the nation will be overwhelming for our struggling economy, as well as schools and medical facilities across the nation. This, however, is just part of the path to amnesty for illegals.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also quietly announced last Friday that, as National Review's Mark Krikorian puts it, "Certain illegal aliens from Honduras and Nicaragua are having their amnesty extended, and USCIS is establishing the 'Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program.'” These illegal immigrants, estimated to number 90,000, have already had Temporary Protected Status since 1999, which was granted to them following Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Fifteen years of “Temporary Protected Status?” Sounds more like Permanent Protected Status, which is exactly what the new parole program will allow. It’s another frequently deployed deceitful Obama tactic -- just change the meaning of words in order to accommodate the agenda.

To make matters worse, another recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies reveals, “[D]eportations from within the United States dropped 34 percent from last year and the number of criminal alien deportations declined by 23 percent.” Further, of the 900,000 immigrants who received a final order of removal, “167,000 are convicted criminals who were released by ICE.” Why aren’t the agencies tasked with enforcing the law on illegal immigration doing their job?

The answer is simple: When a president has an agenda to fundamentally transform America, he will do whatever it takes to accomplish it. He must be stopped. But who will stop him? The current Congress has done little because Democrats control the Senate, and they continue to appropriate money for Obama's agenda. That must change on Election Day, or amnesty will steamroll ahead, to the peril of our already fragile Republic.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on October 21, 2014, 04:36:18 PM
The illegals are more brazen the ever.  They know this will happen.  And not darn thing we the people can do about it.

What war on the rule of  law?  The President has full pardon power.

We are so screwed.  OK who here wants to bet any of these immigrants will vote for Republicans?

Savage today was asking why can't Congress just arrest POTUS for this?   To inflict millions of illegals on the backs of US citizens in a country that is in financial trouble?

Much of my pay is already confiscated.  I see people every week walking into my office claiming disability.  It used to be maybe 50% was unreasonable.  It is not more like 80%.  Every darn little thing.   

Yeah I sure do resent this.  Now I am going to pay for their benefits now.

At the same time Silicon Valley and Hollywood are overwhelmingly giving to the Democrat Party.   Let me know when we start a new country.  I am in.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 21, 2014, 06:48:08 PM
If the Reps take the Senate and IF IF IF this turns out to be as it appears, I am game for impeachment.

What I am NOT game for is quitting.

Our Founding Fathers gave us a Republic.  It is up to us to keep it.
Title: Impeachment
Post by: ccp on October 22, 2014, 04:53:58 AM
"I am game for impeachment"

I agree with you on principle.

However, this is not viable.   It takes too long and a majority of Americans won't be for it. 

For this to have a chance we need majority support..

Look at what happened with Clinton.  It backfired.   He is, as Rush recently pointed out in his radio show (on Drudge) when bringing up Clinton over Lewinsky, that HE is now the "rock" star of the Crat party.  What a sad comment on our modern society.  The guy who did more to dumb down the respect for office, did more to dumb down the integrity and moral values of the Presidency (by not resigning in a dignified way) is now their King.

The country is simply too divided for this.  And forget Independents.  They will lambast Republicans as the party of "no" and will just whine that no one in Washington is getting "anything" done or working "across the aisle".
 
I guess we are stuck.  Hopefully win the Senate, get every single Republican in line (like the Crats do) and do what can be done and hope we win the Presidency in '16 and can turn some things around.  I don't see any other choice other than real revolution which in this day and age in this country has zero chance.

Savage suggested that only happens when people are literally "starving".
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2014, 08:20:55 AM
As this thread all too eloquently testifies, there is much more here than felonious fellatio. 

Fundamentally transforming America via the profoundly unconstitutional act of mass amnesty is something that MUST be stopped and IS something, especially on top of all the illegal postponements of Obamacare and all the rest of it, that DOES rise to the level of impeachment. 

Whether the impeachment succeeds or not, it seems to me it should succeed in not letting the purported mass amnesty to stand.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on October 22, 2014, 09:12:01 AM
It would seem to me that a presidential pardon would stop a prosecution, but granting citizenship would requires an act of Congress, signed by the President.  If an executive action is unconstitutional, there should be a way to stop it short of impeachment.

Removal from office requires a trial in the Senate with a 2/3 majority vote; no election scenario involves a 67 seat majority.  Impeachment ending in removal happens when the President's own party turns on him. (Not going to happen.)  The process takes a long time and attempts to install Biden as President, eligible for (re)election.  Even then, w still have to stop this, through the people, in the courts or through a constitutional crisis.

The question remains, how do you stop these guys?  From Fast and Furious, to IRS election process theft, to lying to the nation about Benghazi, to taking unconstitutional executive actions, how do we stop them?

The answer was supposed to be:  Win the House (2010).  Win the Senate (didn't happen, 2010, 2012, maybe 2014).  Win back the Presidency (didn't happen 2012, maybe 2016).  Have the Court strike down unconstitutional acts (didn't happen with ACA).  Vote contempt charges against cabinet members (had no consequence).

It comes down to political messaging and convincing a LOT more people that this kind of governing is unacceptable - and to offer a much better alternative.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2014, 11:01:05 AM

"The question remains, how do you stop these guys?  From Fast and Furious, to IRS election process theft, to lying to the nation about Benghazi, to taking unconstitutional executive actions, how do we stop them?"
Title: Valerie Jarret implicated in OFF?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 27, 2014, 12:05:05 PM

http://www.tpnn.com/2014/10/24/new-evidence-in-fast-and-furious-scandal-reveals-why-eric-holder-and-valerie-jarrett-should-both-be-in-jail/

also

http://patriotpost.us/articles/30350
Title: They said if I voted for Romney, we'd have government spying on journalists...
Post by: G M on October 27, 2014, 01:10:02 PM
http://nypost.com/2014/10/27/ex-cbs-reporter-government-related-entity-bugged-my-computer/?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=NYPFacebook&utm_medium=SocialFlow

I'm sure Holder will get right on this!
Title: I miss living in America
Post by: G M on October 27, 2014, 08:52:10 PM
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/10/the-most-stunning-news-story-of-2014.php

Where did my country go?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 28, 2014, 08:38:27 AM
I'm glad to see SA not folding up her tents and slinking off in discouragement.  Maybe this book will get some traction. 
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on October 28, 2014, 08:52:04 AM
I'm glad to see SA not folding up her tents and slinking off in discouragement.  Maybe this book will get some traction. 

We can only hope.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 28, 2014, 09:46:21 AM
FOX is running with coverage of her story and her book this morning.
Title: re.Government hacking into investigative reporter's computer and communications?
Post by: DougMacG on October 28, 2014, 09:56:52 AM
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/10/the-most-stunning-news-story-of-2014.php
Where did my country go?

If the guilty party is either the FBI, CIA, DIA or NSA, who do you have investigate this?

"If the Obama administration hacked into a reporter’s computers, used them to spy on her, and even prepared to frame her for a potential criminal prosecution by planting classified documents, aren’t we looking at the biggest scandal in American history?"

And if they didn't do it, and are outraged like the rest of us, where is the call for investigation?
--------------------------------------------------------
THE MOST STUNNING NEWS STORY OF 2014     John Hinderaker, Powerline   (Link above in the quote from GM)
Back in June 2013, we covered the hacking of at least one of reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s computers by persons unknown. CBS, which, as we now know, was anything but supportive of Attkisson, verified that the intrusion(s) had taken place:

A cyber security firm hired by CBS News has determined through forensic analysis that Sharyl Attkisson’s computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012. Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson’s accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data.

This party also used sophisticated methods to remove all possible indications of unauthorized activity, and alter system times to cause further confusion.

But we heard nothing further until the publication of Attkisson’s explosive book, Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington. Now the next shoe has dropped, as the New York Post reports:

In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and “flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.

“This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn’t have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America,” Attkisson quotes the source saying.

She speculates that the motive was to lay the groundwork for possible charges against her or her sources.

Attkisson says the source, who’s “connected to government three-letter agencies,” told her the computer was hacked into by “a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.”

The breach was accomplished through an “otherwise innocuous e-mail” that Attkisson says she got in February 2012, then twice “redone” and “refreshed” through a satellite hookup and a Wi-Fi connection at a Ritz-Carlton hotel.

The spyware included programs that Attkisson says monitored her every keystroke and gave the snoops access to all her e-mails and the passwords to her financial accounts.

“The intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a listening tool,” she wrote in “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.”

But the most shocking finding, she says, was the discovery of three classified documents that Number One told her were “buried deep in your operating system. In a place that, unless you’re a some kind of computer whiz specialist, you wouldn’t even know exists.”

“They probably planted them to be able to accuse you of having classified documents if they ever needed to do that at some point,” Number One added.

If the Obama administration hacked into a reporter’s computers, used them to spy on her, and even prepared to frame her for a potential criminal prosecution by planting classified documents, aren’t we looking at the biggest scandal in American history? Perhaps I’m forgetting something, but I can’t come up with anything to equal the stunning lawlessness on display here–if what Attkisson says is true (which I don’t doubt), and if the administration is the guilty party.

If this were a Republican administration, every reporter in Washington would be on the story, as would various law enforcement agencies. Given that we are talking about a Democratic president, Attkisson shouldn’t expect any help. If I were she, I would hire one of the top litigation firms in Washington and look into suing appropriate federal agencies. That won’t be easy; the most obvious obstacle is that she has to have evidence that a particular agency was involved in the hacking/spying operation in order to survive a motion to dismiss, but it will be hard (maybe impossible) to get that evidence without the ability to do discovery in the lawsuit. But having her own lawsuit allows her to run her own show, and private lawyers are generally far more effective at unearthing and processing information than, say, Congressional committees.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on October 28, 2014, 10:36:00 AM
If people don't go to prison for this,then we no longer have the rule of law at all.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on October 29, 2014, 08:17:14 AM
If people don't go to prison for this,then we no longer have the rule of law at all.

The story has sneaked into the Washington Post:

"Sharyl Attkisson’s computer intrusions: ‘Worse than anything Nixon ever did’"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/10/27/sharyl-attkissons-computer-intrusions-worse-than-anything-nixon-ever-did/
-----------------------------------------

They say the fish stinks from the head, but I was wondering who started the attacks on reporters and news organizations that are not supportive of this administration?
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/01/29/obama-vs-fox-news-behind-white-house-strategy-to-delegitimize-news-organization/
Title: WSJ: Tom Perez seeks AG gig
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 29, 2014, 03:19:37 PM
Tom Perez Has No Regrets
By
Mary Kissel
Oct. 29, 2014 2:35 p.m. ET
12 COMMENTS

It’s no secret in Washington that Labor Secretary Tom Perez wants to succeed Eric Holder as the nation’s next attorney general. But as a recent tweet reminded us, Mr. Perez has willfully ignored a House subpoena for more than a year . . . and he wants to be the country’s top lawyer?

Last week Mr. Perez gave this shout-out on the social media network to St. Paul, Minnesota Mayor Christopher Coleman: “Congrats to @mayorcoleman & the city of St. Paul for taking the next step to #LeadOnLeave!”—a reference to a Labor Department campaign for paid maternity leave. “#PaidLeave is good for families & our economy.”
Tom Perez, U.S. secretary of labor ENLARGE
Tom Perez, U.S. secretary of labor Bloomberg

Messrs. Perez and Coleman are quite a pair. In February 2012, as then-head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Mr. Perez agreed not to intervene in a False Claims Act case levelled against the city by a whistleblower. In exchange, Mr. Coleman agreed to withdraw the city’s pending lawsuit, Magner v. Gallagher, from the Supreme Court.

Magner concerned the legality of suing for unintentional discrimination (known as “disparate impact”) under the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Mr. Perez made a political name for himself at Justice by using the legal theory to accuse banks of racism and then reap hefty settlements. Many legal scholars considered the actions extortionary, and Mr. Perez—by frantically pushing to prevent the Justices from ruling on Magner—wanted to avoid a legal reckoning.

The House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, along with the minority staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee, launched an investigation. They found Mr. Perez had tried to cover up the quid pro quo and “likely violated both the spirit and letter of the Federal Records Act” by using his personal email accounts to conduct official government business. The House subpoenaed his emails.

Mr. Perez flouted the subpoena and was rewarded by the Obama administration with a nomination for Labor Secretary, which Majority Leader Harry Reid pushed through the Senate after killing the filibuster. Meanwhile, a second disparate impact case was also mysteriously withdrawn from the Supreme Court before the Justices could hear oral arguments. Now the court has accepted a third case.

Mr. Perez’s nomination for AG isn’t a sure thing. Brooklyn prosecutor Loretta Lynch and Solicitor General Donald Verrilli are also in the running, and Mr. Perez sports thin credentials on important matters like national security. But surely his flouting of the law is the biggest problem with his candidacy.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on November 02, 2014, 09:16:57 AM
Could a motivated Justice Department go after DNC operative encouragement of illegal voter fraud be possible.  Of course not one under Obama, but what about one under a Republican President?   IS this even possible amid reports on Drudge that Boehner can't even get a law firm to bring the case against Obama because of Democrat retribution against any lawyer who does this?:

Wasserman-Schultz, DNC hire army of lawyers to challenge election results
 
November 2, 2014  8:21 AM MST   Wasserman-Schultz is already preparing to do battle with GOP winners on Election Day.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC), led by its hard hitting and verbose chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, has hundreds of attorneys on retainer in order to fight the results of Tuesday's elections if things don't go their way, according a number of news stories on Sunday.

Voter identification laws appear to be the primary point of contention, with Republicans supporting the law and the Democrats opposing them. The DNC continues to use its "get out the vote" tactics while making allegations that the GOP is trying to "disenfranchise" minority voters, some of whom were proven to have been bused in from other districts or even states.

"These verbal tactics are beginning to become shopworn and bring to mind the words attributed to the father of Communism, Karl Marx: 'Accuse other of what you do.' If anything, it's the Republican National Committee officials who should hire a million lawyers and private detectives to launch investigations into alleged voting irregularities," said former police detective and corporate fraud investigator.

While the Democrats claim voter fraud -- especially voting by illegal aliens of 'green card' immigrants -- is a figment of the Republicans' imaginations, regardless of the studies that show illegal aliens indeed do register to vote and that the Democrats know it.

In one study, reported in an Examiner news story, it was shown that illegal aliens voting is not a "figment" of the GOP's imagination:

"The CCES is an esteemed and highly respected operation at Harvard University that recently published shocking information, gathered from big social science survey datasets, that supports Judicial Watch’s work in this area. In 2012 JW launched the Election Integrity Project, a widespread legal campaign to clean up voter registration rolls and support election integrity measures across the country. Our investigations immediately uncovered data that proved voter rolls in a number of states—including Mississippi, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Texas, Florida, California and Colorado—contained the names of individuals who are ineligible to vote."

While the DNC will deny it encourages illegal voting, a perfect example occurred during a congressional race in California between Democrat Francine Busby and Republican Brian Bilbray: Busby was heard on a tape recorder telling a room full of Latino illegal and legal immigrants that they didn't need "papers" -- meaning identification -- to vote. At the time Busby led in the polls, but once talk radio shows across the nation played the recording, the GOP's Bilbray decisively beat her on election day.

"A study released by the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation provides proof that illegal aliens and immigrants with green cards are committing rampant voter fraud in the United States. This is the reason that Democrats have supported "motor voter" legislation, to make it easier for voter fraud to occur, and why they have opposed voter IDs all of the way to the Supreme Court (where they lost in a suit against Indiana)," said Ted Lawrence, a political pollster and attorney.

While the mainstream news media are beginning to cover the story of rampant voter fraud perpetrated by liberal organizations such as ACORN, don't expect reporters to provide anymore than a passing interest in preventing illegal aliens -- or even legal immigrants -- from voting.
Title: Valerie Jarret and AG Holder in OFF
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 09, 2014, 11:36:17 AM
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152438405597951&fref=nf
Title: Professor Turley
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 19, 2014, 09:06:12 AM
"[T]he people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion." --Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 25, 1787

=================
An Obama supporter with integrity:

Barack Obama claims to be a "professor of constitutional law," but a genuine constitutional scholar, George Washington University's Jonathan Turley, a self-acknowledged liberal Obama supporter, has offered severe criticism of Obama's "über presidency," his abuse of executive orders and regulations to bypass Congress.

When asked by Fox News host Megyn Kelly how he would respond "to those who say many presidents have issued executive orders on immigration," Turley responded, "This would be unprecedented, and I think it would be an unprecedented threat to the balance of powers."

In July, Turley gave congressional testimony concerning Obama's abuse of executive orders: "When the president went to Congress and said he would go it alone, it obviously raises a concern. There's no license for going it alone in our system, and what he's done is very problematic. He's told agencies not to enforce some laws [and] has effectively rewritten laws through active interpretation that I find very problematic."

He continued: "Our system is changing in a dangerous and destabilizing way. What's emerging is an imperial presidency, an über presidency. ... The president's pledge to effectively govern alone is alarming but what is most alarming is his ability to fulfill that pledge. When a president can govern alone, he can become a government unto himself, which is precisely the danger that the Framers sought to avoid in the establishment of our tripartite system of government. ... Obama has repeatedly violated this [separation of powers] doctrine in the circumvention of Congress in areas ranging from health care to immigration law to environmental law. ... What we are witnessing today is one of the greatest challenges to our constitutional system in the history of this country. We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis with sweeping implications for our system of government. There could be no greater danger for individual liberty. I think the framers would be horrified. ... We are now at the constitutional tipping point for our system. ... No one in our system can 'go it alone' -- not Congress, not the courts, and not the president."

Turley reiterated this week: "[Obama has] become a government of one. ... It's becoming a particularly dangerous moment if the president is going to go forward, particularly after this election, to defy the will of Congress yet again. ... What the president is suggesting is tearing at the very fabric of the Constitution. We have a separation of powers ... to protect Liberty, to keep any branch from assuming so much authority that they become a threat to Liberty. ... The Democrats are creating something very, very dangerous. They're creating a president who can go it alone -- the very danger that are framers sought to avoid in our Constitution. ... I hope he does not get away with it."
Title: SNL Skit
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 25, 2014, 03:12:44 PM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=UUqFzWxSCi39LnW1JKFR3efg&v=JUDSeb2zHQ0
Title: Obama and the Roots of Ferguson Rage...
Post by: objectivist1 on November 26, 2014, 05:02:47 AM
Obama and the Roots of the Ferguson Rage

Posted By Arnold Ahlert On November 26, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com

And so the whirlwind, cultivated by Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, the mainstream media and the army of thugs they enabled, is now being reaped. As the result of a St. Louis County grand jury refusing to indict officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of Michael Brown, Ferguson, MO has become Ground Zero, in what irresponsible Missouri State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadali referred to on MSNBC as “St. Louis’s race war.”

One of the race war’s architects pleaded for calm shortly after the decision was announced. Yet even as Obama spoke about that “need for calm” and that there was “no excuse for violence,” he insisted, “We have to try to understand” the anger of those who demanded nothing less than a murder charge absent an ounce of evidence as an “understandable reaction” from people who believe “the law is being applied in a discriminatory fashion.”

Where did those people get that belief? Leave it to Obama to omit that critical information — the same President Obama who met with protest leaders and Sharpton on Nov. 5 at the White House. It was at that unscheduled meeting the president was ostensibly “concerned about Ferguson staying on course in terms of pursuing what it was that he knew we were advocating,” according to Sharpton. “He said he hopes that we’re doing all we can to keep peace.”

One is left to marvel at one of two realities. Either we have a president so utterly naive he believes a hoax-perpetrating, riot-inciting Al Sharpton, who denigrated the grand jury process, pre-organized protest rallies in 25 American cities, and uses his MSNBC platform to fire up racial unrest, is a man of peace. Or the president, who once urged his Latino followers to “punish our enemies,” remains as wedded to the same racial “us against them” mentality as America’s foremost racial arsonist. Is it really possible to believe the former?

Despite Obama’s superficial condemnations of violence, at least 25 businesses were set ablaze, many of which are total losses—and most of which were minority owned.  Ten cars were burned at a dealership, and a “lot of gunfire,” as Ferguson Asst. Fire Chief Steve Fair put it, made maintaining control of the streets highly problematic, if not impossible. Reporters were assaulted, the store Michael Brown robbed prior to his confrontation with Wilson was looted, and at least 61 people have been arrested. “What I’ve seen tonight is probably much worse than the worst night we ever had in August, and that’s truly unfortunate,” said St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar Monday at a 1:30 a.m press conference. Belmar further noted that there was “nothing left” along West Florissant between Solway Avenue and Chambers Road, that he heard at least 150 gun shots, and that he was surprised he and Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, who “got lit up,” as they drove through the area, weren’t hit by that gunfire.

“We talked about peaceful protest, and that did not happen tonight,” Johnson said. “We definitely have done something here that’s going to impact our community for a long time…that’s not how we create change.”

Sharpton continued to stir the pot, criticizing Democratic Prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s handling of the case, and demanding to know who voted for or against indicting Wilson, even though the law prohibits that information from being released. Sharpton’s motives are transparent. The grand jury was comprised of nine white and three black jurors, seven of whom were men, and five of whom were women. Agreement by nine of 12 jurors was necessary to file criminal charges, and there is no doubt Sharpton was attempting to exacerbate the racial divide with the implication that race was the over-riding, if not sole, factor in the decision.

The grand jury met 25 times over the course of three months and heard testimony from 60 witnesses. They contemplated charges ranging from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter, and the bar for indictment was “probable cause,” not the far more onerous standard of determining “beyond a reasonable doubt” whether a crime had been committed. A plethora of evidence from the proceedings was released, demonstrating how the jury came to the conclusions it did. It included testimony from Wilson himself, physical evidence, and other eyewitness testimony, including some from black Americans who corroborated Wilson’s version of events. ”They determined that no probable cause exists to file any charge against Officer Wilson, and returned a ‘No True Bill’ on each of the five indictments,” explained McCulloch.

None of it mattered to the mob—or seemingly the media either. McCulloch faced a hostile press during his post-announcement interview, one that has characterized that interview as “bizarre,” no doubt in response to his contention the media’s “insatiable appetite for something, for anything to talk about, following closely behind with the non-stop rumors on social media,” contributed to the firestorm surrounding this case.

That would be the same media that initially lionized Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson, whose thoroughly debunked eyewitness testimony about Brown being shot in the back while holding his hands up in surrender, epitomized the sensationalism that ignited the national firestorm. Johnson’s lie propelled much of the violence and unrest that followed, initiating the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” meme that remains prevalent to this day. It was the same media that perpetrated the “gentle giant” meme to describe the 6’4’’ nearly 300-pound Brown, only to see it undone by his participation in a strong-arm robbery of a much smaller store owner just prior to his confrontation with Wilson. It was the media who leaked information during the grand jury proceedings, drawing a rebuke from an “exasperated” Holder, despite the reality that MSNBC, The New York Times and the Daily Caller all cited the administration and the Justice Department itself as sources of those leaks. That would be the same Eric Holder who ginned up mistrust of the police when he spoke to 50 community leaders, not just as Attorney General of the United States, but “as a black man” who remembers how “angry” he was when police stopped him for speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike.

That would also be the same Eric Holder, who like his efforts in the Trayvon Martin case, initiated two separate DOJ investigations, one of potential civil rights violations allegedly committed by Wilson, and the other regarding practices of the Ferguson police force. “While the grand jury proceeding in St. Louis County has concluded, the Justice Department’s investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown remains ongoing,” he said. “In addition, the Department continues to investigate allegations of unconstitutional policing patterns or practices by the Ferguson Police Department.”

As for social media, the Twitterverse is currently inundated with calls for the murder of Officer Wilson.

Thus it is unsurprising the protests have spread beyond Ferguson. In Oakland, CA, hundreds of protesters bearing signs that read “The People Say Guilty!” and “Missouri, Palestine, Justice Now!” (an illuminating linkage to say the least) blocked a major highway and other streets, starting fires, breaking the window of a bank, and spray painting a police cruiser with graffiti. In New York City, three bridges were blocked, there were marchers in Times Square and the Police Commissioner had fake blood thrown at him. A total of 90 cities across the nation were besieged by protesters who were seemingly united by a trio of themes: Michael Brown was innocent, Darren Wilson was guilty, and police departments deliberately and disproportionately target black America.

And once again, a mainstream media still interested in fanning the racialist flames is leading the way. The same CNN that ripped the heavy police presence in Ferguson last August is the CNN whose morning co-anchor Michaela Pereira spoke about the community’s “frustration the police didn’t do more to protect those businesses.” Vox columnist Ezra Klein, who apparently considers himself more knowledgable than the grand jury, penned a column whose title says it all: “Officer Darren Wilson’s story is unbelievable. Literally.” Why? “None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown,” Klein insists, even as he admits the encounter with Wilson happened shortly after the aforementioned robbery. Salon.com pushed the envelope to the max, declaring the jury’s decision “reaffirmed what we already knew: America is a white supremacist state.”

Even Brown’s immediate family, who initially expressed “profound disappointment with the decision, but asked that the protests “be kept peaceful,” had their wishes undermined by stepfather Louis Head. Shortly after the decision was reached, he urged the crowd 10 times to “burn this bitch down.”

Those four words aptly describe the agenda of those with a vested interest in keeping Americans divided, angry and completely convinced the nation is a cesspool of racism where law enforcement must be considered the “enemy.” A nation where there are no longer irrefutable facts backed by witnesses and evidence, but a nation where reason and truth can only be determined after the filter of race is applied. One where the narrative must be served, even when that narrative assumes the characteristics of a lynch mob calling for the death of a police officer.

It is a narrative that dismisses the reality of a disproportionate amount of homicides and other crimes committed by black Americans (overwhelmingly against other black Americans) relative to their population, even as it has long glorified the thug culture that engenders most of it. It is the narrative that demands police forces who “reflect the racial demography of the community,” even as many black Americans have been “taught from the time that you could speak, from the time that you could understand speech, that police are to be feared and that they’re part of an occupying force that is there to circumvent the democratic processes and to strip you of your rights,” according to Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Saddest of all, it is the narrative supported by a president whose track record extends from his past with Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his racist rantings and assertions the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” when they arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., to his efforts to exacerbate racial discord during and after the Trayvon Martin saga. He is joined by an Attorney General who believes Americans are a “nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing race, one who insists voter ID is tantamount to “black disenfranchisement,” and continues to run the most racially polarized DOJ in recent history.

Even worse, both men have unduly elevated the status of race huckster Al Sharpton, showing up at National Action Network (NAN) galas to sing his praises. That odious reality is tantamount to a Republican president showing up at a meeting of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization and singing the praises of its white supremacist founder, David Duke. The fact that such as comparison is never made obscures the depths of the racial polarization embraced by the nations’s top two law enforcement officials. It is both an ongoing tragedy and a national disgrace that will only be assuaged when Sharpton and every other person who profits from the misery of millions is ejected from the national stage.

Until then, America will seethe. Well-meaning Americans on both sides of the color line will tread warily, remaining ultimately distrustful of each other, lest they be branded sellouts to “the cause.” The mob and its media enablers will continue to foment violence, looting, death and destruction, based largely on the notion that such mayhem is a “reasonable” price to be extracted from an irredeemably racist nation in need of “fundamental transformation.” One family will mourn for a son who could not resist the siren song of thug culture, while another family will continue to live in terror perhaps forever, or at least until the mob finds another bogeyman at whom it can channel its orchestrated blood-lust. The thin blue line that separates America from the anarchists will be stretched to its limits.

And the promise of a post-racial society that once propelled this president into the White House now more closely resembles the division and racialist bean-counting that epitomizes the community organizer mindset. In short, hope and change is going up in flames in Ferguson, MO.
Title: WSJ: Galston: The Law is with Obama on Immigration
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 26, 2014, 08:13:17 AM
Well?  Does this have merit?

===================================================

The Law Is With Obama on Immigration
History may judge the president unwise, but he is on firm ground going back to FDR.
By William A. Galston
Nov. 25, 2014 7:42 p.m. ET
76 COMMENTS

Last week I had a visceral sense that President Obama ’s executive order on immigration exceeded his constitutional authority. After days of reading and reflection, I’ve changed my mind. History may judge Mr. Obama’s move to be unwise, but it is not illegal.

To understand the current debate, we must look back to the heyday of the New Deal. Along with expansive legislation, new agencies charged with implementing these laws proliferated during the 1930s. President Franklin D. Roosevelt grew worried, commenting that the ability of these new entities to perform legislative and judicial as well as executive functions “threatens to develop a fourth branch of government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution.”


In 1939, FDR asked Attorney General Frank Murphy to study the matter, and the 1941 report of the committee Murphy led became an important source on which legislators were to draw. Five years later, after what the House Judiciary Committee described as a period of “painstaking and detailed study and drafting,” Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which has served ever since as the legal charter of the modern administrative state.

In general, the APA gives the executive branch wide discretion, especially in creating rules for implementing laws. If Congress establishes clear priorities for enforcing the laws it enacts, the executive branch is obligated to honor them as best it can, consistent with the resources Congress provides for this purpose. When Congress does not establish such priorities or fails to appropriate sufficient resources to implement them, the matter is (in the language of the APA) “committed to agency discretion.”

What happens if the exercise of this discretion leads an agency to refrain from enforcing the law against individuals or classes of individuals subject to the law?

As it happens, the Supreme Court answered this question three decades ago in Heckler v. Chaney, which remains the leading case. In a decision joined by seven other justices, Justice William Rehnquist noted that, “This Court has recognized on several occasions over many years that an agency’s decision not to prosecute or enforce, whether through civil or criminal process, is a decision generally committed to an agency’s absolute discretion.”

There is, Rehnquist concluded, a “general presumption of unreviewability of decisions not to enforce”—unless the statute being administered “quite clearly withdrew discretion from the agency and provided guidelines for the exercise of its enforcement power.” The Heckler court, however, did endorse another standard that could trigger judicial review—namely, cases in which an agency has “consciously and expressly adopted a general policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities.”

Now comes the current controversy over how the Obama administration has chosen to implement the Immigration and Nationality Act. Here again there is a leading case—Arizona v. United States in 2012. Justice Anthony Kennedy observed for the majority that although Congress has specified which aliens may be removed from the U.S. and the procedures for doing so, “A principal feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials.”

As a threshold matter, officials must decide “whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all,” an exercise of discretion that may embrace what Justice Kennedy termed “immediate human concerns.” And he offered an example: “Unauthorized workers trying to support their families . . . likely pose less danger than alien smugglers or aliens who commit a serious crime.”

This brings us to the opinion by the Office of Legal Counsel, which notes that because of the mismatch between the number of undocumented aliens (an estimated 11.3 million and the number of removals that annual congressional funding allows (400,000), the Department of Homeland Security has no choice but to establish enforcement priorities. The priorities announced in President Obama’s executive order, the OLC concludes, fall within the DHS’s “lawful discretion to enforce the immigration laws.”

The DHS policy doesn’t violate priorities established by Congress, says the OLC opinion. By establishing high-priority categories, moreover, the DHS does not altogether preclude the removal of aliens in lower priorities if the facts and circumstances warrant. And the DHS action meets the broad Heckler test: It doesn’t amount to an abdication of the DHS’s statutory responsibilities or constitute a rule overriding statutory commands.

President Obama’s decision has made many congressional Republicans very unhappy. They have three choices. They can try to use the power of the purse to prevent the president from carrying out his decision, which could lead to another government shutdown, an outcome that incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has pledged to avert. They can try to take the administration to court, which would have a low probability of success. Or they can try to do what they should have done years ago: Amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to create a better legal regime.

Isn’t it time for our legislators to stop whining and start legislating?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on November 26, 2014, 08:44:52 AM
"Well?  Does this have merit?"

No.

FDR is hardly the gold standard for following the constitution and Galston is paid to balance the WSJ editorial page with a  liberal, opposing view. 

Pres. Obama is not constrained by resources; his enforcement of the laws is constrained by his ideology.  You can find his reasons and motives for his actions in his own words.

Constitutional would be for the head of the executive branch to declare that he is doing he level best to uphold the current laws as written and passed until he can win enough votes in the legislative branch to get those laws changed to the way he would prefer them.  IMHO
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 26, 2014, 08:50:05 AM
a) Let's stay on point.  The standard he cites is not FDR, but the APA and SCOTUS decisions.

b) What about this?  "This brings us to the opinion by the Office of Legal Counsel, which notes that because of the mismatch between the number of undocumented aliens (an estimated 11.3 million and the number of removals that annual congressional funding allows (400,000), the Department of Homeland Security has no choice but to establish enforcement priorities."

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on November 26, 2014, 09:10:23 AM
Enforcement priorities doesn't allow for issuing work documents, taxpayer funded goodies.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 26, 2014, 12:46:42 PM
Agreed, that is a separate point-- for better or worse, does the OLC offer separate justification for it?

Regardless, I posted previously criticizing the President for not conferring with his OLC.  Though far too late, at last he has and as such the OLC is a definitive voice on his behalf. 

So then, when of the arguments based upon the APA (which which I worked while lawyering in DC back in 1982) and the SCOTUS decisions cited?   And, is the data about funding honestly presented?


If the Reps are going into a big fight over this, they better be able to answer this sort of thing concisely and precisely.


Title: From Obama's own lips
Post by: G M on November 26, 2014, 03:20:02 PM
http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/26/obama-i-just-took-an-action-to-change-the-law/

Excited utterance.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 26, 2014, 06:28:44 PM
I suspect that will appear in a campaign add or three , , ,

In the meantime, I am still looking for us to bring our collective analysis to the OLC's defense of the EO.
Title: Rule of law:"What if" Video, Obama called out by Bill Cassidy
Post by: DougMacG on December 03, 2014, 07:33:35 PM
Also posted on Glibness thread:

2 minutes, please watch if you didn't already.

"What if"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2JpRw8h9N0

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/in-louisiana-its-bill-cassidy-against-barack-obama.php
Title: Obama Following Alinsky's Plan TO THE LETTER...
Post by: objectivist1 on December 05, 2014, 08:12:32 AM
Saul Alinsky Lives in Ferguson

Posted By John Perazzo On December 5, 2014 @ frontpagemag.com

If the late Saul Alinsky—the America-hating godfather of community organizing—had fathered a black son, he’d look like Barack Obama. Obama has embraced, revered, and employed Alinsky’s philosophy and tactics of social revolution for decades. Indeed, he even taught Alinsky’s methods in community-organizing workshops and seminars in Chicago, when he was a much younger Marxist. As we witness the continuing racial unrest sparked by the shooting of Michael Brown and the Ferguson grand jury’s subsequent decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson, it is vital to understand that everything the protesters/rioters are doing—in Ferguson and elsewhere—is straight out of Alinsky’s most famous publications, Rules For Radicals and Reveille For Radicals. And Obama has encouraged them, every step of the way.

Obama and Alinsky never actually met in person, as Alinsky died when Obama was just 11 years old. Happily for the future president, by that time he had already been introduced to the man who would mentor him throughout his adolescent years—the America-hating, pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin, Communist writer Frank Marshall Davis. Thus, when Obama eventually encountered Alinsky through the latter’s writings, the young community organizer was well prepared ideologically to soak up Alinsky’s message.

In his quest to cultivate the type of chaos that would spark social revolution against America’s capitalist system, Alinsky exhorted activists to constantly “rub raw the resentments of the people” and “fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression”—but to do this in measured tones, so as not to “scare off” middle-class Americans.

Thus did Obama dutifully and blandly call for “unity” and calm in the immediate aftermath of Michael Brown’s “heartbreaking and tragic” death, even as he repeatedly reminded us that: “police should not be bullying or arresting” anyone without cause; “in too many communities, too many young men of color are left behind and left as objects to fear”; “there is no excuse for excessive force by police”; “the justice gap” between whites and nonwhites is unacceptable; “the criminal-justice system doesn’t treat people of all races equally”; and “too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement, guilty of walking while black, or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.” And when the grand jury in Ferguson subsequently chose not to indict Darren Wilson because the officer obviously had shot Michael Brown in self-defense, Obama pronounced the black community’s indignation to be “an understandable reaction.”

Obama’s carefully chosen words—all delivered in the type of nonthreatening tenor advocated by Saul Alinsky—clearly communicated a single, foundational theme to African Americans: In the racist cesspool known as the United States, black people are routinely treated like second-class citizens, if not subhumans. Oh, and by the way, please remain calm. Wink, wink.

Alinsky also taught that in some cases activists must be completely willing—for the sake of the moral principles in whose name they profess to act—to turn up the proverbial heat and watch society descend into chaos and anarchy; to “go into a state of complete confusion and draw [their] opponent into the vortex of the same confusion.” “Wherever possible,” Alinsky counseled, “go outside the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.”

Mobs of shouting protesters can accomplish that objective quite effectively—even if, as in the present case, they are oblivious to the irony that the poster-child of their crusade is a multiple felon who tried unsuccessfully to murder a police officer. Such demonstrations tend to give onlookers the impression that a mass movement is not only well underway, but may actually be preparing to shift into an even higher gear at any moment. A “mass impression,” said Alinsky, can be lasting and intimidating. Thus did President Obama recently meet at the White House with Al Sharpton, his leading advisor on race-related matters, and other protest leaders from Ferguson, urging them to “stay on course” with their activism.

Yet another highly noteworthy observation by Alinsky was this: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” “The threat,” he explained, “is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Thus, “if your organization is small in numbers,… raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does.”

This can be well achieved by orchestrating a host of simultaneous demonstrations in multiple cities or venues, exactly as the highly organized Gentle Giant crusade has been doing. The stature of these rallies is magnified by the fact that they receive lots of media attention, while scores of millions of ordinary Americans who view them with contempt and dread are busy quietly going about their lives, caring for their families, working at their jobs, and pursuing their personal aspirations as they see fit. Such people are many thousands of times more numerous than the perpetually aggrieved rabble-rousers of the Left, but Alinsky understood—as Obama understands today—that a spraying skunk inevitably gets all the attention when it intrudes unexpectedly upon a picnic.

The America-hating Alinsky also taught that activists, in order to cast themselves as defenders of high-minded principles, must theatrically convey “shock, horror, and moral outrage” whenever any of their demands—however inconsequential—are not met. And no one conveys such emotions more convincingly than Obama’s aforementioned racial “advisor,” Al Sharpton, who vows to continue the Michael Brown/anti-police brutality crusade until the end of time if necessary. Alinsky understood quite well that even a pathetic moral degenerate like Sharpton can be an effective revolutionary if he is skilled in the otherwise worthless arts of bluster and righteous indignation.

Lest anyone think there might be a way to bridge the gap between civil society and the revolutionaries in the vanguard of the current Gentle Giant Brigades, a dose of reality is in order: Alinsky emphasized that the overarching objective of any crusade is never to promote peace or reconciliation, but rather to be unwaveringly “dedicated to an eternal war” in which “there are no rules of fair play” and “no compromise” whatsoever; to mercilessly “pulverize” people with “fear”; and ultimately to “force their capitulation.”

We got a glimpse of this mindset recently when we learned that two New Black Panther Party members were plotting not only to blow up St. Louis’s famed Gateway Arch, but also to assassinate Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson and the city’s prosecuting attorney Bob McCulloch. And a shrieking Louis Farrakhan, for his part, has been busy urging black Americans to throw Molotov cocktails at white people in order to fulfill a scriptural “law of retaliation”; condemning whites for allegedly “killing us” in large numbers; and warning that “we’ll tear this goddamn country up!”

Like all Marxists, Obama, Sharpton, Farrakhan, and the rest of their fellow revolutionaries seek to tear society apart by pitting the “races,” the “classes,” and the “genders” against one another—“rubbing raw” their respective “resentments” until hatred abounds in every person’s heart and mayhem fills the streets. Michael Brown’s corpse is merely a building block for these rabble rousers. They know that someday another African American will be killed by a white police officer and thus be anointed as their movement’s next martyred saint. Bit by bit, the inconvenient fact that Brown was a violent, abusive criminal whose death was brought about entirely by his own actions will be airbrushed out of public memory. And the grievance mongers of the “civil rights” movement will wistfully remember him as just another innocent black victim whose life was tragically cut short by white depravity.

Saul Alinsky would be proud.
Title: Obama's Black Skin Privilege...
Post by: objectivist1 on December 08, 2014, 06:25:44 AM
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec72dLSHRHk
Title: Bush appointee judge to hear EO case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2014, 07:10:10 AM


http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/7/obama-amnesty-in-jeopardy-with-bush-judicial-appoi/
Title: Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke on Eric Holder...
Post by: objectivist1 on December 08, 2014, 07:32:12 AM
Now THIS ought to have been shown on Fox News Channel and every other national newscast, but of course, it wasn't:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMQCFqgAGyM&sns=em

Title: Fed judge rules Obama Amnesty EO unc'l
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2014, 07:17:16 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/16/judge-finds-obama-amnesty-unconstitutional/

Looking for a more serious source's coverage of this.
Title: Re: Fed judge rules Obama Amnesty EO unc'l
Post by: DougMacG on December 16, 2014, 07:29:11 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/16/judge-finds-obama-amnesty-unconstitutional/

Looking for a more serious source's coverage of this.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/16/district-court-declares-obama-immigration-action-unconstitutional/
Title: Re: Fed judge rules Obama Amnesty EO unc'l
Post by: G M on December 16, 2014, 07:48:25 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/16/judge-finds-obama-amnesty-unconstitutional/

Looking for a more serious source's coverage of this.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/16/district-court-declares-obama-immigration-action-unconstitutional/

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/16/federal-judge-obamas-executive-amnesty-is-unconstitutional/comment-page-1/#comments
Title: Matthew Vadum: Senators Vow to Stop Obama's Castro Odyssey...
Post by: objectivist1 on December 19, 2014, 01:46:48 PM
Senators Vow to Halt Obama’s Castro Odyssey

Posted By Matthew Vadum On December 19, 2014

Lawmakers opposed to President Obama’s sudden move to cozy up to Communist Cuba are vowing a full-court press to prevent official diplomatic recognition of the tropical prison republic from going forward.

But it is far from clear if lawmakers will be able to do much about Obama’s Cuban escapades. Presidents typically enjoy great latitude in foreign policy, especially concerning recognition of foreign governments. Lawmakers are probably on stronger ground in resisting repeal of the trade embargo that has been in place since the 1960s. On the other hand, Obama has a pen and a phone, as he likes to say, a reference to his brazen contempt for the rule of law and the strictures of the Constitution.

Obama’s dramatic actions are setting off a feeding frenzy as American companies salivate at the prospect of doing business in Cuba. Little do they realize that Cuba, a dilapidated Stalinist state that, thanks to the absence of good paying jobs, serves largely as a seedy sex tourism destination for Europeans and hardly has an economy at all. Some business restrictions were already eased by the U.S. around 2000. Some companies are allowed to sell medical equipment to the Cuban government. There is not much money to be made, at least not initially.

Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), who are both of Cuban ancestry, have made strong statements about their intentions.

Rubio said it mattered not a whit to him if “99 percent of people in polls” disagreed with his position. “Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naivete during his final two years in office.”

Rubio said he reserved the right “to do everything within the rules of the Senate to prevent that sort of individual from ever even coming up for a vote,” a reference to confirmation proceedings for a prospective U.S. ambassador to Cuba.

Menendez said he was “deeply disappointed” and that it was “a fallacy to believe that Cuba will reform because an American president opens his hands and the Castro brothers will suddenly unclench their fists.”

The chill in relations between the two countries has its roots in the Cold War.

Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, whose forces overthrew the comparatively mild authoritarian regime of Fulgencio Batista, tried to start a nuclear war with the United States and in 1963 openly called for the assassination of President John Kennedy and his brother Robert, the U.S. attorney general. War was only narrowly averted after the Soviet Union turned around ships that were carrying nuclear weapons to Cuba. A short time later one of Castro’s followers, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, murdered President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Cuba is a longtime state sponsor of terrorism and has meddled militarily and otherwise in the affairs of its neighbors and in faraway countries such as Angola. President Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada after its Marxist dictatorship grew too close to Cuba and he struggled heroically to aid the anticommunist contras in their war against the Cuban-backed Communist regime in Nicaragua.

Many conservatives in Congress and elsewhere are saying Obama is a weak leader.

For example, former Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said on the Fox News Channel on Wednesday that Obama’s moves on Cuba constitute “appeasement” and are a “very, very bad signal of weakness and lack of resolve by the president of the United States.”

Bolton and others are correct in terms of how the U.S. is perceived abroad under Obama but this does not reflect weak leadership on Obama’s part. This president knows what he is doing and when given the opportunity to do the right thing reliably chooses to do the wrong thing. Obama is taking the country’s foreign policy in exactly the right direction in terms of his sinister ideology. Obama does not mean well. He does not, unlike traditional U.S. presidents, think of himself as the leader of the free world. He wants to fundamentally transform America inside and out and is quite content to enfeeble the nation by crippling its military, betraying its allies, and embracing its enemies.


All of this excitement follows the sudden release Wednesday of Alan Gross, a U.S. development worker held in a Cuban prison. (An intelligence operative loyal to the U.S. was also released as part of the deal. Details about that individual are scarce.) Gross is a garden-variety leftist who is being used by President Obama to justify establishing diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba.

Obama is repaying a debt to his Marxist friends and allies. Just as President Bill Clinton rewarded his neo-communist supporters by pardoning Marxist Puerto Rican terrorists, Obama is rewarding his Castro-admiring base by freeing Communist spies working for a hostile foreign power.

Gross was reportedly a subcontractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is frequently a home for meddling left-wing activists. He reportedly worked on a program aimed at improving Internet access for Cuban Jews. Why the Obama administration would knowingly send an American into Cuba to perform services they had to have known were considered illegal by Cuban authorities is not clear. The free flow of information is a threat to any totalitarian regime, so a Cuban court convicted Gross of crimes against the state in 2011, sentencing him to a 15-year prison term.

Under a deal that Pope Francis, among others, helped to facilitate, Gross was exchanged for the remaining three members of the so-called Cuban Five — Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, and Ramón Labañino — who had been held in U.S. prisons.  All five Cuban nationals were convicted of spying in 2001. They gathered information on Cuban exiles in the U.S. in order to lay the ground for violent action against them in the future. Hernández was also convicted of conspiring to commit murder.

As Gross prepared for his press conference Wednesday, there was a portrait of  Communist mass murderer Che Guevara clearly visible in the Washington, D.C. office of Gross’s lawyer, high-profile attorney Scott D. Gilbert of Gilbert LLP. The bloodthirsty Guevara was minister of industry and president of the Cuban National Bank. He also administered kangaroo courts that condemned enemies of Fidel Castro’s regime to death. In other words, as Gross prepared his statement about being freed from a Cuban jail, an iconic photograph honoring Cuba’s most infamous jailer stared down at him.

Guevara, incidentally, wanted to annihilate the United States.

“If the nuclear missiles [from the missile crisis] had remained [in Cuba] we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City,” he said. “The victory of socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims.”

In the press conference Gross maligned the U.S., pulling a cowardly pox-on-both-your-houses stunt. Gross drew a moral equivalency between the U.S. and the ruthless authoritarian regime he just escaped:

I also feel compelled to share with you my utmost respect for and fondness of the people of Cuba. In no way are they responsible for the ordeal to which my family and I have been subjected. To me cubanos, or at least most of them, are incredibly kind, generous and talented. It pains me to see them treated so unjustly as a consequence of two governments’ mutually belligerent policies.  Five and a half decades of history show us such belligerence inhibits better judgment. Two wrongs never make a right. I truly hope that we can now get beyond these mutually belligerent policies and I was very happy to hear what the president had to say today. It was particularly cool to be sitting next to the secretary of state as he was hearing about his job description for the next couple of months. In all seriousness, this is a game-changer, which I fully support. [Emphasis added.]

Who condemns his own countrymen as imperialist warmongers after they cut a deal to get him repatriated from the clutches of a dictatorship? And why would he use his opportunity in the spotlight to praise President Obama’s decision to normalize relations with the regime that he believes unjustly imprisoned him?

The whole thing doesn’t smell right. Clearly it was in the works for a long time.

Interestingly enough, Gross thanked Jill Zuckman of left-wing PR firm SKDKnickerbocker for helping to free him. SKDKnickerbocker also employs former resident Maoist in the Obama White House, Anita Dunn, and Democrat operative Hilary Rosen. Gross also thanked Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Communist-friendly lawmakers Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) for freeing him.

Those who follow President Obama’s policy initiatives already know that he delights in trading Americans who hate America for foreign terrorists and murderers who also hate America. Not so long ago there was the swap of U.S Army deserter and Taliban collaborator Bowe Bergdahl for five members of the Taliban’s high command.  Not exactly a good deal for America.

What’s next for Obama, who is hellbent to knock America down a few pegs?

Diplomatic recognition for Iran? At first glance such a development might seem unlikely, but Obama does harbor deep affection for hardline Islamic states. He aided Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and during anti-government unrest that began in Iran in 2009, Obama effectively propped up the Islamist regime there by doing nothing to oppose it.

Anything could happen with Obama in his final two years in the White House.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 19, 2014, 05:13:32 PM
Obj:  That would go better on the Cuba thread I'm thinking , , ,

Doug, GM:  Thanks for the follow up.  It would appear that though the judge is correct, his words are but dicta on a question not truly before him.
Title: The dept. Of inJustice and the war on cops
Post by: G M on December 22, 2014, 12:29:48 PM
http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/12/21/4745/?singlepage=true
Title: Re: The dept. Of inJustice and the war on cops
Post by: DDF on December 22, 2014, 05:05:47 PM
http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/12/21/4745/?singlepage=true

Good read. There is a fundamental issue one key point of it though. No one will ever get everyone to "stand in awe" and to fear the armed forces. That just won't happen. Mexico is a wonderful example in that. It's certainly made an impression on me.
Title: Arrests? Prosecution?
Post by: G M on December 23, 2014, 01:56:08 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/21/rolling-stone-university-of-virginia-rape-story-sp/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law, T Sowell
Post by: DougMacG on December 30, 2014, 04:06:55 PM
"Every society has some people who don't respect the law. But, when it is the people in charge of the law — like the President of the United States and his Attorney General — who don't respect it, that is when we are in big trouble."  - Thomas Sowell  12/30/2104
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell123014.php3#etijXTP4TP8HK3XJ.99
Title: White House knew of CIA's raid on Senate Intel Comm's computers
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2015, 09:40:43 AM
While the following article does not acknowledge the relevant alternative points, there is much here worth considering:

http://conservativetribune.com/obama-crime-of-the-century/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2015, 09:56:32 AM
http://www.ijreview.com/2015/01/237540-arrest-record-nbc-news-star-shows-double-standard-celebrity-gun-owners/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=organic&utm_content=conservativedaily&utm_campaign=Guns
Title: Senate demands BO turn over IRS communications with White House
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2015, 05:53:07 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/29/senate-gop-to-obama-turn-over-communications-irs/
Title: FEd judge blasts DOJ lawyers in ATF case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2015, 09:49:18 AM
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/01/29/federal-judge-blasts-doj-lawyers-in-case-fast-furious-whistleblower/?intcmp=latestnews

Federal judge blasts DOJ lawyers in case of ATF whistle-blower
William La Jeunesse

By William La Jeunesse, Maxim Lott
Published January 29, 2015
FoxNews.com


Jay Dobyns is suing the Department of Justice, claiming it retaliated against him and damaged his reputation after he blew the whistle on the ATF's treatment of agents. (Fox Business News)

A federal judge angrily accused Justice Department attorneys in newly unsealed documents of "fraud upon the court" by intimidating a witness in a case involving a former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent who alleges the agency trashed his reputation.

Judge Francis Allegra, who was appointed to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in 1998 by President Bill Clinton, is presiding over a suit brought by former ATF agent Jay Dobyns against the government agency, which he claims retaliated against him and damaged his reputation. Dobyns infiltrated Hell's Angels and worked on cases involving the Aryan Brotherhood and MS-13 during his law enforcement career.

, In a newly unsealed, Dec. 1, 2014, court ruling that legal experts said was highly unusual, Allegra accused seven Justice Department lawyers of "fraud upon the court, banned them from making any further filings in the case and took the unusual step of directly notifying Attorney General Eric Holder.

“In 40 years of legal practice, government and private, I've never seen that done,” said David Hardy, a constitutional law expert who formerly worked in the U.S. Solicitor General’s Office.

    " ... a federal judge is basically questioning your candor with your court -- it’s exceedingly serious.”

    - Thomas Dupree, former DOJ official

Allegra said the government attorneys may have intimidated a witness and charged that seven of them may have kept illegal behavior secret from the court.

The controversy began after someone burned down the home of Dobyns. Dobyns claimed the ATF failed to protect his family, but the agency claimed Dobyns burned down his own home, a charge he denied. Dobyns then sued the ATF in U.S. Federal Claims Court for damaging his reputation and retaliation.

That’s when Justice Department lawyers got involved. In the ruling from last month, Allegra found a key witness in the trial said he was threatened by another ATF agent – and that ATF lawyers told the threatened agent not to tell the judge about it.

US Court of Federal Claims Judge Francis Allegra basted Justice Department lawyers in a recently unsealed ruling made last month.

“[ATF lawyers] ordered the agent in question not to communicate the threat to the court and stated that there would be repercussions if the agent did not follow counsel’s instructions,” Judge Allegra said in his ruling.

The judge also noted that a tape recording indicates that multiple DOJ lawyers knew about misconduct and did not inform the judge.

“It’s a huge issue. Look, a lawyer’s stock and trade is his or her integrity, and to have a situation where a federal judge is basically questioning your candor with your court -- it’s exceedingly serious,” Thomas Dupree, a partner at the prestigious law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and a former DOJ official from 2007 to 2009, told FoxNews.com.

Allegra’s ruling also documents other alleged wrongdoing. When Tom Atteberry, new ATF Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office, tried to reopen Dobyns’ arson case, Justice Department attorney Valerie Baker told him not to because it would damage her defense against Dobyns. Atteberry was a witnesses in the case, but the judge didn't hear about the DOJ effort to silence him until trial. Allegra ruled that the DOJ action may amount to ‘fraud upon the court.”

“It's very, very serious,” said Dupree. “Judges don’t make allegations like this cavalierly. It's only after they have looked at the evidence and they have deep concerns that something that is not quite right. This is not by any means a run-of-the-mill, routine order.”

Last summer, Judge Allegra awarded Dobyns $173,000 in damages and rebuked the ATF for failing to adequately protect Dobyns and his family. The Justice Department appealed that ruling, but in another highly unusual move, Allegra successfully had the case remanded to his court, so he can pursue the seven government lawyers for concealing evidence. Recently unsealed documents obtained by FoxNews.com show that the DOJ disagrees with Allegra’s decision to keep the lawyers out of his court.

“[The order] limits the attorney general’s authority to select counsel to represent the United States,” a legal filing by Acting Assistant Attorney General Joyce R. Branda from Jan. 5 reads.

She added: “We are prepared to move forward with the… proceedings at the Court’s convenience.”

Related Image
holder_ercch_020212.jpgExpand / Contract

The judge took the unusual step of writing Attorney General Eric Holder directly. (AP)

The judge also sent evidence of the alleged malpractice to the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which initially opened an investigation. However, legal filings show that the agency soon suspended its investigation, saying it would wait to hear what Judge Allegra finds.

Dobyns’ lawyer said that seemed odd given that Judge Allegra had specifically asked DOJ to investigate.

“He asked OPR to investigate these matters,” James Reed, Dobyns’ attorney, told FoxNews.com. “In nearly a quarter-century practicing law I’ve never come close to seeing anything like this,” he said.

Others, such as former ATF agents, said they were not surprised given their experience with the agency.

“It is atrocious. If they can do this to a highly decorated federal agent, imagine what they can do to the average Joe,” said Vince Cefalu, a former agent who helped expose the Operation Fast and Furious scandal and who successfully sued the ATF for retaliating against him.

The ATF declined to comment on the case. Fox News also asked Attorney General Eric Holder if the lawyers involved had been disciplined. The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Blogger David Codrea, one of the first to discover the unsealed documents, said it shows “a pattern of institutional corruption and arrogance that gets its tone set from the top.”

Maxim Lott is a Fox News Channel producer and can be reached at maximlott.com or maxim.lott@foxnews.com
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on February 02, 2015, 11:06:29 AM
Dobyns is a heroic guy, and the Conduct by the ATF is appalling.
Title: Who could have seen this coming? No hearings until 2019.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2015, 02:58:00 PM
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2015/02/02/doj-dilemma-so-many-illegal-aliens-the-courts-cant-handle-them/
Title: Re: Who could have seen this coming? No hearings until 2019.
Post by: G M on February 02, 2015, 03:05:11 PM
http://www.gopusa.com/news/2015/02/02/doj-dilemma-so-many-illegal-aliens-the-courts-cant-handle-them/


Cloward-Piven the system.
Title: Obama handed out millions of illegal work permits
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2015, 08:17:59 PM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/02/02/obama-has-handed-out-millions-of-work-permits-to-people-not-authorized-to-work/
Title: Amnesty tax bonus for illegals
Post by: G M on February 04, 2015, 09:23:20 AM
http://legalinsurrection.com/2015/02/executive-amnesty-comes-with-a-tax-bonus-loophole/
Title: Gingrich: Bureaucrats tampering with Choke Point witnesses
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 04, 2015, 09:15:47 PM


Bureaucrats Tampering with Choke Point Witnesses

Last month the U.S. Consumer Coalition revealed audio tapes proving what small business owners have been reporting for years: the Obama administration is throwing around threats of regulation to try to squeeze out of existence industries the bureaucrats don’t like.

As I wrote last month, in an Obama administration initiative known as “Operation Choke Point,” regulators from the CFPB, FDIC and the Justice Department collaborate to threaten banks, payment processors, and other financial institutions with regulatory consequences unless they cut off service to businesses in any of 30 industries on the administration’s target list.

That list, revealed in a 2011 document from the FDIC, includes gun and ammunition dealers, coin dealers, payday lenders, and sellers of “racist materials,” among other categories of perfectly legal (if not necessarily beloved) businesses. The result is that companies operating in these industries have found it increasingly difficult to do business, because the financial services they rely on for their day-to-day transactions are increasingly dropping them as clients.

Many of the banks and payment processors have told the people they’ve dropped that the decision didn’t reflect their behavior as clients. Instead, business owners have
reported, banks and payment processors say the feds are forcing them to drop clients in targeted industries.

In one typical notice, obtained by the Washington Post, a banker wrote a business that “based on your performance, there’s no way we shouldn’t be a credit provider. Our only issue is, and it has always been, the space in which you operate. It is the scrutiny that you, and now that we, are under.”

The USCC tapes, provided by Wisconsin firearms dealer Mike Schuetz, were even more explicit about the administration’s abuse. As Breitbart reports:

“[Federal] examiners…came in and looked at our accounts…looked at our books,” one official of Heritage Credit Union is heard telling Schuetz on one of the tapes. “Here’s some accounts that we feel that we’re going to regulate you on…and kinda put the screws to us as far as what we could and couldn’t do. The regulatory and compliance issues that we said earlier are true. We never used to have to do that stuff…and our hands are tied by it.”

Other audio recordings are equally chilling. “You wouldn’t believe the regulations we have and when they came in and nailed us on that [accounts] there were about a dozen of them crawling around the building,” a Heritage Credit Union official is heard on the tapes telling Schuetz.

This is pretty chilling behavior when you consider that these regulators are targeting small, legal businesses like Mike’s firearms dealership in Wisconsin.

And those bureaucrats evidently don’t appreciate their tactics being exposed so publicly. Following the disclosure of the tapes, the CFPB distributed a bulletin last week, telling financial services companies they aren’t allowed to talk to “third parties” about federal “supervisory” activities. The bulletin, which was obtained the by Daily Caller, states:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] issues this compliance bulletin as a reminder that, with limited exceptions, persons in possession of confidential information, including confidential supervisory information [CSI], may not disclose such information to third parties...

‘Confidential information’ means ‘confidential consumer complaint information, confidential investigative information, and confidential supervisory information, as well as any other CFPB information that may be exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act pursuant.

In other words, the feds are telling the banks and payment processors to shut up about Operation Choke Point. They don’t want them disclosing to businesses like Mike’s that federal regulators ordered the service terminations. So they’re offering a “reminder” that regulators “may not” release that information to “third parties”--the affected businesses.

This is a bureaucracy behaving more like the Soviet dictatorship than like a group of civil servants. The administration’s veiled threat is tantamount to witness tampering.
Operation Choke Point--and the bureaucratic attempt to cover up its existence--are a sobering reminder of the dangers of centralized power. It’s a genuine threat to freedom when federal bureaucrats have it in their power to ruin the lives and destroy the livelihoods of ordinary, law-abiding Americans.

Your Friend,
Newt
Title: Gowdy ramps up the pressure
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2015, 01:05:38 PM


http://conservativetribune.com/gowdy-drops-bombshell-coverup/
Title: War on the rule of law, Obama Admin won't release IRS targeting documents
Post by: DougMacG on February 10, 2015, 08:32:36 AM
The most transparent administration ever.  Unite, not divide us.  Everyone deserves a fair shake under the law.  That is, unless you dare to disagree with us.

Wasn't mis-use of the IRS the straw that broke Nixon's back?  Good to see a non-conservative source pissed off over this.

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/232249-feds-wont-release-irs-targeting-documents

The Obama administration is refusing to publicly release more than 500 documents on the IRS’s targeting of Tea Party groups.

Twenty months after the IRS scandal broke, there are still many unanswered questions about who was spearheading the agency’s scrutiny of conservative-leaning organizations.

The Hill sought access to government documents that might provide a glimpse of the decision-making through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The Hill asked for 2013 emails and other correspondence between the IRS and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). The request specifically sought emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner and Treasury officials, including Secretary Jack Lew, while the inspector general was working on its explosive May 2013 report that the IRS used “inappropriate criteria” to review the political activities of tax-exempt groups.

TIGTA opted not to release any of the 512 documents covered by the request...
Title: Ted judge in TX halts Obama's EO.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2015, 11:48:45 PM
Obama Immigration Policy Halted by Federal Judge in Texas
A federal judge in Texas has ordered a halt, at least temporarily, to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, siding with Texas and 25 other states that filed a lawsuit opposing the initiatives.
In an order filed on Monday, the judge, Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville, prohibited the Obama administration from carrying out programs the president announced in November that would offer protection from deportation and work permits to as many as five million undocumented immigrants. The first of those programs was scheduled to start receiving applications on Wednesday.
Judge Hanen, an outspoken critic of the administration on immigration policy, found that the states had satisfied the minimum legal requirements to bring their lawsuit. He said the Obama administration had failed to comply with basic administrative procedures for putting such a sweeping program into effect.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/us/obama-immigration-policy-halted-by-federal-judge-in-texas.html?emc=edit_na_20150217

Title: The Rule of Law wins one!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2015, 10:15:39 AM


http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2015/02/chickens-come-home-to-roost-jeremiah-wrights-daughter-is-sent-to-prison/
Title: Noose tightening around Lerner of IRS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 02, 2015, 11:15:15 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/26/irs-watchdog-reveals-lois-lerner-missing-emails-no/?page=all
Title: Any confirm or deny on this?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2015, 09:37:56 PM

http://bearingarms.com/atf-claims-publishing-mistake-m855-ban-2014-atf-regulations-guide-goes-viral/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on March 21, 2015, 05:15:33 AM
I am not sure how I started receiving Hillsdale imprimis but it has great articles (of course I agree with the vast majority of them   8-)

This could go under the immigration thread too.   

But we need not fear.   The elite Republicans are trying to elect a grown-up who will handle this.

http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/
Title: Trigger warning
Post by: G M on April 06, 2015, 12:43:27 AM
http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2015/04/05/liberals-may-regret-their-new-rules-n1980933/page/full
Title: Fed judge insists on enforcement
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 07, 2015, 10:20:46 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/7/obama-motion-immediately-restart-amnesty-rejected-/
Title: DOJ's war on hookers
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 11, 2015, 10:36:49 AM


http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/10/eric-holder-tells-doj-employees-no-more-prostitutes/
Title: What it looks like to the other side
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 12, 2015, 11:50:04 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-rising-insurrection-against-obama/2015/04/03/d00e39f6-d94f-11e4-ba28-f2a685dc7f89_story.html
Title: This bears watching , , , and needs confirmation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 05, 2015, 11:16:15 AM


http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/there-is-no-more-doubt-i-have-the-proof-that-ties-obama-and-the-democratic-party-to-the-irs-scandal/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%205-5-15%20Build-TUES
Title: VDH nails it
Post by: G M on May 06, 2015, 05:31:40 PM
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/050615-751347-us-shows-all-the-symptoms-of-a-civilization-in-collapse.htm?p=2
Title: WSJ: The Scandals we don't know about
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 09, 2015, 10:10:19 AM
 By
Kimberley A. Strassel
May 7, 2015 7:13 p.m. ET
199 COMMENTS

We’re about a year out from the uproar over Department of Veterans Affairs patient waiting lists, and a few months into a new VA scandal. The new scandal is that we don’t know what other scandals there are.

Congress is trying to find out, teeing up an unprecedented battle between the Senate and an investigator who in theory exists to help the Senate: the VA’s inspector general. At issue are thousands of pages of documents that may well reveal significant new areas of department dysfunction, but which the current acting inspector general is point-blank refusing to turn over to congressional overseers. The moment ought to be inspiring a debate over President Obama’s willful obstruction of rigorous IG oversight.

This saga begins in 2011, when the Veterans Affairs’ IG was alerted by members of Congress and whistleblowers to the potential of dangerous overprescription of opiates at the VA’s Tomah facility in Wisconsin. The IG’s office commenced a plodding, three-year investigation. Today’s acting IG, Richard J. Griffin (who took over in 2013), closed that investigation in March 2014, but he did not alert Congress to the fact or make the report public. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who runs the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, didn’t even find out about the existence of the report until this January, and only to discover it was a mere 11 pages and said claims of wrongdoing could not be substantiated.

This finding was mind-boggling given an account in January from the Center for Investigative Reporting showing that the number of Tomah opiate prescriptions had quintupled over eight years, despite fewer patients. Veterans refer to the facility as “Candyland.” Mr. Johnson at a field hearing in March heard from Marvin Simcakoski, whose 35-year-old son died of an overdose there in August 2014. The hearing revealed three additional deaths and included testimony by Tomah employees who had been fired after raising concerns about—or refusing to fill—narcotics prescriptions. One psychologist committed suicide after being terminated.

Even the VA was more critical of itself than was the IG. The department released its own internal investigation of Tomah in March, finding opiate prescription rates 2.5 times the national average, higher average doses, “unsafe clinical practices” and “patient harm” as the result of overprescription.

Mr. Johnson, determined to get to the bottom of Tomah, asked the IG in February to turn over its broader investigative file. The IG’s office has to this day refused to do so, initially (and belligerently) claiming Congress has no “legitimate oversight purpose” for the file, and throwing up all kinds of excuses about statutory bars (including privacy laws) to its release. This is all nonsense, given that inspectors general exist to aid Congress in oversight and that the laws in question therefore have express exemptions for disclosing information to legislators.

Then again, nondisclosure seems to be a habit with this IG office—ranging across years and different officials. USA Today reported in March that the office has conducted 140 health investigations since 2006 that had never been made public. Under growing pressure, the IG finally released them late last week, and the newspaper ran a follow-up noting that the cases ranged from “missed diagnoses” to “failures during surgery” to “misuse of funds” to “personnel issues” to yet more facilities that may be giving “questionable amounts or combinations of narcotics.” In many cases, said the newspaper, “the department’s chief watchdog trusted the VA to correct problems on its own.” Really?

The devotion to secrecy suggests a jarring problem in the entire culture of the Veterans Affairs’ IG office, one that is a little too cozy with the object of its investigative mandate. The whole point of an IG is to blow the whistle on executive-branch failings. Most inspectors general border on fanatic in their oversight, are big into transparency, and have strong working relationships with congressional investigators. By contrast, Mr. Johnson last week was forced to take the extraordinary (and potentially unprecedented) step of issuing a subpoena for IG documents.

The episode is also raising questions about whether President Obama perhaps likes it this way. Mr. Griffin has been the supposedly temporary acting IG at Veterans for more than two years, an uncertainty that may in itself be feeding into office problems. He’s still there because Mr. Obama has failed to appoint a permanent head. In March, all 16 members of Mr. Johnson’s committee—Republicans and Democrats—wrote to Mr. Obama noting that there were 10 IG vacancies, including for such not-so-minor posts as Interior, the CIA and Export-Import Bank. They noted that there were nominations pending for only two of the 10, and requested he move quickly to fill the rest.

Then again, if you are the president, wracked by scandals and mismanagement in your administration, it might be convenient to put IG nominations on the back burner. The conduct of the VA is one of those big scandals, and the cursory evidence suggests the department could still harbor a lot of secrets.

The next time Democrats complain that a GOP Senate isn’t acting on an Obama nomination, Republicans might point out the more important nominations that they are still waiting for.

Write to kim@wsj.com
Popular on WSJ



   

Title: Reps joinl legal fight over Obama's amnesty
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 12, 2015, 09:12:11 PM
Republicans Join Legal Fight Over Obama's Amnesty
By Dan Gilmore · May 12, 2015
Print Email Bigger Smaller

Congressional Republicans have thrown their weight against the Obama administration in the case deciding the legality of the executive branch’s executive actions on immigration. On Monday, 113 GOP lawmakers filed an amicus brief with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that Barack Obama violated Congress' constitutional role and disrupted the “delicate balance of powers.” The brief said Congress has the responsibility to decide an alien’s rights to be in this country — as clarified by the Supreme Court. Sure, when Congress is silent on an issue, the president can go ahead and do his or her part to fix the problem. But Congress already provided guidance on immigration. “Critically,” the brief reads, “Congress’s refusal to enact President Obama’s preferred policy is not ‘silence’; it represents the constitutional system working as intended. Congress has enacted extensive immigration laws — they are simply not enacted in the manner President Obama prefers. Differing policy preferences do not provide license to, as President Obama said, ‘change the law.’”

Republicans are confident that Judge Andrew Hanen will ultimately strike down Obama’s executive action. After all, the federal government has treated his orders with distain. Turns out, after Hanen ordered a stop to the implementation of Obama’s immigration plans, the government went ahead and continued implementing them anyway. This case may very well be a damning judgment on Obama’s power to execute executive orders. More…
Title: Extenuating variable in IRS affair?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2015, 11:30:18 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/418575/conservative-group-uncovers-new-roots-irs-scandal-eliana-johnson
Title: "Stingray" untethered to legal process
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2015, 06:14:13 PM
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/county-sheriff-has-used-stingray-over-300-times-with-no-warrant/
Title: Re: "Stingray" untethered to legal process
Post by: G M on May 25, 2015, 07:05:28 PM
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/county-sheriff-has-used-stingray-over-300-times-with-no-warrant/

http://www.aele.org/law/2011all02/460FSupp2d448.pdf

The headline and article are not accurate.
Title: 5th Circuit upholds injunction against BO's EO for illegals
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 26, 2015, 03:04:50 PM
http://www.wsj.com/articles/appeals-court-keeps-block-of-obama-immigration-plan-1432665888
Title: DOJ says "Nevermind what SCOTUS said , , ,"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 09, 2015, 06:07:26 PM
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/09/obama-fisa-court-surveillance-phone-records
Title: Fed's seizure of AIG ruled illegal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2015, 07:36:28 AM

June 15, 2015 7:16 p.m. ET
79 COMMENTS

For every angry taxpayer who wondered in 2008 how the government could take over one of the world’s largest insurance companies, a federal judge has now provided the answer: It couldn’t, at least not within the bounds of the law.

On Monday Judge Thomas Wheeler of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s seizure of a controlling stake in AIG during the financial crisis was “an illegal exaction under the Fifth Amendment.” The judge explains that the New York Fed, the Treasury and their outside counsel at the Davis Polk law firm “carefully orchestrated the AIG takeover so that shareholders would be excluded from the process. These entities avoided at all cost the opportunity for any shareholder vote.”

The Fed and its regional banks can lend in an emergency. But they lack the authority to seize ownership of private companies. Did government officials realize at the time that they were violating the Constitution? If so, they probably figured they could get away with it. In a Sept. 17, 2008 email, a Davis Polk lawyer wrote that “the [government] is on thin ice and they know it. But who’s going to challenge them on this ground?”

The man who did challenge them is former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg, who now leads Starr International, which brought the case on behalf of AIG shareholders. Monday’s decision is vindication for Mr. Greenberg, who has argued for years that AIG was treated much more harshly than the giant banks and was used as a vehicle to rescue those banks.

Judge Wheeler agrees. “Since most of the other financial institutions experiencing a liquidity crisis were counterparties to AIG transactions, the Government was able to minimize the ripple effect of an AIG failure by using AIG’s assets to make sure the counterparties were paid in full on these transactions,” he writes.

The feds charged AIG much more than it charged the banks to borrow money, and it demanded 79.9% ownership in AIG for the privilege. “With the exception of AIG, the Government has never demanded equity ownership from a borrower in the 75-year history of Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act,” he writes. The feds later sold the shares for a $22.7 billion profit.

This is all a significant rebuke to the main government actors at the time: Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, chief of the New York Fed Tim Geithner, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Though Mr. Greenberg won the legal argument and a moral victory, he lost on his claim that AIG would have been better off in bankruptcy and thus should be compensated for the seizure. Judge Wheeler ruled that AIG shareholders would likely have been wiped out in a bankruptcy, so they can’t claim to have suffered harm. But the judge nonetheless adds that “a troubling feature of this outcome is that the Government is able to avoid any damages notwithstanding its plain violations of the Federal Reserve Act.”

Both sides are reviewing the decision and won’t say whether they plan to appeal, but the mixed verdict may be the best in a bad situation. Taxpayers will not be required to pay a damage amount that would be highly speculative. But the judicial branch of government has forcefully reminded the executive of its legal limits, even in a crisis.

Fed officials are upset that Congress wants to rein in their emergency and regulatory powers. Congress might have less cause to act if the Fed showed more respect for the law.
Title: depends....
Post by: G M on June 20, 2015, 05:09:28 PM
http://m.thenation.com/article/208593-you-can-be-prosecuted-clearing-your-browser-history

Unless you are Hillary Clinton.
Title: Valerie Jarrett's Documented Communist Ties...
Post by: objectivist1 on June 25, 2015, 05:32:28 AM
FBI Files Document Communism in Valerie Jarrett’s Family

JUNE 22, 2015

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama’s trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.

Jarrett’s dad, pathologist and geneticist Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows. In 1950 Bowman was in communication with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who fled to Prague after getting charged with espionage. Bowman was also a member of a Communist-sympathizing group called the Association of Internes and Medical Students. After his discharge from the Army Medical Corps in 1955, Bowman moved to Iran to work, the FBI records show.

According to Bowman’s government file the Association of Internes and Medical Students is an organization that “has long been a faithful follower of the Communist Party line” and engages in un-American activities. Bowman was born in Washington D.C. and had deep ties to Chicago, where he often collaborated with fellow Communists. JW also obtained documents on Bowman from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) showing that the FBI was brought into investigate him for his membership in a group that “follows the communist party line.” The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett’s maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.

Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was also another big-time Chicago Communist, according to separate FBI files obtained by JW as part of a probe into the Jarrett family’s Communist ties. For a period of time Vernon Jarrett appeared on the FBI’s Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would “disseminate the Communist Party line among…the middle class.”

It’s been well documented that Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago lawyer and longtime Obama confidant, is a liberal extremist who wields tremendous power in the White House. Faithful to her roots, she still has connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Jarrett and her family also had strong ties to Frank Marshal Davis, a big Obama mentor and Communist Party member with an extensive FBI file.

JW has exposed Valerie Jarrett’s many transgressions over the years, including her role in covering up a scandalous gun-running operation carried out by the Department of Justice (DOJ). Last fall JW obtained public records that show Jarrett was a key player in the effort to cover up that Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress about the Fast and Furious, a disastrous experiment in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed guns from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels. Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of hundreds of weapons which have been used in an unknown number of crimes, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

In 2008 JW got documents linking Valerie Jarrett, who also served as co-chairman of Obama’s presidential transition team, to a series of real estate scandals, including several housing projects operated by convicted felon and Obama fundraiser/friend Antoin “Tony” Rezko. According to the documents obtained from the Illinois Secretary of State, Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago slum projects operated by Rezko.


Title: Endgame
Post by: G M on June 29, 2015, 06:32:59 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420406/john-roberts-decision-kevin-d-williamson

Title: Hillary's servers subject to federal seizure
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2015, 12:15:35 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/1/state-dept-admits-dozens-hillary-clintons-emails-c/
Title: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity: DOJ and FBI colluded with IRS?
Post by: G M on July 08, 2015, 05:35:32 AM
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2015/07/07/new-docs-reveal-doj-irs-and-fbi-colluding-to-prosecute-obama-opponents/#undefined

Depressing
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: objectivist1 on July 08, 2015, 05:52:41 AM
But not at all surprising.  This President is a de facto dictator.  As Mark Levin has repeatedly pointed out, we are now completely unmoored from the Constitution.  The law is whatever this administration decides it is, since neither the Congress nor the courts are willing to oppose it.

Title: VDH: The end of the republic
Post by: G M on July 09, 2015, 06:06:04 PM
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/09/contempt-for-the-law-americas-biggest-threat/

Title: due process, and the lack thereof
Post by: G M on July 10, 2015, 06:10:40 AM
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/police-officer-brags-about-circumventing-due-process-in-sexual-assault-cases/article/2567949

Title: new rules
Post by: G M on July 13, 2015, 06:06:10 AM
http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2015/07/13/its-time-for-conservatives-to-play-by-the-new-rules-n2023689/page/full

Adapt.
Title: WI John doe raids of conservatives
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 16, 2015, 02:10:24 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421274/wisconsin-john-doe-investigations-halted-supreme-court?8EIXImfzJf1DU3tC.01
Title: Excerpts from WI decision
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2015, 03:08:47 AM
 ENLARGE
Photo: Getty Images
July 16, 2015 6:55 p.m. ET
26 COMMENTS

Excerpts from the July 16 majority opinion by Justice Michael Gableman in Two Unnamed Petitioners v. Peterson and Schmitz, in which the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 4-2 against prosecutors pursuing a secret John Doe probe against conservative groups for violations of campaign-finance law. A related editorial appears nearby:

According to the special prosecutor, the purpose of the John Doe investigation is to root out allegedly illegal campaign coordination between certain issue advocacy groups and a candidate for elective office. To further the investigation, the special prosecutor sought, and received, wide-ranging subpoenas and search warrants for 29 organizations and individuals, seeking millions of documents that had been created over a period of several years. Various targets (collectively “the Unnamed Movants”) moved the John Doe judge to quash the subpoenas and search warrants and to return any property seized by the special prosecutor. . . .

The breadth of the documents gathered pursuant to subpoenas and seized pursuant to search warrants is amazing. Millions of documents, both in digital and paper copy, were subpoenaed and/or seized. Deputies seized business papers, computer equipment, phones, and other devices, while their targets were restrained under police supervision and denied the ability to contact their attorneys. The special prosecutor obtained virtually every document possessed by the Unnamed Movants relating to every aspect of their lives, both personal and professional, over a five-year span (from 2009 to 2013). Such documents were subpoenaed and/or seized without regard to content or relevance to the alleged violations of Ch. 11. As part of this dragnet, the special prosecutor also had seized wholly irrelevant information, such as retirement income statements, personal financial account information, personal letters, and family photos. . . .

The special prosecutor alleges that the Unnamed Movants engaged in illegally coordinated issue advocacy. However, the basis for his theory has evolved over the course of the various legal challenges to his investigation, and he appears unable to decide just how the Unnamed Movants have broken the law.

Today, the special prosecutor alleges two theories of illegal coordination: (1) that the coordination between the Unnamed Movants is so extensive that the supposedly independent groups became subcommittees for the candidate’s campaign under Wis. Stat. § 11.10(4); and (2) that the coordinated issue advocacy amounts to an in-kind contribution under Wis. Admin. Code § GAB 1.20. The special prosecutor’s theories, if adopted as law, would require an individual to surrender his political rights to the government and retain campaign finance attorneys before discussing salient political issues. . . .

The lack of clarity in Ch. 11, which the special prosecutor relies upon, leads us to the unsettling conclusion that it is left to government bureaucrats and/or individual prosecutors to determine how much coordination between campaign committees and independent groups is “too much” coordination. In essence, under his theory, every candidate, in every campaign in which an issue advocacy group participates, would get their own John Doe proceeding and their own special prosecutor to determine the extent of any coordination. This is not, and cannot, be the law in a democracy. . . .

It is utterly clear that the special prosecutor has employed theories of law that do not exist in order to investigate citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing. In other words, the special prosecutor was the instigator of a “perfect storm” of wrongs that was visited upon the innocent Unnamed Movants and those who dared to associate with them. It is fortunate, indeed, for every other citizen of this great State who is interested in the protection of fundamental liberties that the special prosecutor chose as his targets innocent citizens who had both the will and the means to fight the unlimited resources of an unjust prosecution. Further, these brave individuals played a crucial role in presenting this court with an opportunity to re-endorse its commitment to upholding the fundamental right of each and every citizen to engage in lawful political activity and to do so free from the fear of the tyrannical retribution of arbitrary or capricious governmental prosecution. Let one point be clear: our conclusion today ends this unconstitutional John Doe investigation.
Title: American tyranny
Post by: G M on July 19, 2015, 07:06:45 AM
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/14/how-the-irs-fbi-and-justice-department-are-agents-of-modern-american-tyranny/

Fundamentally changed.
Title: Sen. cruz vs.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2015, 07:13:51 AM
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/07/21/watch-as-ice-director-is-forced-to-tell-ted-cruz-hes-absolutely-right-after-he-disputes-her-claim-during-hearing/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire_Morning_Test&utm_campaign=Firewire%20Morning%20Edition%20Recurring%20v2%202015-07-22
Title: This could get very interesting , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 23, 2015, 08:16:42 PM
Criminal Inquiry Sought in Hillary Clinton’s Use of Email

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and MATT APUZZOJULY 23, 2015


WASHINGTON — Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether Hillary Rodham Clinton mishandled sensitive government information on a private email account she used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.

The request follows an assessment in a June 29 memo by the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies that Mrs. Clinton’s private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.” The memo was written to Patrick F. Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management.

It is not clear if any of the information in the emails was marked as classified by the State Department when Mrs. Clinton sent or received them.

But since her use of a private email account for official State Department business was revealed in March, she has repeatedly said that she had no classified information on the account.
Continue reading the main story
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    A Closer Look at Hillary Clinton’s Emails on BenghaziMAY 21, 2015

The initial revelation has been an issue in the early stages of her presidential campaign.

The Justice Department has not decided if it will open an investigation, senior officials said. A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

At issue are thousands of pages of State Department emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account. Mrs. Clinton has said she used the account because it was more convenient, but it also shielded her correspondence from congressional and Freedom of Information Act requests.

She faced sharp criticism after her use of the account became public, and subsequently said she would ask the State Department to release her emails.

The department is now reviewing some 55,000 pages of emails. A first batch of 3,000 pages was made public on June 30.

In the course of the email review, State Department officials determined that some information in the messages should be retroactively classified. In the 3,000 pages that were released, for example, portions of two dozen emails were redacted because they were upgraded to “classified status." But none of those were marked as classified at the time Mrs. Clinton handled them.

In a second memo to Mr. Kennedy, sent on July 17, the inspectors general said that at least one email made public by the State Department contained classified information. The inspectors general did not identify the email or reveal its substance.

The memos were provided to The New York Times by a senior government official.The inspectors general also criticized the State Department for its handling of sensitive information, particularly its reliance on retired senior Foreign Service officers to decide if information should be classified, and for not consulting with the intelligence agencies about its determinations.

In March, Mrs. Clinton insisted that she was careful in her handling of information on her private account. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” she said. “There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”

In May, the F.B.I. asked the State Department to classify a section of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that related to suspects who may have been arrested in connection with the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The information was not classified at the time Mrs. Clinton received it.

The revelations about how Mrs. Clinton handled her email have been an embarrassment for the State Department, which has been repeatedly criticized over its handling of documents related to Mrs. Clinton and her advisers.

On Monday, a federal judge sharply questioned State Department lawyers at a hearing in Washington about why they had not responded to Freedom of Information Act requests from The Associated Press, some of which were four years old.

"I want to find out what’s been going on over there — I should say, what’s not been going on over there," said Judge Richard J. Leon of United States District Court, according to a transcript obtained by Politico. The judge said that “for reasons known only to itself,” the State Department “has been, to say the least, recalcitrant in responding."

Two days later, lawmakers on the Republican-led House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, said they planned to summon Secretary of State John Kerry’s chief of staff to Capitol Hill to answer questions about why the department has not produced documents that the panel has subpoenaed. That hearing is set for next Wednesday.

“The State Department has used every excuse to avoid complying with fundamental requests for documents,” said the chairman of the House committee, Representative Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina.

Mr. Gowdy said that while the committee has used an array of measures to try and get the State Department to hand over documents, the results have been the same. “Our committee is not in possession of all documents needed to do the work assigned to us,” he said.

The State Department has sought to delay the hearing, citing continuing efforts to brief members of Congress on the details of the nuclear accord with Iran.

It is not clear why the State Department has struggled with the classification issues and document production. Republicans have said the department is trying to use those processes to protect Mrs. Clinton.

State Department officials say they simply do not have the resources or infrastructure to properly comply with all the requests. Since March, requests for documents have dramatically increased.

Some State Department officials said they believe many senior officials did not initially take the House committee seriously, which slowed document production and created an appearance of stonewalling.

State Department officials also said that Mr. Kerry is concerned about the toll the criticism has had on the department and has urged his deputies to comply with the requests quickly.
Title: kerry unwilling to say Obama will respect the law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 28, 2015, 04:36:11 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/421698/john-kerry-iran-deal-obama-could-defy-law-congress
Title: Kerry seeks to obstruct for Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 02, 2015, 10:07:36 PM
http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-secretary-of-state-john-kerry-seeks-to-delay-federal-lawsuit-to-force-action-on-clinton-emails/
Title: Re: Kerry seeks to obstruct for Hillary
Post by: G M on August 03, 2015, 05:33:37 AM
http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-secretary-of-state-john-kerry-seeks-to-delay-federal-lawsuit-to-force-action-on-clinton-emails/

Dems uber alles.
Title: Operation Fast and Furious: the gift that keeps on giving
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2015, 09:38:25 AM
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-garland-gun-20150801-story.html#page=1



Five years before he was shot to death in the failed terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, Nadir Soofi walked into a suburban Phoenix gun shop to buy a 9-millimeter pistol.

At the time, Lone Wolf Trading Co. was known among gun smugglers for selling illegal firearms. And with Soofi's history of misdemeanor drug and assault charges, there was a chance his purchase might raise red flags in the federal screening process.

Inside the store, he fudged some facts on the form required of would-be gun buyers.

What Soofi could not have known was that Lone Wolf was at the center of a federal sting operation known as Fast and Furious, targeting Mexican drug lords and traffickers. The idea of the secret program was to allow Lone Wolf to sell illegal weapons to criminals and straw purchasers, and track the guns back to large smuggling networks and drug cartels.

Instead, federal agents lost track of the weapons and the operation became a fiasco, particularly after several of the missing guns were linked to shootings in Mexico and the 2010 killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Arizona.

Soofi's attempt to buy a gun caught the attention of authorities, who slapped a seven-day hold on the transaction, according to his Feb. 24, 2010, firearms transaction record, which was reviewed by the Los Angeles Times. Then, for reasons that remain unclear, the hold was lifted after 24 hours, and Soofi got the 9-millimeter.

As the owner of a small pizzeria, the Dallas-born Soofi, son of a Pakistani American engineer and American nurse, would not have been the primary focus of federal authorities, who back then were looking for smugglers and drug lords.

He is now.

In May, Soofi and his roommate, Elton Simpson, burst upon the site of a Garland cartoon convention that was offering a prize for the best depiction of the prophet Muhammad, something offensive to many Muslims. Dressed in body armor and armed with three pistols, three rifles and 1,500 rounds of ammunition, the pair wounded a security officer before they were killed by local police.

A day after the attack, the Department of Justice sent an "urgent firearms disposition request" to Lone Wolf, seeking more information about Soofi and the pistol he bought in 2010, according to a June 1 letter from Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, to U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch.

Though the request did not specify whether the gun was used in the Garland attack, Justice Department officials said the information was needed "to assist in a criminal investigation," according to Johnson's letter, also reviewed by The Times.

The FBI so far has refused to release any details, including serial numbers, about the weapons used in Garland by Soofi and Simpson. Senate investigators are now pressing law enforcement agencies for answers, raising the chilling possibility that a gun sold during the botched Fast and Furious operation ended up being used in a terrorist attack against Americans.

Among other things, Johnson is demanding to know whether federal authorities have recovered the gun Soofi bought in 2010, where it was recovered and whether it had been discharged, according to the letter. He also demanded an explanation about why the initial seven-day hold was placed on the 2010 pistol purchase and why it was lifted after 24 hours.

Asked recently for an update on the Garland shooting, FBI Director James B. Comey earlier this month declined to comment. "We're still sorting that out," he said.

Officials at the Justice Department and the FBI declined to answer questions about whether the 9-millimeter pistol was one of the guns used in the Garland attack or seized at Soofi's apartment.
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It remains unclear whether Soofi's 2010 visit to Lone Wolf is a bizarre coincidence or a missed opportunity for federal agents to put Soofi on their radar years before his contacts with Islamic extremists brought him to their attention.

Though Islamic State militants have claimed to have helped organize the Garland attack, U.S. officials are still investigating whether Soofi and Simpson received direct support from the group or were merely inspired by its calls for violence against the West.

Comey suggested that the attack fits the pattern of foreign terrorist groups indoctrinating American citizens through the Internet. He referred to it as the "crowdsourcing of terrorism."

In a handwritten letter apparently mailed hours before the attack, Soofi said he was inspired by the writings of Islamic cleric Anwar Awlaki, an American citizen killed in a 2011 U.S. drone strike in Yemen.


"I love you," Soofi wrote to his mother, Sharon Soofi, "and hope to see you in eternity." In a telephone interview, Sharon Soofi described the letter and said her son had been shot twice in the head and once in the chest, according to autopsy findings she received.

At the time of the 2010 gun purchase, Soofi ran a Phoenix pizza parlor. His mother said that was about the same time he met Simpson, who worked for Soofi at the restaurant. They later shared an apartment, a short drive from the Lone Wolf store.

Reached by telephone, Andre Howard, owner of Lone Wolf, denied that his store sold the gun to Soofi. "Not here," Howard said before hanging up.

Sharon Soofi said her son had told her he wanted the pistol for protection because his restaurant was in a "rough area." She said he also acquired an AK-47 assault rifle at the end of last year or early this year, when authorities believe he and Simpson were plotting an attack on the Super Bowl in Arizona.

"I tried to convince him that, what in the world do you need an AK-47 for?" she said in a telephone interview. Soofi told her they practiced target shooting in the desert. Her younger son, Ali Soofi, was living with his brother and Simpson at the time, she said, but left after becoming frightened by the weapons, ammunition and militant Islamist literature.

She blamed Simpson for radicalizing her son, who she said had no history of religious extremism. A month before Soofi bought the pistol, Simpson was indicted on charges of lying to the FBI about his plans to travel to Somalia and engage in "violent jihad," according to federal court documents.

Simpson was jailed until March 2011 and convicted of making false statements. But the judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to prove the false statements were connected to international terrorism. Simpson was released and placed on probation.

After the Garland attack, the FBI arrested a third man, Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem, and charged him with planning the Garland attack. At a detention hearing on June 16, prosecutors and an FBI agent provided details about the plot, but avoided discussing the history of the firearms.

Sharon Soofi said she found her son's letter in her post office box. It was dated the Saturday before the attack, and postmarked in Dallas on Monday, the day after the assault, suggesting he dropped it in the mailbox before he and Simpson arrived in Garland. "In the name of Allah," the letter began, "I am sorry for the grief I have caused."

He referred to "those Muslims who are being killed, slandered, imprisoned, etc. for their religion," and concluded, "I truly love you, Mom, but this life is nothing but shade under the tree and a journey. The reality is the eternal existence in the hereafter."

richard.serrano@latimes.com

Twitter: @RickSerranoLAT
Title: Well, this certainly seems suspicious , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2015, 12:57:23 PM
http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/03/wife-of-judge-blocking-pro-life-videos-is-a-proud-abortion-supporter/#.Vb-WEnOA3I0.facebook
Title: A ray of hope?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2015, 07:28:44 PM
https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/all-clinton-records/
Title: Re: A ray of hope?
Post by: G M on August 03, 2015, 08:32:19 PM
https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/all-clinton-records/

I am going to have to start sending money to judicial watch.
Title: WSJ: NLRB smacked down again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 12, 2015, 08:31:42 AM
Solomon should not have had the job.
Lafe Solomon in 2011. ENLARGE
Lafe Solomon in 2011. Photo: Sonja Y. Foster/Bloomberg
Aug. 11, 2015 7:47 p.m. ET
118 COMMENTS

One of President Obama’s legacies will be his abuse of executive authority, and his hits keep coming. On Friday a federal appeals court struck down a ruling of the National Labor Relations Board because, incredibly, its acting general counsel was in the job illegally.

The scofflaw was Lafe Solomon, whom readers may recall for his legal complaints against the likes of Boeing for wanting to build planes in right-to-work South Carolina instead of union-dominated Washington. It turns out Mr. Solomon was the one violating the law.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a 2014 NLRB ruling against an Arizona ambulance company, SW General. The panel found that Messrs. Solomon and Obama had violated the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which generally holds that a person cannot serve as an “acting” officer of an agency while also nominated for the post.

Mr. Obama directed Mr. Solomon to serve as NLRB acting general counsel in June 2010. Six months later he nominated Mr. Solomon for the post. The Senate refused to confirm him and he left the NLRB in November 2013. Yet before he departed Mr. Solomon issued the complaint against SW General and many other companies.

Congress passed the vacancies reform law to prevent precisely this kind of presidential gambit. In 1997 Republicans blocked the nomination of Bill Lann Lee for assistant attorney general at the Justice Department. President Bill Clinton then named Mr. Lee in an “acting” capacity—a move designed to let him serve the remainder of the Administration without Senate approval. Congress then tightened the rules, which Messrs. Obama and Solomon violated so flagrantly that the Administration barely offered a defense in court.

Judge Karen Henderson, a George H.W. Bush appointee, wrote the opinion and was joined by two Obama appointees. The ruling only applies to the SW General case, but it is an open invitation to Mr. Solomon’s other corporate targets to seek relief as well.

This is the third legal strike against Mr. Obama’s NLRB. The D.C. Circuit ruled against his recess appointees in 2013 and the Supreme Court did the same in 2014. The evidence builds that this is the most lawless Administration since Richard Nixon’s.
Title: Meet the IGs of Hillarygate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2015, 06:08:21 AM
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/12/meet-the-obama-appointees-who-could-sink-hillary/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=Flashpoints
Title: Cop Shot and Killed
Post by: ppulatie on September 01, 2015, 11:42:35 AM
Another cop shot and killed this morning in Illinois.

I am listening to the Police Scanner on my Ipad. Lake County Sheriff. Interesting listening in to the hunt.

Did this for Ferguson and Baltimore. When they were going on, listening really provided a true understanding of how bad the riots were.  (Full disclosure.....I  was a military cop so I LOVE this shit, as long as cops don't die.)

Title: WSJ: IRS update
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2015, 11:59:22 AM
by James Taranto
Sept. 2, 2015 1:30 p.m. ET
WSJ

Hillary Clinton is not the only official of the Obama administration to have engaged in email shenanigans. While we were away last week, as the Washington Times reported, a court filing from the Internal Revenue Service revealed that “Lois Lerner had yet another personal email account used to conduct some IRS business”:

    The admission came in an open-records lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that has sued to get a look at emails Ms. Lerner sent during the targeting [of political dissenters for IRS harassment].

    IRS lawyer Geoffrey J. Klimas told the court that as the agency was putting together a set of documents to turn over to Judicial Watch, it realized Ms. Lerner had used yet another email account, in addition to her official one and another personal one already known to the agency.

    “In addition to emails to or from an email account denominated ‘Lois G. Lerner‘ or ‘Lois Home,’ some emails responsive to Judicial Watch’s request may have been sent to or received from a personal email account denominated ‘Toby Miles,’ ” Mr. Klimas told Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is hearing the case.

At first we wondered why Lerner would use a masculine pseudonym. Then we realized Toby is an epicene name and we’d been thinking of Toby Flenderson, the officious bureaucrat from NBC’s “The Office.” At any rate, Fox News appears to have come up with the explanation: “Two sources told Fox News that Toby Miles is the name of Lerner’s dog.”

Confusingly, Lerner’s canine shares a surname with her husband, and Fox adds that “Lerner’s husband Michael Miles also reportedly may have been linked to the account.” Which goes to prove the old saying: On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

This week, as blogger William Jacobson reports, yet another fake Lerner email came to light:

    In . . . an August 31, 2015 Status Report, the IRS revealed that Lerner also used “a second personal email account” that, unlike the Toby Miles account, “does not appear to be associated with a denomination; only the email address itself appears.” The IRS refuses to disclose the email address for either the Toby Miles or the newly discovered account.

“Denomination,” in this context, is a fancy name for “name,” not a reference to money or religion. In its filing, the IRS reported that the emails in the denominationless account “all were either non-responsive [to the Freedom of Information Act request] or were duplicates of material previously released to Judicial Watch.”

Why Lerner needed so many email addresses is something of a mystery, but she’s not alone among Obama administration officials. The Daily Signal’s Sharyl Attkisson noted in March:

    Former Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson used private email accounts, as well as a secret EPA email address under the pseudonym “Richard Windsor,” to conduct official business. That included communicating with a climate lobbyist.

    In Justice Department emails turned over in a federal Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, [then-Attorney General Eric] Holder’s email name is redacted with no explanation. It’s unknown whether the redactions conceal use of an email address that does not belong to an official government account.

The Washington Times reports on yet another thwarted IRS attempt to evade public scrutiny:

    A federal judge Friday ordered the IRS to turn over the records of any requests from the White House seeking taxpayers’ private information from the tax agency, delivering a victory to a group that for two years has been trying to pry the data loose.

    It’s not clear that there were any such requests—but Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the IRS cannot just refuse to say so by citing taxpayer confidentiality laws, known as section 6103 of the tax code.

Richard Pollock, then of the Washington Examiner, explained the background in a 2013 piece:

    Treasury Department investigators completed but never released a 2011 law enforcement probe of White House economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, The Washington Examiner has learned.

    The investigation by the Treasury Department Inspector-General for Tax Administration was sparked by Goolsbee’s remarks during an Aug. 27, 2010, White House news briefing in which he appeared to possess confidential tax information on Koch Industries, the private conglomerate controlled by the Koch brothers, Charles and David.

    “So in this country we have partnerships, we have S corps, we have LLCs, we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax. Some of which are really giant firms, you know Koch Industries is a multi-billion dollar business,” Goolsbee said.

    It is illegal for government officials to make public confidential tax information. Goolsbee was chief White House economist at the time.

Six senators requested an investigation of Goolsbee’s remark under Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, which protects taxpayers’ privacy. The IRS conducted the probe, then refused to reveal its findings, including to the senators and the Kochs—because, it said, they included taxpayer information that was confidential under Section 6103.

A group called Cause of Action filed the FOIA lawsuit seeking, among other things, “any communications by or from anyone in the Executive Office of the President constituting requests for taxpayer or ‘return information’ ” protected by Section 6103. Again, the IRS balked, saying such requests were private under Section 6103. That was the claim Judge Jackson rejected:

    Congress amended section 6103 in 1976 “in the wake of Watergate and White House efforts to harass those on its ‘enemies list,’ ” in order to “restrict[] government officers and employees from revealing ‘any return’ or ‘return information,’” and its “core purpose” is to “protect[] taxpayer privacy.”

    So, this Court questions whether section 6103 should or would shield records that indicate that confidential taxpayer information was misused, or that government officials made an improper attempt to access that information.

    The IRS argues that “section 6103’s definition of ‘return information’ . . . makes no distinction based on the purpose for which a person might seek disclosure of the documents.” But accepting this argument would require a finding that even requests for return information that could involve a violation of section 6103 constitute “return information” that is exempt from disclosure under FOIA Exemption 3 [which incorporates other statutes’ nondisclosure provisions] and section 6103.

    The Court is unwilling to stretch the statute so far, and it cannot conclude that section 6103 may be used to shield the very misconduct it was enacted to prohibit.

Whether the IRS is concealing misconduct is unknown; it’s possible, for instance, that the Goolsbee report found nothing amiss and its suppression was a product of mere bureaucratic monomania. Similarly, it’s possible Mrs. Clinton actually did turn over printouts of all her work-related emails to the State Department, but we may never know. In any case, it’s unreasonable for government officials to expect us to trust their assurances when they take such pains to prevent their verification.

On a happier note, it’s worth mentioning that the judges in both these cases were Democratic appointees. Emmet Sullivan was nominated by Bill Clinton in 1994 and Amy Jackson by Barack Obama in 2011. Independence and integrity are not dead, at least in the judicial branch.
Title: Things fall apart
Post by: G M on September 03, 2015, 06:44:04 AM
http://pjmedia.com/diaryofamadvoter/2015/09/03/hillarys-election-civil-war/?singlepage=true#undefined

Coming soon?
Title: The war on the rule of law and Law Enforcement
Post by: G M on September 04, 2015, 06:23:36 AM
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/09/02/who-needs-this-police-recruits-abandon-dream-amid-anti-cop-climate/

Obama's legacy
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ppulatie on September 04, 2015, 07:59:07 AM
GM,

My nephew is "Motorcycle 1" on the DC Metro Police. He used to be the number 2 in Homicide and also SWAT.  He was on Facebook the last couple of days talking about losing 2 more officers before retirement. They had 16 and 13 years in, but just walked away. Better to be alive than carried by six.

The responses to his comment was met by officers on other forces throughout the East Coast. They were all reporting the same is occurring. Cops are just walking away.

As to DC, it is inn the midst of a crime wave not seen since the 90's. Murders and violent crime are up tremendously. The cause are liberal politicians and cop leadership that are into "feelings" and not cop policing.

In DC, there is the "bad" area. The crime there is incredible. A murder occurs and when cops investigate, no one will speak up.  It has now reached the point where the cops have told the residents in that area, "keep it inside your neighborhood. Do what you want. We will investigate, but we know what will happen. But don't come out of your area and do this elsewhere. If you do, we are coming in full force."

More of the Obama revolution.
Title: Selective Indignation and Enforcement
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on September 04, 2015, 09:30:02 AM
Situational outrage:

http://reason.com/archives/2015/09/04/remember-the-law-is-only-sacred-when-it
Title: Re: Selective Indignation and Enforcement
Post by: G M on September 04, 2015, 06:51:28 PM
Situational outrage:

http://reason.com/archives/2015/09/04/remember-the-law-is-only-sacred-when-it


Can't wait to get out of law enforcement. So disgusted at what this country has become.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 04, 2015, 09:15:18 PM
If we get a good Rep elected President and keep the House and the Senate, you might be surprised at how much things can turn around.  The Carter years were pretty awful but then came Reagan.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on September 04, 2015, 09:46:05 PM
If we get a good Rep elected President and keep the House and the Senate, you might be surprised at how much things can turn around.  The Carter years were pretty awful but then came Reagan.


The America that elected Reagan doesn't exist anymore.
Title: PP: DOJ goes Kafkaesque
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 07, 2015, 10:51:48 AM
Beefing Up Obama's Pro-Amnesty Agenda
By Arnold Ahlert
 

The Obama administration's intention to force-feed a pro-amnesty agenda to a recalcitrant American public has reached a new low. The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced it had reached an immigration-related settlement with Nebraska Beef Ltd., a meat packing company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. The DOJ had accused the company of discrimination — because the meat packing company demanded that workers show proof of immigration status to demonstrate they were eligible to work legally in the United States.

The DOJ insisted Nebraska Beef violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) because it required "non-U.S. citizens, but not similarly-situated U.S. citizens, to present specific documentary proof of their immigration status to verify their employment eligibility.” Yet the act itself states that "employers may hire only persons who may legally work in the United States (i.e., citizens and nationals of the U.S.) and aliens authorized to work in the U.S. The employer must verify the identity and employment eligibility of anyone to be hired, which includes completing the Employment Eligibility Verification Form (I-9).” Adding insult to injury, the act warns employers that they can be penalized if they fail to complete and/or retain those I-9 forms.

Judicial Watch put this outrage in the proper perspective: "You know the nation is in trouble when a U.S. business gets investigated by its own government for following the law."

Regardless, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, was adamant. “The department is committed to ensuring that individuals who are authorized to work in the United States can support their families and contribute to our country’s economic growth without facing unnecessary and discriminatory barriers to employment,” she stated. “We will vigorously enforce the law to remove such barriers where we find them, and ensure that affected individuals have a means of seeking relief.”

"Relief" in this case amounts to Nebraska Beef paying $200,000 in a civil penalty settlement, establishing an uncapped back-pay fund for people who lost wages because they could not prove they are in the country legally, and two years of compliance monitoring. The company is also required to train employees on the anti-discrimination provision within the Immigration and Nationality Act and to revise policies within its office.

The anti-discrimination provisions of the act can be seen here. The germane clause states that employers "may not treat individuals differently based on citizenship or immigration status. U.S. citizens, recent permanent residents, temporary residents, asylees and refugees are protected from citizenship status discrimination.” All well and good, save for one seemingly inherent contradiction:

How is a company supposed to determine a potential employee’s status and eligibility to work in the United States without documentary proof?

A 2014 federal audit conducted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general revealed the bigger stakes in play here, noting the Obama administration has not only been “inconsistent” in enforcing the provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), but it reduced the average fine for businesses caught hiring illegals by a whopping 40% between 2009 and 2012. Now the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is getting in on the act, helping to facilitate the administration's pro-amnesty agenda.

All Americans should be outraged, but none more so than black Americans. Another disappointing jobs report Friday revealed that only 173,000 jobs were created in August, despite predictions of 220,000. And though the unemployment rate dropped to 4.4% for whites, a drop of 0.2% from July, black unemployment is 9.5%, up 0.4% from July.

Unfortunately, both of those figures hardly tell the real story. The daunting reality is that a record-setting 94,031,000 Americans were not in the labor force last month, and the labor participation rate is 62.6% — the lowest level since 1977. When those people are counted, the overall unemployment rate, trumpeted to be 5.1%, more than doubles to 10.3%. Even worse, wages for all American workers have declined from the time the so-called recovery began in 2009, right through 2014 — with lowest paid workers taking the biggest hit.

All while Obama champions amnesty for million of illegals who would drive those wages even lower — for as long as a decade.

In short, the fundamental transformation, or more accurately, the balkanization of America, continues. Assimilation has been tossed on the ash heap of history, in favor of the multiculturalist "celebrating our differences” nonsense that is tearing this nation apart. The transnationalists who would abet our descent into Third World-ism for cheaper labor and reliable big-government votes must be thoroughly rejected by an electorate that still treasures national sovereignty. And it’s about time presidential candidates other than Donald Trump heartily embrace the one irrefutable statement he has made (echoing Ronald Reagan, by the way): A nation without borders is no nation at all.
Title: WSJ: America's Legal Order Begins to Fray
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2015, 10:41:21 AM
America’s Legal Order Begins to Fray
Amid the escalation of violent crime are signs of a breakdown of basic respect for law enforcement.
WSJ
By Heather Mac Donald
Sept. 13, 2015 6:23 p.m. ET


After two decades of the most remarkable crime drop in U.S. history, law enforcement has come to this: “I’m deliberately not getting involved in things I would have in the 1990s and 2000s,” an emergency-services officer in New York City tells me. “I won’t get out of my car for a reasonable-suspicion stop; I will if there’s a violent felony committed in my presence.”

A virulent antipolice campaign over the past year—initially fueled by a since-discredited narrative about a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo.—has made police officers reluctant to do their jobs. The Black Lives Matter movement proclaims that the police are a lethal threat to blacks and that the criminal-justice system is pervaded by racial bias. The media amplify that message on an almost daily basis. Officers now worry about becoming the latest racist cop of the week, losing their job or being indicted if a good-faith encounter with a suspect goes awry or is merely distorted by an incomplete cellphone video.

With police so discouraged, violent crime has surged in at least 35 American cities this year. The alarming murder increase prompted an emergency meeting of the Major Cities Chiefs Association last month. Homicides were up 76% in Milwaukee, 60% in St. Louis, and 56% in Baltimore through mid-August, compared with the same period in 2014; murder was up 47% in Minneapolis and 36% in Houston through mid-July.

But something more fundamental than even public safety may be at stake. There are signs that the legal order itself is breaking down in urban areas. “There’s a total lack of respect out there for the police,” says a female sergeant in New York. “The perps feel more empowered to carry guns because they know that we are running scared.”

The lawful use of police power is being met by hostility and violence, often ignored by the press. In Cincinnati, a small riot broke out in late July when the police arrived at a drive-by shooting scene, where a 4-year-old girl had been shot in the head and critically injured. Bystanders loudly cursed at officers who had started arresting suspects at the scene on outstanding warrants, according to a witness I spoke with.

During anticop demonstrations in Ferguson, Mo., last month, 18-year-old Tyrone Harris opened fire at police officers, according to law-enforcement officials, and was shot and wounded by police in response. A crowd pelted the cops with frozen water bottles and rocks, wounding three officers, while destroying three police cars and damaging businesses, Ferguson police said. “We’re ready for what? We’re ready for war,” some protesters reportedly chanted.

In Birmingham, Ala., an officer was beaten unconscious with his own gun last month by a suspect in a car stop. There was gloating on social media. “Pistol whipped his ass to sleep,” read one Twitter post. The officer later said that he had refrained from using force to defend himself for fear of a media backlash.

Officers are being challenged in their most basic efforts to render aid. A New York cop in the Bronx tells me that he was trying to extricate a woman pinned under an overturned car in July when a bystander stuck his cellphone camera into the officer’s face, trying to bait him into an argument. “You can’t tell me what to do,” the bystander replied when asked to move to the sidewalk, the cop reports. “A few years ago, I would have taken police action,” he says. “Now I know it won’t end well for me or the police department.”

Supervisors may roll up to an incident where trash and other projectiles are being thrown at officers and tell the cops to get into their cars and leave. “What does that do to the general public?” wonders a New York detective. “Every time we pass up on an arrest because we don’t want a situation to blow up, we’ve made the next cop’s job all the harder.”

Jim McDonnell, head of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the nation’s largest, tells me that the current anticop animus puts the nation in a place where it hasn’t been since the 1960s. “The last 10 years have witnessed dramatic decreases in crime,” Sheriff McDonnell says. “Now, in a short period of time, we are seeing those gains undone.”

Even the assassination of police officers doesn’t appear to cool the antipolice rhetoric. A day after a Houston police deputy, Darren Goforth, was murdered while filling his gas tank last month, Black Lives Matter protesters—as online video chillingly attests—marched in St. Paul chanting: “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.”

An organizer with the Organization for Black Struggle in St. Louis refused to apologize for the tenor of the movement, while denying that it condoned violence. “Until the police aren’t the dangerous force that black people fear, the rhetoric won’t change,” she told the New York Times, after Houston Sheriff Ron Hickman, in the wake of Deputy Goforth’s murder, pleaded for antipolice protesters to temper their language. A Texas legislator, state Sen. Garnet Coleman, assailed Sheriff Hickman for showing “a lack of understanding of what is occurring in this country when it comes to the singling out of African-Americans.”

The irony is that the historic reduction of U.S. crime since the 1990s was predicated on police singling out African-Americans—for protection. Using victims’ crime reports, cops focused on violent hot spots; since black Americans are disproportionately the victims of crime, just as blacks are disproportionately its perpetrators, effective policing was heaviest in minority neighborhoods. The cops were there because they believe that black lives matter.

Thousands of African-Americans are alive today because of a law-enforcement achievement that now is in danger of being squandered. In the current eruption of violent crime, the overwhelming majority of victims have been black. The Baltimore Sun reported that July was the bloodiest month in the city since 1972, with 45 people killed in 30 days. All but two were black.

Police officials I have spoken with in recent months say that they long to hear America’s leaders change the tone of the national conversation before respect for the rule of law itself deteriorates further. They’re still waiting.

Ms. Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Title: Yes, Hillary broke the law (acutally MANY laws)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 28, 2015, 11:31:59 AM
http://nypost.com/2015/09/27/yes-hillary-clinton-broke-the-law/
Title: The long March through the institutions
Post by: G M on October 01, 2015, 02:07:30 AM
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/30/gangster-government-secret-service-tried-to-discredit-jason-chaffetz-for-investigating-the-agency/

Title: Re: The long March through the institutions
Post by: G M on October 02, 2015, 11:28:40 AM
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/30/gangster-government-secret-service-tried-to-discredit-jason-chaffetz-for-investigating-the-agency/



http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret-service-director-revises-account-of-his-role-in-leak-case/2015/10/02/d00eb4f6-689e-11e5-9ef3-fde182507eac_story.html

I can remember when I respected and admired the Secret Service.
Title: The left wins it's war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on October 23, 2015, 02:15:50 PM
Compare and contrast.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/las-vegas/vegas-tax-resister-irwin-schiff-dies-serving-prison-term


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/23/justice-department-no-criminal-charges-for-ex-irs-official-lerner/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ppulatie on October 23, 2015, 02:50:06 PM
The law only applies to the little people, not the DC elite.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on October 23, 2015, 02:53:14 PM
The law only applies to the little people, not the DC elite.

Scooter Libby might argue that point. However, that was before the fundamental change we have experienced.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ppulatie on October 23, 2015, 03:02:16 PM
Sheeez, that was 10 years ago.

How time flies when you are having fun.......................or in my case, getting old.
Title: Bananas!
Post by: G M on October 25, 2015, 03:17:21 PM
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/25/the-banana-republic-of-america/comment-page-1/#comments

Title: Rule of Law fighting back, Impeachment started against IRS CHief
Post by: DougMacG on October 27, 2015, 06:27:06 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/27/house-gop-begins-impeachment-against-irs-chief/

House Republicans begin impeachment against IRS chief John Koskinen

A consequence for lying, cheating and stealing?  Who knew?
Title: opinion post
Post by: ccp on October 28, 2015, 05:56:32 AM
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/sheriff-says-third-video-shows-south-carolina-student-punching-officer-n452481

Leftist attacks on the police continue.   How does one remove a student who disrupts the classroom and refuses to cooperate with the teacher and an assistant principle?

All these police on video incidents start with someone NOT cooperating with law enforcement.  And every time that gets downplayed.

This is not a civil rights issue.  It is not an FBI matter.   And it is not a lawsuit that is not going to be defended by innocent taxpayers. 

Yet it will be all of the above.   This student will come out with money and offers for college tuition.   I wish someone threw me to the ground when I was in school.

Though in those days I recall even the worst kids would have left the room when told to.

Title: %th Circuit rules against Obama's amnesty EO
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 09, 2015, 06:08:50 PM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/nov/9/obama-plan-shield-millions-deportation-rejected-ap/
Title: POTH: Obama admin neutering Inspector Generals
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 28, 2015, 10:45:31 AM
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/us/politics/tighter-lid-on-records-threatens-to-defang-government-watchdogs.html?emc=edit_th_20151128&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193

Title: POTH: Prosecuting the prosecutor and/or judge
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 28, 2015, 12:53:48 PM
WHEN it comes to poor people arrested for felonies in Scott County, Miss., Judge Marcus D. Gordon doesn’t bother with the Constitution. He refuses to appoint counsel until arrestees have been formally charged by an indictment, which means they must languish in jail without legal representation for as long as a year.
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Judge Gordon has robbed countless individuals of their freedom, locking them away from their loved ones and livelihoods for months on end. (I am the lead lawyer in a class-action suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against Scott County and Judge Gordon.) In a recent interview, the judge, who sits on the Mississippi State Circuit Court, was unapologetic about his regime of indefinite detention: “The criminal system is a system of criminals. Sure, their rights are violated.” But, he added, “That’s the hardship of the criminal system.”

There are many words to describe the judge’s blunt disregard of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Callous. Appalling. Cruel. Here’s another possibility: criminal — liable to prosecution and, if found guilty, prison time.

If this notion seems radical, it shouldn’t. Federal law already provides a mechanism to prosecute judges and district attorneys as criminals when they willfully deprive people of their civil rights: Title 18, Section 242, of the federal code.

This isn’t some dusty, rarely used legal tool. The Department of Justice typically wields Section 242 against police and correctional officers accused of physical or sexual violence. But Section 242 applies with equal force to those who prosecute and sentence, the state officials whose deliberate skirting of civil rights can be most devastating.

At least, that’s how it is on paper. The federal government has not in recent memory pursued a judge under Section 242, and it has only rarely enforced this law against prosecutors.

It is absolutely essential to bring rogue law enforcement officers to justice, particularly in a post-Ferguson world in which violations of constitutional rights have come under intense scrutiny. However, the government’s focus on abuses by law enforcement officials leaves the burden of curbing abuse by judges and prosecutors to private individuals.

This is a responsibility few lawyers are willing to accept, in large part because the United States Supreme Court has made pursuing a civil case against a prosecutor or judge practically impossible.

Consider the case of John Thompson, who spent 14 years on death row for a murder he didn’t commit because the New Orleans Parish district attorney’s office intentionally concealed forensic evidence establishing his innocence. After his exoneration, Mr. Thompson sued the office under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, landmark legislation intended to provide a federal forum to those deprived of their civil rights by state officials.

Though Mr. Thompson won a $14 million jury award, the Supreme Court set aside the verdict on appeal. Notwithstanding the fact that the New Orleans prosecutors had similarly withheld evidence in at least four other cases, or the fact that several prosecutors suppressed the evidence in Mr. Thompson’s own case, the court said that Mr. Thompson had failed to demonstrate a pattern of wrongdoing by the district attorney’s office, which it held was required by Section 1983. The court’s decision illustrates just one of a host of protections it has given to prosecutors and judges to shield them from liability.


Civil cases like Mr. Thompson’s reveal a frightening reality. In privileging the discretion of prosecutors and judges to enforce the law, we have come perilously close to placing these officials above the law. We do not know the extent to which judges and prosecutors cross the line into criminality. After all, cellphones rarely capture the moment when a judge or prosecutor illegally locks someone away.

Nonetheless, advocates across the country continue to expose judges who unlawfully deprive defendants of lawyers or throw people in jail simply because they are too poor to pay small amounts of money. We are constantly confronted with wrongful convictions rooted in a prosecutor’s belief that winning a case is more important than seeking justice. These experiences compel us to recognize that sometimes the criminals our justice system most needs to confront are actually running it.

There is a solution: federal criminal prosecutions of state judges and prosecutors who flout the law. The nearly insurmountable barriers to justice in civil court don’t apply in criminal prosecutions. Indeed, the Supreme Court has invoked the availability of Section 242 prosecutions to justify its sealing of federal courthouse doors against people seeking to vindicate their civil rights.

Last month, the Department of Justice provided a rare glimpse of the law’s untapped potential. A Missouri prosecutor pleaded guilty under Section 242 of concealing police officers’ brutal assault of an arrestee, then prosecuting the victim on charges the officers fabricated to cover up their crime.

Missouri marks a promising, yet incomplete mandate. Judges and prosecutors violate civil rights every day, in plain sight, and with seeming impunity. To make them answer for these crimes, the federal government must continue to extend its reach beyond the streets and into the courtroom.

Brandon Buskey is a staff attorney with the A.C.L.U.’s Criminal Law Reform Project.
Title: Re: POTH: Prosecuting the prosecutor and/or judge
Post by: G M on November 28, 2015, 02:30:34 PM
Who is going to prosecute the DOJ for civil rights violations?

WHEN it comes to poor people arrested for felonies in Scott County, Miss., Judge Marcus D. Gordon doesn’t bother with the Constitution. He refuses to appoint counsel until arrestees have been formally charged by an indictment, which means they must languish in jail without legal representation for as long as a year.
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Judge Gordon has robbed countless individuals of their freedom, locking them away from their loved ones and livelihoods for months on end. (I am the lead lawyer in a class-action suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against Scott County and Judge Gordon.) In a recent interview, the judge, who sits on the Mississippi State Circuit Court, was unapologetic about his regime of indefinite detention: “The criminal system is a system of criminals. Sure, their rights are violated.” But, he added, “That’s the hardship of the criminal system.”

There are many words to describe the judge’s blunt disregard of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Callous. Appalling. Cruel. Here’s another possibility: criminal — liable to prosecution and, if found guilty, prison time.

If this notion seems radical, it shouldn’t. Federal law already provides a mechanism to prosecute judges and district attorneys as criminals when they willfully deprive people of their civil rights: Title 18, Section 242, of the federal code.

This isn’t some dusty, rarely used legal tool. The Department of Justice typically wields Section 242 against police and correctional officers accused of physical or sexual violence. But Section 242 applies with equal force to those who prosecute and sentence, the state officials whose deliberate skirting of civil rights can be most devastating.

At least, that’s how it is on paper. The federal government has not in recent memory pursued a judge under Section 242, and it has only rarely enforced this law against prosecutors.

It is absolutely essential to bring rogue law enforcement officers to justice, particularly in a post-Ferguson world in which violations of constitutional rights have come under intense scrutiny. However, the government’s focus on abuses by law enforcement officials leaves the burden of curbing abuse by judges and prosecutors to private individuals.

This is a responsibility few lawyers are willing to accept, in large part because the United States Supreme Court has made pursuing a civil case against a prosecutor or judge practically impossible.

Consider the case of John Thompson, who spent 14 years on death row for a murder he didn’t commit because the New Orleans Parish district attorney’s office intentionally concealed forensic evidence establishing his innocence. After his exoneration, Mr. Thompson sued the office under Section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, landmark legislation intended to provide a federal forum to those deprived of their civil rights by state officials.

Though Mr. Thompson won a $14 million jury award, the Supreme Court set aside the verdict on appeal. Notwithstanding the fact that the New Orleans prosecutors had similarly withheld evidence in at least four other cases, or the fact that several prosecutors suppressed the evidence in Mr. Thompson’s own case, the court said that Mr. Thompson had failed to demonstrate a pattern of wrongdoing by the district attorney’s office, which it held was required by Section 1983. The court’s decision illustrates just one of a host of protections it has given to prosecutors and judges to shield them from liability.


Civil cases like Mr. Thompson’s reveal a frightening reality. In privileging the discretion of prosecutors and judges to enforce the law, we have come perilously close to placing these officials above the law. We do not know the extent to which judges and prosecutors cross the line into criminality. After all, cellphones rarely capture the moment when a judge or prosecutor illegally locks someone away.

Nonetheless, advocates across the country continue to expose judges who unlawfully deprive defendants of lawyers or throw people in jail simply because they are too poor to pay small amounts of money. We are constantly confronted with wrongful convictions rooted in a prosecutor’s belief that winning a case is more important than seeking justice. These experiences compel us to recognize that sometimes the criminals our justice system most needs to confront are actually running it.

There is a solution: federal criminal prosecutions of state judges and prosecutors who flout the law. The nearly insurmountable barriers to justice in civil court don’t apply in criminal prosecutions. Indeed, the Supreme Court has invoked the availability of Section 242 prosecutions to justify its sealing of federal courthouse doors against people seeking to vindicate their civil rights.

Last month, the Department of Justice provided a rare glimpse of the law’s untapped potential. A Missouri prosecutor pleaded guilty under Section 242 of concealing police officers’ brutal assault of an arrestee, then prosecuting the victim on charges the officers fabricated to cover up their crime.

Missouri marks a promising, yet incomplete mandate. Judges and prosecutors violate civil rights every day, in plain sight, and with seeming impunity. To make them answer for these crimes, the federal government must continue to extend its reach beyond the streets and into the courtroom.

Brandon Buskey is a staff attorney with the A.C.L.U.’s Criminal Law Reform Project.
Title: Trey Gowdy on a rampage on taking gun rights via No Fly List
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2015, 09:02:13 AM
https://www.facebook.com/Oversight/videos/10153418211287517/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 04, 2016, 03:00:52 PM
ttt
Title: Do I Need Federal Firearms License to Sell Thousands of Guns to Mexican Cartels?
Post by: DougMacG on January 08, 2016, 07:29:37 AM
Citizen Asks ATF: Do I Need a Federal Firearms License to Sell Thousands of Guns to Mexican Cartels?

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/01/06/citizen-asks-atf-very-important-question-about-selling-guns-with-a-federal-license-n2100639
https://thepatriotperspective.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/gunwalker-update-atfs-operation-facebook-and-furious/atf-facebook-furious-160106-get-off-this-page/

(http://media.townhall.com/_townhall/uploads/2016/1/6/12.jpg)
Title: Executive Privilege on Operation Fast and Furious overruled by Fed judge
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 19, 2016, 04:25:18 PM
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/judge-rejects-obamas-executive-privilege-claim-over-fast-and-furious-records-217970
Title: NRO's Jim Geraghty: More on Operation Fast and Furious
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2016, 12:46:45 PM
Jim Geraghty of NRO:

El Chapo’ Drug Kingpin Had a Rifle from Federal ‘Fast & Furious’ Program
The Fast and Furious gun-smuggling scandal is one of those stories that the government and the media declared over . . . that wasn’t, or isn’t, actually over.

Here’s a nice example:

A .50-caliber rifle found at Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s hideout in Mexico was funneled through the gun-smuggling investigation known as Fast and Furious, sources confirmed Tuesday to Fox News.

A .50-caliber is a massive rifle that can stop a car, or as it was intended, take down a helicopter.

After the raid on Jan. 8 in the city of Los Mochis that killed five of his men and wounded one Mexican marine, officials found a number of weapons inside the house Guzman was staying, including the rifle, officials said.

When agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives checked serial numbers of the eight weapons found in his possession, they found one of the two .50-caliber weapons traced back to the ATF program, sources said.

Also, did you remember this? I didn’t.

This week the scandal took on a new dimension with the revelation that Nadir Soofi, one of two Muslim terrorists killed attempting to murder attendees of a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest held in Texas in May, had acquired one of the guns he owned as a result of the Fast and Furious operation. This meant that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was in the position of indirectly selling Islamic terrorists one of the weapons they may have used in an attack on Americans on American soil.

I wrote after the Inspector General’s report came out:

The inspector general’s report concludes that they can find no evidence Holder knew about Fast and Furious until well after [Border Protection Agent Brian] Terry’s death, but . . . well, the circumstances of Holder being so out of the loop, so in the dark about a major operation certainly appear unusual, perhaps to the point of straining credulity. The report states:

 “We found it troubling that a case of this magnitude and that affected Mexico so significantly was not directly briefed to the Attorney General. We would usually expect such information to come to the Attorney General through the Office of the Deputy Attorney General . . . [Holder] was not told in December 2010 about the connection between the firearms found at the scene of the shooting and Operation Fast and Furious. Both Acting Deputy Attorney General Grindler and Counsel to the Attorney General and Deputy Chief of Staff Wilkinson were aware of this significant and troubling information by December 17, 2010, but did not believe the information was sufficiently important to alert the Attorney General about it or to make any further inquiry regarding this development.”

Not “sufficiently important”? Baffling. Maddening. Some might even say, “implausible” . . .

Repeatedly, everyone under Holder seems to do everything possible to make sure he isn’t informed about an operation that, in the words of the IG report, failed “to adequately consider the risk to public safety in the United States and Mexico”. In fact, information about the program went all the way to Holder’s office -- but somehow, the memos, emails and other communications never reached the man himself. It’s as if he wasn’t there.

From the IOG report, again:

“As we describe below, we identified information regarding Operation Fast and Furious that reached the Office of the Attorney General in 2010 but not Attorney General Holder himself.”

Well. If you’re wondering if this is covered by some sort of obscure procedure or rules, it isn’t:

“[Holder] should have been informed by no later than December 17, 2010, that two firearms recovered at the Terry murder scene were linked to an ATF firearms trafficking investigation … We found that although [Holder’s then deputy-chief-of-staff Monty] Wilkinson forwarded to Holder during the afternoon of December 15 three emails from the US Attorney’s Office providing further details about the shooting and law enforcement efforts to find and arrest the suspects, he did not notify the Attorney General of the revelation that two weapons found at the murder scene were linked to a suspect in an ATF firearms trafficking investigation.”

See, this all occurred at a time when reining in out-of-control, unaccountable law-enforcement officials wasn’t a priority to the Left. It is now, but, eh, sorry, you missed the news cycle.
Title: Against court order, IRS wipes hard drive
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2016, 07:29:59 PM
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/01/20/irs-wipes-hard-drive-that-court-ordered-it-to-preserve/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
Title: One snow day sets work back a month
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2016, 12:04:53 PM
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/01/23/obama-state-dept-wants-to-delay-release-of-hillary-emails-because-of-snow-storm/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
Title: IRS destroying evidence again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2016, 03:15:48 PM
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/again-irs-destroys-another-hard-184100221.html

Hat tip CCP
Title: Re: IRS destroying evidence again
Post by: G M on January 25, 2016, 03:17:53 PM
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/again-irs-destroys-another-hard-184100221.html

Must have the same get out of jail free card issued to Lois Lerner.
Title: AG Lynch deciding whether to obey federal judge's order in OF&F
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 27, 2016, 11:00:16 AM
http://www.teaparty.org/ag-lynch-decided-whether-turn-fast-furious-documents-140286/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ag-lynch-decided-whether-turn-fast-furious-documents
Title: What a curious coincidence
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 27, 2016, 05:48:13 PM
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/01/26/planned-parenthood-board-member-works-in-office-of-d-a-who-indicted-david-daleiden/?utm_content=buffer0c73b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Title: Re: What a curious coincidence
Post by: G M on January 27, 2016, 05:54:37 PM
http://www.lifenews.com/2016/01/26/planned-parenthood-board-member-works-in-office-of-d-a-who-indicted-david-daleiden/?utm_content=buffer0c73b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The blatant politicization of prosecutors and prosecutions has become something kafkaesque.
Title: War on the rule of law: In the Obama administration, Who should prosecute Whom?
Post by: DougMacG on February 03, 2016, 05:57:56 AM
Current Sec of State John Kerry sent classified information to then Sec of State Hillary Clinton's private email on HIS private email...

https://foia.state.gov/searchapp/DOCUMENTS/HRCEmail_Jan29thWeb/O-2015-08635-JAN29/DOC_0C05788004/C05788004.pdf
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/267949-kerry-sent-secret-email-to-clinton-from-personal-account
Title: DC's lawlessness
Post by: G M on February 08, 2016, 05:55:11 PM
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/02/08/irs-tea-party-targeting-lois-lerner-corruption--obama-glenn-reynolds-column/79967098/

Culture of corruption.
Title: WSJ: Career Attorneys at DOJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2016, 10:10:31 AM
http://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-and-clintons-email-probe-1456448102
Title: Dems hoisted on Obama's petard
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2016, 07:28:05 PM
http://freebeacon.com/issues/top-dems-outraged-over-obama-efforts-to-ignore-pro-israel-provisions/
Title: IRS's Lois Lerner and DOJ were in collusion with each other
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 27, 2016, 08:52:37 PM
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/12/11/report-lois-lerner-emails-show-obama-s-justice-department-assisted-irs-to-target-conservative-groups/
Title: AG Lynch on case against Hillary (Brett Baier interview)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 01, 2016, 10:55:42 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkwDy8fA7ZE
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 08, 2016, 10:16:23 PM
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/07/judicial-watch-presses-ahead-with-fight-over-irs-criminal-investigation-facts/
Title: Does Baraq's strong backing for EDC mean the fixi is in?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 18, 2016, 09:26:34 AM
How we now know that Hillary Clinton will not be prosecuted for anything
POSTED AT 8:01 AM ON MARCH 18, 2016 BY JAZZ SHAW

John wrote yesterday about how Barack Obama has been working behind the scenes to move large dollar Democratic donors away from Bernie Sanders and towards Hillary Clinton. This, combined with various attacks from his bully pulpit on Donald Trump, have led to the correct conclusion that Obama will wind up being one of the most active presidents in modern history in terms of the election of his successor. This was a point made this week by Juliet Eilperin at the Washington Post. Traditionally, Presidents have bent over backward to at least lend the patina of non-involvement in such an election, allowing the voters to make their own choice, but not so in this case.

But we learned something else from this episode if you’re willing to look into the tea leaves closely enough. Michelle Jesse came to the same conclusion I did yesterday.

But the bigger point is, why would President Obama tell his party to unite around a candidate at serious risk of criminal indictment — when all signs from the FBI would indicate a very good chance, if not a certainty, that indictment will be recommended based on the investigation? Of course, he would only do such a thing if he knew — was determined — that, no matter what, the chosen candidate would not be charged.

Hillary Clinton herself has appeared to think she’s untouchable — even declaring with certainty that she will not be indicted. “Oh, for goodness, it’s not going to happen. I’m not even answering that question,” Clinton said recently in Miami.

There’s a reason that these two stories are so closely interwoven. If Barack Obama were taking the usual stance of presidents past he would simply express his support for whichever Democrat the voters chose in the primary and get on with his life, but this cycle has a number of wildcards mixed into the deck. You’d be hard pressed to find a parallel in the history of American politics where a major party presidential candidate was on the verge of winning the nomination while simultaneously facing the threat of indictment on serious criminal charges. (We won’t count Nixon in 72 because the break-in at the Watergate hotel didn’t happen until June of that year and there wasn’t a conviction until after Nixon was reelected and sworn in the following January.)
With the President being so clearly invested in electing a Democrat in general and Hillary Clinton in particular to continue his legacy, there’s simply no way he would risk putting his thumb on the scale for a candidate who might be essentially disqualified if she had to run the last stage of her campaign from a jail cell. With all that in mind, it’s difficult to conclude anything other than a presumption that Obama knows that Clinton will face no such peril. But how could he know that if the investigation isn’t even finished yet?

It’s a question which is answered rather easily, and it all comes down to Huma Abedin. It’s true that we’ve previously speculated that Huma might be the undoing of Clinton once all of her records are examined, but she also serves as an example of just how far the Obama administration is willing to go to block any damage to Clinton’s historic candidacy. When the Inspectors General turned over an embezzlement case against Abedin for prosecution, the Justice Department promptly dropped it in the circular file as an act of prosecutorial discretionand that was the end of it.

Is there any reason that they won’t do the same with Hillary Clinton herself? There are only two people who can know the answer to that question with certainty and they are Barack Obama himself and Attorney General Loretta Lynch. If the fix is in and Lynch has been told to flush any recommendation she receives from the FBI or other law enforcement officials, Clinton is in the clear and the campaign can continue without losing any sleep. But if there was even a chance that an indictment was coming, you’d see Barack Obama sidestepping away from Hillary as fast as his feet could carry him.

The game is rigged, folks. At this point even the FBI must be wondering why they’re even bothering with all this work.
Title: IRS resistance angering Fed judge
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 24, 2016, 09:15:42 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/23/obama-administrations-continuous-resistance-in-irs-targeting-case-slammed-by-federal-appeals-court/
Title: What if the Empress Dowager is not indicited?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 30, 2016, 06:29:01 PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-if-clinton-isnt-indicted/2016/03/29/81a1033e-f5d7-11e5-8b23-538270a1ca31_story.html
Title: AG Loretta Lynch wants to let nation break law without consequences
Post by: G M on April 09, 2016, 05:14:49 PM
http://nypost.com/2016/03/27/ag-loretta-lynch-wants-to-let-nation-break-law-without-consequences/

AG Loretta Lynch wants to let nation break law without consequences
By Paul Sperry March 27, 2016 | 6:00am
Modal Trigger AG Loretta Lynch wants to let nation break law without consequences


Black Democrats pitch Loretta Lynch for Supreme Court
As New York moves to decriminalize low-level offenses, arguing enforcement is “rigged against communities of color,” other large cities are coming under pressure from the Justice Department to do the same thing.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch has issued a warning to municipal and state judges across the country that their courts could lose federal funding if they don’t ease up on fines and arrest warrants for minor crimes involving poor offenders, indigent minorities in particular.

In lieu of fines and jail time, Lynch urges the nation’s 6,500 municipal courts to provide an avenue for offenders to perform “community service” or take advantage of “amnesty days,” whereby outstanding arrest warrants are cleared for nominal fees.

Failure to comply with these policies could trigger a Ferguson-style discrimination investigation. Already, Lynch says she’s “evaluating discrimination complaints against several court systems.”

A strongly worded “guidance” letter, written by her civil rights team, warns that a local court policy of enforcing warrants for failure to pay court fines and fees can have an adverse “disparate impact” on African-Americans, who are fined and/or arrested for outstanding warrants at “disproportionate” rates versus whites.

Federal data also show that blacks tend to break both felony and misdemeanor laws at a disproportionate rate. Even if applied evenly across all races and in neutral, color-blind fashion, such policies could be found by Justice to be discriminatory.

“In court systems receiving federal funds, these practices may also violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when they unnecessarily impose disparate harm on the basis of race,” the nine-page letters states.

It’s a slippery slope to clemency for criminals, large and small.
This is the same dubious legal threat the administration is using to force the nation’s public schools to back off suspending unruly — even violent — black students, and to force cops to avoid stopping, frisking and arresting minority offenders.

The Supreme Court has ruled that disparate impact doesn’t violate Title VI, only “intentional” discrimination does. “The administration is quite wrong to say that Title VI incorporates a ‘disparate impact’ standard,” Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity points out. “The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that it does not.”

This new court “reform” will only exacerbate the crime problem. Studies show ignoring low-level crimes like warrant violations only leads to bigger crimes.

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the NYPD has scaled back its aggressive enforcement of low-level offenses only to see both minor and serious crime rebound. Already cops have backed off public urination and other public nuisance violations, while overlooking outstanding warrants for many other misdemeanor crimes.

Even a senior Justice Department official predicts the decriminalization-cum-deincarceration movement will backfire in higher crime nationwide. “In five years the crime rate is going to be crazy again,” he said.

The official, who oversees probation of felons paroled from federal prisons and who requested anonymity, worries the new department policy will be abused.

“I don’t see liberal judges even attempting to make people pay or spending the time making an accurate determination of a person being ‘indigent,’ ” he said. “It’s another way of not holding people accountable for their actions.”

Modal Trigger
The Justice guidance defines “indigent” as anybody who might be “eligible for public benefits,” but not actually receiving them. “Jurisdictions may benefit from creating statutory presumptions of indigency for certain classes of defendants,” the source said.

The administration claims cops and courts conspire to exploit poor blacks to generate city revenue in some kind of shakedown. But data show blacks fail to pay their fines at far greater rates than whites, so why not target whites if cash extortion is the objective?

Many of the cities with the highest fines, such as Philadelphia, are run by Democrats; and the Justice Department is no piker when it comes to levying fines.

“US attorneys always want fines and restitution amounts in the millions from people who have little chance of ever paying it back,” the department official said.

Liberals are actually to blame for the trend they’re trying to reform. Court fines and fees help pay for all the new costs liberals have added to the system, such as drug counseling and home electronic monitoring. They’ve also pushed judges to assess more fines in lieu of incarceration, especially for drug offenders.

Yet now they claim the whole court fine and bail system is racist.

Former federal civil rights attorney Hans Bader, now with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, describes the latest reforms as a “massive assault on the criminal justice system.”

It’s a slippery slope to clemency for criminals, large and small.

Paul Sperry is a former Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration.”
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on April 09, 2016, 05:32:30 PM
Just another example of the war on white people.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 18, 2016, 03:48:00 PM
While I was gone I saw something about how Baraq said there would be no White House interference with the FBI/DOJ investigation of the Empress Dowager and then later in the same comments he interfered.  Anyone have a good citation for this?
Title: Obama puts his thumb on the scales of justice for Hillary
Post by: ccp on April 18, 2016, 07:30:05 PM
 'Anyone have a good citation for this?':
http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/04/11/after-obama-says-he-not-influencing-email-investigation-conservative-media-claim-president-%E2%80%9Ctipping/209859
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 18, 2016, 08:03:01 PM
Thank you.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on April 19, 2016, 11:16:35 AM
He has been meddling from the beginning, like he did with Supreme Court cases, Fast and Furious and IRS Targeting.  Just the fact that he guarantees no political influence tells us there is. 

What else would be holding up the investigation?  Why didn't he start the investigation when he found out about her personal server long before we did?
Title: The war on the rule of law: The Danziger Bridge case
Post by: DougMacG on April 27, 2016, 09:13:13 AM
(Moving this over by request)  I'm sure everyone has already seen this case plastered all over the news...

Serious misconduct and cover up by the New Orleans police followed by misconduct of the Justice Department lawyers in the case. The judge excoriates in very strong language the conduct of gov’t prosecutors and their supervisors in Washington. The judge puts the blame on the supervisors of the civil rights division of the Justice Dept. and Thomas Perez, the current Secretary of Labor and head of the Civil Rights Division at the time, is specifically mentioned.

Perez is a possible Hillary VP choice and Loretta Lynch runs a Justice Department that still hasn't acted on Fast and Furious, IRS targeting, black Panthers voter interference or Hillary Clinton's security breaches.  Also note the lack of coverage outside of that region.  Does anyone here know more on this?

More here:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/04/across-the-danziger-bridge.php
and here:
http://theadvocate.com/news/neworleans/neworleansnews/15568565-123/with-danziger-bridge-pleas-federal-judge-unloads-on-top-government-officials
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 27, 2016, 12:04:13 PM
Lets keep an eye out for those names should they become part of the Empress Dowager's campaign.
Title: Legitimacy
Post by: G M on April 27, 2016, 07:41:19 PM
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/52457.html


Title: More State Dept running interference for the Empress Dowager
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 06, 2016, 09:06:13 AM
https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-lawsuit-uncovers-more-hillary-clinton-emails-withheld-from-state-department/

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/trey-gowdy-benghazi-probe-222867#ixzz47saswgTB
Title: WaPo's opening shot in the leak wars
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 06, 2016, 10:46:42 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/federal-prosecutors-in-virginia-assisting-in-clinton-email-probe/2016/05/05/f0277faa-12f0-11e6-81b4-581a5c4c42df_story.html
Title: are we at war or not?
Post by: ccp on May 07, 2016, 05:16:00 AM
This officer does have a good point.  Why are we always conducting war like military operations without approval from Congress.  OTOH we have a President who will not name the enemy for who they are.   

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/05/06/army-captain-sues-obama-war-isis/
Title: Re: are we at war or not?
Post by: G M on May 07, 2016, 05:28:09 AM
This officer does have a good point.  Why are we always conducting war like military operations without approval from Congress.  OTOH we have a President who will not name the enemy for who they are.   

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/05/06/army-captain-sues-obama-war-isis/

The JV squad is somehow exempt. Obama has a pen and a phone.
Title: Re: are we at war or not?
Post by: DougMacG on May 07, 2016, 12:59:19 PM
This officer does have a good point.  Why are we always conducting war like military operations without approval from Congress.  OTOH we have a President who will not name the enemy for who they are.   
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/05/06/army-captain-sues-obama-war-isis/
The JV squad is somehow exempt. Obama has a pen and a phone.

I think Rand Paul had an authorization of force proposal.  Even if you oppose use of force, you should support taking and up or down vote.  Are we at war with ISIS or not?  To be at war, the constitution requires that congress declare it.  Even against a "JV team".  I don't know a sports analogy that works for people who blow up civilians and decapitate innocent people.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 07, 2016, 03:36:27 PM
"Obama has a pen and a drone."
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on May 07, 2016, 05:21:47 PM
"Obama has a pen and a drone."

I kick myself for not thinking of that! Nice.
Title: Fed judge sanctions DOJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2016, 05:00:05 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/435630/federal-judge-issues-extraordinary-order-sanctioning-doj-misconduct-executive-amnesty
Title: DOJ and FBI at cross purposes?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2016, 12:57:49 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435393/hillary-clinton-e-mails-Cheryl-Mills-DOJ
Title: The end result of war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on May 23, 2016, 06:22:59 AM
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/05/22/government-corruption-law-abiding-society-trust-irs-hillary-clinton-column/84744432/

Glenn Reynolds: When leaders cheat, followers ... follow
Glenn Harlan Reynolds 4:14 p.m. EDT May 22, 2016
The trust that underlies a law-abiding society is rotting away thanks to double-dealing in Washington.


The state is “a gang of thieves writ large,” economist Murray Rothbard is said to have remarked. I’ve always viewed that sort of comment with a bit of skepticism. But now I’m beginning to wonder.

I wonder more when I read things like this report from the Washington Examiner: “The CIA's inspector general is claiming it inadvertently destroyed its only copy of a classified, three-volume Senate report on torture, prompting a leading senator to ask for reassurance that it was in fact ‘an accident.’”

Here’s a hint: It very likely wasn’t.

Is that unfair? I mean, it could have been an accident, right? Yeah it could have been. But it wasn’t. Accidents like that just don’t happen — or, when they do, they’re generally not accidents. And it’s right for people who have custody of evidence to know that any convenient “accidents” will give rise to the presumption that they had something pretty awful to hide, and that they hid it.

But, of course, the CIA’s “accident” was only the latest in a long rash of “accidental” losses of incriminating information in this administration. The IRS — whose Tea Party-targeting scandal is now over 1,100 days old without anyone being charged or sent to jail — seems to have a habit of ”accidentally” destroying hard drives containing potentially incriminating evidence. It has done so in spite of court orders, in spite of Congressional inquiries and in spite of pretty much everyone’s belief that these “accidents” were actually the deliberate, illegal destruction of incriminating evidence to protect the guilty.

Then there’s Hillary’s email scandal, in which emails kept on a private unsecure server — presumably to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures — were deleted. Now emails from Hillary’s IT guy, who is believed to have set up the server, have gone poof.

“Destroy the evidence, and you’ve got it made,” said an old frozen dinner commercial. But now that appears to be the motto of the United States government.

So why do the rest of us bother to obey the law? And, yes, that’s an increasingly serious question.

People follow the law for a mix of reasons. First, they may simply fear punishment. That undoubtedly motivates a lot of people, though in fact the risk of punishment is usually pretty low, and people, in general, obey the law even when the risk of being caught is negligible.

People may also obey the law because they agree with it: I don’t need to worry about the likelihood of punishment for torturing kittens because I think that’s wrong, and I wouldn’t do it anyway.

And people may obey the law because they think that being law-abiding is an important part of maintaining a viable society. But that’s the kind of law-abiding behavior that’s at risk when people at the top treat the law with unconcealed contempt.

Being law-abiding for its own sake is a traditional part of bourgeois culture, and our ruling class has lately treated the bourgeoisie with contempt as well. Which raises the risk that this contempt will be returned.

Back in the midst of the financial crisis, Gonzalo Lira looked at how people were responding to the mortgage meltdown and warned of a coming middle-class anarchy. He wrote:

“A terrible sentence, when a law-abiding citizen speaks it: Everybody else is doing it — so why don’t we? ... What’s really important is that law-abiding middle-class citizens are deciding that playing by the rules is nothing but a sucker’s game.”

America has been — and, for the moment, remains — a high-trust society. In high-trust societies, people extend trust to strangers and follow rules for the most part even when nobody is watching. In low-trust societies, trust seldom extends beyond close family, and everybody cheats if they can get away with it.

High-trust societies are much nicer places to live than low-trust ones. But a fish rots from the head and the head of our society is looking pretty rotten. As Lira says, “I’m like Wayne Gretsky: I don’t concern myself with where the puck has been — I look for where the puck is going to be.” Where will our society be in a decade if these trends continue? And what can we do to ensure that they don’t?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
Title: Fed Judge blasts lying DOJ lawyers
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2016, 03:30:49 PM
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/05/fed-judge-blasts-doj-lawyers-lying-court-defend-obama-amnesty/
Title: this is nice but as always changes nothing
Post by: ccp on May 25, 2016, 03:46:05 PM
But what does "public scolding" mean? 

Are there any consequences?

Should not the state or DC bar take action against these attorneys?

What good is public scolding anyway?  It will not really be in the MSM domain.

What consequences? 

I assume there is no controlling legal authority.

Title: Re: changes nothing, Rule of Law?
Post by: DougMacG on May 25, 2016, 04:10:30 PM
But what does "public scolding" mean? 

Are there any consequences?

Should not the state or DC bar take action against these attorneys?

What good is public scolding anyway?  It will not really be in the MSM domain.

What consequences? 

I assume there is no controlling legal authority.

Agree!  Where are the consequences?  The IRS commissioner, the Attorney General is Fast and Furious, the private email server and on and on.  Break the law, break the rules, no consequence.

Can't wait to see the upcoming pardon season.  No one went to jail, maybe there won't be any pardons.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 25, 2016, 09:45:35 PM
Judge Napolitano said today's IG report PROVES mens rea on Hillary's part and unambiguously predicts the FBI will recommend prosecution before the convention.
Title: Laws are for the little people, not Hillary
Post by: G M on May 27, 2016, 06:30:19 AM
Sub sailor's photo case draws comparisons to Clinton emails
By JOSH GERSTEIN 05/27/16 08:07 AM EDT Updated 05/27/16 09:20 AM EDT
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A Navy sailor is set to plead guilty Friday in a classified information mishandling case that critics charge illustrates a double standard between the treatment of low-ranking government employees and top officials like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and ex-CIA Director David Petraeus, a source close to the case said.
Prosecutors allege that Petty Officer First Class Kristian Saucier used a cellphone camera to take photos in the classified engine room of the nuclear submarine where he worked as a mechanic, the USS Alexandria, then destroyed a laptop, camera and memory card after learning he was under investigation.


No advance notice was given on the court’s docket, but a clerk’s office employee confirmed just after 9 a.m. Friday morning that a change of plea hearing was underway in the case.
Last July, Saucier was indicted on one felony count of unlawful retention of national defense information and another felony count of obstruction of justice. The classified information charge is part of the Espionage Act, but no charge of espionage was filed and no public suggestion of espionage has been made.
The charges carry a maximum possible sentence of up to 30 years in prison, although the sailor’s sentence will likely be significantly less than that.
Saucier’s friends, conservative commentators and others say the stiff charges against Saucier are out of whack with more lenient treatment given to senior officials who face allegations of mishandling classified information, like Clinton.
“I just don’t think it’s fair,” said Gene Pitcher, a retired Navy sailor who served with Saucier aboard the Alexandria. “In reality, what she did is so much worse than what Kris did. ... I think it’s just a blatant double standard.”
Clinton has not been charged with any crime, but the FBI has been investigating how information that intelligence agencies consider classified wound up on the private server that hosted her only email account during the four years she served as secretary of state. Some news reports have said charges are unlikely.
“Felony charges appear to be reserved for people of the lowest ranks. Everyone else who does it either doesn’t get charged or gets charged with a misdemeanor,” said Edward MacMahon, a Virginia defense attorney not involved in the Saucier case.
To some, the comparison to Clinton’s case may appear strained. Clinton has said none of the information on her server was marked classified at the time. In many cases, it was marked as unclassified when sent to her by people in the State Department more familiar with the issues involved.
By contrast, sailors are trained early on that the engine compartment of a nuclear sub is a restricted area and that much information relating to the sub’s nuclear reactors is classified.
Still, it’s far from obvious that the information Saucier took photos of is more sensitive than information found in Clinton’s account. Court filings say the photos were clear enough that they reveal classified details about the submarine that could be of use to foreign governments, such as the vessel’s maximum speed.

However, the Navy says the photos are classified “confidential,” which is the lowest tier of protection for classified information and is designated for information that could cause some damage to national security but not “serious” or “exceptionally grave” damage.
Intelligence agencies claim that Clinton’s account contained 65 messages with information considered “Secret” and 22 classified at the “Top Secret” level. Some messages contained data under an even more restrictive “special access program” designation.
Clinton and her campaign have disputed those findings, calling them a result of “overclassification” and urging that the messages be released in full.

However, Clinton’s critics and some former intelligence officials said she should have recognized the sensitivity of the information. They’ve also noted that about 32,000 messages on Clinton’s server were erased after her lawyers deemed them personal.
“The DOJ is willing to prosecute a former sailor to the full extent of the law for violating the law on classified material, in a situation where there was no purposeful unsecured transmission of classified material,” conservative blogger Ed Morrissey wrote last year. “Will they pursue Hillary Clinton and her team, at the other end of the power spectrum from the rank-and-file, for deliberate unsecured transmission of improperly marked classified nat-sec intelligence? Will they pursue the same kind of obstruction of justice charges for Hillary’s wiping of her server as they are for Saucier’s destruction of his laptop?”

Jury selection in Saucier’s case took place earlier this month in U.S. District Court in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and opening arguments were scheduled to take place Tuesday, just after the Memorial Day holiday. Instead, a change-of-plea hearing is expected Friday. It was not immediately clear to what charge Saucier plans to plead guilty or what plea deal has been struck.
A defense attorney for Saucier and a spokesman for the prosecution did not respond to messages Thursday evening seeking comment for this story.

The investigation into Saucier kicked off in a rather unusual way in 2012 when a supervisor at a dump in Hampton, Connecticut, found a cellphone “on top of a pile of trash approximately three to four feet into the middle of a dumpster at the transfer station,” a court filing read. The supervisor showed the images to a retired Navy friend who turned over the device to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

Pitcher acknowledges that his friend violated Navy rules if he took the photos as prosecutors allege, but he says such infractions by submariners were not uncommon and were almost always dealt with through what the military calls “nonjudicial punishment” or Captain’s Mast. Those involved were demoted and docked some pay, but didn’t face a felony record or the prospect of years behind bars, the retired sailor said.

“Two guys in our boat were caught taking photos in the engine room on the nuclear side of things. Basically, all that happened to them was they … lost a rank,” Pitcher said. “I’ve seen quite a few cases like this and never seen any handled like Kris’.”
secondary_sub_compy_1_ho_1160.jpg

Redacted and declassified cell-phone photos of nuclear sub’s engine room/Justice Department Court Filing
One factor that may have led investigators and prosecutors to handle Saucier’s case more aggressively is the way he responded when confronted about the photos. Court filings say he initially denied he took the pictures. Prosecutors say he later smashed his laptop, camera and memory card and threw them in the woods.
On top of that, Saucier had a handgun not registered to him in his home, prosecutors allege. After the FBI and NCIS showed up to question him, he allegedly cleaned it with bleach and stashed it under the dishwasher.
“They love the obstruction charges,” MacMahon said. “What they look for is something that’s aggravating.”
The defense attorney noted that CIA Director David Petraeus was accused of lying to the FBI when first confronted about keeping top secret notebooks at home and sharing them with his lover. Many lawyers believe that fact may have tipped the case against Petraeus from something that might have cost him his job to one that resulted in criminal prosecution.

Still, Petraeus was never charged with obstruction of justice. Before any charges were filed, his attorney reached a deal with prosecutors in which the retired general pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information.
A former military investigator who handled classified information cases said the military tends to treat such violations more seriously than civilian government agencies do and there are some valid reasons for that.

“It is exceedingly common for people in the military to be held accountable for classified information violations, much more so than in the civilian government or contractor world,” said Bill Leonard, former director of the government’s Information Security Oversight Office. “My sense is that’s just a reflection of the military’s emphasis on good order and discipline. ... It really does make a difference to the guy or gal next to you if [sensitive] information is compromised. That’s a very real consequence.”
secondary_sub_compy_2_ho_1160.jpg
Redacted and declassified cell-phone photos of nuclear sub’s engine room/Justice Department Court Filing

Since Saucier is still in the Navy, it’s unclear why he was charged in federal civilian court rather than sent to a court-martial. One possibility is that investigators may have considered charging others in civilian life with conspiring with the Navy sailor, but that has not happened.
Former Navy sailors said Saucier’s case also overlaps with a period during which the Navy was trying to strike a balance involving the boredom of submarine life during deployments as long as six months and the increasing popularity of smartphones, video-game players and similar devices.
While photography was always banned in engine rooms and taking a camera there would have been highly suspicious, ubiquitous phones with cameras have added new complexity to the situation, the sailors said.
With his friend set to plead guilty, Pitcher said he’s still convinced that Saucier is being treated more harshly than others in government of low or high rank.
“A lot of people were doing what Kris was doing,” Pitcher said. “Clearly, to an educated observer, this is not fair treatment in comparison to other highly visible cases.”


Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/kristian-saucier-investigation-hillary-clinton-223646#
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook
Title: Hillary ineligible
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 30, 2016, 12:41:52 PM
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=245244612504426&set=a.109079146120974.1073741827.100010566667295&type=3&theater
Title: One of the Statutes that Hillary broke
Post by: DougMacG on May 30, 2016, 07:14:13 PM
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=245244612504426&set=a.109079146120974.1073741827.100010566667295&type=3&theater

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2071
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on May 31, 2016, 04:34:15 AM
"Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States."

The left's answer is always the same.  She did NOT "willfully and unlawfully etc...... " (even though the public record alone is enough to prove that she did.)



Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2016, 08:07:08 AM
Thank you Doug!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on June 01, 2016, 07:25:17 AM
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=245244612504426&set=a.109079146120974.1073741827.100010566667295&type=3&theater

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2071

One point first, the constitution spells out the requirements to be President and the requirement of the Vice President are the same, eligible to be President, and Title 19 of the US Code doesn't come above that.  So this law means she is banned and barred from holding any office in the United States - except President or Vice President. 


1)  She "willfully, unlawfully, concealing and removing, or attempting to conceal or remove"
        30,000 documents removed from server under her direction, hidden from oversight

2) "any record, paper, document, or other thing [ELECTRONIC MAIL (EMAIL)]

3)  with "any public office"  [Secretary of State]

Is there a gray area here?  She didn't "attempt to remove or conceal"?  These aren't "other things" like papers and documents?  Sec State is not a "public office"?

US Code provides that:  Shall be fined and / or imprisoned. 

Within the law above, either or both, fined and imprisoned, is a legal choice; neither is not.

Whoever it is [U.S. Attorney General and the President] that is charged with fining or imprisoning her [at least bringing charges] should also face a consequence for refusal to perform the duties entrusted upon them.  Even President Nixon's cabinet understood the choices available to them, do your job or resign your office.  Too bad we don't use the impeachment process more often for office holders who don't and won't enforce the laws that apply to the executive branch.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2016, 09:24:28 AM
"One point first, the constitution spells out the requirements to be President and the requirement of the Vice President are the same, eligible to be President, and Title 19 of the US Code doesn't come above that.  So this law means she is banned and barred from holding any office in the United States - except President or Vice President." 

Disagree.  I think the C. is setting out the minimum requirements here; the requirements listed are not meant to be an exhaustive list.
Title: A Guitar Factory Under Siege
Post by: G M on June 02, 2016, 06:34:18 AM
http://weaponsman.com/?p=32369

http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2014/05/26/lumber-union-protectionists-incited-swat-raid-on-my-factory-says-gibson-guitar-ceo/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on June 02, 2016, 12:58:10 PM
[DM] "One point first, the constitution spells out the requirements to be President and the requirement of the Vice President are the same, eligible to be President, and Title 19 of the US Code doesn't come above that.  So this law means she is banned and barred from holding any office in the United States - except President or Vice President." 

Crafty]  Disagree.  I think the C. is setting out the minimum requirements here; the requirements listed are not meant to be an exhaustive list.


Very interesting.  My view above is based on my opinion, not necessarily legal ruling.  Crazy, but I believe one Congress cannot bind a future Congress, for example, notice how they ignore Humphrey Hawkins and laws that required budgets to be introduced and passed on a particular schedule.  To me, same goes for Title 19 etc.  Congress and Pres of 1960s do not limit who can run for President in 2016.  We have an amendment process for that and it requires 4/5ths of the state legislatures, not a majority in congress plus a Presidential signature.

Even if you went with my view that only the constitution can limit her eligibility to be President, it should be damaging enough that she is banned from any lower office and that her entire inner circle is ineligible for re-hire to staff positions because they conspired to commit the same crimes.
Title: War on the rule of law, "This is how I was treated by the IRS"
Post by: DougMacG on June 20, 2016, 08:31:48 AM
This summarizes the Presidency of Barack Obama and the continuation of this national nightmare under the name of Hillary Clinton.  Obama has not answered to Fast and Furious or to the IRS scandal that helped him get fraudulently reelected in a way far worse than Richard Nixon.  No one has been fired, arrested or prosecuted.  Hillary Clinton worked on the Nixon impeachment and has not distanced herself from the Obama administration scandals.  Waiting for "the media" to pursue this is beyond foolish.  Trump's strength supposedly was to control the media coverage in his favor.  None of that is happening.  This treatment described here is obscene, unworthy of happening in the Soviet Union or PRC.  It is on a par with tanks rolling over protesters in Tiananmen Square.  Worse in a way because of how it is swept under the carpet where the PRC wanted all potential protesters to see their carnage.

Here it is, for all who read PJ Media or DBMA forum, to see:
(I better post the entire text in case the government censors take the story down.)

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/06/16/heres-how-the-irs-treated-me-because-im-a-conservative/

To save on accounting fees, I did much of the legwork. I mailed the heavy envelope with my $850 fee to the IRS on February 8, 2013. The IRS cashed my check -- but the three-month mark, by which we were told we could expect a response, passed.

Then the process became Kafkaesque -- not American.

We called as instructed. We were told we were not assigned an agent yet. We were told we could not be told when we would be assigned an agent. We were told to call back. We did. We were sent a form saying there were problems with the application.

We asked what kinds of problems. We were told that we could not be told. They would assign us an agent. When would we be assigned an agent? The IRS woman impatiently said she did not know.

We waited, long past the three-month mark. And past our opportunity to hold a 2013 year-end fundraiser. I continued to post and speak, and I published three educational guidebooks.

But over a year passed. I called my senator’s office. After several correspondences, we were told we had been assigned an agent.

On May 16, 2014, our – ahem -- Cincinnati-based agent sent an “Information Request” consisting of seven multi-part objections -- with a two-and-a-half week deadline to respond. I was floored. She ended up granting us several extra days.
To save on accounting fees, I did much of the legwork. I mailed the heavy envelope with my $850 fee to the IRS on February 8, 2013. The IRS cashed my check -- but the three-month mark, by which we were told we could expect a response, passed.

Then the process became Kafkaesque -- not American.

We called as instructed. We were told we were not assigned an agent yet. We were told we could not be told when we would be assigned an agent. We were told to call back. We did. We were sent a form saying there were problems with the application.

We asked what kinds of problems. We were told that we could not be told. They would assign us an agent. When would we be assigned an agent? The IRS woman impatiently said she did not know.

We waited, long past the three-month mark. And past our opportunity to hold a 2013 year-end fundraiser. I continued to post and speak, and I published three educational guidebooks.

But over a year passed. I called my senator’s office. After several correspondences, we were told we had been assigned an agent.

On May 16, 2014, our – ahem -- Cincinnati-based agent sent an “Information Request” consisting of seven multi-part objections -- with a two-and-a-half week deadline to respond. I was floored. She ended up granting us several extra days.

The IRS had three types of objections to our application: minor paperwork, a financial inquest, and ideological accusations.

The paperwork, involving a signature and a confusingly worded line on the application, could have been handled quickly by telephone.

The other categories were clearly intended to harass.

One amounted to an audit. An audit not on an existing organization, but on one still applying for status.

In the standard 501(c)(3) application, the IRS only asks for projected expenses, not exact amounts or names of vendors.

But now, still in the application process, we were asked to account -- down to the penny -- for such things as office supplies, honoraria to bloggers (ranging from $0 to $25), and professional fees. They wanted names of bloggers, contributors to guidebooks, and vendors -- how much each was paid, for which project, and what purpose. They wanted percentages of “time and resources” spent on named activities.

We then faced an ideological inquisition on … Common Core. Remember, the IRS granted non-profit status to the multi-million dollar agency that wrote the Common Core standards, namely the Bill Gates-funded Achieve.

They asked us to describe:

… the percentage of your total [Common Core] expenditures and total time spent on these activities during each of your past taxable years.
They also wanted future estimates. Then, they demanded:

Submit representative copies of the materials you prepare or distribute in furtherance of these activities.
Another demand they made was laughably harassing considering the information they already:

For purposes of calculating the percentage of expenditures, allocate salaries, administrative, overhead, and other general expenditures to these activities using a reasonable method. For purposes of calculating the percentage of time, include volunteer as well as employee hours.
Remember, it was pretty much me in the basement. I described my one-woman efforts in a recent post.

We finally received approval on September 2014. They forced me to waste money and time when we should have been building on the momentum of our launch and fundraising. Other groups also lost opportunities, namely in 2012.

That’s how this IRS, this administration, works.

FACEBOOK3.10K TWITTERTWEET 

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on June 20, 2016, 08:59:17 AM
The federal government has been weaponized. Dissent will be treated accordingly.
Title: A win for the rule of law: CA's Yee to prison
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 27, 2016, 06:43:55 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/25/ex-calif-state-sen-leeland-yee-gun-control-champion-heading-to-prison-for-weapons-trafficking/
Title: NRO: NEW docs show Lerner likely broke law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2016, 02:20:38 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437280/irs-tea-party-harassment?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-06-29&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Paris guns from Operation Fast & Furious?!?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2016, 02:26:53 PM
Second post


Not yet confirmed, but there would appear to be considerable smoke , , ,

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/06/law-enforcement-sources-gun-used-paris-terrorist-attacks-came-phoenix/
Title: Re: Paris guns from Operation Fast & Furious?!?
Post by: G M on June 29, 2016, 03:01:12 PM
Second post


Not yet confirmed, but there would appear to be considerable smoke , , ,

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/06/law-enforcement-sources-gun-used-paris-terrorist-attacks-came-phoenix/

I'm sure the MSM will jump right on this story!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2016, 07:22:57 PM
At the moment it looks murky. 

IF the gun was outside OFF, then I'm guessing this will be used as proof of the need for the controls suggested by the proposed UN Small Arms Treaty.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on June 29, 2016, 07:40:53 PM
At the moment it looks murky. 

IF the gun was outside OFF, then I'm guessing this will be used as proof of the need for the controls suggested by the proposed UN Small Arms Treaty.


There are already laws governing the import/export of weapons, which I doubt were followed, but that has never stopped them before. So, I guess that is how it will be spun.
Title: Why Special Prosecutor is a bad idea
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 03, 2016, 10:41:02 AM
Well, if the gun in question walked into Mexico, and from there to Jihadi hands in Paris, that presents all kinds of interesting questions, , ,


==============================================



http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436488/hillary-clinton-email-scandal-obama-special-prosecutor-james-comey-fbi-justice-department
Title: Saddest things obituary of my life
Post by: G M on July 05, 2016, 08:54:31 AM
07/05/2016 The rule of law and the American republic R.I.P.
Title: Re: Saddest things obituary of my life
Post by: DDF on July 05, 2016, 09:59:27 AM
07/05/2016 The rule of law and the American republic R.I.P.

I have a question.

How does anyone, any longer, respect something this blatantly corrupt?

Title: Gangster government
Post by: G M on July 05, 2016, 01:03:16 PM
http://observer.com/2016/07/james-comey-sells-out/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2016, 05:03:15 PM
Would someone please find and post here all the various cases of other people who HAVE been prosecuted for such things and for less?

Thank you-- I'm looking to write the rant from hell on all of this.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DDF on July 05, 2016, 06:14:17 PM
Would someone please find and post here all the various cases of other people who HAVE been prosecuted for such things and for less?

Thank you-- I'm looking to write the rant from hell on all of this.


Patraeus, Snowden, Assange,Deutch, Berger, and more here:

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-federal-cases.html

and more here, this link being particularly interesting because Comey himself is involved, as is Holder:

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/former-cia-officer-convicted-for-unauthorized-disclosure-of-national-defense-information-and-obstruction-of-justice

"Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, 47, of O’Fallon, Missouri, was convicted today in the Eastern District of Virginia of six counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information, and one count each of unlawful retention of national defense information, unauthorized conveyance of government property and obstruction of justice. Sterling was indicted on Dec. 22, 2010, and arrested on Jan. 6, 2011. Sentencing is scheduled for April 24, 2015."

This link here cites several cases and is especially good because it notes the year, administration and outcome of the case and highlights the glaring hypocrisy of this administration (11 separate cases noted):

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/spc/multimedia/espionage/

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on July 05, 2016, 06:23:07 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437502/hillary-clinton-email-scandal

Patraeus got off with a 100 K fine.  Which for him is NOTHING.  He is already serving on multiple boards raking in millions.

 I am also 100% convinced he got off so easy because they needed to clear the deck for Clintons excusal.  Couldn't have him get serious punishment and then not do same for her. 
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DDF on July 05, 2016, 06:28:17 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437502/hillary-clinton-email-scandal

Patraeus got off with a 100 K fine.  Which for him is NOTHING.  He is already serving on multiple boards raking in millions.

 I am also 100% convinced he got off so easy because they needed to clear the deck for Clintons excusal.  Couldn't have him get serious punishment and then not do same for her.  

Two years of probation, $100,000 fine, and losing your career is a hell of a lot more than Clinton got.... That train just keeps rolling. Interesting to note, the CNN Liberal cheerleaders reference in their video of the "special treatment" Patraeus received.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/23/politics/david-petraeus-sentencing/
Title: The day the rule of law died
Post by: G M on July 05, 2016, 06:45:45 PM
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/07/05/the-day-the-rule-of-law-died/?singlepage=true
Title: Re: The day the rule of law died
Post by: DDF on July 05, 2016, 07:00:28 PM
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/07/05/the-day-the-rule-of-law-died/?singlepage=true


Good article. I have to say, I've met several hitmen in person, even looked them in their eyes, unhandcuffed in their prison cells, alone, with his cellie present, and the blackness in their eyes. Not the type of people anyone would pick for president, so when there is an overwhelming consensus that Clinton has people killed:

" this is not the kind of case a reasonable prosecutor would make. Of course it isn't -- not if that prosecutor wants to both keep his job and stay above ground."

What in the fk is she doing as the nominee?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on July 05, 2016, 07:44:32 PM
America has been fundamentally transformed.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DDF on July 05, 2016, 08:22:57 PM
America has been fundamentally transformed.

When I left, six years ago, I never knew it would change that much.

Now that I am thinking about returning, I wonder what I am coming back to.

I honestly think this will break the country into two, shortly.
Title: Hey Comey, here's a case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2016, 07:06:16 AM
http://toprightnews.com/man-commits-exact-same-crime-as-hillary-clinton-but-look-what-the-fbi-did-to-him/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on July 06, 2016, 12:24:55 PM
We are a nation of laws for most of us but at the top wealthiest and connected we are a nation of lawyers:

http://www.theamericanmirror.com/nancy-pelosi-driver-cuts-across-traffic/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DDF on July 06, 2016, 01:01:48 PM
We are a nation of laws for most of us but at the top wealthiest and connected we are a nation of lawyers:

http://www.theamericanmirror.com/nancy-pelosi-driver-cuts-across-traffic/

Sorry....no longer interested in who they're electing.

I just, not five minutes ago, did this:

Just called Congressman Gowdy's office (202-225-6030), stating that:
"I would like it brought to the floor, that I want a state set aside for Americans, where we can go and start a sovereign nation, where a rule of law will apply to us all, and not just for the peasants. That the fact that there are two sets of laws, one for yourselves, and one for the common man foregoes entirely the rule of law. The fact that Comey and Lynch have completely failed to apply that law, when they have already tried and convicted others for lesser and same offenses is insufferable and will not be tolerated."
"Anne" replied that "I can certainly understand your frustration," to which I cut her off and stated"
"No ma'am, I have been respectful, and am not interested in your excuses. I want the message that I just conveyed to you, conveyed to Congressman Gowdy. You have already shown us who you are."

I also just called Texas Governor Greg Abbot as well, stating precisely the same thing, verbatim.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DDF on July 06, 2016, 02:21:56 PM
http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2016/07/04/you-owe-them-nothing--not-respect-not-loyalty-not-obedience-n2186865


Sometimes in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. It is high time to declare our personal independence from any remnant of obligation to those who have spit upon the rule of law. We owe them nothing - not respect, not loyalty, not obedience.

Think about it. If you are out driving at 3 a.m., do you stop at a stop sign when there’s no one coming? Of course you do. You don’t need a cop to be there to make you stop. You do it voluntarily because this is America and America is a country where obeying the law is the right thing to do because the law was justly made and is justly applied. Or it used to be.

The law mattered. It applied equally to everyone. We demanded that it did, all of us – politicians, the media, and regular citizens. Oh, there were mistakes and miscarriages of justice but they weren’t common and they weren’t celebrated – they were universally reviled. And, more importantly, they weren’t part and parcel of the ideology of one particular party. There was once a time where you could imagine a Democrat scandal where the media actually called for the head of the Democrat instead of deploying to cover it up.

People assumed that the law mattered, that the same rules applied to everyone. That duly enacted laws would be enforced equally until repealed. That the Constitution set the foundation and that its guarantees would be honored even if we disliked the result in a particular case. But that’s not our country today.

CARTOONS | STEVE BREEN
VIEW CARTOON
The idea of the rule of law today is a lie. There is no law. There is no justice. There are only lies.

Hillary Clinton is manifestly guilty of multiple felonies. Her fans deny it half-heartedly, but mostly out of habit – in the end, it’s fine with them if she’s a felon. They don’t care. It’s just some law. What’s the big deal? It doesn’t matter that anyone else would be in jail right now for doing a fraction of what she did. But the law is not important. Justice is not important.

The attorney general secretly canoodles with the husband of the subject of criminal investigation by her own department and the president, the enforcer of our laws, shrugs. The media, the challenger of the powerful, smirks. They rub our noses in their contempt for the law. And by doing so, demonstrate their contempt for us.

Only power matters, and Hillary stands ready to accumulate more power on their behalf so their oaths, their alleged principles, their duty to the country – all of it goes out the window. But it’s much worse than just one scandal that seems not to scandalize anyone in the elite. Just read the Declaration of Independence – it’s almost like those dead white Christian male proto-NRA members foresaw and cataloged the myriad oppressions of liberalism’s current junior varsity tyranny.

There is one law for them, and another for us. Sanctuary cities? Obama’s immigration orders? If you conservatives can play by the rules and pass your laws, then we liberals will just not enforce them. You don’t get the benefit of the laws you like. We get the benefit of the ones we do, though. Not you. Too bad, rubes.

So if you are still obeying the law when you don’t absolutely have to, when there isn’t some government enforcer with a gun lurking right there to make you, aren’t you kind of a sucker?

Don’t you feel foolish, like you’re the only one who didn’t get the memo that it’s every man/woman/non-binary entity for his/her/its self?

Who is standing against this? Not the judges. The Constitution? Meh. Why should their personal agendas be constrained by some sort of foundational document? Judges find rights that don’t appear in the text and gut ones that do. Just ask a married gay guy in Los Angeles who can’t carry a concealed weapons to protect himself from [OMITTED] radicals.

The politicians won’t stand against this. The Democrats support allowing the government to jail people for criticizing politicians and clamor to take away citizens’ rights merely because some government flunky has put their name on a list. Their “minority report” on Benghazi is an attack on Trump, and to them the idea of congressional oversight of a Democrat official whose incompetence put four Americans in the ground is not merely illegitimate; it’s a joke.

Is the media standing against this, those sainted watchdogs protecting us from the powerful? Don’t make me laugh.

What do these moral abortions have in common? Short term political gain over principle. These people are so used to the good life that a society’s reflexive reliance on the principle of the rule of law brings that they think they can undermine it with impunity. Oh it’s no big deal if we do this, they reason. Everyone else will keep playing by the rules, right? Everything will be fine even as we score in the short term.

The Romans had principles for a while. Then they got tempted to abandon principle for – wait for it – short term political gain. Then they got Caesar. Then the emperors. Then the barbarians. And then the Dark Ages. But hey, we’re much smarter and more sophisticated than the Romans, who were so dumb they didn’t even know that gender is a matter of choice. Our civilization is permanent and indestructible – it’s not like we are threatened by barbarians who want to come massacre us.

Oh, wait. The last words of some of these people to their radical Muslim killers before they are beheaded will be, “Please remember me as not being Islamaphobic! And sorry about the Crusades!”

There used to be a social contract requiring that our government treat us all equally within the scope of the Constitution and defend us, and in return we would recognize the legitimacy of its laws and defend it when in need. But that contract has been breached. We are not all equal before the law. Our constitutional rights are not being upheld. We are not being defended – hell, we normals get blamed every time some Seventh Century savage goes on a kill spree. Yet we’re still supposed to keep going along as if everything is cool, obeying the law, subsidizing the elite with our taxes, taking their abuse. We’ve been evicted by the landlord but he still wants us to pay him rent.

Now it seems we actually have a new social contract – do what we say and don’t resist, and in return we’ll abuse you, lie about you, take your money, and look down upon you in contempt. What a bargain!

It’s not a social contract anymore – American society today is a suicide pact we never agreed to and yet we’re expected to go first.

I say “No.”

We owe them nothing - not respect, not loyalty, not obedience. Nothing.

We make it easy for them by going along. We make it simple by defaulting to the old rules. But there are no rules anymore, certainly none that morally bind us once we are outside the presence of some government worker with a gun to force our compliance. There is only will and power and we must rediscover our own. If there is no cop sitting right there, then there is nothing to make you stop at that stop sign tonight.

They don’t realize that by rejecting the rule of law, they have set us free. We are independent. We owe them nothing - not respect, not loyalty, not obedience. But with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we will still mutually pledge those who have earned our loyalty with their adherence to the rule of law, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
Title: How come Clinton's lawyers can get away with destroying evidence?
Post by: ccp on July 06, 2016, 06:56:06 PM
"In his comments on Tuesday, Comey declared, “The FBI … discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.” We also already know that some of those work-related emails could be permanently deleted. Indeed, according to Comey, “It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that [Clinton and her team] did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.”

Why are not these lawyers who knew exactly what they were doing when they had thousands of emails permanently removed from their devices not liable for obstruction of justice?

Why do we not hear anything about this?
Title: Re: How come Clinton's lawyers can get away with destroying evidence?
Post by: G M on July 06, 2016, 08:08:37 PM
"In his comments on Tuesday, Comey declared, “The FBI … discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.” We also already know that some of those work-related emails could be permanently deleted. Indeed, according to Comey, “It is also likely that there are other work-related e-mails that [Clinton and her team] did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.”

Why are not these lawyers who knew exactly what they were doing when they had thousands of emails permanently removed from their devices not liable for obstruction of justice?

Why do we not hear anything about this?

Because she and her attorneys are above the laws that you and I live under.
Title: No charges for Cersei
Post by: G M on July 06, 2016, 09:39:56 PM
(https://pajamasmed.hs.llnwd.net/e12/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/LESJONESFBI.jpg)

https://pajamasmed.hs.llnwd.net/e12/instapundit/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/LESJONESFBI.jpg

The Clintons make the Lannisters look decent and ethical.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on July 07, 2016, 06:07:39 AM
We might have to re-name this thread, there is no rule of law.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on July 07, 2016, 06:16:56 AM
We might have to re-name this thread, there is no rule of law.

True. It's dead and buried in an unmarked grave.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on July 07, 2016, 09:27:42 AM
We might have to re-name this thread, there is no rule of law.

True. It's dead and buried in an unmarked grave.

It is the only war that Obama has won.
Title: Theory: Comey ordered to let her off, decided to make her guilt clear
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 07, 2016, 09:35:45 AM
http://endingthefed.com/theory-under-orders-to-let-hillary-skate-comey-decided-to-make-her-guilt-clear.html
Title: Re: Theory: Comey ordered to let her off, decided to make her guilt clear
Post by: G M on July 07, 2016, 10:36:12 AM
http://endingthefed.com/theory-under-orders-to-let-hillary-skate-comey-decided-to-make-her-guilt-clear.html

If he had an ounce of integrity, he would have told the truth and resigned.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on July 07, 2016, 12:37:14 PM
We keep hearing about how honest and how much integrity he has from everyone.  Yet he clearly gave in to the political pressure.  We will probably never know why.

Amazing how he gave in to her lawyers and met with her when she would not be under oath and no transcripts of that interview.  So the interview itself was a total charade.

We here thought the fix was in the day Obamster came out and explained she did nothing intentional or he didn't think she broke any laws.  They  were all colluding one way or the other behind the scenes.
We kept hearing how Comey would do the right thing.   Yet he succumbed to the Dem machine like everyone else.



Title: Trey Gowdy's cross of FBI Director Comey
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 07, 2016, 02:04:53 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV6q9LOubfc
Title: Re: Trey Gowdy's cross of FBI Director Comey
Post by: DougMacG on July 07, 2016, 02:48:27 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV6q9LOubfc

Wow.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on July 07, 2016, 02:58:47 PM
Yes Tray was great. Reading Director Comey's answers is beyond incomprehensible.  Here we are again with statements akin to:

"It depends what is is!"

"she has sex with him but he did not have sex with her"

Or it depends how you define "being in the same room with someone"

If he was honest he would say he was pressured and resign or say he didn't think that Justice was going to do anything anyway to save us from going through more of the same I decided to end it here.

At least he would have been honest.

All I can say is this will be huge black mark on his record he will have to live with.

Gotta love the Dershowitz the other night saying when asked if Hillary broke any laws  he says "not even close" and than proceeds to explain do we want an FBI that has this kind of power aka J Edgar Hoover again?   What is he talking about?  This is not about Comey abusing his power this is about the Secretary of State abusing hers!   Is this guy  an "f"n partisan or what?  But coming from a guy who bears no remorse for getting OJ off what can we expect?
Title: SOme interesting facts on Sec. State Powell
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 07, 2016, 04:33:32 PM
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/us/politics/state-dept-classified-data-found-ex-secretaries-personal-email-john-kerry-condeleezza-rice-colin-powell.html?_r=0&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%2F
Title: JW: Comey should resign
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2016, 10:35:00 AM
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/286668-fbis-comey-is-complicit-in-clinton-email-scandal
Title: Strassel: Comey ran true to form
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 08, 2016, 08:54:43 PM
When President Obama in 2013 named James Comey to head the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the president must have sensed that he had picked someone who could be trusted to have his back, even if Mr. Comey had served in the George W. Bush administration. This week, Mr. Obama’s bet paid off when the G-man let Hillary Clinton skate.

Not that Mr. Comey had an explicit understanding with the White House. It’s just that Mr. Obama and his savvy political team must have known from the start that Mr. Comey was no John Adams.

Not the Adams of Founding Father fame, but John Adams when he was a younger man, who in 1770 agreed to defend British soldiers accused of massacring Boston colonists. The legal task was so unpopular, so dangerous, that nobody else would do it. Yet Adams believed that the law trumped politics, and that the men deserved a fair trial. In taking the case, he risked both his economic and political future. He took it anyway.

Mr. Obama announced Mr. Comey’s appointment by praising his “fierce independence and deep integrity.” And the press drooled over several episodes in his history that had given the former Justice Department official a reputation as tough and impartial. What this missed was that Mr. Comey had risen through the ranks precisely by being the opposite of tough. Washington rewards officials who are best at currying public favor, best at surviving, best at creating unfounded legends. And Mr. Comey had been steadily rising in Washington a long time.

Consider the episode for which he is perhaps most famous: opposing the George W. Bush administration’s “warrantless wiretapping” program in 2004. The left cast the then-deputy U.S. attorney general as a hero, breathlessly relating how he had rushed to the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to oppose reauthorization of the program. Mr. Obama, in choosing Mr. Comey, furthered this lore, feting him as a man who “was prepared to give up a job he loved rather than be part of something he felt was fundamentally wrong.”

Yet there was nothing tough or bold about opposing a program that was always going to be explosively controversial. Intervening wasn’t brave; it’s what any watch-your-own-backside official would do. There was nothing courageous in later spinning his role, or tarnishing well-meaning government lawyers whose interpretations of the policy differed from his own. Tough would have been standing behind a program that was vital in the war on terror; tough would have been defending the policy when it became a lightning rod for liberal and media criticism.

There was nothing tough, when Mr. Comey was a federal prosecutor in 2003, about expending vast time and resources to harass banker Frank Quattrone over the wording of a single ambiguous email. Tough would have been withstanding the post-Enron, antibusiness populist climate and refusing to burnish one’s prosecutorial credentials by turning Mr. Quattrone into a whipping boy. There was nothing tough about continuing to defend the FBI’s hapless investigation of non-anthrax-mailer Steven Jay Hatfill. Tough would have been admitting the FBI had bungled it.

And there was certainly nothing tough in 2003 about appointing a special prosecutor—an old buddy named Patrick Fitzgerald—to investigate the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA employee. How tough was it to allow the hounding of Bush officials after Washington had turned against the war in Iraq? Tough would have been exercising the authority Mr. Comey had to shut the case after Mr. Fitzgerald quickly discovered the leaker’s identity. Mr. Comey instead let it run for three years, let it temporarily put a journalist in jail for refusing to disclose a source, and let it end with the scandalous perjury conviction of Scooter Libby. This isn’t tough. It’s going with the popular flow.

All of which is why it was no surprise that Mr. Comey this week let Mrs. Clinton off, despite the damning evidence amassed by the FBI of gross negligence in her handling of classified material. A prosecutor—for this was the position Mr. Comey essentially assumed on Tuesday—who put the law above all else would have brought charges, holding Mrs. Clinton to the same standard as other officials convicted of similarly “extremely careless” handling of classified material.

A prosecutor who had spent a lifetime with one eye on politics and one eye on his résumé would have behaved exactly as Mr. Comey did. He must have noticed that Mrs. Clinton, leading in the polls, had recently dangled a job offer in front of his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. He saw President Obama pressing not just his thumb, but his whole body, on the scales of justice. Reporters were on Mrs. Clinton’s side. Democrats were ready to be furious if he decided the wrong way.

Mr. Comey wasn’t ready to go it alone and impose accountability on Mrs. Clinton. That would have been tough. That would have been brave. He instead listed her transgressions in detail and left it to the public to pass judgment at the ballot box in November. That isn’t how the system is supposed to work. But Mr. Comey is no John Adams.
Title: Obama's SCOTUS record
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 10, 2016, 10:36:32 AM
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/obama-has-lost-supreme-court-more-any-modern-president?utm_content=bufferb83fe&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Title: Marine who sent email to keep his buddies in Helmland safe punished
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 11, 2016, 09:43:51 AM



http://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2016/07/09/marine-who-sent-one-classified-email-got-much-worse-punishment-than-hillary-n2189202
Title: Cong. Trey Gowdy's cross of AG Lynch
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 12, 2016, 12:32:44 PM


https://www.facebook.com/RepTreyGowdy/videos/vb.143059759084016/1174516615938320/?type=2&theater
Title: the Clintons' Casa Grande criminal conspiracy back in the 90s
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2016, 10:41:05 AM
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/07/david-kendalls-deceitful-whitewater-op-ed.php
Title: AG Lynch blows off the law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2016, 07:38:36 AM
https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=J4eEp0u6Yck
Title: Dems violate Sectionb 8 USC 1324
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2016, 05:31:36 PM
http://dennismichaellynch.com/dnc-breaks-federal-law-at-convention-violation-of-section-8-u-s-code-%C2%A7-1324/
Title: Prediction: This will be an immunization by the IRS for Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 27, 2016, 08:54:26 AM


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-27/irs-launches-investigation-clinton-foundation
Title: 1100 Secret donors tied to Clinton Slush Fund remain secret
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 27, 2016, 07:37:36 PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/1100-donors-to-a-canadian-charity-tied-to-clinton-foundation-remain-secret/2015/04/28/c3c0f374-edbc-11e4-8666-a1d756d0218e_story.html
Title: More evidence of the obvious for posterity
Post by: ccp on July 28, 2016, 11:05:34 AM
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Judicial-Watch-IRS-Tea-Party-Targeting/2016/07/28/id/740991/
Title: NSA probably has Clinton's emails
Post by: ccp on August 01, 2016, 07:51:11 AM
You mean to tell me the FBI could have gotten the deleted emails all along?   huh

I cannot imagine they would not have had just cause to get these emails in view of the pattern ob obstruction of justice.

Just astounding.  Dershowitz has the nerve to question if we want an FBI to have this kind of power?   What about the question , do we really want a corrupt person as President of the United States.
The voter have a right to know how corrupt the  person is who is major part nominee.  For God's sake if the FBI cannot be trusted to enforce the law the who will?

http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2016/07/31/exclusive-nsa-architect-agency-clintons-deleted-emails/

Interesting how the NSA now is backing off its' surveillance of regular folks like you and me, JUST as this news is coming out thanks to Aaron Klein.
Title: Judicial Watch continues to push IRS case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 07, 2016, 08:19:16 PM
http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/04/justice-dept-had-powerful-case-for-irs-targeting-charges/
Title: Obama DOJ squashed FBI request for investigation of Clinton Slush Fund
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 11, 2016, 02:52:06 AM
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/08/10/revealed-obama-doj-blocked-clinton-foundation-investigation/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

 :-o :-o :-o
Title: Baraq, the Ransom, and the Rule of Law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 13, 2016, 12:56:34 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/438744/iran-ransom-payment-president-obama-broke-law-sending-cash-iran?utm_source=NR&utm_medium=SatEmail&utm_campaign=August13McCarthy&utm_term=VDHM
Title: 15 Questions for Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 24, 2016, 04:24:42 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439275/hillary-clinton-email-scandal-judicial-watch-questions&hl=en&geo=US?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-08-24&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: 1/3 of Huma's emails redacted 100%
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 26, 2016, 06:23:38 PM
http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/13-of-abedin-emails-100-redacted/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 26, 2016, 06:51:44 PM
http://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/08/25/former-u-s-attorney-matthew-whitaker-enough-evidence-to-have-a-special-prosecutor-investigate-clinton-foundation/
Title: Judicial Watch's questions for Hillary to answer in writing under oath
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2016, 06:47:59 AM
http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-submits-email-questions-hillary-clinton-written-answers-oath-due-september-29/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Tipsheet%208-31-16%20%281%29&utm_content=
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2016, 06:49:33 AM
http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-court-hearing-tuesday-august-30/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Tipsheet%208-31-16%20%281%29&utm_content=
Title: Obstruction of Justice
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2016, 11:13:19 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/439534/multiple-outrages-clinton-obama-benghazi-obstruction
Title: Congress, the power of the purse, and extra legal Executive action
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2016, 11:49:21 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439570/stop-settlement-slush-funds-act-congress-needs-reassert-its-power-purse&hl=en&geo=US?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202016-09-01&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Hillary's FBI docs
Post by: G M on September 02, 2016, 08:51:20 PM
https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-documents-in-hillary-clinton-e-mail-investigation

Title: @#$@#$%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2016, 09:47:37 PM
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/09/02/fbi-interview-hillary-said-no-biggie-secretnoforn-data-got-exposed/ 
Title: Fellow raqueteer Cheryl Mills allowed to pretend being EmpressDowager's attorney
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 02, 2016, 10:05:32 PM
Third post of day

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/439676/clintons-fbi-interview-what-was-cheryl-mills-doing-there
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on September 03, 2016, 10:12:47 AM
In one article it was said that Comey took the recommendations from DOJ as to whether they wanted to prosecute and of course they did not.  So he publicly comes out and says something like, "no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute this case giving Lynn and Obama cover just days after she comes out, when pressured, to proclaim she would follow Comey's recommendation.

Yet publicly it is presented just the opposite .  That Lynn would do whatever Comey recommended.  Was Comey a willing dupe or was he double crossed?

That is really the only question remaining.

The fix was in from the start as we here knew it would be .  It is sad but not surprising how the media lets this slide.  Obama is untouched, Lynn, the Democratic party is allowed to walk.

I admit to being surprised at the amount of evidence of multiple crimes and cover ups and failure to enforce the law is even being made public.  Thank god for the FOIA.  At least the truth is in plain site - even if our controlling government authority and a complicit media will not do anything about it.



Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on September 03, 2016, 11:36:25 AM
The fish rots from the head down. Obama brought Chicago style corruption to the federal government. Just as the IRS was weaponized, the USDOJ and the FBI are corrupted.


In one article it was said that Comey took the recommendations from DOJ as to whether they wanted to prosecute and of course they did not.  So he publicly comes out and says something like, "no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute this case giving Lynn and Obama cover just days after she comes out, when pressured, to proclaim she would follow Comey's recommendation.

Yet publicly it is presented just the opposite .  That Lynn would do whatever Comey recommended.  Was Comey a willing dupe or was he double crossed?

That is really the only question remaining.

The fix was in from the start as we here knew it would be .  It is sad but not surprising how the media lets this slide.  Obama is untouched, Lynn, the Democratic party is allowed to walk.

I admit to being surprised at the amount of evidence of multiple crimes and cover ups and failure to enforce the law is even being made public.  Thank god for the FOIA.  At least the truth is in plain site - even if our controlling government authority and a complicit media will not do anything about it.




Title: WSJ on the cash and hard currency ransom to Iran
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 07, 2016, 12:48:38 PM
http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sent-two-more-planeloads-of-cash-to-iran-after-initial-payment-1473208256
Title: Comey stains the FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 09, 2016, 08:29:20 AM
https://patriotpost.us/posts/44734
Title: Impeach Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 10, 2016, 07:19:29 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439715/impeach-hillary-clinton-congress-has-power-do-it
Title: The left now going after Comey
Post by: ccp on September 11, 2016, 07:56:57 AM
The *LEFT* now going after Comey claiming he abused his power.   Taking the cue from Dershowitz ??  asking the question , "do we really want an FBI with this much power?"

My God.   This is just as sick as Hillary knowingly getting a child rapist off and laughing about it:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/james-comey-fbi-accountability-214234

They just gotta to defend their girl with crazy illogical phony legal arguments to the end - now that the race has tightened and they are horrified the email thing is NOT behind her like they expected.
 :x

Title: Chaffetz vs. the FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2016, 11:09:26 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qct5BBRjC8Y
Title: I need help stripping the header of a VIP's email , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 20, 2016, 09:06:06 AM
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-panel-probes-web-rumor-on-clinton-emails
Title: Re: I need help stripping the header of a VIP's email , , ,
Post by: G M on September 20, 2016, 09:23:30 AM
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-panel-probes-web-rumor-on-clinton-emails


No intent! -Corrupt Comey
Title: IRS turned into partisan thugs
Post by: ccp on September 22, 2016, 04:34:34 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440246/irs-commissioner-john-koskinen-criminal-belongs-prison

and the status of impeachment:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/us/politics/house-impeach-irs-john-koskinen.html?_r=0

It doesn't help to have a Leftist media that will do everything in its' power to undermine anything Congress does to bring justcec to this matter.
Title: Trey Gowdy at the tip of the spear defending the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 22, 2016, 02:35:57 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsjCYMXsYU8
Title: Riots, brought to you by Obama and Soros
Post by: G M on September 24, 2016, 11:12:04 AM
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/09/22/send-em-back-doj-sends-same-unit-to-charlotte-that-helped-ferguson-baltimore-rioters-organize/


SEND 'EM BACK: DOJ Sends Same Unit to Charlotte That Helped Ferguson, Baltimore Rioters Organize
By David Steinberg September 22, 2016
chat 499 comments

In moments of social unrest featuring violence and crime, one would expect the only proper role of the taxpayer-funded federal government is to quash the disturbance.

However, a unit of progressive attorneys within the Department of Justice has been at the center of every significant riot during the Obama administration, and this unit -- the Community Relations Service, or CRS -- was not at those scenes to protect the safety of all citizens.

In fact, the CRS was caught encouraging the chaos.

Not only did CRS side only with the protesters and not with law enforcement, they actively facilitated the protests, even as they were turning violent.

Additionally, this same unit has a serious fraud and corruption problem.

CRS came under fire this year for internally generated charges of incompetence, out-of-control management, and abuse of taxpayer funds.
Sponsored

The Washington Examiner reports:

    A Justice Department spokesman told the Washington Examiner that staffers from its Community Relations Service will be deploying to Charlotte ...

    The department's Community Relations Service provides conflict resolution specialists across the nation "to promote peaceful resolution of conflicts and tensions," according to the DOJ's website.

    "The Community Relations Service is the department's 'peacemaker' for community conflicts arising from differences of race, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion and disability," the website says.

Despite the reasoning behind CRS's existence, their actions under the Obama administration and the Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch DOJ couldn't have strayed further from the mission.

Rather than "promote peaceful resolution," the CRS instead -- and always -- promotes resolution only in favor of the side fomenting violence.

Reported J. Christian Adams:

    The Justice Department Community Relations Service (CRS) was founded in 1964, originally intended to be an intermediary between contested sides in racially charged disputes. In recent years, however, CRS has been criticized for taking sides in places such as Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, and Sanford, Florida. For example:

    -- A report claimed that CRS helped facilitate bus transportation for protesters to attend a rally to protest the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford.

    -- In Ferguson, CRS was criticized for appearing to take sides rather than serving as an impartial intermediary. Attorney General Eric Holder traveled to Ferguson after the riots and made statements that reinforced this perceived bias.

The Orlando Sentinel revealed further details of CRS's actions in Florida:

    When civil-rights organizers wanted to demonstrate, these federal workers taught them how to peacefully manage crowds.

    They even arranged a police escort for college students to ensure safe passage for their 40-mile march from Daytona Beach to Sanford to demand justice ...

    "They were there for us," said the Rev. Valarie Houston, pastor of Allen Chapel AME Church, a focal point for the community after the unarmed teen's death. She met the peacekeepers there for the first time during a March 20 town-hall meeting. "We felt protected," she said.

    Houston said the conciliators told her they act as the "eyes and ears of the community" and provided guidance about keeping their message about nonviolence clear.

    ...

    Thomas Battles, the Southern regional director for Community Relations Service, arranged a Thursday meeting between Special Prosecutor Angela Corey and a group of Sanford ministers, where Corey answered questions and shared her testimony of faith.

    The visit came one day after Corey announced her office charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder.

Sponsored

Why was Thomas Battles not organizing a meeting with those opposed to the filing of charges? Or with the majority of Sanford residents, who had preferred an end to the protests? Or with law enforcement?

Perhaps because Battles was ... at the dentist:

    Employees have complained about the personal travel of Thomas Battles. The director of southeastern states for the DOJ, Battles makes in excess of $133,000 in salary and benefits in the Atlanta office of CRS. But DOJ employees have complained that Battles is using federal dollars for personal travel from his office in Atlanta to Miami, his hometown. The DOJ employees have complained that Battles makes taxpayer-funded travel to Miami approximately 24 times a year to visit his family -- and also to attend to personal affairs such as visiting his favorite dentist for teeth cleanings. Regional CRS employees in the Miami office purportedly are not even aware of Battles being in Florida when these taxpayer-funded visits occur.

Or, perhaps Battles was signing a lease for unnecessary prime office space:

    PJ Media has obtained video taken inside Justice Department offices which show empty, unused office space within leased commercial space. The offices are intended for at least twenty federal employees according to DOJ sources -- but only TWO are using them.

    The Justice Department Community Relations Service offices in Dallas are on the 20th floor of the Harwood Center, a luxury downtown high rise. Justice Department sources provided PJ Media with a video taken inside the Dallas DOJ offices which documents the brazen waste of taxpayer dollars.

    The video shows empty offices, boxes stacked on unused desks, jumbo window offices with couches, large conference rooms with television sets running, enormous offices which appear to be unused, stacks of printer boxes, bookshelves filled with VHS tapes, and a kitchen area with seating for four.

    The video shows 58 chairs for use by just two employees working in the office.

In reality, these "civil-rights organizers" and college students aided by CRS included many intent on violence.

The taxpayer-abusing, outrageously mismanaged CRS created a further, dangerous burden on law enforcement and the local community that could have been minimized had CRS carried out its actual mission rather than encourage one side.

They were the "eyes and ears of the community" -- but only of the very small segment of the community that wished to cause a disturbance. The vast majority of Sanford residents -- who preferred to stay inside and to return to their peaceful lives immediately -- were not aided by CRS.

But they did foot their bill.

And now, they're paying for CRS to possibly encourage even more chaos in Charlotte.
Title: Comey now appears to be a disgrace
Post by: ccp on September 25, 2016, 08:44:16 AM
http://observer.com/2016/09/the-fbi-investigation-of-emailgate-was-a-sham/
Title: Re: Comey now appears to be a disgrace
Post by: G M on September 25, 2016, 09:12:59 AM
http://observer.com/2016/09/the-fbi-investigation-of-emailgate-was-a-sham/

Corrupt Comey.
Title: Trey Gowdy in outstanding form (James Comey)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 25, 2016, 09:33:17 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nNM544lCQw
Title: Re: rule of law, email coverup, FBI fake investigation, DOJ
Post by: DougMacG on September 26, 2016, 10:40:09 AM
DOJ did not prosecute because FBI could not determine "intent".

The law does not require intent.

The FBI asked her no questions relating to intent.

The President said he didn't know about her private email until he learned about it in the press in 2014.  The president was emailing her private server via a pseudonym since 2012.

The fish rots from the head, in this case it was at least a two-headed rotten fish.  Now we know the FBI co-conspired with the political wings of the administration.  Also the IRS and DOJ. 

It is not only political opponents who should be upset about this.
Title: Re: Trey Gowdy in outstanding form (James Comey)
Post by: DDF on September 26, 2016, 10:46:37 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nNM544lCQw

Indeed.

DOJ did not prosecute because FBI could not determine "intent".

The law does not require intent.

The FBI asked her no questions relating to intent.

The President said he didn't know about her private email until he learned about it in the press in 2014.  The president was emailing her private server via a pseudonym since 2012.

The fish rots from the head, in this case it was at least a two-headed rotten fish.  Now we know the FBI co-conspired with the political wings of the administration.  Also the IRS and DOJ. 

It is not only political opponents who should be upset about this.

We've all pointed out here, many times, that just with the banks, this is too big to fail. Obama stating that he learned of the servers from the media, but then being shown to have been sending and receiving emails from HRC's private server begs an important point:

What do you do when the entire apple is rotten? Because it clearly is.
Title: I would love for Trump to point this out during the debate
Post by: ccp on September 26, 2016, 12:52:11 PM
Especially since the MSM certainly won't.  What better way to bring it up then with ~ 100 million estimated people watching:

This is why we need to throw all the bums out.  Is this not the best example of corruption all the way up and down the line?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440380/obama-email-alias-clinton-why-fbi-didnt-prosecute-hillary
Title: Re: I would love for Trump to point this out during the debate
Post by: DDF on September 26, 2016, 01:43:46 PM
Especially since the MSM certainly won't.  What better way to bring it up then with ~ 100 million estimated people watching:

This is why we need to throw all the bums out.  Is this not the best example of corruption all the way up and down the line?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440380/obama-email-alias-clinton-why-fbi-didnt-prosecute-hillary

And to think that Nixon was crucified for a few minutes of tape recordings. I don't think there has ever been larger example of corruption know to the public eye in American history.
Title: Judge Napolitano now says it sounds like Obama
Post by: ccp on September 27, 2016, 07:27:04 AM
gave the orders to DOJ and FBI to let Hillary off at all costs:

http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/09/26/platte-river-networks-employee-described-hillary-cover-judge-napolitano-reacts

No accident nothing that might broach this subject was even remotely touched open in debate.  I don't see why Trump should not bring this up that it appears White House was involved with a cover up and that this is another reason why we need to vote for him.  To clean this up.
Title: 2nd post today
Post by: ccp on September 27, 2016, 08:11:08 AM
This is really terrible we have an administration that is using arms of the government as political weapons:

http://www.breitbart.com/california/2016/09/26/palantir-obama-admin-sues-peter-thiels-racial-discrimination/
Title: WSJ: Cheryl Mills, immunized
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 27, 2016, 08:40:12 PM
The Secrets of Cheryl Mills
If there was no evidence of criminal activity, why all the immunity?
By William McGurn
Sept. 26, 2016 7:31 p.m. ET

Why did Cheryl Mills require criminal immunity?

This is the irksome question hanging over the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s home-brew server in the wake of news that Ms. Mills was granted immunity for her laptop’s contents.

Ms. Mills was a top Clinton aide at the State Department who became Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer when she left. She was also a witness, as well as a potential target, in the same FBI investigation into her boss’s emails. The laptop the bureau wanted was one Ms. Mills used in 2014 to sort Clinton emails before deciding which would be turned over to State.

Here’s the problem. There are two ways a witness can get immunity: Either she invokes the Fifth Amendment on the grounds she might incriminate herself, or, worried something on the laptop might expose her to criminal liability, her lawyers reveal what this might be before prosecutors agree to an immunity deal.

As with so much else in this investigation, the way the laptop was handled was out of the ordinary. Normally, immunity is granted for testimony and interviews. The laptop was evidence. Standard practice would have been for the FBI to get a grand-jury subpoena to compel Ms. Mills to produce it.

Andrew McCarthy, a former U.S. attorney, puts it this way: “It’s like telling a bank robbery suspect, ‘If you turn over that bag, I’ll give you immunity as to the contents’—which means if the money you robbed is in there, I can’t use it against you.”

The Mills immunity, which we learned of on Friday, has unfortunately been overwhelmed by the first Trump-Clinton debate. But the week is still young. On Wednesday, Congress will have an opportunity to put the Mills questions to FBI director James Comey when he appears before the House Judiciary Committee.

Back in July, Mr. Comey must have thought he’d settled the issue of Mrs. Clinton’s emails with a grandstanding press conference in which he asserted “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring a case against her based on what the FBI had found. In so doing, he effectively wrested the indictment decision (and any hope for political accountability) from the Justice Department. Plainly even his own agents weren’t buying, given that Mr. Comey later felt the need to issue an internal memo whining that he wasn’t being political.

Now we learn about the multiple immunity deals. Immunity in exchange for information that will help make the case against higher-ups is not unusual. Even so, the Mills deal carries a special stink.

To begin with, Ms. Mills was pretty high up herself. As Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, she was in the thick of operations. In 2012, while working at State, she traveled to New York to interview candidates for a top job at the Clinton Foundation.

More disturbing still, not only was Ms. Mills granted immunity for the content on her laptop, she was permitted to act as Mrs. Clinton’s attorney even though she herself was also a witness in the investigation.

This was allowed in part because she told the FBI she knew nothing of Mrs. Clinton’s private server until after she’d left the State Department. But this claim is suspect and contradicted by emails that have since emerged. These include one to Huma Abedin asking, “hrc email coming back—is server ok?”

The special treatment accorded Ms. Mills also reeks on a more fundamental level. As a rule, the Justice Department is aggressive about going after lawyers for any perceived conflict of interest. This would include, for example, a lawyer who wanted to represent different parties in a trial.

By giving Ms. Mills a pass to serve as Mrs. Clinton’s attorney in an investigation in which she was a material witness, Justice allowed her to shield her communications with Mrs. Clinton under attorney-client privilege. Indeed, Ms. Mills invoked that privilege during her own FBI interview.

Imagine Tom Hagen, the mob lawyer played by Robert Duvall in “The Godfather,” discussing with Don Corleone who was to get whacked—and then invoking the lawyer-client relationship to hush it up. Think of it this way and you begin to get the picture.

For those who think the fix was in from the start, Ms. Mills’s presence at Mrs. Clinton’s FBI interview, along with nine other people (not including the two FBI agents) is further evidence of a circus. Judiciary Committee members might do well to ask Mr. Comey why Ms. Mills and so many others were allowed to sit in on that interview.

In short, far from resolving Mrs. Clinton’s email case, the handling of the investigation has provoked questions about integrity of both the FBI and Justice. The big question for Mr. Comey remains this:

You publicly said there was no case for criminal charges. So what did Cheryl Mills need immunity for?

Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on September 27, 2016, 09:09:38 PM
Too bad the tang colored combover forgot to mention this in the debate. Would have been useful.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DDF on September 27, 2016, 10:07:46 PM
Too bad the tang colored combover forgot to mention this in the debate. Would have been useful.

I couldn't agree more.

We all play chess a lot. There are reasons that he may not have attacked her on many items. It's certainly not my preference. Overwhelming force, right off of the top. Having said that, there is a lot to be said for one remaining pawn, when all of the pieces have been captured and the pawn converts.

I hope Mr. Tang knows what the hell he's doing.
Title: Comey on Clinton payroll?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 28, 2016, 02:10:36 PM
Can anyone confirm or deny?  I do not know this site.

http://miniplanet.us/fbi-director-received-millions-from-clinton-foundationhis-brothers-law-firm-does-clintons-taxes/
Title: war on the rule of law, Dept of Injustice Discretionary Prosecutors
Post by: DougMacG on September 29, 2016, 06:17:13 AM
I wonder why we call them prosecutors when they see the law broken, know who broke it, have the evidence and then fail to prosecute.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2016/09/28/department-of-justice-prosecutors-not-the-fbi-granted-cheryl-mills-immunity-n2224609?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on September 29, 2016, 07:43:27 AM
Corruption all the way to Obama.

Yeah right the Constitutional lawyer.......

Forget the law.  Just prosecute who he wants and look the other way when he doesn't and all for his political advantage.

If this is not impeachable then nothing is.   Therefore nothing is.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DDF on September 29, 2016, 10:00:06 AM
Where's the reset button?

Everyone that isn't a staunch democrat knows that's probably the only way to fix this, short of a miracle from Trump and the cabinet he assigns, and even that's doubtful, because the GOP has plenty of dirt swept under the rug as well.

Have to see.
Title: Strassel nails Comey on the Cheryl Mills immunity deal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 30, 2016, 01:11:35 PM
 By Kimberley A. Strassel
Sept. 29, 2016 7:28 p.m. ET
1017 COMMENTS

Two revealing, if largely unnoticed, moments came in the middle of FBI Director Jim Comey’s Wednesday testimony before the House Judiciary Committee. When combined, these moments prove that Mr. Comey gave Hillary Clinton a pass.

Congress hauled Mr. Comey in to account for the explosive revelation that the government granted immunity to Clinton staffers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson as part of its investigation into whether Mrs. Clinton had mishandled classified information. Rep. Tom Marino (R., Pa.), who was once a Justice Department prosecutor and knows how these investigations roll, provided the first moment. He asked Mr. Comey why Ms. Mills was so courteously offered immunity in return for her laptop—a laptop that Mr. Comey admitted investigators were very keen to obtain. Why not simply impanel a grand jury, get a subpoena, and seize the evidence?

Mr. Comey’s answer was enlightening: “It’s a reasonable question. . . . Any time you are talking about the prospect of subpoenaing a computer from a lawyer—that involves the lawyer’s practice of law—you know you are getting into a big megillah.” Pressed further, he added: “In general, you can often do things faster with informal agreements, especially when you are interacting with lawyers.”

The key words: “The lawyer’s practice of law.” What Mr. Comey was referencing here is attorney-client privilege. Ms. Mills was able to extract an immunity deal, avoid answering questions, and sit in on Mrs. Clinton’s FBI interview because she has positioned herself as Hillary’s personal lawyer. Ms. Mills could therefore claim that any conversations or interactions she had with Mrs. Clinton about the private server were protected by attorney-client privilege.
More Potomac Watch

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Only here’s the rub: When Ms. Mills worked at the State Department she was not acting as Mrs. Clinton’s personal lawyer. She was the secretary's chief of staff. Any interaction with Mrs. Clinton about her server, or any evidence from that time, should have been fair game for the FBI and the Justice Department.

Ms. Mills was allowed to get away with this “attorney-client privilege” nonsense only because she claimed that she did not know about Mrs. Clinton’s server until after they had both left the State Department. Ergo, no questions about the server.

The FBI has deliberately chosen to accept this lie. The notes of its interview with Ms. Mills credulously states: “Mills did not learn Clinton was using a private email server until after Clinton’s tenure” at State. It added: “Mills stated she was not even sure she knew what a server was at the time.”

Which brings us to the hearing’s second revealing moment. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) pointed out that the FBI’s notes from its interview with Clinton IT staffer Bryan Pagliano expose this lie. In late 2009 or early 2010, Mr. Pagliano told investigators, he approached Ms. Mills to relay State Department concerns that the private server might pose a “federal records retention issue.” According to Mr. Pagliano, Ms. Mills told him not to worry about it, because other secretaries of state had used similar setups.

More damning, Mr. Chaffetz held up an email that Ms. Mills sent in 2010 to Justin Cooper, whom the Clintons personally employed to help maintain the server. The email reads: “hrc email coming back—is server okay?” Mr. Cooper responds: “Ur funny. We are on the same server.”

To be clear: When Mrs. Clinton had an email problem, Ms. Mills didn’t call the State Department’s help desk. She didn’t call Yahoo customer service. She called a privately employed Clinton aide and asked specifically about Mrs. Clinton’s “server.” She did this as chief of staff at the State Department. Mr. Chaffetz asked Mr. Comey why the FBI wrote that Ms. Mills was ignorant about the server until later.

Mr. Comey suddenly sounded like a man with something to hide. “I don’t remember exactly, sitting here,” he said, in what can only be called the FBI version of “I don’t recall.” He then mumbled that “Having done many investigations myself, there’s always conflicting recollections of facts, some of which are central, some of which are peripheral. I don’t remember, sitting here, about that one.”

Really? Only a few minutes before he had explained that the Justice Department was forced to issue immunity to Ms. Mills because she had asserted attorney-client privilege. Yet he couldn’t remember all the glaring evidence proving she had no such privilege? Usually, the FBI takes a dim view of witnesses who lie. Had the FBI pursued perjury charges against Ms. Mills—as it would have done against anyone else—it would have had extraordinary leverage to force her to speak about all of her communications regarding the server. It might have even threatened to build a case that Ms. Mills was part of a criminal scheme. Then it could have offered immunity in return for the real goods on Hillary.

But going that route would have required grand juries, subpoenas, warrants and indictments—all things that Mr. Comey clearly wanted to avoid in this politically sensitive investigation. Much easier to turn a blind eye to Ms. Mills’s fiction. And to therefore give Mrs. Clinton a pass.

Write to kim@wsj.com
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on September 30, 2016, 02:23:48 PM
If we can't trust the two top law enforcement people in the country (Lynch being the other)  then who can we trust?

Why should we trust our government.?

Why should we trust the press that allows them to get away with this?

Why should we trust the President of the United States who clearly gave the ok for this?

Why can not Trump expand upon this instead of wasting time in a shouting match with some insignificant girl with 15 minutes of fame?

God this is sickening......
Title: We all know Obama put out the word to "fix it" just as much
Post by: ccp on October 03, 2016, 06:09:24 AM
as we all know Hillary was selling State favors when she was there and certainly the same when she was a Senator.

Mr Fitton said,

"“It’s outrageous but not surprising. Welcome to our world. This is what we put up with all the time from the agencies,”

This fits exactly what the Judicial Watch attorney said over 10 years ago when I explained the fraud at the Copyright Office.  I told him what was going on and how copyrights were being switched around altered and made to disappear and applications were being held up and  the Copyright Attorneys instead of wanting to get to the bottom of it (like little old naive me thought) just wanted it covered up.  He laughed (sympathetically and with me, NOT at me) and said this is "typical" [of our Federal government]

Evidence it came from Obama as per Judicial Watch.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/10/02/ig-report-obama-operatives-impeded-foia-requests-punished-judicial-watch/

Title: Comey and Clinton go way back
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 04, 2016, 07:41:05 AM
http://www.wnd.com/2016/07/comey-has-long-history-of-clinton-related-cases/

Amongst the interesting info herein

Prosecutor in Berger case

As deputy attorney general, Comey was involved in the investigation of Berger, as Fox News reported in 2004

Berger at that time was under criminal investigation by the Justice Department for removing from the National Archives various classified documents that should have been turned over to the independent commission investigating the 9/11 terror attacks and for removing handwritten notes he made while reviewing the documents.

The New York Times reported in 2005 that Republican leaders speculated Berger removed the documents from the National Archives because he was trying to conceal material that could be damaging to the Clinton administration.

There is no evidence Comey’s investigation for the Justice Department made any attempt to determine if anyone affiliated with the Clinton White House prompted Berger or coordinated with him in the decision to remove the classified documents.

image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2012/06/sandy_berger.jpg
Sandy Berger

Sandy Berger

Various statements Comey made about Berger’s mishandling of classified documents bear comparison to his comments regarding Hillary Clinton’s email server.

In 2004, Fox News noted Comey told reporters he could not comment on the Berger investigation but did address the general issue of mishandling classified documents.

“As a general matter, we take issues of classified information very seriously,” Comey said in response to a reporter’s question.
Video: Attorney general to accept FBI findings in Clinton email probe

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/07/comey-has-long-history-of-clinton-related-cases/#kQQ8dj8ygxL6gL9p.99
Title: Big study on Obama vs. our Immigration laws
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 04, 2016, 11:52:05 AM
http://www.fairus.org/DocServer/ObamaTimeline_2016.pdf
Title: US Marine: Don't bust me if you don't bust Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 14, 2016, 07:42:30 PM
http://www.wsj.com/articles/to-fight-discharge-marines-lawyer-points-to-hillary-clintons-security-lapses-1476435601
Title: Re: US Marine: Don't bust me if you don't bust Hillary
Post by: G M on October 15, 2016, 01:08:41 AM
http://www.wsj.com/articles/to-fight-discharge-marines-lawyer-points-to-hillary-clintons-security-lapses-1476435601

Laws are for the little people. Sorry Marine, you should be sure to have powerful connections to the DNC before committing a felony.
Title: Trump is right, she should be prosecuted
Post by: ccp on October 15, 2016, 05:10:25 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441105/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-jail-prosecutor-debate-fbi-emails
Title: Re: Trump is right, she should be prosecuted
Post by: DDF on October 16, 2016, 10:45:50 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441105/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-jail-prosecutor-debate-fbi-emails

She should be more than prosecuted. When they're done prosecuting her, and she's convicted....

Mussolini comes to mind.
Title: Must read-Dems inciting violence
Post by: G M on October 17, 2016, 03:32:00 PM
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/10/17/exclusive-okeefe-video-sting-exposes-bird-dogging-democrats-effort-to-incite-violence-at-trump-rallies/

I'm sure Comey's FBI will follow up on this.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on October 17, 2016, 05:22:11 PM
GM,
The Dems are already out in force blaming *Trumps'* rhetoric for THIS too.  HE is so incendiary he drove them to it!

Everything just gets spun around on its head beyond any common sense.
Title: FBI releases
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2016, 05:27:55 PM
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/17/fbi-releases-100-new-pages-on-clinton-email-probe.html

https://vault.fbi.gov/hillary-r.-clinton/hillary-r.-clinton-part-01-of-04/view
Title: Retired CIA officer on Hillary and the law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 31, 2016, 11:47:43 PM
A serious friend vouches for the serious creds of this author:

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/303499-hillarys-emails-matter-a-retired-cia-officer
Title: Federalist Papers: Email proves Hillary and Cheryl Mills lied to FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2016, 11:48:56 AM
http://thefederalistpapers.org/us/breaking-leaked-email-proves-hillary-and-cheryl-mills-lied-to-the-fbi?utm_source=FBLC&utm_medium=FB&utm_campaign=LC
Title: DOJ official previously represented Podesta; DOJ sidebar heads up
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 02, 2016, 03:34:09 PM
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/01/kept-me-out-jail-top-doj-official-involved-in-clinton-probe-represented-her-campaign-chairman.html

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/02/justice-department-official-gave-clinton-camp-heads-up-about-testimony.html
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on November 02, 2016, 05:02:27 PM
we knew Clinton's team was being tipped off the entire time.  it is nice to see the proof.  With her big shot DC lawyers running all around town getting the inside scoops and figuring how to get this fixed.

She knew when she said she wanted to meet the FBI and get it overwith and "get this wrapped up" she had been assured the fix was in.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on November 02, 2016, 06:24:04 PM
I believe everyone on this board would agree with me when I say I have zero confidence in Obama's DOJ to see that justice is done.  Nadda, none.  I have no confidence in the Obama or people at the DOJ.  I have only as much confidence in Comey as to the extent he would be allowed to do his job unpressured. 

We know the coverup leads to Obama.  No Trump - no justice.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/02/fbis-clinton-foundation-investigation-now-very-high-priority-sources-say.html
Title: Sharyl Attkinson: No spin summary of the FBI report
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 02, 2016, 06:52:21 PM
https://sharylattkisson.com/the-clearest-no-spin-summary-of-fbi-report-on-hillary-clinton-email/

This kicks ass!!!!!!!!!
Title: Re: Sharyl Attkinson: No spin summary of the FBI report
Post by: DDF on November 02, 2016, 08:39:07 PM
https://sharylattkisson.com/the-clearest-no-spin-summary-of-fbi-report-on-hillary-clinton-email/

This kicks ass!!!!!!!!!


YES. IT. DOES.
Title: Obama Admin illegally diverting $5B to insurance companies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 03, 2016, 10:14:28 PM
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/obama-administration-illegally-diverting-billions-insurance-companies?utm_content=buffercc715&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Title: Re: Obama Admin illegally diverting $5B to insurance companies
Post by: DougMacG on November 05, 2016, 11:21:01 AM
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/obama-administration-illegally-diverting-billions-insurance-companies?utm_content=buffercc715&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The laws that regulate me all seem to have an enforcement mechanism and penalty attached to them.

'Obama administration broke the law' is how almost every sentence about them could begin.  Yet no one pays a price for it.
Title: Obama encourages illegal alien voting
Post by: G M on November 06, 2016, 04:02:55 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpG7Pgx3r8

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpG7Pgx3r8)
Title: Re: Obama encourages illegal alien voting
Post by: DDF on November 06, 2016, 05:05:35 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpG7Pgx3r8

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIpG7Pgx3r8)


 :x :x :x
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 06, 2016, 10:39:54 PM
I find myself wondering if there is dishonest editing in that clip.
Title: Media and Internet
Post by: DDF on November 06, 2016, 10:58:28 PM
Twitter was down broefly this evening, and Wikileaks said they are under attack; all after Wikileaks just realeased another 8000 emails.

The Clinton camp is telling the public to ignore the emails.

Wikileaks has a 10 year track record of 100% accuracy.
Title: Obama's emails to Hillary at core of failure to enforce the law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 07, 2016, 08:52:35 AM
http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1997/05/01/877310.html?pageNumber=40
Title: NRO: Lock her up!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 22, 2016, 09:55:29 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442412/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-case-prosecution-lock-her-up
Title: Sessions to clean up Barack's DOJ
Post by: ccp on November 23, 2016, 12:21:43 PM


http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442411/jeff-sessions-attorney-general-nomination-justice-department-should-enforce-law
Title: FBI investigation of Hillary continues
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2016, 09:50:41 AM
http://www.thedailyliberator.com/back-clinton-investigation-re-opened-new-york-fbi/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on December 16, 2016, 11:38:01 AM
The LEFt's nonstop trying to delegitimize the election in every imaginal way actually makes an ongoing investigation of Clinton emails and foundation imperative.  It is now not just for knowing the truth for truth's sake but now it is *politically necessary*.

It is also necessary to find the degree to which Obama and Lynch went out or their way to cover it up.  We KNOW they did.
Title: DOJ not investigating threats to Trump electors
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 20, 2016, 10:55:10 PM
http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2016/12/why-wont-mainstream-media-mention-all.html
Title: Re: DOJ not investigating threats to Trump electors
Post by: G M on December 21, 2016, 07:41:42 AM
http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2016/12/why-wont-mainstream-media-mention-all.html


I think that will change in about a month.
Title: Those "missing" 22 million Bush emails
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 31, 2016, 08:01:05 AM
December 2009

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/14/white.house.emails/index.html


Washington (CNN) -- Computer technicians have recovered about 22 million Bush administration e-mails that the Bush White House had said were missing, two watchdog groups that sued over the documents announced Monday.

The e-mails date from 2003 to 2005, and had been "mislabeled and effectively lost," according to the National Security Archive, a research group based at George Washington University. But Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it could be years before most of the e-mails are made public.

"The e-mails themselves are not what we're getting," Sloan said.

Documents related to the handling of e-mail under the Bush administration and subsequent information regarding how White House e-mails are currently archived will be released under a settlement with the Obama administration, which inherited a lawsuit the groups filed in 2007. But the National Archives must sort out which documents are covered by the Freedom of Information Act and which ones fall under the Presidential Records Act, which means they could be withheld for five to 10 years after the Bush administration left office in January, Sloan said.

"The National Archives will sort this out," she said.

The e-mail controversy dates back to the Bush administration's 2006 firing of the top federal prosecutors in nine cities. After congressional committees demanded the administration produce documents related to the firings, the White House said millions of e-mails might have been lost from its servers. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive sued over the issue in 2007, arguing the Bush administration violated federal laws that require presidential records to be preserved.

Court records have shown that the Bush administration knew about the e-mail problems as far back as 2005 and did nothing to fix them, Sloan said.

"They never made an effort to restore them," she said.

But Scott Stanzel, a former deputy press secretary in the Bush White House, said the group "has consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues."

"We always indicated that there is an e-mail archiving system and a disaster recovery system," Stanzel said. "We also indicated that e-mails not properly archived could be found on disaster recovery tapes. There is a big, big difference between something not being properly archived and it being 'lost' or 'missing,' as CREW would say."

Monday's settlement allows for 94 days of e-mail traffic, scattered between January 2003 to April 2005, to be restored from backup tapes. Of those 94 days, 40 were picked by statistical sample; another 21 days were suggested by the White House; and the groups that filed suit picked 33 that seemed "historically significant," from the months before the invasion of Iraq to the period when the firings of U.S. attorneys were being planned.

Also requested were several days surrounding the announcement that a criminal investigation was under way into the disclosure of then-CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. That investigation led to the conviction of White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents investigating the leak.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington represented Wilson and her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in a lawsuit over her exposure, which they argued was in retaliation for his accusation that the Bush administration over-hyped the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. A federal judge dismissed the case on procedural grounds in 2007, but Sloan said the missing e-mails raise the "strong possibility" that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never received all the documents he requested during the leak investigation.
Title: Judicial Watch: There's still hope to lock her up
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 31, 2016, 08:02:47 AM
Lock her up!!!

Year End Bang on Clinton Email
In 2016, Judicial Watch established itself it as the most significant public policy entity in the nation. Our work in the courts exposing the truth about the Clinton emails and the corruption of the Clinton pay-to-play scandals changed history.

So it is fitting that in this, the year’s final Weekly Update, I have a report for you on a new major court decision that could dramatically influence what comes next on the Clinton email scandal.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit made a ruling this week in a JW case that would require Secretary of State John Kerry to seek the help of the attorney general in recovering additional Hillary Clinton emails. This means that Clinton email issue will be squarely before the Trump administration, as I highlight in our statement to the press:

Today’s appeals court ruling rejects the Obama State Department’s excuses justifying its failure to ask the attorney general, as the law requires, to pursue the recovery of the Clinton emails. This ruling means that the Trump Justice Department will have to decide if it wants to finally enforce the rule of law and try to retrieve all the emails Clinton and her aides unlawfully took with them when they left the State Department.

The appellate ruling reverses a decision in which the District Court declared “moot” a Judicial Watch’s lawsuit challenging the failure of Secretary of State John Kerry to comply with the Federal Records Act (FRA) in seeking to recover the emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other high level State Department officials who used non-“state.gov” email accounts to conduct official business (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. John F. Kerry (No. 16-5015)).

According to the FRA, if an agency head becomes aware of “any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal . . . or destruction of [agency] records,” he or she “shall notify the Archivist . . . and with the assistance of the Archivist shall initiate action through the Attorney General for the recovery of [those] records.” Kerry refused to do this, and we sued. The lower court decided Kerry had done enough. The appeals court panel disagreed:

Appellants sought the only relief provided by the Federal Records Act—an enforcement action through the Attorney General. But nothing the Department did (either before or after those complaints were filed) gave appellants what they wanted. Instead of proceeding through the Attorney General, the Department asked the former Secretary to return her emails voluntarily and similarly requested that the FBI share any records it obtained. Even though those efforts bore some fruit, the Department has not explained why shaking the tree harder—e.g., by following the statutory mandate to seek action by the Attorney General—might not bear more still. It is therefore abundantly clear that, in terms of assuring government recovery of emails, appellants have not “been given everything [they] asked for.” Absent a showing that the requested enforcement action could not shake loose a few more emails, the case is not moot.

In May 2015, we filed the lawsuit after the State Department failed to take action following a letter to Kerry “notifying him of the unlawful removal of the Clinton emails and requesting that he initiate enforcement action pursuant to the FRA,” including working through the attorney general to recover the emails.

Judicial Watch’s lawsuit subsequently was consolidated with a later lawsuit filed by our friends at the Cause of Action Institute. For more on this court development, you can see our discussion over at the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal. And then we also have our Facebook Live Weekly Updatediscussions here and on Youtube.

This Obama administration has demonstrated itself to be an agent of lawlessness and an enemy of an open and transparent republic. To start, let’s hope that President-elect Trump’s appointees at the State Department and Justice Department finally start enforcing the rule of law on the Clinton email scandal.
Title: Re: Those "missing" 22 million Bush emails
Post by: G M on December 31, 2016, 08:06:23 AM
Any allegations of classified materials in those emails?


December 2009

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/12/14/white.house.emails/index.html


Washington (CNN) -- Computer technicians have recovered about 22 million Bush administration e-mails that the Bush White House had said were missing, two watchdog groups that sued over the documents announced Monday.

The e-mails date from 2003 to 2005, and had been "mislabeled and effectively lost," according to the National Security Archive, a research group based at George Washington University. But Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it could be years before most of the e-mails are made public.

"The e-mails themselves are not what we're getting," Sloan said.

Documents related to the handling of e-mail under the Bush administration and subsequent information regarding how White House e-mails are currently archived will be released under a settlement with the Obama administration, which inherited a lawsuit the groups filed in 2007. But the National Archives must sort out which documents are covered by the Freedom of Information Act and which ones fall under the Presidential Records Act, which means they could be withheld for five to 10 years after the Bush administration left office in January, Sloan said.

"The National Archives will sort this out," she said.

The e-mail controversy dates back to the Bush administration's 2006 firing of the top federal prosecutors in nine cities. After congressional committees demanded the administration produce documents related to the firings, the White House said millions of e-mails might have been lost from its servers. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive sued over the issue in 2007, arguing the Bush administration violated federal laws that require presidential records to be preserved.

Court records have shown that the Bush administration knew about the e-mail problems as far back as 2005 and did nothing to fix them, Sloan said.

"They never made an effort to restore them," she said.

But Scott Stanzel, a former deputy press secretary in the Bush White House, said the group "has consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard IT issues."

"We always indicated that there is an e-mail archiving system and a disaster recovery system," Stanzel said. "We also indicated that e-mails not properly archived could be found on disaster recovery tapes. There is a big, big difference between something not being properly archived and it being 'lost' or 'missing,' as CREW would say."

Monday's settlement allows for 94 days of e-mail traffic, scattered between January 2003 to April 2005, to be restored from backup tapes. Of those 94 days, 40 were picked by statistical sample; another 21 days were suggested by the White House; and the groups that filed suit picked 33 that seemed "historically significant," from the months before the invasion of Iraq to the period when the firings of U.S. attorneys were being planned.

Also requested were several days surrounding the announcement that a criminal investigation was under way into the disclosure of then-CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. That investigation led to the conviction of White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents investigating the leak.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington represented Wilson and her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, in a lawsuit over her exposure, which they argued was in retaliation for his accusation that the Bush administration over-hyped the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. A federal judge dismissed the case on procedural grounds in 2007, but Sloan said the missing e-mails raise the "strong possibility" that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never received all the documents he requested during the leak investigation.

Title: Unannounced FBI Clinton document release
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 09, 2017, 09:35:55 AM


http://www.speroforum.com/a/XHHCZIQCFI15/79734-FBI-quietly-releases-dozens-of-Clinton-documents-unannounced?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=SNULSAXHOK41&utm_content=XHHCZIQCFI15&utm_source=news&utm_term=FBI+quietly+releases+dozens+of+Clinton+documents+unannounced#.WHPJR3rcC-A

Perhaps even more important is that it was reported on FOX this morning that the unannounced release included info that recipients of Hillary's classified emails who lacked security clearance WERE HACKED BY FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS.

Gents, please keep an eye out for proper citations for this!
Title: Judicial Watch: two federal rulings
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2017, 11:37:40 AM
New Email Action by Court As Obama Leave Office

It is likely when you receive this email, our nation will have a new president, Donald Trump.  Judicial Watch wishes the new president all the best and hope he brings with him a respect for the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution – a respect sorely lacking from the Oval Office’s previous occupant.  One of the Obama’s legacy of lawlessness are the pending Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against various executive agencies.  Yesterday, all of these lawsuits, well over 60, were against the Obama administration.  Today, they are against agencies of the Trump administration.  Ironically, the Trump administration will have to grapple with all of Judicial Watch’s Clinton email-related lawsuits against the State Department and other agencies!

President Trump should commit to a transparency revolution, especially as Hillary Clinton’s war on transparency helped make his presidency possible.  The Trump administration and new Congress must focus on restoring the rule of law and accountability after the eight years of a lawless Obama administration.  Corruption in government is an overwhelming problem.  We expect, but will not rely on, President Trump or other DC politicians to do the right thing.  Judicial Watch will continue its independent investigations and lawsuits in order to hold politicians of both political parties accountable to the rule of law.
Let’s hope the Trump administration takes a different approach to transparency, one that respects the law and the people’s right to know.  His appointees will have to deal with the transparency issue immediately, especially as the courts took actions this week to make sure that the Obama administration wouldn’t destroy some public documents on its way out the door.

This week U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan granted our Motion to Preserve  emails of a U.S. Department of Justice assistant attorney general. Judge Sullivan issued a Minute Order on January 17, 2017, requiring the Justice Department to “preserve all agency records and potential agency records between the dates of December 1, 2014 and November 7, 2016 in any personal email account of Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Peter Kadzik.”

The court order came in response to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit we filed against the U.S. Department of Justice on January 15, 2017, seeking access, in part, to email correspondence between Peter Kadzik, the Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs, and John Podesta, then-chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, regarding the Justice Department’s review of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:17-cv-00029)).

According to Wikileaks, on May 19, 2015, Kadzik sent Podesta an email appearing to tip off Clintons’ campaign about the Justice Department’s review of Clinton’s emails:

There is a HJC oversight hearing today where the head of our Civil Division will testify. Likely to get questions on State Department emails. Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the State Department posts the emails.

On November 7, 2016, Judicial Watch submitted a FOIA request to the Justice Department seeking:

•   All email correspondence between Peter Kadzik on either his official Justice Department email account or peterkadzik@gmail.com and any non-government employee regarding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of non-state.gov email to conduct official government business;
•   All email correspondence between Peter Kadzik on either his official Justice Department email account or peterkadzik@gmail.com and John Podesta; and
•   All email correspondence between Peter Kadzik on his official Justice Department email account or peterkadzik@gmail.com and any official, officer or employee of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.
•   The timeframe for this request is December 1, 2014 to November 7, 2016.
Also on November 7, we submitted another FOIA request to the Justice Department seeking:
•   All emails sent to or received by Peter Kadzik using the email address peterkadzik@gmail.com in which he conducted official government business; and
•   All emails copied and/or forwarded … to Peter Kadzik’s Justice Department email account from peterkadzik@gmail.com.
•   The timeframe for this request is January 1, 2016 to the present.

After the Justice Department failed to respond to its FOIA requests, we filed a FOIA lawsuit on January 5, 2017, and, the next day filed a Motion for Preservation Order for the court to order the Justice Department to preserve the agency records “currently residing” in Kadzik’s Gmail account:
The records at issue are in the physical possession of Assistant Attorney General Kadzik. With the upcoming change in administrations on January 20, 2017, it is likely that he will leave government service on or around that date.

***
[Judicial Watch] is concerned that after Assistant Attorney General Kadzik leaves government employment, Defendant will no longer have control over the actions of this official.

In the Justice Department’s January 17, 2017 Opposition to Judicial Watch’s Motion for Preservation Order, the Department contended that:

It is the government’s understanding that Mr. Kadzik has located no agency records or potential agency records in his Gmail account and that, therefore, there are no such documents to preserve … Because the government has already taken the action that Judicial Watch’s motion requests, and has informed the Court of that action, Judicial Watch’s motion is moot and should be denied.

The court was not persuaded, did not find Judicial Watch’s motion moot, and issued the Preservation Order the same day.

It is astonishing that the Obama Justice Department played games with its emails, especially Clinton-related emails.  We hope this and our other lawsuits -- and the court’s hard-hitting court order – sent a signal to the entire Obama administration not to destroy government records to spite the American people’s right to know.  It will now be up to the Trump administration to either finally vindicate the rule of law or continue its obstruction.
 
Federal Court Orders Top Obama DHS Officials To Preserve Emails

Yet another federal judge ordered the Obama administration to preserve emails in yet another Obama email scandal – this one at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

U.S. District Court Judge Randolph D. Moss this week ordered  Department of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and three other top DHS officials to preserve “all emails regarding, concerning, or related to official United States Government business” they sent through non-“gov” emails from December 23, 2013, and December 29, 2015.”

The court order came in our Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit seeking agency records in the personal email accounts used by the four top Homeland Security officials (Judicial Watch v U.S. Department of Homeland Security  (No. 1:16-cv-00967)(D.D.C.)).

Ruling “out of an abundance of caution,” Judge Moss ordered the preservation of records “to minimize the risk of any inadvertent loss of potentially responsive emails.” The court ruling covers Johnson, Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Chief of Staff Christian Marrone, and General Counsel Stevan Bunnell:

ORDERED that Secretary Johnson preserve all emails sent or received between December 23, 2013, and December 29, 2015, that are stored in any of his private email accounts that may contain responsive records, including any emails in archived or deleted folders, on a portable thumb drive or hard drive to be kept in his possession until this Court determines that the emails must be provided to the Department for processing or that they may be deleted;
FURTHER ORDERED that Deputy Secretary Mayorkas, former Chief of Staff Marrone, and former General Counsel Bunnell do the same with respect to their own private email accounts that may contain responsive records…

On December 22, 2016, Judicial Watch filed a Motion for Preservation Order in which it asked the court to issue a “preservation order” for the non-.gov emails of Johnson, Mayorkas and Bunnell because their departure from government service was anticipated upon the installation of the new administration, at which point, Homeland Security would no longer have any control over the former officials:

With the upcoming change in administrations on January 20, 2017, it is likely that the three officials currently in office (Secretary Jeh Johnson, Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and General Counsel Stevan Bunnell) will leave government service.

Counsel for DHS has informed [Judicial Watch’s] counsel that DHS has “asked” these officials to preserve the agency records in their possession. DHS’ counsel declined to provide any evidence supporting this assertion. Because [Judicial Watch] does not know specifically what DHS asked its employees to do and what, if any, other steps DHS has taken to ensure preservation, Plaintiff is concerned DHS’s mere requests to its employees are insufficient. This will be particularly concerning once the officials possessing the emails leave government employment, as the agency will have no control over the actions of these officials…

A court order requiring preservation of these emails is particularly necessary now as DHS has suggested that these officials may have been acting without authorization by sending emails from these accounts…. As such, there is no assurance that these officials will abide by a “request” by the agency to preserve these emails, particularly after their employment ends…

At a hearing on January 5, Obama Justice Department lawyers confirmed that they had done nothing to retrieve government records from Jeh Johnson or the other officials’ accounts. On January 10, Judge Moss ordered  DHS to produce any “preservation requests” for emails sent to Johnson, Mayorkas, Marrone, and Bunnell. In today’s court ruling, Judge Moss specifically ordered the DHS officials to preserve all of the contested emails.

We have every reason to believe that there are government records on Jeh Johnson’s and other top DHS officials’ personal email accounts. The fact that the Obama administration has stonewalled their production is yet another example of the lack of transparency that has permeated this administration. Once again, it took persistent legal action from Judicial Watch to preserve the public’s right to know.

In June, Judicial Watch in a related case  obtained 693 pages of Homeland Security records revealing that Secretary Jeh Johnson and 28 other agency officials used government computers to access personal web-based email accounts despite an agency-wide ban due to heightened security concerns. The documents also reveal that Homeland Security officials misled Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) when Perry specifically asked whether personal accounts were being used for official government business.

The waivers were granted to Johnson and other senior staffers after Homeland Security’s Sensitive Systems Policy Directive 4300A was promulgated on April 30, 2014. The Directive was issued after hackers breached  the Office of Personnel Management computer system. Directive 4300A states, “The use of Internet Webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL) or other personal email accounts is not authorized over DHS furnished equipment or network connections.”  These national security concerns were thrown out the window so top DHS officials evade the transparency laws.  Let’s hope the Trump administration has the political will to hold these Obama officials to account to the law and the American public by disclosing any government records from their “private” email accounts.

 
Clinton Email Benghazi Lawsuit Heats Up

The Clinton email and Benghazi scandals aren’t over. Not by a long shot.

Just last week, JW’s attorneys asked a federal court for additional discovery. In addition to document requests, the new Revised Discovery Proposal asks for depositions from Clinton, Clinton aide Cheryl Mills and eight other State Department officials to explore “evidence of wrongdoing or bad faith with respect to State Department’s response” to our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request as well as some earlier FOIA requests.

The January 10 filing is the latest move in our July 2014 FOIA lawsuit  seeking records related to the drafting and use of the Benghazi talking points (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). This lawsuit forced the Clinton email issue into the public eye in early 2015.

In March 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth granted “limited discovery ” to Judicial Watch, ruling that “where there is evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith, as here, limited discovery is appropriate, even though it is exceedingly rare in FOIA cases.” In May 2016, we filed an initial Proposed Order for Discovery seeking written and oral information. (In December Judge Lamberth requested both parties to file new proposed orders in light of information discovered in various venues since last May.)

You won’t be surprised to learn that the thoroughly corrupt Obama State Department opposed our proposal.

In last week’s filing, we informed the court that despite repeated conferences with the State Department, they had been “unable to reach agreement on a discovery proposal” and that “Defendant [State Department] is unwilling to agree to any discovery at all in this action.”  Judicial Watch’s new discovery proposal focuses on “two main areas:”

These areas are: (i) evidence of wrongdoing or bad faith with respect to State Department’s response to Plaintiff’s FOIA request for records related to the talking points provided to U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice following the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attack and (ii) potential remedies that may ensure a sufficient search for responsive records is undertaken…

Our Revised Discovery Proposal seeks both documents and depositions. The documents requested include:

1.   All documents that concern or relate to the processing of any and all searches of the Office of the Secretary for emails relating to the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attack and its aftermath…

2.   All communications that concern or relate to the processing of all searches referenced in Document Request No. 1 above, including directions or guidance about how and where to conduct the searches…

3.   All records that concern or relate to the State Department’s policies, practices, procedures and/or actions (or lack thereof) to secure, inventory, and/or account for all records…

4.   Plaintiff requests copies of the attached records [previously obtained by Judicial Watch] with the Exemption 5 redactions removed…
In addition to basic documents, we think testimony is essential, including a deposition of Hillary Clinton to learn:

[the] identification of individuals (whether State Department officials, other government officials, or third-parties, including but not limited to Sidney Blumenthal) with whom Secretary Clinton may have communicated by email.

We are asking to depose former Clinton aides, including Cheryl Mills, chief of staff; Jacob Sullivan, Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Policy Planning; Heather Samuelson, head of the White House Liaison Office; Lauren Jiloty, Special Assistant; and Monica Hanley, confidential assistant. Also on the list is Clarence Finney, currently Deputy Director of the State Department’s Executive Secretariat Staff; Sheryl L. Walter, who was Director of the Office of Information Program and Services; and Gene Smilansky, a department lawyer.

In one of their last gasps of obstruction of justice, Obama State Department continues to oppose court-ordered efforts to gather the facts from Secretary Hillary Clinton and her top aides about how their email practices violated the American’s people right to know what really happened in Benghazi.
The Trump administration must now decide whether to reverse course on this desperate, last minute obstruction. 

Until next week...
Title: Morris: Lock her up!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2017, 04:03:49 PM
The Dog Didn't Bark: No Pardon For Hillary
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on January 20, 2017
If Bill and Hillary looked dour at Donald Trump's inauguration, it may have been more than just frustration and sour grapes at losing the election.  As Obama passed into history and Trump took power as president, what didn't happen may have had more consequence for the former first couple than what did take place:  Obama did not pardon Hillary.

Now the coast is clear for a thorough investigation of Hillary both on charges of mishandling state secrets and of running a pay-for-play operation out of the State Department.

As president-elect, Trump vowed not to pursue Hillary and expressed the wish that she not be prosecuted, but said that it "was not something I feel very strongly about."  In a series of tweets on November 22nd, Trump said that a prosecution of Hillary would be "very divisive" and noted that the Clintons have "suffered greatly" already.  But, significantly, he refused to say that he would take prosecution of Hillary "off the table."

Anyone watching the inaugural ceremonies could not fail to note how deliberately President Trump avoided eye contact with either Clinton, passing right by under their noses rather than pause for a handshake.

For his part incoming Attorney General Jeff Sessions has promised to recuse himself from any investigation.

But the investigators themselves -- in at least four US Attorney offices -- are by no means letting up.  If they find a case that Hillary ran afoul of the law in either scandal (pay for play or national secrets), it is quite likely that they will recommend prosecution.  In that eventuality, it is hard to see either Sessions of President Trump refusing to bring the case.

Hillary's only secure protection would have been an Obama pardon.  But now she is exposed.  She may have to face the fruits of her own criminality.
Title: JW: Border Patrol alters stats about released criminal aliens
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2017, 08:07:11 AM


http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/01/border-patrol-alters-stats-hide-release-criminal-aliens-high-recidivism/?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Tipsheet%201-25-17%20%281%29&utm_content=
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on January 25, 2017, 08:50:11 AM
   
"JW: Border Patrol alters stats about released criminal aliens"

So why should anyone with a "f" brain believe there is no voter fraud

we have been led by liars for years
Title: Acting AG orders DOJ not to defend Trump's EO
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2017, 04:40:33 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/us/politics/attorney-general-civil-rights-refugee.html?emc=edit_na_20170130&nl=breaking-news&nlid=49641193&ref=cta&_r=0
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on January 30, 2017, 05:55:20 PM
This is unbelievable.

We have all out civil war.  Just no guns .

and this now from the State Department
most fed employees are Democrats ; those who refuse to cooperate must all be fired.

all this because some people have to sit in an airport for some extra hours!

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2017, 07:33:46 PM
I hear Trump has fired the Acting AG.

GOOD!!!

http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/30/law-professor-explains-why-trump-had-no-choice-but-to-fire-the-acting-ag/#.WJAH1xYqGQs.twitter


Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on January 30, 2017, 07:37:03 PM
This is unbelievable.

We have all out civil war.  Just no guns .

and this now from the State Department
most fed employees are Democrats ; those who refuse to cooperate must all be fired.

all this because some people have to sit in an airport for some extra hours!



I'm pretty sure the guns part is coming...
Title: 8 USC Section 1182
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2017, 09:23:03 PM
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182
Title: rogue judge
Post by: ccp on February 06, 2017, 07:00:55 AM


https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2017/02/rogue-judges-undermine-our-sovereignty-heres-how-congress-can-stop-them
Title: Executive Power Run Amok
Post by: bigdog on February 06, 2017, 09:13:47 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/06/opinion/executive-power-run-amok.html

"As an official in the Justice Department, I followed in Hamilton’s footsteps, advising that President George W. Bush could take vigorous, perhaps extreme, measures to protect the nation after the Sept. 11 attacks, including invading Afghanistan, opening the Guantánamo detention center and conducting military trials and enhanced interrogation of terrorist leaders. ...

"But even I have grave concerns about Mr. Trump’s uses of presidential power. ...

"Mr. Trump’s firing of the acting attorney general, Sally Yates, for her stated intention not to defend his immigration policy, also raises concerns. Even though the constitutional text is silent on the issue, long historical practice and Supreme Court precedent have recognized a presidential power of removal. Mr. Trump was thus on solid footing, because attorneys general have a duty to defend laws and executive orders, so long as they have a plausible legal grounding. But the White House undermined its valid use of the removal power by accusing Ms. Yates of being “weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.” Such irrelevant ad hominem accusations suggest a misconception of the president’s authority of removal."
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on February 06, 2017, 09:36:28 AM
ad hominem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

If any one with a brain is to suppose that Yates was not being political and was in her mind trying to uphold some idealist principle will not convince most on the left.
If she refused to carry out executive orders she is weak on enforcement.

If her personal beliefs (political ) were not at the core of what she did then what was?  Soros giving her a check?

If this is all the NYslimes can come up with,  criticizing Trump not because he had every right to fire her but because he made a statement that she is weak on immigration then the socialist NY paper  is reduced to  desperately scraping from the bottom of the barrel anything they can to find a fault with Trump.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: bigdog on February 06, 2017, 09:50:25 AM
ad hominem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

If any one with a brain is to suppose that Yates was not being political and was in her mind trying to uphold some idealist principle will not convince most on the left.
If she refused to carry out executive orders she is weak on enforcement.

If her personal beliefs (political ) were not at the core of what she did then what was?  Soros giving her a check?

If this is all the NYslimes can come up with,  criticizing Trump not because he had every right to fire her but because he made a statement that she is weak on immigration then the socialist NY paper  is reduced to  desperately scraping from the bottom of the barrel anything they can to find a fault with Trump.



You don't know who John Yoo is, do you? He's a far cry from a liberal.
Title: Goldsmith v. Lederman on Yates
Post by: bigdog on February 06, 2017, 12:43:29 PM
OTOH, ccp (and others), you might find this interesting:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-special-wednesday-edition-goldsmith-v-lederman-yates
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on February 07, 2017, 07:33:38 AM
Bigdog,

Thanks for the very thought provoking posts.  

I listened to most of the tape.  Interesting and sharp discussions about  Yate's choices (if I understood it all correctly - it was late at night and I was exhausted)

She claimed as a matter of Stated Dept policy or law she should not or could not enforce Trump's executive order.
I think the speakers agreed she was wrong to claim that doing so on behalf of Stated Dept. legal grounds was wrong. For her to refuse to do so on some personal interpretation of  moral or idealistic grounds is reasonable.

She had every right to refuse for herself but should  not have invoked that she was doing so as representing the State Dept.

She had 2 choices.  one : resign  two : make a public statement (as she did) and refuse to carry out the orders.  

If she chose the former choice she could still make a public statement about what her reasons were.

If she chose the second choice she would have to know she would be fired.  So either way she had to know she was "falling on her sword" .

She appears to have thought that either choice was "equivalent" and for unclear reason (perhaps she "misread" or misinterpreted State Dept law is hypothesized as her assuming equivalence though not to my understanding the true motive is not known) chose to make a public statement and refuse on some false legal grounds .

This is all well and good.
Now Trump fires her and the NYT implies he impugns her character by calling her "weak" on immigration.    And the NYT claims that by doing so Trump or his representatives undermine their strong legal footing against her actions.

I assume the NYT would also like to claim impugning her character is "un Presidential".

I disagree with them on both points and hold their criticism is a veiled device  to politically undermine Trump.  I also feel that it is reasonable to state Yates IS weak on immigration by tying her refusal to enforce an executive order on immigration which is designed to protect American citizens  to refusing to participate with actions  the President deems are necessary to best protect American citizens.

Either way it is hard to fathom that her criticism and the way in which she decided to go public with a press conference was also not a somewhat veiled to effort to politically undermine her new boss.
Political showomanship was part of the equation.   It would be pushing the limits of credulity that she had not to at least some degree  coordinated with Democratic political  operatives.

Bottom line for me is I don't disagree with Trump's tweet.

(Of course I am just one more opinion and of course I have political biases too.)

Title: The war on the rule of law, Yoo, NYT, Executive Power Run Amok
Post by: DougMacG on February 07, 2017, 09:17:50 AM
Prof Yoo is selective about when he supports or opposes executive power (like the rest of us).

The President is on "solid footing" for the removal but his voicing of his reason for removal "suggests a misconception of the president’s authority..."?  

Libya wasn't a war?  
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/387751/president-doesnt-need-congresss-approval-attack-isis-john-yoo
Maybe it was a 'kinetic military action', but it looked, smelled, killed and overthrew a government like a war.  http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/03/24/obamas-unconstitutional-war/

On the fence, we already have congressional approval:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Fence_Act_of_2006
The existing law says, roughly, build the fence, make it secure, do what it takes.  So does Trump's executive order. Who enforced that law, not the administration John Yoo served.

Mostly Yoo's attacks are on the words of Trump, not his actions - that he will end NAFTA or slap on tariffs without taking it through Congress.  He has not done that.

The countries on the temporary ban order are "Muslim nations" only in the sense that their military rule tolerates nothing else.  Trump's earlier words referenced a ban on religion; this order did not.  There is a difference between strong words entering negotiations and policy.  Did Reagan end every campaign sentence about tax rate cuts with - 'depending on what the Democratic House wants to do?  No, nor did JFK.  It was presumed that it will go through Congress only if a leader leads it through and the people demand it.  

Prof. Yoo should know the term "bully pulpit" originated with Theodore Roosevelt more than a hundred years ago, not with Donald Trump.  Did they all have this misconception?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: bigdog on February 07, 2017, 10:06:32 AM
Yoo is selective about when he supports executive power, but not like the rest of us. He is, in fact, a --if not the--major proponent of the unitary theory of presidential power, so when he suggests that there are limits to presidential action, you need to understand how far he is willing to push those boundaries. Please see any number of his academic works on this point.

Title: Unitary Theory of Executive Power
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 07, 2017, 10:42:31 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory

BD:  Was it Yoo who wrote the position paper for Bush 43 that concluded that waterboarding was not torture?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: bigdog on February 07, 2017, 02:44:34 PM
Yes, sir.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 07, 2017, 03:57:41 PM
That bit about strong or weak unitary theory was something I had not considered previously.  Thanks.

Title: Loretta Lynch wears her partisanship on her lapel now
Post by: ccp on March 05, 2017, 08:49:06 AM
If anyone doubts the true colors of Loretta Lynch then just watch this:

http://www.wnd.com/2017/03/loretta-lynch-need-more-marching-blood-death-on-streets/

Phony grandmother facade aside she is every bit the militant partisan Holder is.  And was at DOJ. 
Title: Alexander Hamiliton on replacing the Rule of Law with Force.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 30, 2017, 10:36:02 AM
The Foundation

"The instruments, by which [government] must act, are either the AUTHORITY of the Laws or FORCE. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; ... and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government, there is an end to LIBERTY." --Alexander Hamilton
Title: Re: Alexander Hamiliton on replacing the Rule of Law with Force.
Post by: G M on March 30, 2017, 11:18:29 AM
The Foundation

"The instruments, by which [government] must act, are either the AUTHORITY of the Laws or FORCE. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; ... and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government, there is an end to LIBERTY." --Alexander Hamilton

Pretty much where we are today.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 30, 2017, 11:21:42 AM
We fight to keep the Republic our Founding Fathers gave us.

Make America Great Again!
Title: DHS (Obama?) vouched for 320 illegal aliens to become notaries in NC
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 30, 2017, 05:51:56 PM
More than 300 North Carolina notaries were illegal residents, records show



"A state representative is demanding the resignation of North Carolina's secretary of state after reviewing documents that show 320 people with no legal residency status were given notary positions for nearly a decade.

Rep. Christopher Millis voiced his concerns in an interview with Fox News over details found within documents provided by North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall’s office. Marshall told Fox News the Dept. of Homeland Security approved the notary authorizations.

VIDEO: DEMOCRATIC LAWMAKER TIPS OFF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS TO ICE RAIDS

“We found over 320 nonpermanent residents that her office commissioned as notaries. Including one that was slated for final deportation,” Millis said. “It’s very concerning not just the fact that these individuals will have the ability to affirm items like oath, but also the ability in our state for them to certify absentee ballots.”

Millis says these same documents show Marshall’s office regularly accepted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) cards as forms of identification which he claims on his website are not valid to prove residency. “A DACA card is a temporary employment authorization to facilitate safe and legitimate employment and income for otherwise undocumented aliens but does not confer legal immigration status.”

DACA RECIPIENT WITH ALLEGED GANG TIES FACES RELEASE FROM DETENTION CENTER

Millis stressed these same concerns in a nine-page letter written to Secretary Elaine Marshall on March 27th. He ended the letter by asking for her resignation.

“I make all of these implications very seriously and I’m not making any of this lightly,” Millis said. “Whenever I ask the Secretary to resign immediately or I made it clear to her that I will move through with a resolution for impeachment if she so chooses not to resign.”

In an email statement to Fox News, Marshall says Millis’ request for her resignation is a political attack by “an opponent in a recent election.”

“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has authorized the specifically mentioned notaries to work here lawfully,” Marshall wrote. “That federally authorized status continues to be unchanged by the new Presidential administration.”

Millis also said a similar statement was made when this issue became public late last year.

“This being masked from the public and including a number of misleading and false statements made by the Secretary and her office since the article went out in September and all up until this point, its definitely clear it meets the allegations of her impeachment on malfeasance,” Millis said.

Fox News asked Millis what would happen to the notaries in question. His response: “We will see what happens with these notaries moving forward, but it’s definitely outside the letter of the law.” 


Terace Garnier is a Fox News multimedia reporter based in Columbia, South Carolina. Follow her on twitter: @TeraceGarnier"

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/03/29/more-than-300-north-carolina-notaries-were-illegal-residents-records-show.html

A Notary Public is an official of integrity appointed by state government —typically by the secretary of state — to serve the public as an impartial witness in performing a variety of official fraud-deterrent acts related to the signing of important documents.

Edit: A more important question is the fact that Marshall states, “The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has authorized the specifically mentioned notaries to work here lawfully,” Marshall wrote. “That federally authorized status continues to be unchanged by the new Presidential administration.”

Does that mean that Obama was purposely undermining legal requirements of sovereign state governments as well as the Union?
Title: A bit more on Operation Fast & Furious (OFF) 2.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 03, 2017, 02:16:53 PM
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/03/obama-doj-failed-stop-mexican-cartel-murder-ice-agent-smuggled-guns/
Title: The obama irs
Post by: ccp on April 11, 2017, 01:49:13 PM
Despite the IRS destroying much of the evidence of their crimes, Judicial Watch was still able to find *more* evidence of IRS targeting political opponents:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/04/10/documents-confirm-that-obama-irs-improperly-targeted-conservatives/
Title: Judicial Watch sues EPA for encrypted records (Deep State)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 15, 2017, 08:06:02 AM
Deep State Watch – JW Sues EPA for Records from Encrypted App

The administrative deep state – the legions of unelected, entrenched bureaucrats in Washington – thinks it doesn’t have to answer to an elected president, the rule of law, or the American people. We are now seeking to uncover the truth about the particularly notorious fifth column in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

We just filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for communications sent or received by EPA officials who may have used the cell phone encryption application “Signal” to thwart government oversight and transparency. We filed the suit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. Environmental Protection Agency (No. 1:17-cv-00533)).

The lawsuit was filed after the EPA failed to respond to our February request for:

1. Any and all work-related communications sent to or from the following EPA officials using the app known as “Signal,” for the period February 3, 2016, to the      present
Administrator (or Acting);

Deputy Administrator (or Acting);

Assistant Administrator (or Acting), Office of Air and Radiation;

Assistant Administrator (or Acting), Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention;

Assistant Administrator (or Acting), Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance;

Assistant Administrator (or Acting), Office of Land and Emergency Management;

Assistant Administrator (or Acting), Office of International and Tribal Affairs; and

Chief Financial Officer (or Acting).

2. Any and all records requesting or approving the use of the messaging app known as “Signal” by any EPA personnel for official business. The time frame for the requested records is July 1, 2014, to the present.

You can see that there’s no getting around that we want – government records from the secrecy app.

The use of Signal by EPA officials to prevent government oversight was reported in a February 2, 2017, Politico article entitled “Federal workers turn to encryption to thwart Trump.”

According to the article:
  
Whether inside the Environmental Protection Agency, within the Foreign Service, on the edges of the Labor Department or beyond, employees are using new technology … to organize letters, talk strategy, or contact media outlets and other groups to express their dissent.
***

Fearing for their jobs, the employees began communicating incognito using the app Signal shortly after Trump’s inauguration.
***

[T]he goal is to “create a network across the agency” of people who will raise red flags if Trump’s appointees do anything unlawful.

This lawsuit could expose how the anti-Trump “deep state” embedded in EPA is working to undermine the rule of law. Let’s hope the Trump administration enforces FOIA and turns over these records. Given EPA’s checkered history on records retention and transparency, it is disturbing to see reports that career civil servants and appointed officials may now be attempting to use high-tech blocking devices to circumvent the Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act altogether.

Signal has long been touted within the high-tech community as an encryption device particularly effective for blocking government access to smartphone messaging. In a 2015 article titled “Signal Keeps Your I-Phone Calls and Texts Safe from Government Oversight,” TechCrunch.com advised: “Don’t want someone else handing your text messages, pictures, videos or phone conversations over to the government? There’s an app for that. An iOS app called Signal is a project out of Open Whisper Systems, a not-for-profit collective of hackers dedicated to making it harder for prying government eyes to get ahold of your information.”

The use of private encryption software such as Signal by federal officials and employees not only may make it difficult for their work to be overseen; it also may make it impossible for federal agencies to fulfill their record-keeping and transparency obligations under the Federal Records and Freedom of Information Acts. The Federal Records Act requires federal employees to preserve all records of work-related communications on government servers, even if such communications occur over non-government emails, phones or text messages. The records must be forwarded on to the agency for preservation and archiving, and the records are subject to release under the Freedom of Information Act, unless specifically exempted.

The Environmental Protection Agency has a history of employees’ failing to preserve records and using private emails to conduct agency business or conducting official business through non-official communication channels:

According to a September 20, 2016, report put out by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which was based upon emails obtained under FOIA: “Moving select correspondence about EPA-related business to non-official email accounts was an understood, deliberate and widespread practice in the Obama EPA.”

According to a December 21, 2016, Inspector General Report, the EPA’s “mobile device-management processes do not prevent employees from changing the device’s configuration settings for retaining text messages on all government-issued mobile devices.” Apparently, at least one EPA employee set his phone to delete messages automatically after 30 days.

Although excluded from the body of the IG report, the Inspector General reportedly told the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Lamar Smith, who requested the IG investigation, that EPA officials archived only 86 text messages out of 3.1 million messages sent and received by agency employees in 2015.

Chairman Smith originally requested the IG report in November 2014 after it was revealed that high-ranking EPA officials, including then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, may have deleted texts to hide official business.

The tech publication Wired covered the new challenges to transparency well:
  
Judicial Watch, for its part, acknowledges that it may be tough to dig up deleted Signal communications.  But another element of its FOIA request asks for any EPA information about whether it has approved Signal for use by agency staffers.  “They can’t use these apps to thwart the Federal Records Act just because they don’t like Donald Trump,” says Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton.  “This serves also as an educational moment for any government employees, that using the app to conduct government business to ensure the deletion of records is against the law, and against record-keeping policies in almost every agency.”

Fitton hopes the lawsuit will at least compel the EPA to prevent employees from installing Signal or similar apps on government-issued phones.  “The agency is obligated to ensure their employees are following the rules so that records subject to FOIA are preserved,” he says.  “If they’re not doing that, they could be answerable to the courts.”

The issue is now before the courts, so stay tuned.
====================================

Also see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yNGjj8NWEY

Title: If the Government Cannot Be Trusted, Can It Protect the Nation?
Post by: G M on April 16, 2017, 08:01:14 AM
I used to have faith in the people that did these jobs. Eight years of Obama's politicization/weaponization of the federal government taught me otherwise.


If the Government Cannot Be Trusted, Can It Protect the Nation?
by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY   April 15, 2017 4:00 AM


A brawl over FISA is coming. ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Ronald Reagan famously described these as “the nine most terrifying words in the English language.” It may be time to propose a two-word corollary. “Trust us.” In the end, underneath the geek-speak of encryption, electronic intercepts, forward-looking infrared thermal imaging, satellite surveillance, and sundry collection technologies, that is what the government is really saying when it comes to national security: “Trust us. The intelligence collection we do is important — is essential – to keeping you alive. Oh . . . and don’t ask a lot of questions. You know, can’t discuss that — methods and sources, etc.” I don’t think that’s going to cut it this time. Before 2017 is out, we are going to have a brawl over FISA — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Specifically, over FISA section 702, on which much of the sprawling American intelligence enterprise is now based.

It will lapse if not reauthorized by Congress. We ought to be headed into that brawl with a sense of how dangerous the world has become: Competitive great-power geopolitics has reemerged, yet international jihadism remains as threatening as ever. Instead, foremost in our minds will be how readily the government’s awesome intelligence capabilities can be abused. That is the real significance of the controversy over Obama-administration spying on the Trump campaign and transition. The scandal that CNN is hell-bent on ignoring brings into sharp relief the very abuses the media, echoing civil-liberties activists, have warned against for years: pretextual uses of intelligence-collection powers to spy on political opponents and dissenters. As a national-security conservative with no illusions about government, I’ve acknowledged these concerns. I’ve countered, though, that the powers are, yes, essential to national security. The abuse of power is thus a reason to get rid of the abuser, not the power. In our modern political dysfunction, that seems impossible. Washington protects its own. No one gets fired anymore, let alone impeached. So just as we make war on “terror” because we don’t want to identify the enemy, we condemn “power” because we can’t bring ourselves to hold the rogue officials accountable. Did the Obama administration have compelling foreign-intelligence reasons to monitor its political opponents? Or was Russian espionage mainly a cover for political spying? As I’ve said before, there is enough risk on both sides that I doubt we will get definitive answers to these questions.

There is little doubt, however, that Republicans and Democrats will mutually find intelligence-collection power to be a convenient scapegoat. That’s where this is heading: the showdown over FISA reauthorization. So can we trust the government with this power? It is worth remembering that, before someone decided that the perilous complexities of the modern world left us with no choice but to trust the government, we built a governing system on the premise that it can’t be trusted. Our supposedly self-determining society never conducted a referendum that officially transformed government from a necessary evil to a guardian angel. But while you weren’t looking, there does seem to have been a dramatic transformation of the Fourth Amendment. Before someone decided that the perilous complexities of the modern world left us with no choice but to trust the government, we built a governing system on the premise that it can’t be trusted. The amendment’s original meaning is simple enough: The government is not permitted to seize your most personal information — that yielded by searching your home, your person, your papers, or your effects — in the absence of permission from a judge. The idea is that the government’s own say-so cannot be trusted. Consequently, we don’t let it knock down your door unless its agents show probable cause that you have committed some wrong. That showing must satisfy a court — the forum in which the citizen is protected from government overreach. Only if the judge grants a warrant may the government search and seize.

Flash-forward a couple of centuries. The Fourth Amendment’s words are still the same, but the paradigm has shifted. Now we permit the government to seize first and search later. That is, we let government intelligence agents obtain evidence without cause. The caveat is that they will just hold it in a database, they won’t analyze it unless and until there is cause. The courts no longer determine whether the government may obtain the evidence in the first place; they merely endorse and kinda-sorta police the “seize now, search later” arrangement — under which the government is granted such broad discretion to analyze what it has obtained that the judicial protection seems illusory. I don’t mean to make this sound like a scam. There is a legal rationale for it. The principal targets of government foreign-intelligence operations are aliens outside the U.S. — i.e., agents of foreign powers who could detrimentally affect American interests, and who are located outside the jurisdiction of American courts. They are not entitled to American legal protection at all, so the courts should not be involved — to say nothing of the fact that the judiciary, for all its legal acumen, is not institutionally competent to oversee intelligence matters.

Yet modern communications technology renders it inevitable that intelligence-collection efforts, even as they target foreigners, will capture private communications involving Americans. So the courts have to be involved. Still, this involvement does not mean they are any more competent to oversee intelligence matters. And the effort to safeguard Americans inevitably benefits foreign targets of intelligence collection — often, our enemies. So how have we resolved these tensions? We let the courts oversee foreign-intelligence collection so Americans will have some ostensible protections; but we don’t let the courts be much more than a rubber stamp, because we know they really shouldn’t be involved in foreign-intelligence matters — and because we don’t want to turn our own judiciary into our enemies’ shield. It is a delicate balance. It is also a balance that can be unbalanced in a hurry, because it has more to do with shifting political winds than with enduring legal norms. After all, we’ve departed from our legal norms: We allow the government to seize our information without cause and trust that they will never look at what we’ve allowed them to retain unless some really good reason — some national-security reason — triggers a need to pluck us out of the database and investigate. And . . . because intelligence involves secrets and sources and life and death, we’ve accepted that the government cannot tell us its reasons for investigating. We trust that when the government tells us it is protecting national security, it is not actually scheming to spy on the incumbent administration’s political opponents . . . and on us. But can we trust the government? Whether we are inclined to do so depends on what is making us feel most vulnerable at the moment: foreign threats or rogue officials. If I had to bet right now, I’d say FISA is in trouble because of the rogue officials . . . and we’re in trouble because the foreign threats are not going away. — Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior policy fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446767/fisa-reauthorization-federal-intelligence-surveillance-act-trump-administration-spying-scandal-national-security
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2017, 10:32:02 AM
Any chance we could persuade you to put a few paragraphs in there?  :-D
Title: Sharyl Attkisson: Obama surveillance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2017, 06:58:40 PM
https://sharylattkisson.com/obama-era-surveillance-timeline/
Title: VIDEO: Berkeley cops sit in patrol car and watch as Trump supporters attacked
Post by: G M on April 16, 2017, 08:46:06 PM
http://www.theamericanmirror.com/video-berkeley-cops-sit-patrol-car-trump-supporters-attacked/

And where does this lead?

Title: "BART takeover robbery: 40 to 60 teens swarm train, rob weekend riders."
Post by: G M on April 25, 2017, 11:34:29 AM
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2017/04/bart-takeover-robbery-40-to-60-teens.html

April 24, 2017
"BART takeover robbery: 40 to 60 teens swarm train, rob weekend riders."

There's surveillance video of this incident, but according to the BART spokesperson, because the people who are seen committing obvious crimes appear to be minors, the video cannot be put up on line.
The juveniles “committed multiple strong-arm robberies of bags and cell phones,” said a police summary prepared after the incident. “At least two victims suffered head/facial injuries requiring medical attention.”...

The attack was quick, police reported, and the teenagers were able to retreat from the station and vanish into the surrounding East Oakland neighborhood before BART officers could respond.

I can't believe they won't/can't make the video available so these criminals can be caught. Is that really the law in California?
Posted by Ann Althouse at 6:02 PM 
Tags: crime, law, surveillance, teenagers
Title: Fed judge blocks Trump on Sanctuary Cities
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 25, 2017, 02:57:26 PM
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/330516-federal-judge-blocks-trumps-sanctuary-cities-order
Title: Re: "BART takeover robbery: 40 to 60 teens swarm train, rob weekend riders."
Post by: DougMacG on April 25, 2017, 03:17:02 PM
"BART takeover robbery: 40 to 60 teens swarm train, rob weekend riders."
"because the people who are seen committing obvious crimes appear to be minors, the video cannot be put up on line."

I've heard of protecting the privacy of minors but never above trying to solve a crime.  If a "teenager" hasn't seen a parent in 2-3 years, are they really still minors?

I wonder if this is another case of white on black crime or Christian on Muslim crime that we so far too often see.  Lutherans out wilding??
Title: Re: "BART takeover robbery: 40 to 60 teens swarm train, rob weekend riders."
Post by: G M on April 25, 2017, 04:56:31 PM
"BART takeover robbery: 40 to 60 teens swarm train, rob weekend riders."
"because the people who are seen committing obvious crimes appear to be minors, the video cannot be put up on line."

I've heard of protecting the privacy of minors but never above trying to solve a crime.  If a "teenager" hasn't seen a parent in 2-3 years, are they really still minors?

I wonder if this is another case of white on black crime or Christian on Muslim crime that we so far too often see.  Lutherans out wilding??


Can't let the truth get in the way of the left's narrative.
Title: NRO: On Orrick's injunction
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 26, 2017, 10:04:11 PM
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447058/trump-administration-sanctuary-city-executive-order-activist-liberal-judge-william-h-orrick?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-04-26&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Incredibly, Baltimore Advising Police Against Arresting Illegal Aliens
Post by: G M on May 01, 2017, 03:37:59 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/369544.php

May 01, 2017
Incredibly, Baltimore Advising Police Against Arresting Illegal Immigrant Criminals at All, Lest They Be Subsequently Deported
Trump says he's prioritizing illegals who commit other illegal acts for deportation.

If a blue city arrests and prosecutes an illegal, then, they make him more readily subject to deportation.

Solution? Just don't arrest or prosecute illegals for anything other than the most serious violent offenses.

Not only do they have immunity from our immigration laws, they'll now have immunity from almost every criminal law.

Amazing.

The Baltimore State's Attorney’s Office has instructed prosecutors to think twice before charging illegal immigrants with minor, non-violent crimes in response to stepped up immigration enforcement by the Trump administration.
Deputy State’s Attorney Michael Schatzow, in a memo sent to all staff Thursday and obtained by The Sun, wrote that the Justice Department's deportation efforts "have increased the potential collateral consequences to certain immigrants of minor, non-violent criminal conduct."

"In considering the appropriate disposition of a minor, non-violent criminal case, please be certain to consider those potential consequences to the victim, witnesses, and the defendant," Schatzow wrote.

Although the media tells us illegals don't vote, blue city and state Democrats sure act as if they do, and sure seem to think they have a sizable electoral influence.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on May 02, 2017, 04:38:45 AM
"Although the media tells us illegals don't vote, blue city and state Democrats sure act as if they do, and sure seem to think they have a sizable electoral influence."

One can think of many comments to make about this but one thing is certain:

If all these people coming over here were far more likely to be Republican voters and not Dem party hacks we all know the borders would have been enforced and illegals deported the first day Brock was in office.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on May 02, 2017, 06:07:12 AM
"Although the media tells us illegals don't vote, blue city and state Democrats sure act as if they do, and sure seem to think they have a sizable electoral influence."

One can think of many comments to make about this but one thing is certain:

If all these people coming over here were far more likely to be Republican voters and not Dem party hacks we all know the borders would have been enforced and illegals deported the first day Brock was in office.

Exactly.
Title: War on the rule of law, Susan Rice, Comey, HRC, Loretta Lynch
Post by: DougMacG on May 04, 2017, 07:14:18 AM
ccp: no loss  (politics)
The congressional hearings are such a waste of time anyway.  She is just going to lie her way through them even if she showed up so what is the point?
Have we ever seen any consequences that means anything from any of these things?  I can't recall any:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-obama-security-adviser-declines-invite-testify-220908322--politics.html
---------------

Congressional hearings are a waste of time because congress had no power (under Obama) to jail the people it held in contempt.  Eric Holder comes to mind.  Lois Lerner.  The IRS commissioner.

Having Susan Rice, who was at the center of some of the administration's lies, testify (falsely) under oath does have some potential value IMHO.
--------------
Comey and the Russians cost Hillary the election?  First it wikileaks, not the Russians, and what they were releasing was proof she broke the rule of law.

Comey went public when Loretta Lynch recused herself.  Why?  For meeting with Bill Clinton secretly.  Does that break the rule of law?  Of course.  Ex parte, interfering with a federal investigation, and for another thing, equal treatment under the law.  What other person under federal investigation gets to have one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, who got her her job and largely controls her future, meet in secret with the Attorney General SECRETLY right while she is making her decision of whether to go forward with criminal prosecution.  She shouldn't have 'recused herself' from the decision, she should have been escorted off the scene in handcuffs, read her rights and been given a fair trial.

Comey, who never asked HRC a question about intent, is still talking yesterday about finding no evidence of intent in the hidden and discovered emails.  Unmentioned is that the espionage act she broke dos not in any way require intent.

And what was the intent of the private server that BILL Cinton set up and Hillary used?  James Carville said it on national television.  To keep these committees from seeing these correspondences.  And what was the business, proven in all the hacked and released emails?  The co-mingling of the Clinton Foundation, State Department business, and the accompanying Clinton personal wealth gain tied to it as plain to see as the sunrise on a clear day.

And to jail goes no one.

Rule of law?  What rule of law!

If you or I (or George W Bush) did the same thing, we would be in jail now.
Title: Re: War on the rule of law, Susan Rice, Comey, HRC, Loretta Lynch
Post by: G M on May 04, 2017, 08:12:48 AM
I have discussed this with multiple people with law enforcement backgrounds. We are in agreement that the rule of law is dead in this country.



ccp: no loss  (politics)
The congressional hearings are such a waste of time anyway.  She is just going to lie her way through them even if she showed up so what is the point?
Have we ever seen any consequences that means anything from any of these things?  I can't recall any:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-obama-security-adviser-declines-invite-testify-220908322--politics.html
---------------

Congressional hearings are a waste of time because congress had no power (under Obama) to jail the people it held in contempt.  Eric Holder comes to mind.  Lois Lerner.  The IRS commissioner.

Having Susan Rice, who was at the center of some of the administration's lies, testify (falsely) under oath does have some potential value IMHO.
--------------
Comey and the Russians cost Hillary the election?  First it wikileaks, not the Russians, and what they were releasing was proof she broke the rule of law.

Comey went public when Loretta Lynch recused herself.  Why?  For meeting with Bill Clinton secretly.  Does that break the rule of law?  Of course.  Ex parte, interfering with a federal investigation, and for another thing, equal treatment under the law.  What other person under federal investigation gets to have one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, who got her her job and largely controls her future, meet in secret with the Attorney General SECRETLY right while she is making her decision of whether to go forward with criminal prosecution.  She shouldn't have 'recused herself' from the decision, she should have been escorted off the scene in handcuffs, read her rights and been given a fair trial.

Comey, who never asked HRC a question about intent, is still talking yesterday about finding no evidence of intent in the hidden and discovered emails.  Unmentioned is that the espionage act she broke dos not in any way require intent.

And what was the intent of the private server that BILL Cinton set up and Hillary used?  James Carville said it on national television.  To keep these committees from seeing these correspondences.  And what was the business, proven in all the hacked and released emails?  The co-mingling of the Clinton Foundation, State Department business, and the accompanying Clinton personal wealth gain tied to it as plain to see as the sunrise on a clear day.

And to jail goes no one.

Rule of law?  What rule of law!

If you or I (or George W Bush) did the same thing, we would be in jail now.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law, Comey
Post by: DougMacG on May 11, 2017, 07:50:14 AM
The left, the media or the rule of law, who knows?  Does anyone seriously believe firing Comey will make some impeachment level crime of Trump's go away, of which there is no evidence after almost 12 months of investigation...

They didn't kill him.  He can still speak, and make appearances. They didn't fire the whole department.  Was he working alone in secret on something? 

Did he (successfully) investigate leaks in his own department, or the leaks of the bureaucracy (deep state) or of the previous administration?

Did he investigate the IRS scandal that came to light under his watch?  Who did they charge?  (No one)

Is there ANYTHING he did right or got right?
Title: Trump Cans Comey Like A Boss
Post by: G M on May 11, 2017, 08:06:17 AM
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/05/11/trump-cans-comey-like-a-boss-n2324865

Trump Cans Comey Like A Boss
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: May 11, 2017 12:01 AM 


 

We always knew Donald Trump was brassy, but until he sent half-stepping ex-FBI Director James Comey packing, we didn’t know that his manparts were made of brass. You gotta be hardcore to step up to that sanctimonious tool, that Kasich-With-A-Badge, and cut him off at the knees in the face of the inevitable monsoon of fake news media panic, girlish Democrat howling, and sputtering Menschian Russianoia.

No hesitation. No apologies. When it became inarguable that this pumped up functionary with delusions of omnipotence had finally passed his sell-by date, Trump pulled the trigger. That’s taking charge. That’s leading from the front. That’s regulating. Damn, it’s nice to once again have a chief executive who’s not a simpering femboy.

The pathetic Democrats were caught so utterly off-guard, and were so completely bought-into their spittle-flicking Comey hate, that their 180 from calling for Comey’s head to calling for his restoration will give them mental whiplash. They’ll be in figurative neck braces just like the one their hero Ted Kennedy wore after he left Mary Jo in the pond.

The morning of the day that Trump canned Comey, the Dems were in high dudgeon over Comey’s “correction” of his Senate testimony regarding how many classified emails Huma sent to her overexposed spouse. It was a lot less than what Comey told Congress…under oath…when everyone was watching. No biggie. He “clarified” it afterwards, so it was all good.

 
When normals give false testimony under oath, we call it “perjury,” and Comey’s former subordinates frog march them into federal prison. But when Comey does it, it’s merely an oopsie and he gets to shrug as the sad trombone blows.

Democrats have a beef about Comey telling Congress – which promptly leaked it – that he was reopening the Clinton investigation right before the election. But he was reopening it, and he assured Congress he’d let it know if he did, and it was a big deal. Hillary had no right to a free pass on the foreseeable consequences of her decision to flout the law. No toilet server, no hacks, no problem – this was all of her doing and no one should blame Comey for that. Nor was it Comey who kept her out of Michigan, Wisconsin, and the parts of Pennsylvania where people cling to their guns and religion.

But his “Free Pass for Hillary” press conference in July was perhaps the most transparently horrific decision by a Justice Department official since Janet Reno decided that she had to burn down the Branch Davidian compound to save its kids. Here’s the thing about Comey – he was arrogant. He was so arrogant that he took for himself the power to ignore the law because he determined, by himself, that if Hillary was treated like every other non-elite citizen the outcome would somehow be wrong. Voters might vote incorrectly if Hillary was held accountable and Comey, in his surpassing benevolent wisdom, could not allow that.


His press conference did incalculable damage to the American People’s faith in the rule of law. But he’s special, and his most-favored-felon treatment of fellow elite alum Hillary and her cadre of crooks was just professional courtesy.

His dedication to higher truth justified Jimmy lying to our faces. Any normal American, but not Hillary, would have been indicted over those classified emails – those of us who actually held security clearances understand that especially well. And that stuff about no prosecutor being able to prove the case? A first-year lawyer with a hangover could prove her U.S. Code violations to a jury of Kardashians with ADD.

Everything Comey said at that press conference after laying out that devastating indictment of Hillary Clinton was a lie. Everything. But he had his higher purpose. He was not bound by the petty rules that constrain lesser men.

It was never Comey’s job to determine whether to prosecute her. He was a cop – well, cops actually do cop things instead of ride a desk and stare lovingly into the mirror, but his role was law enforcement nonetheless. Comey was not a prosecutor. Yet he usurped that job because he felt that only St. Jim had the moral fortitude to see beyond and above our mere mortal laws. It was his obligation – nay, his duty – to ignore the statutes enacted by the People through the Congress and to do what he determined was right, not what the law required, not what his oath compelled, but what he felt good about.


Comey’s actions were not the actions of an officer of a democratic republic, but of an aspiring benign dictator who feels himself unbound by mere mortal laws. And history is replete with the heaps of bodies that lie at the far end of that slippery slope. Such men never stay benign long.

That pompous hack can never be too gone from office. He probably thought he was going to skate too, right up until the minute security showed up with an empty banker’s box to confiscate his access card and walk him out to the sidewalk.

The Democrats are fuming, enraged that President Trump dared to fearlessly exercise the power of every other president and dismiss those who serve at his pleasure whom he no longer finds pleasing. But he rejects the idea that because liberals disapprove, his every action is somehow illegitimate. Trump refuses to accept the narrative that he is The President*, America’s Asterisk-in-Chief.

Not a thing.

Savor this moment. You just lived through history. January 20, 2017, is when Donald Trump took the oath of office. May 9, 2017, is when he became President.
Title: The craven cowards at the FBI, starting at the top with Comey
Post by: G M on May 13, 2017, 10:01:12 AM
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2017/05/12/cowards-fbi-comey/

The craven cowards at the FBI, starting at the top with Comey
MAY 12, 2017 BY BOOKWORM 12 COMMENTS

Comey pretended that his moral cowardice was a virtue, a dangerous attitude that empowers weak people and that permeates the entire FBI.

FBI Comey J. Edgar Hoover Building Federal Bureau of Investigation
As Comey’s firing as FBI director continues to roil the Left, all sorts of interesting things are emerging. For example, it was Comey who gave Bill Clinton a pass in 2002 following an investigation into Clinton’s Marc Rich pardon. Having been one of the Whitewater investigators, you’d think Comey would have figured out early that, where there’s a Clinton, there’s a rat to be smelled, but somehow . . . he didn’t.

Comey was also the one who authorized the FBI to spend $100,000 investigating Dinesh D’Souza’s $20,000 illegal campaign finance donation. One could say that keeping elections clean is so important that money is no object, but that’s not what the FBI and other government branches had said before they got D’Souza — a prominent Obama and Democrat Party critic — in their sights. Previously (and since then), for small dollar campaign finance violations, the government had handed out small punishments.

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 Dinesh D'Souza ✔ @DineshDSouza
WHY I'M SMILING TODAY: This capo James Comey allocated $100,000 to investigate my $20 K case--all to please his mob bosses Holder & Obama
3:35 PM - 9 May 2017
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Kimberly Strassel has written a scathing article detailing Comey’s ongoing corrupt practices, made all the more damning by the fact that she pretends to take Comey at his word — namely, that he sees himself as a model of virtue and rectitude constantly saving the day:

. . . t seems the head of the FBI had lost confidence—even before TarmacGate—that the Justice Department was playing it anywhere near straight in the Clinton probe. So what should an honor-bound FBI director do in such a conflicted situation? Call it out. Demand that Ms. Lynch recuse herself and insist on an appropriate process to ensure public confidence. Resign, if need be. Instead Mr. Comey waited until the situation had become a crisis, and then he ignored all protocol to make himself investigator, attorney, judge and jury.

By the end of that 15-minute July press conference, Mr. Comey had infuriated both Republicans and Democrats, who were now universally convinced he was playing politics. He’d undermined his and his agency’s integrity. No matter his motives, an honor-bound director would have acknowledged that his decision jeopardized his ability to continue effectively leading the agency. He would have chosen in the following days—or at least after the election—to step down. Mr. Comey didn’t.

Which leads us to Mr. Comey’s most recent and obvious conflict of all—likely a primary reason he was fired: the leaks investigation (or rather non-investigation). So far the only crime that has come to light from this Russia probe is the rampant and felonious leaking of classified information to the press. Mr. Trump and the GOP rightly see this as a major risk to national security. While the National Security Agency has been cooperating with the House Intelligence Committee and allowing lawmakers to review documents that might show the source of the leaks, Mr. Comey’s FBI has resolutely refused to do the same.

And where is the rest of the FBI in all of this? Some agents are taking a “brave” and “virtuous” stand too. In true FBI tradition, showing the backbone and strength for which they’re known, they’re changing their Facebook pictures to show Comey’s face, rather than their own [that’s sarcasm, in case you wondered]:

FBI agents are reportedly changing their Facebook profile photos to pictures of James Comey — or pictures of them with Comey — to show their support for the sacked FBI director.

The Daily Beast reported that at least a dozen agents had changed their photos, a gesture usually reserved for fellow agents slain in the line of duty.

According to Gateway Pundit, though, some agents are thinking of going public about their disagreements with Comey. The link in that article is to an October 17, 2016 article in which anonymous FBI agents say they’re displeased with Comey’s handling of matters.

You know what? I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for those agents to go public. I think FBI agents’ courage is limited to Facebook profile pictures.

I say that for the reasons I stated back in April 2016, when I predicted (accurately) that Hillary would get a pass. The basis for this prediction is my unchanging belief that middle class civil servants crave job security and will not allow principles to get in their way. (Please note that I don’t give myself any moral high ground as I have the same cowardly, middle class mindset.)

No matter how principled they’d like to think they are, most middle-class people will turn a blind eye to corruption in their midst rather than run the risk of being unable to pay their mortgage or fund all of the other payments necessary to support a middle-class lifestyle. They don’t think of themselves as dishonest or complicit in dishonesty. They think of themselves as cautious people who aren’t going to risk their children’s future for some grand-standing that, rather than resulting in applause, could leave them unemployed and desperate.

This episode from my past makes me doubt very strongly that Hillary Clinton will be indicted. I know that the rumor mill keeps saying that FBI agents, from Comey on down, will quit if Loretta Lynch lets Hillary walk. Some of the FBI agents whispering this to friendly reporters may even believe that they’ll quit.

Mostly, though, this is a bluff.  Why?  Because the people talking about quitting are middle-class people with mortgages, and school fees, and insurance, and all the other expenses that keep us in the middle-class living up to our own expectations. If Hillary really does walk, 99% of those “I’ll quit if she’s not indicted” agents will manage, very quickly and easily, to convince themselves to stay in their jobs, and get their salaries and pensions.

[snip]

We middle-class people — the ones who collect paychecks for showing up and doing our job — are not paying the piper. We’re not entrepreneurs who get to make our own decisions. Instead, we are dependent on the good will of the very people who may stand accused of corruption. It’s the government, the high-level management, the business owner, who pay the piper and call the tune. We just dance.  And if we miss a step, we’re out on our derrieres with nothing to show for all the skillful dancing we did for so many years before we alienated both piper and payor.

[snip]

Human nature is fixed. Those of us comfortable with our status are also trapped by our status. While there are people with sufficient moral courage or insufficient investment in their middle-class status who will take a stand, most of us will manage to tell ourselves a series of comfortable lies that enable us to live with the embezzler [and] the corrupt politician. . . .

Although I didn’t predict quite how Comey would ensure an outcome that protected Hillary, I was certainly right that a man craving both power and economic security would do what he did.

Ultimately, for all his public posturing, Comey is a coward — and, moreover, one who has managed to convince himself that his moral cowardice is a virtue. That’s a very dangerous mindset. The moment someone believes that about himself, he’s essentially anointed himself as King Rat. Moreover it’s been apparent for a while that this King Rat has been riding herd over a bunch of other cowardly, but morally superior, little rats.

Comey was a nascent J. Edgar Hoover, and those who work for him are either complicit because they support his methods and his ends or they’re complicit because they are too immersed in their delicately balanced middle class lifestyles to do anything that might harm them economically. Some will change their Facebook photos and some will murmur mutinously about “speaking out,” but that’s it. That’s all they’ll do.

The above is why those voters who pay taxes like President Trump. He’s not beholden to anybody and he reacts as a taxpayer would: This guy is doing a bad job, he’s abusing his power, and he shouldn’t be getting a salary. He needs to be fired.

No wonder Trump terrifies the resident rats in the D.C. Swamp.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on May 13, 2017, 01:36:06 PM
"No matter how principled they’d like to think they are, most middle-class people will turn a blind eye to corruption in their midst rather than run the risk of being unable to pay their mortgage or fund all of the other payments necessary to support a middle-class lifestyle. They don’t think of themselves as dishonest or complicit in dishonesty. They think of themselves as cautious people who aren’t going to risk their children’s future for some grand-standing that, rather than resulting in applause, could leave them unemployed and desperate."

This happens all day long, everywhere sadly.
Title: Special prosecutor called but no crime
Post by: ccp on May 14, 2017, 12:09:27 PM
https://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2017/05/13/what-crime-would-a-special-prosecutor-prosecute/
Title: Re: Special prosecutor called but no crime
Post by: G M on May 14, 2017, 12:29:18 PM
https://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2017/05/13/what-crime-would-a-special-prosecutor-prosecute/

Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.

Lavrentiy Beria
Title: NSA won't release Clinton-Lynch tarmac tape due to national security
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 01, 2017, 08:42:37 AM
I thought they were discussing grandchildren and golf? :?

http://freedomoutpost.com/nsa-wont-release-clintonlynch-tarmac-tape-claims-national-security/

http://bigleaguepolitics.com/nsa-blocks-release-loretta-lynch-bill-clinton-airplane-tape-national-security/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on June 01, 2017, 10:14:22 AM
A tape exists???

Wow.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2017, 11:39:32 AM
Read with care-- it is a "refuse to confirm or deny".
Title: More examples why I donate to Judicial Watch
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 23, 2017, 04:08:21 PM
The Obama Library Smoking Guns?       
June 23, 2017
 
 
(Weekly Update: Live with Tom Fitton)

Obama Advisor Susan Rice’s Unmasking Material is at the Obama Library
Judicial Watch Sues for Obama Family Travel and Secret Service Costs
President Trump:  Please End the Obstruction on Benghazi Cover-up Documents
Supreme Court to Hear Big Case Against Proposed Wisconsin Redistricting
 
Obama Advisor Susan Rice’s Unmasking Material is at the Obama Library
Your Judicial Watch performed a massive public service this week.  We exposed how key Obama spying scandal documents, including the infamous Susan Rice unmasking records, were moved to the Obama Presidential Library.
 
The National Security Council (NSC) informed us by letter on May 23, 2017, that the materials regarding the unmasking by Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice of “the identities of any U.S. citizens associated with the Trump presidential campaign or transition team” have been removed to the Obama Library.
 
The NSC will not fulfill our April 4 request for records regarding information relating to people “who were identified pursuant to intelligence collection activities.”
 
The agency also informed us that it would not turn over communications with any intelligence community member or agency concerning the alleged Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election; the hacking of DNC computers; or the suspected communications between Russia and Trump campaign/transition officials.  Specifically, the NSC told us:
Documents from the Obama administration have been transferred to the Barack Obama Presidential Library.  You may send your request to the Obama Library.  However, you should be aware that under the Presidential Records Act, Presidential records remain closed to the public for five years after an administration has left office.
Our April 4 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sought:
 
1.) Any and all requests for information, analyses, summaries, assessments, transcripts, or similar records submitted to any Intelligence Community member agency or any official, employee, or representative thereof by former National Security Advisor Susan Rice regarding, concerning, or related to the following:
•   Any actual or suspected effort by the Russian government or any individual acting on behalf of the Russian government to influence or otherwise interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
•   The alleged hacking of computer systems utilized by the Democratic National Committee and/or the Clinton presidential campaign.
•   Any actual or suspected communication between any member of the Trump presidential campaign or transition team and any official or employee of the Russian government or any individual acting on behalf of the Russian government.
•   The identities of U.S. citizens associated with the Trump presidential campaign or transition team who were identified pursuant to intelligence collection activities.
2.) Any and all records or responses received by former National Security Advisor Susan Rice and/or any member, employee, staff member, or representative of the National Security Council in response to any request described in part 1 of this request.
 
3.) Any and all records of communication between any official, employee, or representative of the Department of any Intelligence Community member agency and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice and/or any member, employee, staff member, or representative of the National Security Council regarding, concerning, or related to any request described in Part 1 of this request.
 
The time frame for this request was January 1, 2016, to April 4, 2017.
 
While acknowledging in its FOIA request that “we are cognizant of the finding by the Court of Appeals … that [the NSC] “does not exercise sufficiently independent authority to be an ‘agency’ for purposes of the Freedom of Information Act,” we argued:
The records sought in this request pertain to actions by the former National Security Advisor that demonstrate a much higher degree of independent authority than was contemplated by the court; specifically, the issuance of directives to the Intelligence Community related to the handling of classified national security information…
 
The recent revelations of the role of Susan Rice in the unmasking the names of U.S. citizens identified in the course of intelligence collection activities and the potential that her actions contributed to the unauthorized disclosure of classified national security information are matters of great public interest.
We have filed six FOIA lawsuits related to the surveillance, unmasking, and illegal leaking targeting President Trump and his associates (see here, here, here, here, here and here).
 
Prosecutors, Congress, and the public will want to know when the National Security Council shipped off the records about potential intelligence abuses by Susan Rice and others in the Obama White House to the memory hole of the Obama Presidential Library. We are considering our legal options, but we hope that the Special Counsel and Congress also consider their options and get these records.
 
As noted, the records could be squirreled away from the public for at least five years, but there are ways they can be obtained almost immediately under law.  The exceptions to Obama Library records restricted access are as follows:
“subject to any rights, defenses, or privileges which the United States or any agency or person may invoke, Presidential records shall be made available--

(A) pursuant to subpoena or other judicial process issued by a court of competent jurisdiction for the purposes of any civil or criminal investigation or proceeding;
(B) to an incumbent President if such records contain information that is needed for the conduct of current business of the incumbent President’s office and that is not otherwise available; and
(C) to either House of Congress, or, to the extent of matter within its jurisdiction, to any committee or subcommittee thereof if such records contain information that is needed for the conduct of its business and that is not otherwise available;
You can see that both President Trump and Congress can quickly get ahold of these records.  As JW considers it legal options, they should both move quickly to preserve, protect, and disclose the Obama spying scandal documents to JW and the American people.
   
Judicial Watch Sues for Obama Family Travel and Secret Service Costs
Our presidents are catered to 24/7, and nobody would deny them safety and tools to do the job. However, all too often they seem to be tempted to slip into occasional ostentation, to conflate their personal and political agendas with the duties of their office? You know it happens, and we do, too.
 
That’s why filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit (FOIA) against the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security seeking Air Force and Secret Service expense records for Obama family travel dating back to 2014. We filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security (No. 117-cv-01007)).

We also want Secret Service expenditure records for the kickoff to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign between April 1 and May 6, 2015. Additionally, we seek travel records regarding President-elect Donald Trump between November 9 and December 12, 2016, for residing in Trump Tower and then going on a “Thank You Tour” of six states.

We went to court after the Air Force and Secret Service failed to respond to multiple FOIA requests filed between October and December 2016.

Our requests to the Air Force are seeking records concerning mission taskings, transportation costs, and passenger manifests for:
•   Obama’s trip to Los Angeles in October 2016, which included two fundraisers and an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live”
•   Michelle Obama’s October 2016 appearance at a Clinton campaign rally in North Carolina
•   Obama’s November 2016 appearance at a Clinton campaign rally in Orlando, FL.
Our requests to the Secret Service are seeking all records of costs for providing security and other services for all VIPs for the following:
•   Obama Palm Springs vacation in February 2014.
•   Michelle Obama and her daughters on their yearly Aspen vacation in February 2014. The Secret Service expenditures totaled $121,876.21 for a similar vacation in 2015, which includes airfare.
•   Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from April 1, 2015 – May 6, 2015.
•   Michelle Obama’s trip to Morocco, Spain and Liberia in June and July 2016 to “promote education.”
•   Obama’s vacation to Martha’s Vineyard in August 2016.
•   Michelle Obama’s October 2016 Clinton campaign stop in North Carolina.
•   Obama’s October 2016 trip to Los Angeles.
•   Obama’s November 2016 trip to Orlando.
•   Security expenses for then President-Elect Donald Trump and Trump Tower in New York, New York from November 9, 2106 – December 5, 2016.
•   President-elect Trump’s “Thank You Tour” from November 9, 2016 – December 12, 2016.
•   Security expenses for Obama’s residence in Chicago, Illinois, between January 20, 2009 – December 7, 2016.
As you know, we monitored Obama family travel costs throughout his presidency. On May 17, we announced our latest figures showing Obama family travel cost taxpayers at least $99,714,527.82 during his two terms.

We are also demanding transparency from the Trump administration, tracking and suing for records of the travel expenses incurred by President Trump, the First Lady and other VIPs.

The government could not care less about giving taxpayers basic information about what it costs to provide travel and protection to our political leadership and candidates. Judicial Watch shouldn’t have to file federal lawsuits to get basic information about how much taxpayers spend on the presidency, but if that what it takes….
 
President Trump:  Please End the Obstruction on Benghazi Cover-up Documents
 
We have a new secretary at the State Department, but we apparently don’t have a new attitude in the agency about releasing information that might make even a former Obama official look bad.
 
You can find the background in the fine work of our JW staff attorneys who just asked a federal court to order the department to end its “slow dragging strategy” in producing documents regarding the handling of requests about the false talking points used by then-Ambassador Susan Rice to talk about the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.  (We’re in court as part of a FOIA lawsuit we filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Judicial Watch vs. Department of State (No. 1:17-cv-00205)).
 
You will recall that in the wake of the attacks in which four Americans were killed, Rice was dispatched to five Sunday news programs to falsely claim that the Benghazi attack was the result of a “spontaneous” protest against an “anti-Islamic” Internet video. Separate JW litigation into the Benghazi talking-points scandal led to the discovery of the Hillary Clinton email issue and to the creation of the House Select Committee on Benghazi.  Now we want to know how the Clinton email scandal was covered up the Obama State Department.
 
On May 26, the State Department informed us that the department’s “searches have uncovered in excess of 3,100 potentially responsive documents.”  On June 1, the State Department disclosed that the documents consist of approximately 51,329 potentially responsive pages.
 
The State Department initially proposed a production schedule that we argued would “carry out the rolling production of responsive documents by more than 30 months (to December 2019).” The State Department then amended the proposal to extend its production to October 2018.
 
But we aren’t happy with this delay so my attorney colleagues asked the court to order the State Department to produce all “non-exempt responsive records” in three monthly productions, with a final production on or before September 30, 2017.
 
Back on March 15 the State Department was ordered to produce documents. Judicial Watch argues in its new filing that:
The State Department’s two productions included a total of 22 documents released in full.  During the course of approximately 10 weeks, [the State Department] processed and reviewed only 108 documents in response to [Judicial Watch’s] FOIA request (as 86 documents were withheld in full) – an average of 10 documents per week or 4 documents per business day.
The Trump administration needs to put its foot down and stop the Deep State from protecting Hillary Clinton and the Obama gang. It is disheartening to see the Trump administration stall the release of documents about the Benghazi cover-up. President Trump needs to take direct action to ensure the truth truly and fully comes out about the Benghazi scandal.
 
We sued after the State Department failed to respond to a December 2, 2016, FOIA request seeking:
•   All records related to the processing of the FOIA request served on the State Department by Judicial Watch, Inc. on May 13, 2014. All tasking, tracking, and reporting records for searches conducted in response to the request should be considered responsive. Forms DS-1748 and any “search slips,” “search tasker,” and “search details,” also should be considered responsive.
•   All internal State Department communications that relate to the processing of or search for records responsive to the FOIA request, including any guidance about how and where to conduct the searches, whether and how to search the emails of then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and any issues, problems, or questions regarding the searches and/or search results.
•   All records that relate to the State Department’s discovery, prior to February 2, 2015, that additional searches for records responsive to the FOIA request were necessary. In this regard, the State Department represented in a February 2, 2015 status report filed in litigation regarding the FOIA request that: 
o   In the course of preparing additional information to provide to [Judicial Watch] for purposes of settlement discussions, [the State Department] has discovered that additional searches for documents potentially responsive to the FOIA [request] must be conducted.
•   All records that identify the location(s) or source(s) of potentially responsive records that necessitated the “additional searches …”
Previously, we filed a June 21, 2013, FOIA lawsuit about the Benghazi talking points that produced a declassified email showing then-White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes and other Obama administration public relations officials attempting to orchestrate a campaign to “reinforce” President Obama and to portray the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack as being “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy” (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-00951)).
Title: Keep this in mind if you are getting ready to send your son to higher ed
Post by: G M on June 29, 2017, 12:42:27 PM
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/06/29/campus-police-adopt-guilty-until-proven-innocent-approach-to-rape-accusations/

Campus Police Adopt 'Guilty Until Proven Innocent' Approach To Rape Accusations
BY TOM KNIGHTON JUNE 29, 2017

Imagine that you're a young man in college, eager to get the education you've been told your whole life was necessary for any degree of success. Then, there's a knock on your dorm room door. It turns out that a girl you know has accused you of raping her. You know you didn't do anything wrong, but the campus police don't seem to be particularly interested in your protestations of innocence. It's clear from the start that the police don't seem interested in right or wrong, only in making sure you get punished.

Sounds terrifying, right? It's also far too likely to happen now that several campuses are adopting something called a "victim-centric" approach to investigating rape accusations.

The College Fix notes:

It actively harms accusers to ask them basic factual questions about their accusations, according to Strand, former chief of behavioral sciences at the Army’s military police school:
The questions he teaches cops to ask are open-ended and center on the victim’s experience -- their thoughts before and during a crime, tactile memories such as smells, sounds and feelings, and details of the experience that they can’t forget.
UMinn police chief Matthew Clark says it’s important for officers to “learn how to adapt to victims’ experiences” before they have any clue whether an accuser is a victim, as adjudicated by a non-police body:

“When you start talking about your experience based on your senses, you actually start telling the tale of what happened,” Clark said. “But you can’t dictate it; you’ve got to let those victims go with it the way they experienced it.”
It’s not clear whether UMinn police are going as far as University of Texas police, which started explicitly refusing to collect evidence that may exonerate an accused student a year ago.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education warned that UT police were being politicized when they were told to avoid asking certain questions of accusers.

Those who have been raped experience significant trauma, and an officer with a disbelieving tone may not help the accuser feel that justice is being served.

But that doesn't mean that police officers can neglect our nation's laws when investigating. Their job is to gather evidence. All evidence. The only acceptable outcome is based on the entirety of the evidence.


When people ask why fewer men are going to college -- a question that brings up over 43 million hits on Google -- they should consider that colleges are now hostile environments for men. In addition to the constant indoctrination that Y chromosomes are the reason the whole world sucks, the mere accusation of sexual misconduct can ruin a man's life.

Now campuses are creating an environment where those expected to take an impartial gathering of the facts are explicitly told to not be impartial. It's enough to make many parents and sons reconsider college as an option.

Meanwhile, this abomination of justice is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1879&context=mulr


Title: Fundamental transformation of the legal system
Post by: G M on July 20, 2017, 09:01:27 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/370753.php

Plan accordingly.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 21, 2017, 06:43:32 PM
Indeed--where the rubber meets the road.  :x
Title: Rand Paul and Harris
Post by: ccp on July 22, 2017, 08:00:32 AM
This is bipartisanship  ->    :-P  (We rarely, and lately never  see bipartisanship when it is for conservative  causes . )

http://www.breitbart.com/california/2017/07/22/rand-paul-teams-up-with-kamala-harris-over-bail-reform/


FWIW Wikipedia on bail in the US
Wikipedia stuff is usually written I suspect  by libs especially on subjects that deal with progressive issues :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bail_in_the_United_States
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 22, 2017, 08:38:30 AM

This is a matter on which people can disagree moving through the democratic process.  As such, it is not the thread for it.
Title: Inspector General: IRS records missing
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 27, 2017, 11:38:50 AM
IRS Records Missing
The Obama IRS scandal continues.
 
You won’t read about in the liberal media but on July 13 the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration issued a devastating report finding that the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) records management practice resulted in lost records and incomplete IRS responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and congressional inquiries.  Here is the key finding:

IRS policies do not comply with certain Federal requirements that agencies must ensure that all records are retrievable and usable for as long as needed. For example, IRS e-mail retention policies are not adequate because e-mails are not automatically archived for all IRS employees. Instead, the IRS’s current policy instructs employees to take manual actions to archive e-mails by saving them permanently on computer hard drives or network shared drives. This policy has resulted in lost records when computer hard drives are destroyed or damaged. In addition, a recently instituted executive e-mail retention policy, which should have resulted in the archiving of e-mails from specific executives, was not implemented effectively because some executives did not turn on the automatic archiving feature.

For certain cases that TIGTA reviewed, IRS policies were not implemented consistently to ensure that all relevant documents were searched and produced when responding to external requests for records. TIGTA’s review of 30 completed Freedom of Information Act requests found that in more than half of the responses, the IRS did not follow its own policies that require it to document what records were searched. TIGTA also found that IRS policies for preserving records from separated employees were not adequate.

In short, records of IRS employees including top officials may have gone missing.  And the IRS never told anyone about it.
 
We’ve been on top of this issue for years. In fact, just this past April we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the IRS to obtain records relating to the agency’s “preservation and/or retention” of the email records of officials who have left the agency since January 2010 (Judicial Watch v. Internal Revenue Service (No.1:17-cv-00596)).
 
We filed the suit as part of our continuing efforts to gain information about the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups and citizens during the Obama administration.
 
Our litigation forced the IRS first to say that emails belonging to Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit, were supposedly missing and later declare to the court that the emails were on IRS back-up systems. Lerner was one of the top officials responsible for the IRS’ targeting of President Obama’s political opponents. We exposed various IRS’ record keeping problems:

•   In June 2014, the IRS claimed to have “lost” responsive emails belonging to Lerner and other IRS officials.

•   In July 2014 Judge Emmett Sullivan ordered the IRS to submit to the court a written declaration under oath about what happened to Lerner’s “lost” emails. The sworn declarations proved to be less than forthcoming.

•   In August 2014, Department of Justice attorneys for the IRS finally admitted to Judicial Watch that Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The IRS’ attorneys also disclosed that Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) was looking at several of these backup tapes.

•   In November 2014, the IRS told the court it had failed to search any of the IRS standard computer systems for the “missing” emails of Lerner and other IRS officials.

•   On February 26, 2015, TIGTA officials testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it had received 744 backup tapes containing emails sent and received by Lerner. This testimony showed that the IRS had falsely represented to both Congress, Judge Sullivan, and Judicial Watch that Lerner’s emails were irretrievably lost. The testimony also revealed that IRS officials responsible for responding to the document requests never asked for the backup tapes and that 424 backup tapes containing Lerner’s emails had been destroyed during the pendency of Judicial Watch’s lawsuit and Congressional investigations.

•   In June 2015, Judicial Watch forced the IRS to admit in a court filing that it was in possession of 6,400 “newly discovered” Lerner emails. Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the IRS to provide answers on the status of the Lerner emails the IRS had previously declared lost. Judicial Watch raised questions about the IRS’ handling of the missing emails issue in a court filing, demanding answers about Lerner’s emails that had been recovered from the backup tapes.

•   In July 2015, U.S District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan threatened to hold John Koskinen, the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and Justice Department attorneys in contempt of court after the IRS failed to produce status reports and recovered Lerner emails, as he had ordered on July 1, 2015.
Obama IRS Commissioner Koskinen was nearly impeached in September 2016 for misleading Congress on Lerner’s emails.

So this new report is shocking but not surprising.  We have long battled the IRS in court over its obstruction in responding to FOIA requests about Obama era IRS abuses. It is a scandal that the Obama IRS did not tell Judicial Watch, the courts, or Congress about the loss of government records. Our attorneys will review this report to assess whether we should seek relief and accountability from the courts.  In the meantime, President Trump should finally fire IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and direct the Justice Department to reopen its criminal inquiry into the Obama IRS abuses and cover-ups.
Title: The war on cops continues
Post by: G M on August 22, 2017, 09:52:52 AM
https://spectator.org/the-ferguson-effect-even-in-the-bronx/

The Ferguson Effect — Even in the Bronx
ALFRED S. REGNERY
August 22, 2017, 12:15 am

Under Bill de Blasio and Darcel Clark, a natural fit.
Imagine the scenario: a woman is making a threatening and very loud disturbance in a Bronx apartment building. The police are called. They find a 66-year-old “EDP” — an emotionally disturbed person — a black woman threatening neighbors and gripping a pair of scissors.

Led by a highly experienced sergeant who happens to be white, the police talk her into dropping the scissors and stepping out of her bedroom so emergency medical services can safely engage with her. The police don’t pull their guns, pepper spray her or use their Tasers. They just talk. But when the sergeant tries to grab her, she runs to her bed, picks up a baseball bat and winds up for a swing at the sergeant’s head.

Faced with the deadly weapon at close range, the sergeant pulls his pistol and fires twice in defense.

Inevitably, that brought out charges from the reflexively anti-cop left. Bill de Blasio, Black Lives Matter, and Al Sharpton weighed in. But they didn’t have much to go on. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman looked at the evidence and concluded that the sergeant adhered to NYPD guidelines, that his action fell well within the bounds of case law established by the U.S. Supreme Court, and declined to get involved.


 
Enter Darcel Clark, the troubled Bronx District Attorney, a 55-year-old long-time Bronx pol, a former judge who recently assumed the prosecutor’s job — with the loud support of Mayor Bill de Blasio — and who is already running for her 2018 re-election. Despite the fact that it would be virtually impossible to get a guilty jury verdict, if there were one, upheld on appeal, the prosecutor empanelled a grand jury, which indicted the sergeant for second degree murder — the first time a NYPD officer has been charged with murder since 1999. You have to think that politics, not justice, was what that was all about.

As for the sergeant — Hugh Barry — in his ninth year on the fabled New York Police Department, an honorable man without a blemish on his record and the recipient of five Excellent Police Duty medals, things are not so good. On administrative leave, his life is now in turmoil. If convicted, he could go to prison for the rest of his life. In any event, his case could be in the courts for years and he will likely be in dire financial straits by the time it’s over. His family life, as in so many of these cases, will be a far cry from where it was a year ago — before he responded to the call of duty. His emotional health will be taxed to the limit and under the best of circumstances his career — a career he loves — will never be the same.

And District Attorney Darcel Clark’s record? Not so hot. Her 2015 election was allegedly orchestrated by Democrats in order to avoid a primary after her predecessor resigned to become a judge. Her short term as District Attorney is rife with accusations — and lawsuits — of misconduct, cronyism, and complete politicization of her office.

But the larger, and longer-term tragedy is for the poor residents of the Bronx who rely on the police to maintain some semblance of peace and order in their lives. As the NYPD goes about its business in the Bronx, as they answer calls every hour of the day and night, there is little doubt that the “Ferguson effect” will play a role in how quickly they respond and what risks they are willing to take. A Pew Research Center national survey released in January concludes that more than half of all police officers say that recent high-profile fatal encounters between black citizens and police officers have made their jobs riskier, aggravated tensions between police and blacks, and left many officers reluctant to fully carry out their duties. Why, an officer would certainly ask, should I risk my career, my livelihood, my very freedom when, if I look the other way, or take a little longer to get to the crime scene, or make a traffic stop instead, the situation will work itself out one way or another?
Title: Conservatism Is Not A Suicide Pact
Post by: G M on August 28, 2017, 07:46:46 AM
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2017/08/28/conservatism-is-not-a-suicide-pact-n2373543

Conservatism Is Not A Suicide Pact
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Aug 28, 2017 12:01 AM

The whiny wailing and rending of garments (mostly bow ties) by the True Cons over President Trump pardoning Sheriff Joe Arpaio brings to mind another president’s choice when a loyal supporter was the victim of a liberal witch hunt. President Bush was an honorable man, but the way he allowed Scooter Libby and the Libby family to be ruined and impoverished over what everyone knew was a skeevy liberal political vendetta before issuing a partial commutation is to W’s lasting shame. His excuse: the Rule of Law or something.

But, as anyone willing to see knows, today the Rule of Law is a unicorn and it has been for a long time. I like the Rule of Law, and I’ve been warning for years about what happens when it goes away. Yet we are where we are, whether we like it or not. We’re in a land where the law is only intermittently and selectively applicable. Allowing allies to suffer in an effort to pretend that all is well is not going to bring the Rule of Law back. Nostalgia for the Rule of Law no excuse for tolerating an injustice to an ally. Hell, undoing injustices is what the pardon power is for.

What will bring the Rule of Law back? How do we get to the Conserva-Eden we are expected to act like we already reside it? Perhaps another statement of principle? Maybe another post on some unread conservajournal? I know – how about more complaining about how frustrated conservatives are uncouth and should just sit there and take whatever fascist garbage the left dishes out?


I always thought it was conservative to punish wrongdoers. The other side abandoned the Rule of Law, so I would think that they might – maybe – learn a lesson by experiencing the consequences of their bad choice. But apparently punishing wrongdoers is now off the table because some other principle, of which I was unaware during nearly four decades inside conservatism, requires we never ever retaliate.

You know, I’m not sure that’s a thing. And I have to say – it’s tiresome getting Rule of Law lectures from people who are perfectly happy to have the president ignore immigration laws that they don’t dig.

So, my finger-wagging True Con friends, what’s your plan? How do we go from liberals abandoning the Rule of Law, and such ancillary and associated components of a society based on liberty like free speech and free enterprise, to a liberty-based society operating under the Rule of Law? “Elect more True Cons!” isn’t a plan; it’s an aspiration, and not much of one. I don’t need another cliché, or another citation to general principles, or some variant of my new favorite, all-purpose get-out-of-having-an-actual-plan-free card, the old “We’re better than this” line.


My plan is to cause the left so much pain by applying their new rules to them that they give up trying to grind their Birkenstocks into our faces forever. Yes, as a practical matter that means allying with President Trump, guy I formerly criticized in detail and without restraint, and who was my 16th of 17 choices in the primary (Jeb! was last because he’s an insufferable wuss and I won’t suffer him).

See, I reject the notion we are ever somehow morally obligated by conservative principles to lose to liberals. If I have to swallow something awful, I’ll take half a loaf any day over an entire loaf of liberal dung like Felonia von Pantsuit. I think the new rules are terrible, and they are antithetical to everything I’ve worked for since before many of my Fredocon critics were a tinge of regret growing in their mommies’ bellies the morning after. But I refuse to sit back and allow libs to be victorious because I won’t dirty my hands fighting fire with fire. If that makes me not conservative enough for some, I can live with that. I can’t live with leftist tyranny.


So, now you True Cons know my plan. It might work, it might not. But it’s a plan. Now, what’s your plan to achieve that conservative utopia you keep talking about? Let me lay out the situation straightforward from here in three steps:

Liberals are attacking the foundations of a society based on the liberties enshrined in the Constitution.
?
A society based on the liberties enshrined in the Constitution.
So, what’s Step Two?

Come on, lay it out. In detail. Feel free to tweet it to me! But I want a plan. No clichés, no citations to Burke, no airy statements of general principle. A plan. Lay it on me. Step Two - what’s your plan?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.


Hmmmm. See, I don’t think you True Cons really have a plan.

Abstract principles are not a plan. A couple weeks ago I wrote about how, now that the tech companies that dominate the flow of information and discourse in our society have decided to insert their politics into their businesses, we should use our political power to ruthlessly regulate them back into neutrality if they persist. It’s an awful idea, in principle, and I’d like to avoid it. But I’d also like to avoid conservatives being utterly banished from the internet.

What was the True Con response? “Free enterprise, blah blah blah.” Yeah, okay, got it. I sure appreciate the 411 on this newfangled “free enterprise” thing. (I should totally learn about it – thanks, 22-year old marketing major with a subscription to The Weekly Standard!) Lots of cant, but no concrete, coherent solutions. My favorite was the guy who suggested the solution was to start my own Google in my garage, except my garage is full of junk. Oh, and by the time we collected a few billion in capital and built an entire new tech mega-corp that somehow escaped being smothered by Google as we grew, every search on Google would return a link to something approved by Hillary Clinton.

I think you want to rely on the power of conservative ideas and sort of hope they spontaneously erupt into a conservative paradise via a right wing Big Bang without you actually having to fight for them. After all, fighting is messy and unseemly, and you also have to ally yourselves with … those kind of people, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. It’s so embarrassing having to explain them to your liberal peers. Many of these misbegotten normals are baffled by fancy sandwiches and stuff.

Before you give me more grief for allying with the Republican in the White House – you know, that guy your party elected – I’m going to need your plan. See, we need real solutions, and my solution is fighting back hard and ruthlessly. I say make our enemies feel the pain they would inflict upon us because it might change their behavior – again, there was a time when conservatives believed in punishing wrongdoers. I also support fighting back because it denies them victory and dominance over us – do you have any illusions that Hillary Clinton and her pet Supreme Court would not be imposing/upholding “hate speech” bans that would silence anyone to the right of Angela Davis if we had not blocked her with Donald Trump? And I also support fighting back because you cannot simply sit back and allow yourself to be repeatedly beaten and humiliated without utterly destroying your side’s morale. Denying the enemy the head of Sheriff Joe had tangible value beyond its substantive justice (Jury? We don’t need no stinking juries to put an American citizen in prison!).

I’m looking for a plan, not another lecture, not another mournful dirge to my lack of True Conservativishness, not another spittle-flecked outburst from some nepotism-pumped hack whose influence has recently waned after years of ineffective “conservative leadership.” We have Trump, and at least he’s not Hillary. At least we aren’t actively losing, and we’re even winning occasionally. If you have a better idea, then stop sitting on the sidelines complaining and share your plan. The rest of us, the ones out on the field with dirt under our fingernails, are awaiting your insights.
Title: I did not enjoy reading this:
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2017, 03:34:41 AM
WSJ:
The Arpaio Pardon
Liberal hypocrisy doesn’t justify conservative disdain for the rule of law.
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 27, 2017 6:31 p.m. ET


Candidate Donald Trump promised to abide by the rule of law that took a beating under the Obama Administration, and that theme may have helped him win the election. President Trump’s pardon late Friday of deposed Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio undermines that promise and further politicizes the law.

The 85-year-old Mr. Arpaio became a hero of many conservatives with his brazen style and tactics targeting illegal immigrants. His aggressive enforcement drew a lawsuit and court injunction, culminating in a contempt conviction last month. While Mr. Trump praised Mr. Arpaio’s long career of public service, that hardly justifies the sheriff’s defiance of the law he swore to uphold.

In 2008 the American Civil Liberties Union sued the sheriff’s office for racially profiling Latinos during traffic and saturation patrols. After several years of litigation, federal Judge Murray Snow ordered the sheriff’s office to stop detaining individuals who had not committed a state crime merely based on the suspicion that they are in the country illegally.

Two years later the judge found officers had violated his preliminary injunction and ordered anti-bias training, a court-appointed monitor and patrol cameras, among other remedies. In 2016 Mr. Arpaio was held in civil contempt for flouting the judge’s orders. He was also reprimanded for withholding video evidence.

Then last August Judge Snow referred Mr. Arpaio to the Justice Department for criminal contempt proceedings. In his defense, Mr. Arpaio argued that the court orders were unclear to him or officers. Because his violations were supposedly unintentional, he said criminal charges were unwarranted.

It’s true there was some confusion as to what officers were allowed to do under state and federal law. A 2010 state law required officers to check the immigration status of individuals during a “lawful stop, detention or arrest” when there’s probable cause they’re in the country illegally. Federal judge Susan Bolton blocked the state law in 2010, but the Supreme Court in 2012 upheld a central provision obligating officers to check individuals’ immigration status.

In any case, the legal uncertainty doesn’t gainsay Judge Snow’s charge that Mr. Arpaio lied to him and judicially appointed monitors. Hence the criminal contempt citation, which Judge Snow said was needed “to vindicate the Court’s authority by punishing the intentional disregard for that authority.” Criminal contempt is the only way to hold government officials personally responsible for violating court orders.

Mr. Arpaio may be right that the Obama Justice Department relished his prosecution, and some evidence presented at the trial was irrelevant to the case. But Judge Bolton considered the merits and, based on the evidence, determined that Mr. Arpaio had demonstrated a “flagrant disregard” for the law.

Mr. Trump’s power to pardon is undeniable, but pardoning Mr. Arpaio sends a message that law enforcers can ignore court orders and get away with it. All you need is a political ally in the White House or Governor’s mansion. Down that road lies anarchy. Attorney General Jeff Sessions understands this, which is why he reportedly urged the President to let the judicial process play out. Mr. Trump short-circuited the courts by pardoning Mr. Arpaio before he was sentenced or granted an appeal.

Some of our friends on the right say Mr. Trump’s liberal critics had no problem dismissing Congress’s contempt citations against former Attorney General Eric Holder and IRS official Lois Lerner as political. The left also supported the commutation of Bradley Manning, who leaked military intelligence.

All true and deplorable, but since when does liberal hypocrisy justify conservative disdain for the law? Mr. Trump should be setting a better standard than imitating Barack Obama, but polarized politics is leading America to a bad place where policy agreement or political support makes right. You pardon your lawbreakers and we’ll pardon ours.

Mr. Trump may hope the pardon will energize supporters, but it is also dividing the GOP. Even before the contempt citation, Sheriff Arpaio’s aggressive tactics were becoming unpopular, and in November he was defeated by 13 points. Mr. Trump’s disdain for federal judges also isn’t making friends in the federal judiciary that will have to rule on his decisions in the coming years. The Arpaio pardon is a depressing sign of our hyper-politicized times.

Appeared in the August 28, 2017, print edition.
Title: FBI blocks release of Hillary's emails "because there is not enough interest"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2017, 04:00:40 AM
second post

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/29/fbi-lack-public-interest-emails-justifies-withhold/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTTJNMU56VTJaRGN6WXpkaiIsInQiOiJNRFFFdnJ2T3NVamtTMHlZZU9qNWwrSlZNczh2S0NhNjNQR0F3N1hPbmplVkxwRDFzU29XVG9mUDQzcmUwVnR6dVozSFBZd0M5RkR0bGFlWnAzMWJ6M1hYU1h1VFd1TGRYVFhoXC9oQ1ZEUytjc2htODBQTGV2YURcL05iaHFEY0h5In0%3D
Title: Obama DOJ holdover blocking Awan investigation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 27, 2017, 08:57:23 AM
http://truepundit.com/fbi-investigation-of-espionage-blackmail-charges-in-awan-case-blocked-by-obama-doj-appointee-who-worked-for-holder-lynch/
Title: Re: Obama DOJ holdover blocking Awan investigation
Post by: G M on September 27, 2017, 10:34:05 AM
http://truepundit.com/fbi-investigation-of-espionage-blackmail-charges-in-awan-case-blocked-by-obama-doj-appointee-who-worked-for-holder-lynch/

You'd almost think they were hiding something.
Title: Guard Wounded in Jihadi Attack at Cartoon Contest Sues FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2017, 09:27:59 AM
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/10/security-guard-wounded-in-jihad-attack-at-muhammad-cartoon-event-sues-fbi-charges-coverup
Title: IRS targeted border security groups
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2017, 11:48:19 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/5/irs-targeted-pro-border-security-groups-audit/
Title: FBI "finds" 30 pages of tarmac documents after JW lawsuit
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 14, 2017, 05:39:34 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvlGh_lDCyg&utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weekend+playback&utm_term=members&utm_content=20171014123810
Title: MD State Bar under Hillary's control?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2017, 09:20:39 AM
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/16/maryland-defend-hillary-clinton-lawyers-cheryl-mil/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWm1JMlkyUTBaRGxrTjJNNCIsInQiOiJyS0ZxUjNLUkVnOFIxNjJKQkFMWDZrTmpOaFFJalN6ZXdLUnZVTndBcEw1TEllSG41XC9Pbmt2UmlyZlVMYkwwTkZGY1VpUk5MSzBsVVd0QVBzMlhcL3c5Q0JyZVFSazg2ZjdXSlwvSWxiWFRKdFpHMHhXZHpCK1RyYXlkTktHUmJcL0IifQ%3D%3D
Title: Obama DOJ knew of Russian bribery for US uranium
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2017, 05:15:00 PM
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/10/bombshell-revelations-about-russia-and-obamas-department-of-justice.php
Title: In case you weren't sure if the rule of law is dead...
Post by: G M on November 30, 2017, 04:12:16 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/372751.php

Of Course: Judge Decides She's Commander in Chief and Orders Military to Continue Recruiting Transgenders, Because We're Now In a Lawless War of All Against All

It seems that judges should have some regard for the constitutional scheme of separation of powers, but apparently Social Justice imperatives trump any notion of democracy and lawful order.

The military must begin accepting transgender recruits Jan. 1 despite a ban ordered by President Trump this year, according to a D.C. district court judge.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly had already granted a preliminary injunction in the Doe v. Trump lawsuit filed by a group of transgender troops. She clarified this week that her order also blocks Defense Secretary Jim Mattis from delaying the recruiting.

Mattis had planned to begin accepting transgender recruits on the first of the year before Trump tweeted in July that they would not be allowed to serve in the military in any capacity. The president later followed up with an order telling the Pentagon to abandon the plan, which got underway during the previous administration.

"Secretary Mattis is a defendant in this case, he is directly bound by the injunction and he cannot change the policy that existed before President Trump issued his order," the judge said.

In other words, Obama's executive orders as president are still in force because this judge likes Obama better and elections don't matter.

I honestly don't see how the United States remains a coherent unified nation
Title: SCOTUS 7-2 for Trump Travel Ban
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 04, 2017, 09:18:17 PM

By The Editorial Board
Dec. 4, 2017 7:04 p.m. ET
32 COMMENTS

The Supreme Court almost never intervenes in a case that appellate courts are still considering, but on Monday it did precisely that to allow President Trump’s third travel ban to take effect. The 7-2 order (with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting) granted the Administration’s request to block the stay of the ban that had been issued by judges in Hawaii and Maryland. The Fourth and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal had refused to block the stay, and the Supremes intervened to grant it after the Administration appealed.

This is an important moment for the rule of law. The Supreme Court had already intervened once to rebuke the lower courts over Mr. Trump’s initial travel ban, but judges ignored the warning and kept overturning modified versions with injunctions that blocked their implementation even before considering the merits. Yet the executive has considerable latitude on immigration and national security, as the Justices seem to recognize.

We don’t think the travel ban is wise or necessary policy, but opposition to a policy is not justification for judges to ignore the law.
Title: Wisconsin's Secret Police
Post by: G M on December 12, 2017, 11:14:01 AM
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/12/11/governmental-accountability-board-more-like-wisconsins-secret-police-glenn-reynolds-column/938988001/

Governmental accountability board? More like Wisconsin's Secret Police
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Opinion columnist Published 3:40 p.m. ET Dec. 11, 2017 | Updated 4:46 p.m. ET Dec. 11, 2017

We talk about the recent revelation that the John Doe investigation into Gov. Scott Walker gathered millions of pages of records from Republicans

It was a partisan witch hunt masquerading as an inquiry into campaign irregularities. And it might presage the outcome of the Mueller investigation.


The “Cheesehead Stasi.” That’s what Twitter humorist IowaHawk called a long-running and politicized investigation organized by Democratic politicians in Wisconsin, targeting supporters of Republican Gov. Scott Walker. The mechanism for this investigation was an allegedly nonpolitical, but in fact entirely partisan, “Government Accountability Board.”

In the course of its secretive “John Doe” investigation, the GAB hoovered up millions of personal emails from Republican donors and supporters, and even raided people’s homes, while forbidding them to talk about it:

“I was told to shut up and sit down. The officers rummaged through drawers, cabinets and closets. Their aggressive assault on my home seemed more appropriate for a dangerous criminal, not a longtime public servant with no criminal history,” Archer wrote in a June 30, 2015, Wall Street Journal op-ed. The column was published a day before she filed her civil rights lawsuit.

When the agents finally left her home, Archer said she took inventory of the damage. She found drawers and closets ransacked, her “deceased mother’s belongings were strewn across the floor.” Like so many other targets of the secret John Doe investigation, Archer was forced to watch her neighbors watch her — the star of a very public search-and-seizure operation. . . .

And like her fellow targets, she was told she could say nothing publicly about being a target of Chisholm’s probe. Doing so could have landed her in jail and hit with hefty fines. The secret investigations come with strict gag orders."


Now an investigation by Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel on behalf of the overseeing court has spelled out a long list of misdeeds by the investigators, and has called for punishments including contempt-of-court holdings and possible disbarment. And the stuff that it has uncovered is pretty awful.

In short, it was a partisan witch hunt masquerading as an inquiry into campaign irregularities. And confidential information gathered during that investigation was deliberately leaked in an effort (unsuccessful) to influence a pending United States Supreme Court decision.

The prosecutors felt justified in these actions because they had already made up their minds about their targets’ guilt. As the report says, “After reviewing the emails exchanged between the attorneys at GAB, it is apparent that GAB attorneys had prejudged the guilt of Governor Walker, Wisconsin Republicans, and related organizations that they were investigating and this dramatically influenced their ability to give competent legal advice. GAB attorneys did not act in a detached and professional manner. The most reasonable inference is that they were on a mission to bring down the Walker campaign and the Governor himself.”

The investigation continued despite its failure to find anything like the sort of violations it was ostensibly intended to investigate. It continued despite court orders to stop. And prosecutors retained evidence (including medical and other records about Republican officials and donors, kept in a file labeled “opposition research”) even after being ordered by the Wisconsin Supreme Court to turn all the information over. It was a lawless exercise of prosecutorial power, for political ends.



Wisconsin Democrats took Scott Walker’s victory very hard. They tried to recall him, and failed. And they tried to undermine his term in office through the abuse of legal institutions. Now some of them will face professional discipline, and judicial punishment, as a result. (Criminal charges would be appropriate, except that, as the Attorney General’s report notes, record-keeping was — conveniently — poor enough that it’s hard to be sure exactly who did what.)

Given the vast powers with which prosecutors are entrusted, it’s easy for an investigation to get out of hand, especially when the investigators are a partisan bunch lacking in political diversity, and start out with the certainty, shored up by political resentment, that their targets must be guilty of something. But these abuses can ultimately turn back on the abusers.

It’s too early to say, as one account does, that the Wisconsin debacle prefigured the ongoing Robert Mueller investigation into Trump’s campaign, though there are certainly similarities between the attitudes of “The Resistance” in Washington and the Wisconsin establishment’s response to Walker. Writing in The Washington Post last week, Ed Rogers wrote that, though he’d supported Mueller in the past, Mueller needed to get a handle on the overwhelming partisan slant of his prosecutors or he’d be discredited. 

It’s good advice. Mueller and his investigators should take care not to get wrapped up in partisan politics while conducting a criminal investigation. Because that seldom ends well.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @instapundit.
Title: Obama appointed IG sees Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2017, 08:11:35 PM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/29/obama-ig-guy-admits-strategic-coordination-state-c/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20171213005413
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on December 13, 2017, 06:15:31 AM
" https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/29/obama-ig-guy-admits-strategic-coordination-state-c/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20171213005413 "

IF not for Fox or talk radio we would never be informed of this though it is obviously true

The MSM selectively ignores as always when it is their champion .
Title: JW: State releases Clinton Server emails from Weiner's laptop; Lerner & IRS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 29, 2017, 08:19:40 PM

A Major Victory: State Releases Clinton Server Emails from Weiner's Laptop!

Today, the U.S. Department of State began releasing Huma Abedin's work-related documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that were found on her estranged husband Anthony Weiner's personal laptop.

This is a major victory. After years of hard work in federal court, Judicial Watch forced the State Department to finally allow Americans to see these public documents. We have been following this case closely because from our past experience we know that Abedin's emails include classified and other sensitive materials. 

The document are still being posted, but our team has seen enough to confirm that classified information from Hillary Clinton's email server has been found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman from New York who was married to Clinton aide Huma Abedin. The fact that classified information has been found from Clinton and Abedin on Weiner's laptop shows the urgent need for a criminal investigation by the Justice Department.

Back in October, in accordance with a court ordered production of documents, the State Department announced: "The State Department identified approximately 2,800 work-related documents among the documents provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation." The State Department told the court it expected to complete its review and production of the FBI records by December 31, 2017.

The production of these documents is the result of a May 5, 2015, lawsuit we filed against the State Department (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)). We sued after State failed to respond to a March 18, 2015, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking: "All emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013 using a non-‘state.gov' email address."

Abedin was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff. Weiner is a disgraced former congressman and New York mayoral candidate who pleaded guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor. Abedin kept a non-State.gov email account that she used repeatedly for government business on Hillary Clinton's notorious email server(s).

We previously released 20 productions of documents in this case that show examples of mishandling classified information and instances of pay to play between the Clinton State Department and the Clinton Foundation. Also, at least 627 emails were not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over, and further contradict a statement by Clinton that, "as far as she knew," all of her government emails had been turned over to department.

Perhaps Clinton and Abedin were expecting all of this to just go away with Clinton's election to the White House last year.  Let's hope the Justice Department finally gets it act together and proves that bet wrong.

=============================================
Judicial Watch Opposes Secrecy in Obama IRS Scandal

Judicial Watch continues the fight for accountability over the misdeeds tied to the Obama IRS scandal. We just asked a federal court to unseal the depositions of Lois Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the IRS, and Holly Paz, her top aide and former IRS director of Office of Rulings and Agreements. Both played key roles in the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups opposed to Obama policies in the run up to the 2012 presidential election.
We made the request in an amicus curiae brief filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, supporting NorCal Tea Party Patriots' class action lawsuit seeking the unsealing of the depositions (NorCal Tea Party Patriots, et al. v. The Internal Revenue Service, et al. (No. 1:13-cv-00341)).
A federal judge sealed the depositions after Lerner's and Paz's lawyers claimed the two were receiving threats. Our brief argues that the documents sought may shed light on government misconduct, and the shielding of internal government deliberations does not serve the public's interest.
We detailed how the Lerner and Paz depositions may significantly impact our ongoing lawsuits seeking information about misconduct by government officials in the IRS targeting scandal:
In addition to the revelation of IRS employees' conduct in the emails uncovered, the records obtained by Judicial Watch [in the course of its FOIA investigation] also sparked investigations into Lois Lerner's emails and IRS' failure to preserve thousands of emails that were potentially relevant to the various investigations about the IRS' treatment of conservative groups. While the federal government has now admitted that the targeting "was wrong" and "for such treatment, the IRS expresses its sincere apology" the IRS continues to this day to withhold from the public in Judicial Watch's main IRS case … email communications with Lois Lerner and/or Holly Paz …
Lerner was actively engaged in the attempted cover-up of IRS misconduct. In July 2016, we revealed that both Lerner and Paz, knew the agency was specifically targeting "Tea Party" and other conservative organizations two full years before disclosing it to Congress and the public. They also knew donor lists of tax-exempt organizations were being used to target those donors for audits.
After refusing to acknowledge the targeting, the IRS was forced by Judicial Watch to finally admit that the agency had used "inappropriate political labels" to screen the tax-exempt applications of conservative organizations. IRS agents were targeting organizations requesting tax-exempt status based on "guilt by association" and "party affiliation." We brought to light the fact that the IRS was going to require 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations to restrict their alleged political activities in exchange for "expedited consideration" of their tax-exempt applications.
In April 2015 we released court ordered IRS documents that included an email from Lerner asking that a program be set up to "put together some training points to help them [IRS staffers] understand the potential pitfalls" of revealing too much information to Congress. The documents also contain a Lerner email from 2013 in which she says she is willing to take the blame on some aspects of the scandal. She also indicates that she "understands why the IRS criteria" leading to the targeting of Tea Party and other opponents of the President Obama "might raise questions."
In July 2015 we revealed that the IRS scandal also included the Justice Department and FBI as well. According to documents we obtained under court order, in an October 2010 meeting Lerner, Justice Department officials and the FBI planned for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity. As part of that effort, the Obama IRS gave the FBI 21 computer disks, containing 1.25 million pages of confidential IRS returns from 113,000 non-profit, 501(c)(4) social welfare groups as part of its prosecution effort.
According to a letter from then-House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, "This revelation likely means that the IRS – including possibly Lois Lerner – violated federal tax law by transmitting this information to the Justice Department."
In response to our litigation, the IRS initially claimed that emails belonging to Lerner were missing. Later, IRS officials conceded that the "missing" emails were on IRS back-up systems. Throughout our litigation, we have repeatedly exposed a variety of IRS record keeping inconsistencies, erroneous claims, and failures to produce court-ordered records:
•   In June 2014, the IRS claimed to have "lost" responsive emails belonging to Lerner and other IRS officials.
•   In July 2014 Judge Emmett Sullivan ordered the IRS to submit to the court a written declaration under oath about what happened to Lerner's "lost" emails. The sworn declarations proved to be less than forthcoming.
•   In August 2014, Department of Justice attorneys for the IRS finally admitted that Lerner's emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe. The IRS' attorneys also disclosed that Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) was looking at several of these backup tapes.
•   In November 2014, the IRS told the court it had failed to search any of the IRS standard computer systems for the "missing" emails of Lerner and other IRS officials.
•   On February 26, 2015, TIGTA officials testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it had received 744 backup tapes containing emails sent and received by Lerner. This testimony showed that the IRS had misled Congress, Judge Sullivan, and Judicial Watch that Lerner's emails were irretrievably lost. The testimony also revealed that IRS officials responsible for responding to the document requests never asked for the backup tapes and that 424 backup tapes containing Lerner's emails had been destroyed during the pendency of our lawsuit and Congressional investigations.
•   In June 2015, Judicial Watch forced the IRS to admit in a court filing that it was in possession of 6,400 "newly discovered" Lerner emails. Judge Emmet Sullivan's ordered the IRS to provide answers on the status of the Lerner emails the IRS had previously declared lost. We raised questions about the IRS' handling of the missing emails issue in a court filing, demanding answers about Lerner's emails that had been recovered from the backup tapes.
•   In July 2015, U.S District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan threatened to hold John Koskinen, the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, and Justice Department attorneys in contempt of court after the IRS failed to produce status reports and recovered Lerner emails, as he had ordered on July 1, 2015.
 
In a republic, citizens have a right to know what their government is up to, especially when officials abuse the powers entrusted to them. This effort to seal Lois Lerner and Holly Paz depositions for all time is affront to the rule of law and government accountability.
For the full history on our IRS battles, click here.
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Mueller should go after Hillary IT techie
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 30, 2017, 06:56:35 AM
second post

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455020/hillary-clinton-server-emails-erased-technician-should-be-pressured?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202017-12-30&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on December 30, 2017, 08:31:15 AM
"   Andrew McCarthy: Mueller should go after Hillary IT techie "

we know he won't because this in not about foreign influence or the law but about getting Trump for impeachment if the Dems win the House and Senate.

Title: Brooklyn prosecutor disbarred
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 31, 2017, 12:15:09 AM
https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/sites/newyorklawjournal/2017/12/29/ex-brooklyn-prosecutor-convicted-of-illegal-surveillance-gets-disbarred/?slreturn=20171131031037
Title: WSJ: DOJ and FBI contempt for House Subpoenas
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 03, 2018, 06:34:35 AM


A Moment of Contempt
Justice and the FBI continue to flout House subpoenas.
By The Editorial Board
Jan. 2, 2018 7:33 p.m. ET
201 COMMENTS

The House Intelligence Committee has set a deadline of Wednesday for the Department of Justice and FBI to turn over documents related to the Christopher Steele dossier purporting to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. If they fail to comply, Speaker Paul Ryan will need to back up Congress’s institutional prerogatives and hold the individuals responsible to contempt proceedings and possible impeachment.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray have had the subpoenas since Aug. 24, but they have responded with excuses, delays and misdirection. The Justice Department has refused to provide Congress with the most basic documents demanded under the subpoenas. These include reports detailing the FBI’s interactions with sources such as Mr. Steele, who was hired by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which was funded by associates of the Hillary Clinton campaign.


Justice also refuses to make available crucial witnesses, including FBI agent Peter Strzok (a lead investigator in the Trump-Russia probe), former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr (whose wife worked for Fusion GPS) and FBI attorney James Baker (former FBI Director Jim Comey’s right-hand man). Justice is also still sitting on months of anti-Trump text messages between Mr. Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

This isn’t acceptable, and neither Justice nor the FBI has offered a valid reason for their resistance. Senior Intelligence Committee members and staff are cleared to read classified information, and Congress has the constitutional authority to oversee the executive branch whose offices it funds. The excuse that such requests interfere with a Justice Department Inspector General probe wouldn’t pass a middle-grade separation-of-powers exam.

A contempt brawl would not be fun, but Congress has already abandoned too much power to the executive. Mr. Ryan risks turning oversight into a power without enforcement ability. A Republican Congress holding Republican office-holders responsible for flouting subpoenas would send a useful signal across the government. And it might give President Trump or White House Counsel Don McGahn new incentive to intervene with Justice and order compliance.

Appeared in the January 3, 2018, print edition.
Title: Will ICE arrest Gov. Brown for harboring illegal aliens?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 04, 2018, 06:09:05 AM


http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/will-ice-arrest-guv-brown-for-violation-of-law-he-did-break-the-law/
Title: FBI & DOJ argue for dismissal of Garland TX jihad attack case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2018, 06:55:06 AM


FBI, DOJ argue for dismissal of suit about their foreknowledge of Garland, Texas jihad attack
JAN 15, 2018 7:52 AM BY ROBERT SPENCER36 COMMENTS

This case should not be dismissed. I was co-sponsor and co-organizer of this event and spoke at it, and was there when the jihadis began firing. And this case is bigger than Bruce Joiner, which is not to say that his case is not of cardinal importance. The FBI clearly knew the attack was coming (although it didn’t bother to inform us or our security team), as the FBI agent was right there, following behind the jihadis, whom he had encouraged to “tear up Texas.” But even though they knew the attack was coming, they didn’t have a team in place to stop the jihadis. They had one man there, and one man only. The jihadis were not stopped by FBI agents, but by our own security team. If the jihadis had gotten through our team, they would have killed Pamela Geller and me, and many others. (They would no doubt have loved to kill Geert Wilders, but he left before they arrived.)

The Daily Beast wrote in August 2016 about how this undercover FBI agent encouraged the jihadis. The Beast’s Katie Zavadski wrote: “Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent. ‘Tear up Texas,’ the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.”

What was the FBI’s game in telling them to “tear up Texas”? Why didn’t they have a phalanx of agents in place, ready to stop the attack? Or did they want the attack to succeed, so that Barack Obama’s vow that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” would be vividly illustrated, and intimidate any other Americans who might be contemplating defending the freedom of speech into silence?

We twice asked the FBI for an investigation into this matter. They ignored us. Of course. After all, it isn’t as if this happened to someone important, like Linda Sarsour.
Now that we are learning how corrupt and compromised the FBI really is, the last thing this case should be is dismissed. We need a full investigation of the FBI’s activities leading up to the Garland jihad attack.
 
“FBI, DOJ Argue for Dismissal of Suit About Garland, Texas Attack,” by Todd Shepherd, Washington Free Beacon, January 15, 2018:

The FBI and the Department of Justice are arguing for a liability case against them to be dismissed, while at the same time admitting to key details surrounding the bureau’s involvement in the 2015 terrorist attack on the “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas.

In that attack, the first in the United States for which ISIS claimed responsibility, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, drove to the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland in a car loaded with six guns and over a thousand rounds of ammunition.

The two men opened fire when they were stopped at a perimeter checkpoint. A security guard, Bruce Joiner, was shot in the leg and the two attackers were killed just yards away from where the shooting began.

Joiner filed suit last October, claiming the FBI was partially responsible for his injuries. His suit argues the bureau “solicited, encouraged, directed and aided members of ISIS in planning and carrying out the May 3 attack,” and is asking for just over $8 million damages.

Court filings from Thursday confirm that an undercover FBI agent was in a separate car directly behind the attackers when they opened fire, and that the agent, “was dressed in Middle Eastern attire and police almost killed him, but he saved his life by claiming to be an FBI agent.”

Lawyers with the Justice Department are asking the court to dismiss the case, arguing that the FBI is immune from liability under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

The origins of the attack stretch to Paris, France, in January of 2015 when radicalized Islamists killed 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for the magazine’s depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.  Fewer than two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attack, an Islamic group held a conference at the Culwell Center in Garland, called, “Stand With the Prophet in Honor and Respect.”

As a counter to the Islamic conference, self-described “free speech advocate” Pamela Gellar organized the “First Annual Muhamed (sic) Art Exhibit and Contest,” also to be held at the Culwell Center, slated for May of 2015.

Simpson and Soofi were part of a small cell of radical Islamists in the Phoenix area, which the FBI had been monitoring. An undercover agent, identified in Thursday’s filings only as “UCE-1,” had infiltrated the group for some time and had been in communication with Simpson.  Documents from a separate court case shed light on just how deep the agent’s activity had been, which included the following messaging between “UCE-1” and Simpson abut the upcoming “Draw Muhammed” event:

UCE-1: Tear up Texas.
Simpson: Bro, u don’t have to say that…U know what happened in Paris…I think…Yes or no…?
UCE-1: Right.
Simpson: So that goes without saying…No need to be direct.

A 60 Minutes exposé last March first revealed that the undercover agent was in a separate car directly behind Simpson and Soofi when the attack began, that the agent was taking pictures of the pair just seconds before they opened fire, and that the undercover agent tried to flee the scene once the attack began but was apprehended by local police.

The government’s only comment in response to the 60 Minutes report last March was to say, “There was no advance knowledge of a plot to attack the cartoon drawing contest in Garland, Texas.”

Joiner’s attorney, Trenton Roberts, says his client sued in an effort to get to the bottom of the FBI’s involvement in the attack.
Roberts says there are only two explanations of what transpired that day with the undercover agent.

“It seems like it had to have been one or the other,” Roberts told the Washington Examiner. “Just a complete botched operation where they [the FBI] don’t want the attack to actually take place, or, it’s something where they need the attack to take place in order for this guy [the agent] to advance in the world of ISIS.”

“And that’s really what I think. I think that they thought, ‘he’s undercover and in order to advance, he needed to get pictures or video of this attack,’ and then that would bolster his street cred within ISIS,” Roberts said.

The government’s response claimed that Joiner’s lawsuit, “provides only rank speculation that UCE-1 met up with and followed Simpson and Soofi to the event, and provides no well-plead factual allegations regarding what exactly UCE-1 did at or immediately before the event that could constitute the assistance, direction, solicitation, or encouragement of an assault. Rather, the only communication Plaintiff can point to as a basis for the assault claim is the comment to ‘tear up Texas.”

The curiosities surrounding the case have drawn the notice of some congressional leaders.

Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, complained in April of last year that he was learning details of the FBI’s involvement in the attack only through the media, and two years after the fact….


Title: The Bundy Case
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2018, 11:10:13 AM
second post



https://patriotpost.us/articles/53383
Title: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity!
Post by: G M on January 22, 2018, 11:54:23 AM

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-22/whos-lying-fbi-says-5-months-texts-lost-yet-ig-horowitz-says-his-office-received

Nothing to see here, move along.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 22, 2018, 04:02:46 PM
Hmmm , , , hard to square that with this:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018...lost-yet-ig-horowitz-says-his-office-received
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on January 22, 2018, 04:48:48 PM
Hmmm , , , hard to square that with this:

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018...lost-yet-ig-horowitz-says-his-office-received

I clicked on the above link and got "page not found".
Title: Pattern and practice
Post by: G M on January 22, 2018, 05:01:45 PM
http://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/370122-another-software-upgrade-suppressing-evidence-is-fbi-standard-procedure

By the book.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 22, 2018, 07:22:35 PM
Its back , , , https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-22/whos-lying-fbi-says-5-months-texts-lost-yet-ig-horowitz-says-his-office-received
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on January 22, 2018, 09:52:08 PM
Its back , , , https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-22/whos-lying-fbi-says-5-months-texts-lost-yet-ig-horowitz-says-his-office-received

So, I wonder how widespread this loss of texts was. Agency-wide? Just that field office? Will this present a issue in discovery for other criminal cases?
Title: And it keeps getting worse...
Post by: G M on January 22, 2018, 09:55:54 PM
https://pjmedia.com/trending/page-strzok-referenced-fbi-secret-society-met-day-election/

Suddenly, we are now living in an Alex Jones fever dream...
Title: Obama administration war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on January 23, 2018, 09:19:03 AM
Sometimes in this world of ugly partisan politics we see our opponent caught up in a scandal and can't help feel a sense of joy or hummor as if their demise is your victory. 

This is something far different.  Our own FBI, our own intelligence agencies, our outgoing administrationl caught up in a massive effort to sway the election and to overturn it if necessary bring fright, not joy, to see them caught.

For one thing, the misuse of the FISA process will make it harder or impossible for future administrations to fight future threats with that valuable and powerful tool.  So real future threats will go undetected and real people will be killed, cities destroyed,  because a bunch of partisan hacks infiltrated our most trusted agencies and destroyed our trust.

What Loretta Lynch did, and James Comey, conspiring to 'recuse' but still control the result is beyond contemptible.  They saw gross negligence and labeled it something else, for what purpose?  To not sway an election that they are more than happy to overturn. 

This didn't start with a fear of Trump.  The Obama administration weaponized the DOJ under Holder way before that and the IRS targeting took abuse of power and corruption light years beyond Nixon's feeble attempts.

They hid their tracks.  Holder took a contempt of congress charge with no penalty to avoid telling the American people what really happened in Fast and Furious.  The Schumer Senate issued an IRS targeting report that concluded both sides were wrongly targeting.  On page 188 of that report it turns out that all progressive groups were approved while all conservative groups were denied. 

A previous IRS chief visited the White House once in four years.  Obama's IRS chief was on the calendar 157 times during this time.  The fish stunk from the head.

These huge unconstitutional acts were orchestrated from the Oval Office.  Don't you think the tracks, if found, on this one, fake dossier, FISA fraud, unmasking and wiretapping lead there too? 

President lost his bid for a second term protecting the idea that we don't prosecute ex-Presidents, especially when they were already disgraced and forced out of power.  What test should we apply to ex-President Obama?

It sets a dangerous precedent to have political opponents prosecute predecessors after they leave office.  It's sets an even more dangerous one to let high crimes against our republic go by without consequence.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 23, 2018, 07:40:50 PM
Some important thoughts there.

Regarding President Obama, during the investigation he said Hillary lacked bad "intent" but maybe had been "careless".

"Intent" was misapplied by Comey as the legal standard instead of the statutory standard of "gross negligence" and was called , , , drum roll , , , "careless".

Dog whistle much?!?

Also, it seems clear that Obama was in on the insecure email activities with Hillary.

Title: Hillary-Baraq emails key to decision not to indict Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 23, 2018, 07:49:30 PM
second post:

Speaking of which!!!

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455696/hillary-clinton-barack-obama-emails-key-decision-not-indict-hillary
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on January 24, 2018, 08:31:15 AM
"Obama was in on the insecure email activities with Hillary.":

Yes, and Andrew McCarthy is right on the money.   Obama 'only learned about it in the news', just like us, yet he was sending and receiving with her under his own pseudonym.  He was in all the way, over his head in it, lured in by the Clintons.  The Clintons and Obamas had some kind of mutually assured destruction pact between them in addition to  their shared political interests.

The only way that all of these scandals don't go right to the top would be if he was a puppet and someone else was really calling the shots.  The closest confidant to President Obama was Valerie Jarrett.  She had total access and was most trusted but she wasn't calling the shots in his place.

Obama was in it on Fast and Furious, IRS Targeting, FISA Fraud and unmasking and wiretap - the whole phony Russian conspiracy.  We are missing a whistleblower from that administration and a few more documents.  Maybe one of these lousy people, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Rybicki can be flipped.

"Obama had emails from Clinton, which he had to know were from a private account since her address did not end in “@state.gov” as State Department emails do."

He set up his own phony email address to do this.  He wasn't sending without knowing where he was sending.

"Note that claims of executive privilege must yield to demands for disclosure of relevant evidence in criminal prosecutions. But of course, that’s not a problem if there will be no prosecution.

Laws were broken that should be investigated and prosecuted.  If so, that barricade falls.
--------------------

Related note, Michael Flynn (reportedly) plead guilty when they threatened to go after his son.  
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/08/politics/michael-flynn-son-special-counsel-russia-investigation/index.html
Flynn was illegally and unconstitutionally wiretapped as part of the lie to the FBI trap.  That all falls as discovered.  In the end those charges will be dropped.  He had hoped to flip him on Trump collusion that didn't exist and they needed to indict someone high up to justify their existence.
--------------------
Anyone who doubts that the Obamas had a partisan interest in the successor election should watch this video again, Michelle Obama's speech to the 2016 DNC.  Michelle didn't give this speech separate from Barack and the administration's interest, and they were not neutral on choosing a successor.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZNWYqDU948

The Obama's hate Trump and it's personal, not just political.
Title: Sharyll Attkinson: Walls closing in on FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2018, 03:38:11 PM
http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/370717-as-walls-close-in-on-fbi-the-bureau-lashes-out-at-its-antagonists#.WmpWz0sR8xl.facebook
Title: VDH: Hillary's sure victory explains everything
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2018, 07:59:16 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/455885/print
Title: War on Rule of Law, Cheryl Mills, Obama Knew, We need to clean this up!
Post by: DougMacG on January 30, 2018, 09:25:57 AM
Adding this criminal intent email to a couple more threads:

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUq3BGiVoAAYCLE.jpg)

President Obama said he learned of her private email in the news just like the rest of us yet was caught using it at least 20 times under a pseudonym.

Isn't this evidence under subpoena?  Clean it up means ... destroy it?!
Title: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity!
Post by: G M on February 01, 2018, 07:26:20 PM
http://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/371853-new-fbi-messages-reveal-agents-searching-for-way-to-evade-record?amp&__twitter_impression=true

The laws only apply to the little people.
Title: When federal prosecutors go bad
Post by: G M on February 06, 2018, 04:42:54 AM
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/02/when_federal_prosecutors_go_bad.html
Title: IG Horowitz
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 06, 2018, 06:08:37 AM
GM, that is a very interesting article.

=====================================

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/372457-ig-poised-to-reignite-war-over-fbis-clinton-case?userid=188403
Title: Attkission v. USG
Post by: G M on February 12, 2018, 07:31:57 AM
https://sharylattkisson.com/2018/02/10/update-attkisson-v-us-govt-in-computer-intrusion-lawsuit/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SharylAttkisson+%28Sharyl+Attkisson%29

Funny how this isn't newsworthy.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 12, 2018, 09:18:43 AM
Wasn't there something about how she got caught overstating her claims in this regard?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: G M on February 12, 2018, 11:06:02 AM
Wasn't there something about how she got caught overstating her claims in this regard?

If so, I am not aware of it.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 12, 2018, 11:25:47 AM
IIRC it had to do with this:
============================

Sharyl Attkisson Shares Update On Computer Hacking Investigation

June 17, 2013 2:22 PM

HACKED: Twitter Accounts Gone Wrong

Reporting Dom Giordano
 
PHILADELPHIA (CBS)  — Just days after CBS News confirmed that reporter Sharyl Attkisson’s computer had indeed been hacked, Attkisson spoke to Dom Giordano about the investigation.

“This suspicious activity has been going on for quite some time – both on my CBS computer and my personal computer,” Attkisson said. “CBS then hired its own independent cyber security firm, which has been conducting a thorough forensic exam … they were able to rule out malware, phishing programs, that sort of thing.”

Attkisson described some of the bizarre things that were happening with her computer.

“There were just signs of unusual happenings for many months, odd behavior like the computers just turning themselves on at night and then turning themselves back off again. I was basically able to verify and obtain information from my sources on the suspicious activity and I reported it to CBS News in January because of course it included CBS equipment and systems.”

Attkisson could not speak about whether the hacking was related to her questions about Benghazi because of “legal counsel,” but she did say her work at that time was primarily on the occurrence.

“Whoever was in my work computer, the only thing I was working on were work-related things with CBS were big stories I guess during the time period in questions were I guess Benghazi and ‘Fast and Furious.’ The intruders did have access to personal information including passwords to my financial accounts and so on, but didn’t tamper with those, so they weren’t interested in stealing my identity or doing things to my finances. So people can decide on their own what they might have been trying to do in there.”

When asked how she felt about being hacked, Attkisson had this to say:

“Even apart from this specific incident with my computers … I operate as though someone is looking at what I do, just because that’s the safest thing,” Attkisson said. “While it’s upsetting to have that sort of intrusion done, it’s also not that unexpected.”

Attkisson also confirmed that the investigation is still ongoing, and that she still has questions about the way the Benghazi incident was handled.

“We’re continuing to move forward aggressively, CBS News takes this very seriously, as do I. I think whenever an unauthorized party comes into the home of an American, whether it’s any private citizen or journalist and gets in their house, searches their computers — these are computers my family uses — and they’re inserting or removing material for whatever their reasons are, I think that’s a really serious and disturbing matter and we’re gonna follow it up and keep pursuing it.”
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: DougMacG on February 12, 2018, 09:19:30 PM
Wasn't there something about how she got caught overstating her claims in this regard?

I tried to look that up because I trust her as a source. Found something from 2013, (business insider, sorry no link) but the Obama Holder DOJ denying wrongdoing doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 13, 2018, 08:25:00 AM
Maybe it was a smear-- I haven't seen anything about it for quite some time , , ,
Title: War on the rule of law, Sharyl Attkisson
Post by: DougMacG on February 13, 2018, 08:43:59 PM
Attkisson follow up:

May 21, 2013
CBS Is Investigating How A Reporter's Computer Was Compromised
http://www.businessinsider.com/sharyl-attkisson-benghazi-computer-intrusion-fast-furious-doj-2013-5

May 22, 2013
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT: We Never 'Compromised' CBS Reporter's Computers
http://www.businessinsider.com/sharyl-attkisson-cbs-benghazi-computers-doj-justice-department-2013-5
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: ccp on February 14, 2018, 05:54:58 AM
Jeff Sessions really is in an impossible situation

how does he deal with all the Obama DOJ issues without alienating everyone there?

How and who does he fire or investigate ?

OTOH there is corruption there and we need to clean house
perhaps he is not up to the job.
perhaps he is but just going slowly .

 :|
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 14, 2018, 06:23:05 AM
Excellent work Doug!

IIRC her claim about seeing stuff disappear in real time off her screen due to these intrusions was seriously challenged.
Title: Sharyll Attkinson accuses DOJ of secretly switching her computer hard drives
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 01, 2018, 02:50:34 PM
 :-o :-o :-o

https://pjmedia.com/trending/sharyl-attkisson-accuses-doj-secretly-switching-computer-hard-drives/

Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Mza8HkpaA
Title: Clapper skates on felony crime
Post by: G M on March 13, 2018, 08:08:46 AM
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/james-clapper-avoids-charges-for-clearly-erroneous-surveillance-testimony/article/2651233

Above the law.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 13, 2018, 08:47:33 AM
" shocked shocked shocked

https://pjmedia.com/trending/sharyl-attkisson-accuses-doj-secretly-switching-computer-hard-drives/

Also see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Mza8HkpaA"

Sounds like what the crooks in white collar crime do , in the music industry and certainly in technology and other intellectual property.
I am convinced some of the thieves MUST have had government (CIA FBI NSA or other agency or military spy training ) and they go into the stealing business

corporate espionage.  As far as I know there is exactly ZERO investigations into this from anyone.

indeed it is club probably like we doctors are accused of from time to time or police officers or lawyers etc.
Title: Re: Clapper skates on felony crime
Post by: DougMacG on March 13, 2018, 09:00:33 AM
"Above the law."

We have these rules. They don't follow them. And there is no consequences. Why does that happen?!  Clappert shouldn't have gotten away with that under their own administration much less under a new one.  Still no charges or penalty to anyone for all that happened with Hillary, DNC, etc.  Fast and Furious. Email Server, negligent care of secret documents.  Uranium One and the Clinton Crime Family Foundation, blatant!
 IRS targeting was the worst of my lifetime.  Yet Scooter Libby did time for nothing.  Flynn has his life turned upside down for we don't know what yet.  The two sets of standards is so obvious and so accepted - by both sides!

It isn't that I want HER locked up in particular, I would just like to a consistent attempt u8nder all administrations to show that all the laws apply to all the people equally.
Title: Does this not make you
Post by: ccp on March 17, 2018, 08:28:19 AM
glad he was fired?

yesterday it was pointed out he may still be able to appeal and STILL get his well deserved revoking of his pension reversed:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/andrew-mccabe-firing-response_us_5aac79dae4b0337adf83e00a
Title: Trump is not the only one with a massive anger and ego problem
Post by: ccp on March 19, 2018, 07:27:19 AM
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/03/17/politics/john-brennan-donald-trump-mccabe-firing/index.html

in other words:

[we have man ways to get back at you!]

[ who dare you question we]
Title: JW's Tom Fitton on more than fit in this line
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 07, 2018, 05:59:45 AM
https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/in-the-news/tom-fitton-mueller-operation-irrelevant-compared-brennan-corruption-video/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=on%20the%20air&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180407125249
Title: De Blasio aide busted for gun
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2018, 01:40:36 PM


https://nypost.com/2018/04/09/de-blasio-aide-arrested-with-gun-was-riding-in-suv-that-reeked-of-weed-cops/
Title: Obama DOJ vs. FBI field agents
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 17, 2018, 08:44:49 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/apr/16/obamas-justice-dept-feuded-fbi-agents-quit-politic/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=20171227&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning
Title: DOJ called FBI to shut down Clinton Foundation investigation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 18, 2018, 09:10:58 AM


https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/michael-w-chapman/fbis-mccabe-doj-are-you-telling-me-i-need-shut-down-clinton
Title: Joseph Di Genoa: The Politicization of the FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 25, 2018, 12:25:41 PM


https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-politicization-of-the-fbi/
Title: Kerry colludes to save cowardly Iran deal 2.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 07, 2018, 07:33:35 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/john-kerry-iran-deal-collusion/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=SPONSORED:%20NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202018-05-07&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
Title: NRO on Dershowitz
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 12, 2018, 08:02:39 AM
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/11/alan-dershowitz-donald-trump-what-happened-218359
Title: AD on Mueller
Post by: ccp on May 12, 2018, 08:15:06 AM
from CDs article from previous post:

" The woman behind us in line took her free book, turned to her husband and asked, “What happened to Alan Dershowitz?”

I don't know but Alan has gone from being one of my least favorite attorneys to one of my most favorite ones for his opinions on this as well as his defense of Israel.

Glad to have him on OUR side.

He speaks and I listen.

Title: VDH: The blowback of the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 13, 2018, 04:42:06 PM

 
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/05/president-trump-deep-state-critics-risk-blowback/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202018-05-13&utm_term=VDHM
Title: VDH nails it again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2018, 07:40:21 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/obama-trump-administrations-elites-value-style-over-substance/
Title: WSJ: The FBI's document black outs
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2018, 07:48:31 AM

By The Editorial Board
June 13, 2018 7:07 p.m. ET
437 COMMENTS

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray want Congress to trust them about the FBI’s actions in 2016. That would be easier if not for daily proof that they continue to play games when redacting documents.

Senate oversight Chairman Ron Johnson exposed the latest unjustified blackouts in a June 8 letter to Mr. Wray. The Wisconsin Republican is one of several Chairmen objecting to the FBI’s excessive redactions and its refusal to even supply the standard “log” with justifications for each redaction. Under pressure, Justice grudgingly invited Johnson staffers to review some documents in late May.

Those sessions revealed that the bureau is redacting in a way that stymies Congress’s ability to run down leads in its oversight of the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump investigations. Notably, Justice and the FBI have been redacting names or initials of employees involved in handling those cases. This frustrates Congress’s ability to seek more information or interviews with those individuals.

One initial batch of documents contained an Oct. 11, 2016 text message from FBI official Peter Strzok to his FBI paramour Lisa Page. It read: “Currently fighting with”—while the rest was redacted. The unredacted version reads: “Currently fighting with Stu for this FISA,” which may be a reference to the warrant the FBI obtained to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Who is Stu and what was that fight? Congress has a right to know.

The initials “BO” are also redacted from several messages. An unredacted version shows a Strzok text on Oct. 7, 2016: “Jesus. More BO leaks in the NYT.” Another from Oct. 25, 2016 reads: “Just cranky at them for bad choices about BO.” Investigators aren’t certain who BO is, but one possibility is Bruce Ohr, the DOJ employee who was demoted after it emerged that he’d held undisclosed meetings with anti-Trump dossier author Christopher Steele, and whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Mr. Steele.

Another less-redacted text shows someone blacked out a Strzok explanation for why the FBI didn’t pursue some Clinton leads. “Clinton, Mills, and Abedin all said they felt the server was permitted and did not receive information that it was not. To the extent there was objection down the line in IRM, we did not pursue that as State OIG did, because it was not a key question behind our investigation.”

Why not? An important issue regarding Mrs. Clinton’s private email server was whether she and aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin intentionally violated State Department rules in setting it up, and if this increased her mishandling of classified information.

Redactions are supposed to be limited to guarding national security, attorney-client privilege, individual privacy or criminal investigations. These blackouts appear motivated to withhold pertinent information from Congress or spare the FBI political embarrassment.

Meanwhile, the FBI is refusing to answer a May 11 letter from Sen. Johnson seeking the names of employees who are doing the redacting. Mr. Johnson is concerned that some of the employees involved in this investigation might also be overseeing the redacting.

As retired FBI special agent Thomas Baker wrote on these pages last month (“The FBI’s Shocking Disrespect for Congress,” May 11), the FBI has damaged its credibility by flouting subpoenas and slow-rolling or hiding information. This behavior is why Congress must continue to pry out the truth.

Appeared in the June 14, 2018, print edition.
Title: 47 IGs letter against Obama in 2014
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 14, 2018, 07:50:11 AM
second post: hat tip CCP

"In 2014, 47 of the nation’s 73 inspectors general signed a letter alleging that Obama had stonewalled their “ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner.”


https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/obama-administration-stonewalled-inspectors-general/
Title: planned timing perfect from LEFT wing and never Trump righties
Post by: ccp on June 14, 2018, 04:04:45 PM
NY DOJ files suit against Trump within day of IG report release ; duh

No , no deep state here .  Perfect for NYT WP and CNN to ignore the IG report and spend all their column and airtime wind bagging about the law suit  " the entire CNN propaganda  team :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CNN_personnel


http://news.trust.org/item/20180614145037-m3zna
Title: Justice Department IG Reveals FBI Corruption
Post by: G M on June 15, 2018, 06:16:00 AM
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/justice-department-ig-reveals-fbi-corruption/

Justice Department IG Reveals FBI Corruption
Senior FBI agent threatened to prevent Trump election in text message; agents took gifts from reporters

BY: Bill Gertz    
June 14, 2018 5:02 pm

The FBI mishandled the politically charged investigation of classified information found on Hillary Clinton's private email server, and Bureau agents engaged in improper behavior including a text message threat to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, according to a Justice Department inspector general probe.

A report by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, however, appeared to let the FBI off the hook for allowing political biases and concerns about protecting the FBI's reputation influence its investigation of classified data found on the email server.

Former FBI Director James Comey, who was fired by President Trump, came in for blistering criticism in the IG report for not informing Justice Department superiors about his decision in July 2016 to publicly exonerate Clinton in the probe—three weeks before she was named the Democratic presidential nominee.

Comey and the FBI were also was criticized in the report for delaying and then re-opening the email investigation days before the November 2016 election after tens of thousands of new emails were found after the probe had been closed in July.

The IG found "no evidence" Comey's July 2016 statement ending what the report called the FBI's "Midyear" probe of classified information found in the Clinton emails was the result of political bias or "an effort to influence the election."

"We concluded that Comey’s unilateral announcement was inconsistent with Department policy and violated long-standing department practice and protocol by, among other things, criticizing Clinton’s uncharged conduct," the report said.

"We also found that Comey usurped the authority of the attorney general, and inadequately and incompletely described the legal position of department prosecutors."

Comey announced July 5, 2016, that he was recommending against prosecuting Clinton based on a lack of illegal intention and asserting that no reasonable attorney would prosecute her for the security breaches.

The FBI also failed to act quickly in responding to the discovery of emails between Clinton and key aide Huma Abedin found two months later on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, Abedin's husband, as part of an investigation of Weiner sexting with a minor.

The delays created the perception that the FBI was slow-rolling a decision to reopen the email probe.

Comey told investigators when he learned of the Weiner laptop emails he did not know Weiner was Abedin's husband and failed to grasp the significance of the new evidence.

Clinton place both "secret" and "top secret" information on emails found on the private server used while she was secretary of state to avoid triggering official records preservation rules.

The FBI declined to charge her for the mishandling of classified information because classification markings had been removed from the information in the emails, the report said.

The 568-page IG report, "A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election" contains details of several FBI and Justice Department scandals that emerged since the 2016 election.

The report reveals that:

Obama administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch acted improperly in not cutting short a meeting aboard an aircraft with former President Bill Clinton during the investigation of Hillary Clinton. Both Lynch and Bill Clinton denied discussing the ongoing email probe during the meeting.
The FBI improperly permitted two Clinton aides who were witnesses in the investigation to sit in on the FBI's questioning of Clinton
Comey drafted an initial statement exonerating Clinton months before the investigation ended.
The draft statement exonerating Clinton also removed the term "gross negligence"—a condition that could have been used for prosecution—and replaced with "especially concerning."
An initial assessment in the Comey draft statement saying foreign spy services were "reasonably likely" to have accessed the classified data on the Clinton server was replaced with "possible."
FBI ethics officials "did not fully appreciate" the potential conflict of interest by former FBI Director Andrew McCabe's wife receiving $675,288 in 2015 from Clinton associate Terry McAuliffe, then-governor of Virginia, for her political campaign for a state senate seat. McCabe became head of the email probe in early 2016.
The FBI improperly regarded a parallel investigation of Russian collusion with the Trump presidential campaign in 2016 to be more important the Clinton email probe.
 

The most damaging disclosures in the IG report relate to five FBI officials, including FBI counterintelligence official and Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok who was involved in both the email and Russia probes.

Strzok was having an affair with Lisa Page, special counsel to the FBI deputy director, and the two officials exchanged thousands of emails revealing political bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton.

The IG report noted "particular concern" by the apparent political bias in elevating the Russian investigation over the email probe, as revealed in text messages between Strzok and Page.

The texts between the two FBI officials "potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions they made were impacted by bias or improper considerations."

Most of the texts between Strzok and Page that appeared to impact investigative decisions were related to the Russian probe that was not part of the IG review.

"Nonetheless, when one senior FBI official, Strzok, who was helping to lead the Russia investigation at the time, conveys in a text message to another senior FBI official, Page, ‘No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it' in response to her question, ‘[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!', it is not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects," the report said.

"Under these circumstances, we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias," the report said.

In addition to Strzok and Page, text messages also were reviewed by the IG related to two other FBI agents, one on the email probe, and another FBI lawyer.

"The text messages and instant messages sent by these employees included statements of hostility toward then candidate Trump and statements of support for candidate Clinton, and several appeared to mix political opinions with discussions about the Midyear investigation,' the report said.

The conduct "brought discredit to themselves, sowed doubt about the FBI’s handling of the Midyear investigation, and impacted the reputation of the FBI."

No direct evidence was found that the political biases were linked to investigative decisions, the report said.

But the report noted "the conduct by these employees cast a cloud over the FBI Midyear investigation and sowed doubt over the FBI's work on, and its handling of, the Midyear investigation."

"Moreover, the damage caused by their actions extends far beyond the scope of the Midyear investigation and goes to the heart of the FBI's reputation for neutral fact finding and political independence."

The IG finding of bias will likely fuel further criticism by President Trump of the Russia investigation that eventually was elevated into Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.

Trump has denounced the probe of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign as a political witch-hunt designed to discredit his presidency.

Clinton, for her part, has blamed Comey for undermining her election bid by re-opening the email investigation so close the election.

The IG report said Comey believed that his failure to disclose the newly found emails to Congress would be an act of concealment.

The IG, however, sharply criticized Comey for saying he had only two doors to enter, one for concealment and one for publicizing the re-opened probe.

"The two doors were actually labeled ‘followpolicy/practice' and ‘depart from policy/practice,'" the report said.

"Although we acknowledge that Comey faced a difficult situation with unattractive choices, in proceeding as he did, we concluded that Comey made a serious error of judgment."

Comey was also influenced in mishandling the case because he believed Clinton would be elected president and he feared the information would leak if the FBI failed to make it public.

He also was concerned that "failing to disclose would result in accusations that the FBI had ‘engineered a cover up' to help Clinton get elected," the report said.

The report said there also were "concerns about protecting the reputation of the FBI" and worries about the perceived illegitimacy of a Clinton presidency if the discovery of the emails was not made public.

"We found no evidence that Comey’s decision to send the October 28 letter [to Congress] was influenced by political preferences," the report said.

"Instead, we found that his decision was the result of several interrelated factors that were connected to his concern that failing to send the letter would harm the FBI and his ability to lead it, and his view that candidate Clinton was going to win the presidency and that she would be perceived to be an illegitimate president if the public first learned of the information after the election."

Regarding FBI agents disclosing information to reporters, the IG stated that agents had unauthorized contacts with reporters and accepted favors and gifts in apparent exchange for details about the email investigation.

"We identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters," the report said.

"In addition, we identified instances where FBI employees improperly received benefits from reporters, including tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events," the IG said, noting the improper activities are under investigation.

The report said leaks, fear of potential leak and "a culture of unauthorized media contacts" influence FBI decisions regarding its investigations.

The report recommended providing guidance to agents and prosecutors on legal actions that could impact an election.

The IG also called for making an explicit rule that an investigating agency cannot announce its charging decision without consulting the attorney general or other senior Justice officials.

The report also suggested developing a policy on discussing the conduct of uncharged persons in public statements.

The IG also recommended improving the policy of saving of text messages from official mobile phones and devices and to include a banner on the devices warning users they have no expectation of privacy.

Better education of FBI employees regarding the policy on accepting gifts is also needed, along with disciplinary action to deter improper conduct.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on June 15, 2018, 06:55:42 AM
" Justice Department IG Reveals FBI Corruption "

The LEFT:  the ONLY corruption was Comey announcing the reopening of the email investigation of Hillary (then later coming out and stating nothing there - again)

 :x :x :x

Title: The IG Report and the Legacy of Obama
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2018, 02:08:37 PM
hat tip GM

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-ig-report-and-the-legacy-of-obama/

The IG Report and The Legacy of Obama
 BY MATT MARGOLIS JUNE 16, 2018

President Barack Obama announces he will nominate U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, right, to be the next Attorney General, Saturday, Nov. 8, 2014 (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

As shocking as the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Hillary email investigation released earlier this week was, the truth is none of us should be surprised by it. I certainly wasn’t. Anyone who paid any attention at all to what was going on during the Obama years would know that what happened in the summer of 2016 within Obama’s Justice Department was the climax of an eight-year crescendo of partisan corruption, intent on protecting Obama’s legacy from Donald Trump.

Eight years is a short time for the FBI to go from a respected institution to a partisan arm of the White House, but it happened right under our noses, with the media doing its best to keep us in the dark.

From the earliest days of the Obama administration, the Obama/Holder/Lynch Justice Department protected political allies from justice. A slam-dunk case of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party during the 2008 presidential election was inexplicably dropped, resulting in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declaring in the summer of 2010 that there was evidence of “possible unequal administration of justice” by the Justice Department. Obama also blocked a corruption probe that implicated former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for bribery. He also illegally fired an inspector general who was investigating a friend and donor of Obama’s. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder worked in concert to protect each other. Holder would stonewall congressional investigations into Obama administration corruption and Obama would assert executive privilege to keep damaging information away from the eyes of investigators, such as crucial documents in the Fast and Furious investigation.

The Obama Justice Department also targeted Obama’s enemies. When conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza was prosecuted for making $20,000 in straw donations to a friend’s U.S. Senate campaign, many legal experts saw it as partisan selective prosecution, including liberal Harvard Law School professor and Obama supporter Alan Dershowitz. James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was placed on a terrorist watch list in order to limit his international travel after posting a viral video showing himself dressed like a terrorist crossing back forth over the U.S. border with Mexico to demonstrate the horrible state of our nation’s border security.

There are dozens of scandals in the Obama administration that never resulted in any of the key players being prosecuted. No special counsels were ever appointed. By the end of the Obama administration, they’d been able to get away with so much because the media refused to give anything damaging to Obama the coverage it deserved for eight years.

So, is it really that surprising that anti-Trump FBI agent Peter Strzok was leading both the Trump investigation and the Hillary Clinton email investigation? There was no justification for this, but yet, it happened. And the impact of their political bias is undeniable. We now know from text messages between Strzok and his fellow FBI agent and lover Lisa Page (who also was involved in the investigations) that Strzok was going to do whatever he could, with the power of the FBI, to keep Trump out of the White House:

Page: [Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!
Strzok: No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.

There are other anti-Trump text messages from several FBI agents and lawyers as well, all of which raise legitimate concerns that the FBI’s investigation of Trump was a political witch hunt, and that there was a concerted effort to protect Hillary Clinton.

Dinesh D’Souza, speaking with Laura Ingraham on Fox News earlier this week, believes that the ”tremendous kind of glee and sense of immunity with which these agents at the high level of operating” suggests they were ordered by someone high up. Who gave the order? The answer to that, according to D’Souza, is the answer to the question, who benefits?

“Hillary benefits, but Hillary clearly couldn't have given the order," D'Souza said. "She was secretary of state and then she was out of the government. Obama, on the other hand, very much did not want Trump to win. He knew that Trump would try to erase his legacy. It's very embarrassing for him to be succeeded by Trump. I wonder if Obama is the one who gave the order.”

The reputation and our faith in the FBI have been severely compromised by eight years of politicization under the “leadership” of Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and Loretta Lynch. That is a legacy of Obama’s that must be fixed. I have no doubt that most of the agents in the FBI, regardless of their political leanings, are upstanding individuals who believe in equal justice. But, somehow a slew of hyper-partisan anti-Trump agents all ended up running the most pivotal investigations leading up to the 2016 election by aggressively pursuing the dubious link between Trump and Russia, while simultaneously easing up on the Clinton email investigation.

We must make sure that the right people are held accountable, and safeguards are put in place to make sure such terrible abuses never happen again. But our faith in the FBI won’t be so easily restored.
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Misconduct at FBI and DOJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2018, 12:19:30 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/misconduct-at-fbi-department-of-justice/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202018-06-17&utm_term=VDHM
Title: Sean Hannity: These are the laws Hillary broke
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2018, 12:31:45 PM
http://video.foxnews.com/v/5797769954001/?playlist_id=930909813001#sp=show-clips

18 USC 793 (D,E, and F)

18 USC 1924 (A)

18 USC 641

18 USC 2071 (D)

18 USC 1505

18 USC 1515 (B)

18 USC 1001

52 USC 30121

52 USC 30101
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on June 17, 2018, 06:11:25 PM
The laws Hillary broke......


But Brock said she didn't mean it .  So the deep state team took their cue and gave her a  "sentence" consisting  of  a  minute or two tongue lashing and
the Leftist media cabal proceeded with  all their joy and gaiety to  trash and  bash the Republican nominee.

 :x
Title: The IG Report Was a Whitewash and Devastating All At Once
Post by: G M on June 18, 2018, 06:09:56 AM
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2018/06/18/the-ig-report-was-a-whitewash-and-devastating-all-at-once-n2491691

The IG Report Was a Whitewash and Devastating All At Once
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Jun 18, 2018 12:01 AM

 
The FBI has managed to transform its image from Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., into Special Agent Boogaloo Shrimp, and the Inspector General’s report was the bureaucratic self-policing equivalent of Breakin’ Faith 2: Electric Bamboozle.

Here’s the punchline: MC Hammered, who dropped his Glock and shot a dude whilst bustin’ a move, was one of those “top 5% of applicants” that zombie FBI Director Christopher Wray kept babbling about during his excuse conference following the report’s release. But that guy would not have even placed in competition for the title “Worst FBI Agent Ever” against the toadies, flunkies, and hacks the report highlights.

During his spin cycle news conference, Wray spent a surprising amount of time – that is, any time – boasting about the quality of his FBI honors interns. Great. Put one of them in charge. He, she, or (knowing the current liberal culture of the FBI) xe, can’t do any worse.

Wray’s ruined agency’s best n’ brightest conspired to undo the results of an election to ensure that the liberal politician who wouldn’t derail their gravy train would take office, but hey, a couple hours of diversity classes will fix that right up. I know I feel much better knowing that these bureaucratic superstars are finally going to get some training to inform them that trying to use their power as federal law enforcement agents to swing an election to their preferred political party is wrong. Apparently, that was previously unclear.

The IG report bait n’ switch was just another example of our elite shrugging in the face of indisputable evidence of its own wrongdoing. The bombshells in the IG report could justly be classified as “thermonuclear,” but remember the Comey conference back in July 2016? Its bombshells were thermonuclear too. Integrity Boy laid out an utterly devastating case against Felonia Milhous Von Pansuit, highlighting in damning detail her litany of crimes that would have consigned you, me, or anyone else not in the elite to a long tour in the stony lonesome. And then that Looming Doofus concluded his lengthy summation with, “But never mind.”

The same with the IG report. Yeah, the report demonstrated intense and pervasive political bias. Yeah, at every turn the FBI/DOJ hacks gave unprecedented deference and breaks to Hillary. Yeah, from the get-go they talked about how no one was ever going to be prosecuted. Nah, nothing to see.

It’s like a prosecutor laying out a crushing case to a jury, then saying, “And in conclusion, I’d like you to find the defendant not guilty.”

“No evidence,” concludes the IG report. It’s 500+ pages of evidence.

Let’s try a hypothetical. You are on a jury. My client is a black man claiming racial discrimination by his company. I present you with texts from key leaders in the company – who are still employed in high positions at the company – discussing how they hate black people. I demonstrate that at every single opportunity, the company made choices that hurt my client, just like at every opportunity the FBI and DOJ made choices to help Hillary the Harpy. Then, I show the company fired my client with no evidence of his wrongdoing, just like the FBI exonerated Stumbles O’Drunky with tons of evidence of her wrongdoing. Do you think I presented “no evidence?”

You, as a juror, have a choice – was my client discriminated against?

I, as his lawyer, also have a choice – Ferrari or Lamborghini?

The IG report sidestepped the most critical point, the one that is resulting in the American people losing their last remaining fragments of faith in our system, the fact that there are demonstrably two sets of rules, that there are two brands of justice in America.

There is one for you, me, and everyone else not in the elite – the infuriated, angry Normals. And there is another one for the elite.

I bet if you, me, or anyone else not in the elite were being prosecuted by the feds, the feds would be totally neutral regarding our politics, they would show us deference and give us breaks, and they would resolve from the beginning that we were going to walk. Let’s ask Scooter Libby or Dinesh De Souza or Conrad Black or Mike Flynn about that.

President Trump, you’ve already fixed the injustices suffered by Scooter and Dinesh. Pardon the other two guys. Pardon Conrad Black and General Mike Flynn. Show that this unAmerican, tyrannical garbage is unacceptable by refusing to accept it.

Hell, pardon everyone Robert Mueller and his team of Democrat operatives have ever even talked to. The report’s incoherent conclusion notwithstanding, it shows that this whole process is irredeemably tainted with political bias. Shut it down and let the voters decide if they want to validate injustice or not.

Our country cannot go on like this. The rule of law matters, and the rule of law does not have exceptions that exempt preferred people and groups. We have tolerated this abomination long enough – it has to stop. Either the elite rediscovers its sense of duty and service and stops it, or we will stop it. Donald Trump is our latest attempt to do that. If he is unable to do so, the elite is really going to hate what we try next.

See, they don’t get to win.

Some have taken to calling our political/cultural response to this abandonment of the rule of law “tribalism.” And it is, because tribalism is the only alternative to the rule of law. Some like Jonah Goldberg rightly warn against the tribalist trend, and it is bad, but it sure beats the hell out of being the liberals’ serfs. Others are fussily upset that we choose uniting to protect ourselves over surrender – to them I say, if you Fredocons don’t like tribalism, then help us fix the freakin’ problem instead of trying to shut us up and pretending everything is groovy.

Once again, here are the two, and only two, options:

Rule of law
My tribe – the Normals – wins
Notice how there is no option for “The elite tribe exercises unchallenged dominion over us.” So, choose wisely.

The IG report, simultaneously a devastating indictment of elite misconduct and a total whitewash, is a symptom of the moral leprosy infecting our elite. It is rotting away our institutions, and the foundations of the United States as we knew it. But the elite can’t, or won’t, even admit to itself what we all see.

And this means that means the elite can’t, or won’t, do what is necessary to repair the damage the elite itself has caused our country. No wonder the Normals are getting militant – and if the elite does not wake up to the danger, this country will be torn apart, or even worse.

The funky FBI guy’s breakdance antics were almost funny. But what his incompetence and the IG’s devastating whitewash are is terrifying.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on June 18, 2018, 08:08:16 AM
The role of the unelected government in Washington is to oversee the political branches, give direction, set priorities and make sure they are all doing their jobs properly.

Or is it the other way around?!
Title: IG report blocks part about AG Lynch
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 26, 2018, 07:45:02 PM
https://spectator.org/the-buried-lede-of-the-inspector-generals-report/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20180627024248
Title: WSJ: An indictment of political timing
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2018, 06:06:59 AM


An Indictment of Political Timing
The late charges against Rep. Chris Collins violate Justice policy.
New York Republican Chris Collins leaves U.S. Federal Court in New York after being indicted on insider trading on Aug. 8.
New York Republican Chris Collins leaves U.S. Federal Court in New York after being indicted on insider trading on Aug. 8. Photo: timothy a. clary/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
268 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 14, 2018 7:19 p.m. ET

The Justice Department indicted New York Republican Chris Collins last week for insider trading, and three days later the third-term Congressman ended his re-election campaign while professing his innocence. Whether or not Mr. Collins is convicted, prosecutors have succeeded in killing his political career and maybe helping Democrats gain a seat in Congress.

Such an outcome is one reason that official Justice Department policy frowns on indictments close to Election Day. An indictment near an election means a politician must campaign under a cloud. Prosecutors can put an ugly set of facts in front of voters before the accused has a chance to put on a defense. A late-hit indictment, effectively if not intentionally, puts the Justice Department on the side of a candidate’s political opponent.

This explains why three different Attorneys General each have explained the importance of “election year sensitivities” in memos in 2008, 2012 and 2016. “Department of Justice employees are entrusted with the authority to enforce the laws of the United States and with the responsibility to do so in a neutral and impartial manner. This is particularly important in an election year,” begins the March 9, 2012, two-page version from AG Eric Holder.

A paragraph later the memo elaborates: “Simply put, politics must play no role in the decisions of federal investigators or prosecutors regarding any investigations or criminal charges. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of investigative steps or criminal charges for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

Yet Justice clearly gave an advantage to Mr. Collins’s Democratic opponent when it indicted the Congressman on Aug. 8. Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, conducted a news conference complete with two incriminating charts, a passel of officials at his side, and condemning phrases such as Mr. Collins “placed his family and friends above the public good.”

But if the evidence is so compelling, the question is why prosecutors took so long. The illegal stock tip and the trades at issue took place in June 2017. The trades are easy to document and the defendants and witnesses were readily accessible for interviews. You’d think prosecutors could have at least managed to indict Mr. Collins before the New York primary a year later on June 26, 2018.

That would have given Mr. Collins a chance to withdraw before his name was on the November ballot. And it would have given Republicans a chance to nominate someone else to compete in what is one of the most Republican districts in New York. With the late indictment, Mr. Collins may not be able to get his name off the ballot even though he has abandoned his campaign.

Asked about the indictment’s timing, Mr. Berman was dismissive. “Politics does not enter into our decision-making,” he told reporters. “We are cognizant of the prudential concerns surrounding an election,” but “here we are months away from an election and those concerns do not apply.”

He should have said 90 days away. That’s closer to Election Day than the Justice Department’s notorious July 29 indictment of then GOP Senator Ted Stevens in 2008. Sally Yates, the Obama-era Deputy Attorney General, once told the Justice Department Inspector General, “To me if it were 90 days off, and you think it has a significant chance of impacting an election, unless there’s a reason you need to take the action now you don’t do it.”

Sarah Isgur Flores, the Justice Department spokeswoman, says that Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Rod Rosenstein were informed of the Collins indictment ahead of the public announcement. She adds that “we make charging decisions when they are ready to present to a grand jury. There is no other factor.” In any case, she says, the AG memos on political sensitivities refer only to “election-related charges.”

That last point defies common sense. Why issue a department-wide memo only about campaign- or election-related charges? Those would be investigated in nearly all cases only after an election.

The memos only make sense as a warning about any criminal charges that could affect an election outcome—which is how our sources who are former Justice officials also interpret it. The fair conclusion from the statements by Ms. Flores and Mr. Berman is that the current Justice Department either ignored or has abandoned this official guidance.
***

We won’t speculate on motives, though it’s no defense that this is a Republican Justice Department and Mr. Collins is a Republican. The department has clashed more with House Republicans this year than it might with a Democratic House next year.

It’s worrisome enough that Justice, in its zealous prosecution, didn’t seem to mind interfering in an election. We’d have thought officials would have learned a lesson from the debacle of Ted Stevens—or from 2016.

Appeared in the August 15, 2018, print edition.
Title: WSJ on the Strzok firing
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2018, 06:10:42 AM
Second post

Strzok and Consequences
The FBI fires a Comey ally who tarnished the bureau’s reputation.
On August 13, the FBI has fired Agent Peter Strzok, who helped lead the bureau’s s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election until officials discovered he had been sending anti-Trump texts.
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 14, 2018 7:23 p.m. ET

One year ago Robert Mueller kicked FBI agent Peter Strzok off his investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The special counsel recognized his investigation would be compromised if he kept on his team an FBI investigator who exchanged text messages with a colleague blasting Donald Trump while supporting Hillary Clinton.

The bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility had recommended a demotion and 60-day suspension, but Deputy Director David Bowdich recognized this would be seen as a slap on the wrist when the FBI is fighting to re-establish a reputation for integrity. He overruled OPR and sacked Mr. Strzok.

Mr. Strzok reacted the way we’ve come to expect from FBI officials of the James Comey era: He set up a GoFundMe page and accused the bureau of caving to “political pressure.”

On cue, President Trump jumped in with tweets attacking his FBI nemesis. This is said to confirm Mr. Strzok’s charge that he was fired for political reasons. But this is surely a stretch, given Mr. Trump’s more or less incessant tweets complaining that his Attorney General and FBI director won’t do what he wants them to.

Most of the headlines imply that Mr. Strzok was let go solely because of his inflammatory text messages with FBI colleague and paramour Lisa Page. It’s true these are nasty and alarming: Mr. Strzok talks about the “smell” of Trump voters at a Walmart , and Ms. Page warns there could be consequences for going into the Hillary Clinton email interview “loaded for bear” if she ended up becoming President. Mr. Strzok also reassured Ms. Page he would “stop” Mr. Trump from becoming President.

Any reasonable person reviewing these texts would conclude that Mr. Strzok had a bias unbecoming of any FBI agent, much less one entrusted to lead investigations that affected the fates of both presidential candidates. In his defense Mr. Strzok told Congress that he never let his “personal opinions” affect “any official action,” and Inspector General Michael Horowitz conceded he found no direct proof that they did.

But proving that bias affected an investigatory decision is akin to proving point-shaving to throw a basketball game. It’s very difficult. In this context it’s worth noting the IG’s statement that the Strzok-Page texts “cast a cloud” over the whole investigation. The IG further noted he “did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over the following up on the [Hillary Clinton email] investigative lead discovered on the [Anthony] Weiner laptop was free from bias.”

The IG report deals only with the Clinton email investigation. The IG is still investigating the Russia investigation that Mr. Strzok also led. When he testified before Congress, Mr. Strzok refused to answer nearly all of the substantive questions. This is one reason America is still in the dark about crucial facts in that investigation, such as the role played by Justice official Bruce Ohr, whose wife worked for Fusion GPS, which paid for dirt on Trump campaign officials.

The FBI has been granted enormous law enforcement and intelligence power on the assumption that it demands a culture of truth. Restoring this culture, badly tarnished during the Comey years, is crucial for public trust. Much more needs to be done to restore that trust, but firing Mr. Strzok had to be done.
Title: The Rule of Law Is a Sick Joke
Post by: G M on August 31, 2018, 01:36:36 PM
The Rule of Law Is a Sick Joke
Kurt Schlichter |Posted: Aug 30, 2018 12:01 AM


It’s adorable when people talk about the rule of law. OK, let’s assume that Donald Trump broke the law under some bizarrely convoluted interpretation of the hateful and unconstitutional (in a world where our Constitution was properly understood) thicket of campaign finance statutes that somehow makes the guy who is being extorted a criminal for paying off the aging bimbos shaking him down. Why should we care? Because we don’t care. MSNBC can howl “impeachment” 300 times an hour and we still won’t care. Even if this was an actual crime and Donald Trump was guilty of it, we don’t care. Did he illegally pay off weather-beaten pole-clinger Stormy and also the one from Playboy who was actually hot? Don’t care.

The climate scam is derailed, ISIS is dead, and then we got Gorsuch, Grennell, and a great economy. Those things we care about. Trump 2020, jerks.

“Buh buh but, the rule of law!” howl the feckless Fredocon swabbies on the decks of the sinking S.S. Conservative, Inc. We’ve really disappointed them this time. Heck, we haven’t seen Mitt Romney so upset since Candy Crowley stuffed him into a vinyl gimp suit and led him around the debate stage on a leash.

And their liberal masters are on a “rule of law” kick too. “Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator so the president can’t nominate Kavanaugh for some reason,” yip an endless line of Democrat Connecticut valor stealers, fake Indian illegal alien excusers, and mental defectives with ridiculous names like “Mazie.”

Except the “rule of law” is a lie and a scam and we Normals are woke to the grift and we’re not falling for it. Not anymore.

Sure, the rule of law is terrific in concept, and it would sure be nice to give it another whirl here in America, but we aren’t blind or stupid. We see what the “law” is and how it’s applied – there’s one law for the elite (that’s the one that never gets applied) and one for us Normals that’s designed to keep us in line with our mouths shut.

Today, the “law” is a weapon wielded by the establishment to cement its grip on its power and position. That’s why Democrats are so eager to repeal Citizens United and pass all sorts of new laws restricting election campaigning. They know they will be able to violate those laws with impunity while using them to jam up their conservative opponents.

Justice? That’s a laugh. And all the fake posturing and posing, both by the Democrats and by the conservaquisling crew, is not going to change our minds and make us unsee what is right before our eyes.

Sure, the law applies to everyone as written. The establishment, which is not even clever enough to hold onto power in an election against a reality TV show host, is at least clever enough to not speak aloud disclaimers like “Except we elite folks can do this.” No, its application is where this comes into play. The rule of law is not just words on the page; it is how those words are applied, and if they are not applied equally to everyone then there is no rule of law. And because there is no equal application of the law today, there is no rule of law in the United States today. As I’ve written in my novels People’s Republic and Indian Country, that’s a slippery slope you just don’t want to slide down.

What it means right now is that preferred establishment figures and groups get a free pass from their elite prosecutor pals, but you – an uppity Normal or the representative you choose – gets the full weight of the feds. That’s by design. The law is not designed to restrain our masters. It’s designed to keep you in chains. The elite tries to sell you on the idea that justice is blind, that before the law everyone is the same. But that’s a lie. It’s not, and that’s the way they want it.

Look at Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit. I recently asked fellow folks who did stuff with classified material back in the day what would have happened to one of us if we had done what that Looming Doofus James Comey said The Harpy did before handing her an “Elite Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free” card. The results were 99% “I’d be in Leavenworth,” and the other 1% insisted that I was racist and cisnormative for even bringing it up.

Do you think the FBI would give you a pass if you decided to respond to a subpoena by bleaching your hard drive? Come on. You’d be negotiating with Bubba for the top bunk’s primo cell block view. But the FBI brass gave her a pass, because she was their establishment pal. Then, when we dared to elect someone that the bureaucrats did not approve of, they picked a bunch of Hillary donors to “investigate” our candidate until they found a “crime.” I’m old enough to remember back when “Russian collusion” was a thing; actually, we’ve found that it was a thing only among the liberals paying people to pay Russians for a dossier as part of a campaign to undo the election. Yet, none of our law enforcement apparatus, under the wheezy command of Sleepy Jeff Sessions, seem interested in investigating that. I wonder what Jeff’s doing in the photos they must have of him – there’s an image to haunt your nightmares.

Where there are two sets of laws, there are no laws. There’s just power being applied to try to keep the Normals in line. Remember, Manafort was investigated and cleared years ago. Even that half-wit Michael Cohen would have kept up happily committing his low-grade graft if not for daring to be associated with the guy the establishment hates. By the way, I find it hilarious that Cohen gave Mueller the pleas to the two (fake) campaign finance “crimes” in exchange for five years. Idiot. He had the brass ring and gave it away – if he’d been my client, and I don’t represent gutless morons, I would have held out for six months home detention. And that sad-faced, desperate, basset hound-looking Democrat operative (working through fellow partisans in the Southern District of New York office) would have eventually given it to him.


Where are the indictments of the swamp dwellers pulling tax or foreign representation shenanigans with a (D) behind their name? How about one of the Podestas? Yeah, right. It’ll never happen. Normal-friendly General Flynn gets ambushed and pleads when he’s on the verge of bankruptcy and his family threatened; Clapper and Brennan lie away under oath to Congress then get juicy gigs on pinko networks. These selective prosecutions are a signal – defy the elite at your peril.

Favored groups like Illegal aliens get to flaunt our laws too. After all, Democrats want to replace us ornery Normals with more obedient voters, and the GOP squish caucus wants to help the Chamber of Commerce maintain an endless stream of submissive serfs to toil for the donor companies it represents. If a few more Americans die because we selectively enforce the law, eh, so what? How is a “sanctuary city” consistent with the rule of law? It’s not, and they don’t even pretend it is. And what happened to the Wall Street bankers and hedge fund guys who wrecked our savings in 2008? Oh, right – instead of jail time, they got a trillion of our dollars. When establishment hacks talk about the “rule of law,” they mean that they should be able to use the law to rule you while they get to ignore the law when it’s inconvenient.

So, is it any surprise that when the establishment now comes to us breathlessly announcing that they finally got the goods on Donald Trump breaking the law that we just shrug and laugh? As my upcoming book Militant Normals: How Regular Americans Are Rebelling Against the Elite to Reclaim Our Democracy explains, we Normals are no longer buying the lies. We see that the law as applied today is not a tool of justice but one of oppression. And this is bad. America is not policed by cops; it is policed by Americans, who generally used to see the law as fair and equal and thereby respected and obeyed it. But now? Forget it. Our refusal to recognize the law as legitimate anymore is the real danger for the establishment. Because where there are no rules, there is only power. And at the end of the day, the militant, Second Amendment-loving mass of Normal Americans has a lot more real power than them.
Title: Re: The Rule of Law Is a Sick Joke, Schlichter
Post by: DougMacG on August 31, 2018, 02:51:18 PM
Well expressed! Regarding bleach bitting a hard drive under subpoena, yes I'd be in Leavenworth. And if a Republican prosecutor kicked down the doors of Obama's lawyer's office and dug into his entire life story, the Left would be outraged and what came out of the search would surely be inadmissible.

We've had two standards of justice for quite some time but this is beyond argument. He writes with the chip on the shoulder that all conservatives feel. Liberals should consider these facts before judging our anger.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on August 31, 2018, 03:47:34 PM
" We've had two standards of justice for quite some time but this is beyond argument "

It sure is.

And where is Jeff Sessions on this.  I have come to agree with Lou Dobbs .

Sessions must go and we need someone not afraid (so it appears) to clean house  and  at least *try* to put a stop to this.

We don't here a darn peep from him.

Some lady on his show pointed out how the Republicans never know how to "kill" the opposition .  They only know to win the next election.

I admit the word kill might be changed to "beat down" perhaps but she is 100


% correct.

We just sit here and allow Dems and there hoards in the media to continue there distortion of truth and justice like patseis.

Title: Comey and Sandy "Fingers" Berger in 2004
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 04, 2018, 01:03:52 PM

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/mueller_comey_and_the_deep_state_rescue_of_sandy_berger.html
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on September 04, 2018, 04:20:33 PM

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/mueller_comey_and_the_deep_state_rescue_of_sandy_berger.html#ixzz5QB5I3Zvn
Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook :



"As punishment, Comey and crew recommended a $10,000 fine for Berger and a three-year loss of top-level security clearance. That, incredibly, was it. Oh, yes, as part of the package, the FBI and/or DoJ was to give Berger a lie detector test. Neither agency bothered."


and now with Repubs in charge at DOJ , ie sessions they do the same .  play with kid gloves while the crats fight with brass knucklles

and we will lose again in November
Title: Intriguing rumint about Clapper and Brennan; O'Keefe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2018, 11:58:11 AM
As best as I can tell this is a lot of rumint, albeit very intriguing rumint:

Fk!  Misplaced the URL!  The gist of it was that Clapper and Brennan hacked Justice Roberts and backed him off of voting against Obamacare.

Anyway, here is this:

http://hermancain.com/james-okeefe-hidden-camera-catches-state-dept-employee-bragging-about-serving-the-resistance-at-work/
Title: Dems on the Intel Gang of Eight colluding with DOJ?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 19, 2018, 08:46:04 PM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/09/18/corruption-junction-desperation-amid-democrat-members-of-the-intelligence-gang-of-eight/#more-154239
Title: Re: Dems on the Intel Gang of Eight colluding with DOJ?
Post by: G M on September 19, 2018, 09:03:29 PM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2018/09/18/corruption-junction-desperation-amid-democrat-members-of-the-intelligence-gang-of-eight/#more-154239

I wonder what is wrong with my copy of the constitution.





I can't find anything about how the DOJ/FBI operate independent of the chief executive in it.

Title: Plan 37
Post by: G M on September 26, 2018, 04:12:53 PM
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/09/plan-37-every-time-leftists-lose.html

It takes various forms.
Title: Squadron Property And Cultural Rubicons
Post by: G M on September 27, 2018, 11:03:33 AM
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2018/09/squadron-property-and-cultural-rubicons.html

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2018
Squadron Property And Cultural Rubicons

Vietnam was a helicopter war. Amidst the slow-rolling serial trainwreck that was most of the US participation in the Southeast Asian Wargames of 1965-1975, we had a plethora of helicopter squadrons deployed to the Republic of Viet Nam (for Common Core kids, that would be the southern one at the time), and as is liable to happen during such a war, a number of them were battle damaged. Many of them shot to pieces, hauled out, and reconditioned even after being 100% inoperable, to the point that we lost more helicopters in that war than the total we ever built, as some hulks were pieced and patched together multiple times after total loss. And the rest were salvaged for parts.

The apocryphal tale is told of one such repaired helicopter. As a standard procedure, once one puts a non-salvageable airframe back into service, by dint of some hellaciously skilled and dedicated airframe and powerplant mechanics in-country, it was a regulation that the resurrected bird be test-flown to demonstrate airworthiness and safety of operation. War is harsh, but seldom deliberately stupid, at least at the operational level. So it was under these parameters that one such salvaged bird was being test flown.

Given that most of the bases were in the coastal country, and most of the enemy main forces were inland, the best place to test-fly a helicopter and minimize getting it all shot to bits again was out over the South China Sea. This is a double-edged sword, but generally provided benefits that overrode the obvious drawback. Mostly.

But for the pilots and crew of one such helicopter, the law of averages caught up to them, and the helicopter, being test-flown well out over the ocean, disappeared without a trace. No mayday, no clue, just a helo and several souls gone, amidst a war that was eating both like a ravenous beast.

Enter the flexible and utilitarian morals and institutional larceny that allows the best-run military machines to cope with the insanity of war. Because a squadron, roughly comparable in size to an infantry battalion, is several hundred men, and even at 1960s prices, multiple millions of dollars worth of machines, tools, parts, equipment, and miscellany, from nuts and bolts to aircraft engines, and everything in between. Canteens, machine guns, flak jackets, toilet seats, high explosive ordnance, and everything else you can imagine, and a million things you cannot, in quantities normally only encountered at a Wal-Mart or Target store, or aboard a 100-car freight train.

And not to put the point too finely, 8000 miles away from home, in a war zone where things were destroyed daily by tons of bombs, rockets, mines, shells, bullets, and of course, the finest pilfering skills of one of the most thriving black market economies of all time. Anything not guarded 24/7 would disappear in minutes in Vietnam, up to and including entire aircraft and other major end-user items. (Think things like APCs, tanks, artillery pieces, jeeps, etc.)

And senior NCOs and junior officers are responsible for all that stuff, as well as every commanding officer having to personally sign for and accept responsibility for everything down to the last door knob and belt buckle. Which, amidst such widespread theft and combat destruction, was sheer insanity coupled with practical impossibility.

Until the helicopter went missing.

Because after a dutiful search for survivors yielded nothing whatsoever, a report had to be filed, and items accounted for. Whereupon some shifty but brilliant NCO or senior NCO pointed out to a junior officer that it would be rather convenient to cover for all the tons of things blown up, stolen, lost, pilfered, etc., to just include them on the manifest and equipment carried on that now gone-forever helicopter.

And so, in rapid order, every crew chief, maintenance shop, and officer from warrant to XO certified, in detail, the manifest of tools, spare parts, and military miscellany that had been aboard the doomed flight, and the CO signed off on it, immediately bringing the reality of property on hand into line with what was actually able to be found, touched, and wielded by that squadron.

This boon to military accounting had, of course, the obvious flaw.
Someone higher up in the hierarchy, presented with the dozens of pages of missing gear on the missing aircraft, did some napkin math, and observed deftly that the weight of the missing items would be roughly twenty times the maximum lifting capacity of the helicopter in question, and the only way a craft actually so burdened could have achieved aerial flight was if someone had detonated an explosive device under the skids in the mid-teen kiloton range. Otherwise, it would have been like trying to get an elephant off the ground using a pair of hummingbird wings.

But the military being the military, no one wanted to rock the boat, and so the obviously fraudulent work of fiction was funneled right back to the gaping maw of Pentagon reports, where it disappeared like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and the cosmic scales were in balance.

I bring that story up, because with the daily Clown Carnucopia of Fail that is the Noah's Ark of counterfeit accusers of Judge Kavanaugh, and the growing scale of recockulousness that they spiral into with each new fakenews "J'accuse!", it's only a matter of time before some cold-case weenie, or weenies, realize the golden opportunity this circus provides.

Judge Kavanaugh is about to find himself blamed for the Black Plague, the Chicago Fire, the Lindbergh Kidnapping, the Great Depression, being D.B. Cooper, causing Three Mile Island, Apollo XIII, the Exxon Valdez, turkey burgers, and the designated hitter rule. Then Interpol will pile on and tag him for annexing the Sudetenland, the Jack the Ripper murders, Vesuvius consuming Pompeii, setting Rome ablaze during Nero's reign, putting three seconds back on the clock in the 1972 Summer Olympics basketball finals, and the continued high regard in France for the films of Jerry Lewis. They may even drag the pope into this, and blame him for publishing Galileo's Dialogue, reconvening the Inquisition, and burning Kavanaugh at the stake for rank heresy. At this point, it's all simply the next logical step.

The serial lunacy of vague, obviously fabricated, and totally preposterous stories coming out hasn't merely jumped the shark; they passed jumping some days back, and are now strapping JATO bottles on that bitch, and trying to traverse the Grand Canyon, lengthwise, or possibly skipping straight to a low earth orbit.

And it would simply be desperate farce, except for the actual toxic and corrosive damage these asstards are doing to the country. Senators with the IQ of houseplants are literally setting the Constitution on fire in pursuit of a momentary partisan advantage. The only step lower than this is actual open hostilities.

They've finally gone full-on Captain Ahab barking lunatic batshit crazy, in their ceaseless pursuit of overturning an election whose simple reality they cannot rationally process.

"And he piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his heart's hot shell upon it." - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
They have casually trashed the sterling reputation of a sitting judge on the DC Court of Appeals, on the word of drunks, whores, and psychotic sociopaths (besides the former who are already in the Senate itself). After more than half a century of looking the other way at philandering, murder, and a presidential rapist and serial sexual predator while on duty in the West Wing, they have decided that only now, lacking anything else to try to stop the president from executing the duties of his office and filling a Supreme Court vacancy, this is the time to go all-in on gutting eight centuries of jurisprudence in place since Magna Carta, and doing it overnight.

There are at least four sitting senators who should not simply be censured, they should be impeached for breach of oath, and kicked right the f**k out of the Congress, and then prosecuted to maximum extent of civil and criminal law. So too the slanderous accusers in this ongoing epic charade.

And worst of all, they've happily set lying whores, and their baseless allegations, above the actual damage done to the nominee's family, a wife and two daughters, and irreparably harmed the cause of women who've suffered actual assaults, by reducing them all to the same calculus, in tarring them all with same presumption that every allegation is just a cheap stunt for political gain. And the defective delusional leftard harpies of the chorus, who couldn't get laid at a nerd conference even if their tits were Xbox controllers, are happy to sell their shriveled carbonized souls for the merest whiff of a chance to derail a slam-dunk SCOTUS nominee who doesn't share their beliefs in the disposability of unborn babies, whose antics can provide them the fifteen minutes of fame they treasure above actual accomplishment, and the attention they could never get from a lifetime of fatherless upbringings.

We're witnessing the destruction of the entire rule of law to salve the tortured psychoses of sluts with daddy issues, and to pander to their impotent ravings.

The only way this stops is to stop catering to it, and failing that due to a surplus of invertebrate RINOs, this is going to be rectified in the traditional manner.

When a man's reputation is sullied so casually, it ends with someone's teeth on the pavement, or a bullet hole in their liver on the dueling field.
Dulce et decorum est.

When you try to do the same thing to half of society, expecting it'll stop anywhere short of heads on pikes is a pipe dream. And I'm not speaking metaphorically in the slightest.

Because this is no longer just about Kavanaugh and his confirmation, though even Bitch McConjob finally seems to have found his voice - and spine - over this latest outrage.
This effort is nothing less than the permanent Othering of the entire species of soy-free meat-eating conservative males.

This is the Left finally working themselves up to the frenzy of a Kristallnacht.

And there's only one answer to that sort of cultural jihad:
Challenge accepted.

We wanted fair play.
The moonbats want to play Cowboys and Leftards.

As Timothy Turtle told ChuckU Schumer when the Senate dropped the bomb on cloture:
"You're going to regret this. And soon."
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 29, 2018, 01:13:13 PM
Nice piece of writing.
Title: Was the ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Against President Trump a Trans-Atlantic Affair?
Post by: G M on November 23, 2018, 05:33:01 PM
https://theothermccain.com/2018/11/22/was-the-deep-state-conspiracy-against-president-trump-a-trans-atlantic-affair/

Was the ‘Deep State’ Conspiracy Against President Trump a Trans-Atlantic Affair?
Posted on | November 22, 2018


 

When Steve Bannon and others began speaking of the “Deep State,” many people dismissed this as a paranoid conspiracy theory, without bothering to investigate what this phrase actually signifies. Let me summarize briefly: During the past 25 years or so, since the end of the Cold War, a general consensus about the shape of the international order has emerged among the policy-making elite, and the bureaucracies of the federal government are staffed with people who share this consensus. On a host of issues from climate change to immigration to trade, this consensus has solidified into a sort of secular religion among government employees, who oppose any attempt to disrupt the existing arrangements (e.g., “Brexit” or revising NAFTA). In 2016, those who share this policy consensus were “all-in” for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, because she was committed to a continuation of the status quo, whereas Donald Trump vowed to disrupt the existing order.

The “Deep State” refers to the fact — and it is a now an established fact, not a paranoid theory — that efforts to prevent Trump’s election were supported by personnel of national-security agencies, including the CIA and the FBI. Anyone who has paid attention to the texts between FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Pages can see this. And U.S. allies have also been implicated in the effort to prevent Trump’s election:

MI6 [the British intelligence agency] is locked in a secret battle with US President Donald Trump to persuade him not to disclose documents linked to the Russian election-meddling probe — it has been revealed.
Intelligence sources on both sides of the Atlantic told the Telegraph that spy bosses in London were frantically appealing to Trump not to make the classified documents public.
The President’s aides have reportedly hit back with questions over why Britain wants the documents to be kept secret.
But authorities in the UK say they have ‘genuine concern’ about sources being exposed if classified parts of the wiretap request were made public.
Other sources also said MI6 was concerned the publication of the documents would set a ‘dangerous precedent’ for the release of top secret information, and may dissuade future sources from coming forward.
A US based intelligence source said: ‘I think that stuff is going to implicate MI5 and MI6 in a bunch of activities they don’t want to be implicated in, along with FBI, counter-terrorism and the CIA.’
The documents in question concern an FBI request to wiretap former Trump policy adviser Carter Page, submitted a month before the Presidential election in 2016.
Documents show the FBI suspected Page of being lured in by Russian intelligence, and the bureau was given leave to place him under intense surveillance for several months. . . .
Memos describing alleged ties between Trump and Russia compiled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele are contained in the papers, which may form part of the reason for Britain’s concern.
Steele is most notable for authoring a dossier which claims Russia collected a file of compromising information on Trump.

Whatever policy quarrels Americans might have amongst ourselves, we ought to be able to agree that policy should be determined by elected officials, and not by the “hired help.” Employees of the FBI and the CIA are not independent policy-makers, but must answer to the President and to Congress. If federal employees are permitted to use their offices to interfere in the electoral process — effectively, to choose their own bosses — then the government ceases to be the servant of the people, and becomes the master. The manufactured outrage over “Russian collusion,” claiming that Trump is a Putin puppet, is a distraction from the issue of how the bureaucratic apparatus of the federal government has become a subversive influence in our politics and an obstacle to real reform.

What the alarm in British intelligence agencies shows is that “Deep State” operatives like Peter Strzok had the assistance of “Deep State” operatives in the U.K. in attempting to prevent Trump’s election. The claims by MI6 that declassification of these wiretaps might reveal sensitive counter-terrorism secrets are almost certainly a bogus argument, as what they actually seek to conceal is the extent to which Her Majesty’s government was part of a corrupt project intended to help elect Hillary Clinton.
Title: Deep State, Deep Stating
Post by: G M on December 02, 2018, 02:38:23 AM
https://coldfury.com/2018/12/01/deep-state-deep-stating/

Deep State, Deep Stating
 Posted on 12/1/2018      by Mike   
A lot of us seem shocked by this, but I can’t imagine why.

FBI agents raided the home of a recognized Department of Justice whistleblower who privately delivered documents pertaining to the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One to a government watchdog, according to the whistleblower’s attorney.

The Justice Department’s inspector general was informed that the documents show that federal officials failed to investigate potential criminal activity regarding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and Rosatom, the Russian company that purchased Uranium One, a document reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation alleges.

The delivered documents also show that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller failed to investigate allegations of criminal misconduct pertaining to Rosatom and to other Russian government entities attached to Uranium One, the document reviewed by TheDCNF alleges. Mueller is now the special counsel investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

Sixteen agents arrived at the home of Dennis Nathan Cain, a former FBI contractor, on the morning of Nov. 19 and raided his Union Bridge, Maryland, home, Socarras told TheDCNF.

The raid was permitted by a court order signed on Nov. 15 by federal magistrate Stephanie A. Gallagher in the U.S. District Court for Baltimore and obtained by TheDCNF.

“On Nov. 19, the FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity in the Union Bridge, Maryland area,” bureau spokesman Dave Fitz told TheDCNF. “At this time, we have no further comment.”

Well damn, transparent and above-board as all hell, then. No harm, no foul; carry on, dedicated public servants.

Cain informed the agent while he was still at the door that he was a recognized protected whistleblower under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act and that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz recognized his whistleblower status, according to Socarras.

Cain further told the FBI agent the potentially damaging classified information had been properly transmitted to the Senate and House Intelligence committees as permitted under the act, Socarras said. The agent immediately directed his agents to begin a sweep of the suburban home, anyway.

Frightened and intimidated, Cain promptly handed over the documents, Socarras told TheDCNF. Yet even after surrendering the information to the FBI, the agents continued to rummage through the home for six hours.

Disgusting? Yep. Unconscionable? indubitably. Something that simply couldn’t happen in a free society governed by the rule of law and the will of the people? Surely.

Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be us. The FBI, corrupt and un-American as it has been right from its inception, should have been torn down root, branch, and bough long ago. It won’t be—not even for something as brazenly egregious as this. They’ll get away with it—just like Hillary!™, Obama, Mueller, Comey, and the rest of the cabal will skate on the various high crimes they committed, crimes that this outrage was launched for the purpose of keeping buried. Full stop, end of story.

More precisely, this was a two-pronged, dual-purpose maneuver: intended to both provide cover for the Deep State’s own precious bloated ass, and to send a message of threat and intimidation to any who would dare contemplate moving against them. No more, no less. Now you can look for the story to go away with a quickness. When it does, you’ll know the whole thing worked as intended…and that the Deep State is alive and well, emboldened by Black Tuesday’s dismal results…and winning.
Title: FBI raided home of whistleblower
Post by: ccp on December 02, 2018, 10:41:19 AM
"Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be us. The FBI, corrupt and un-American as it has been right from its inception, should have been torn down root, branch, and bough long ago. It won’t be—not even for something as brazenly egregious as this. They’ll get away with it—just like Hillary!™, Obama, Mueller, Comey, and the rest of the cabal will skate on the various high crimes they committed, crimes that this outrage was launched for the purpose of keeping buried. Full stop, end of story."

thanks to a media that looks the other way when it protects the dems or their narrative

Trump could release all this , I read.  He is saving for the right time I hope.  Of course when he does the left will simply attack him, the messenger , not the message which they always do .....

 :x

Title: Faking Bogus Investigations
Post by: G M on December 06, 2018, 04:50:55 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/378537.php

December 06, 2018
How Did The FBI Get a Warrant for a Raid Against a... Whistleblower Protected by the Whistleblower Law? Did They Tell the Judge He Was a Whistleblower with Whistleblower Protections? Or Did They Forget to Mention That?

The FBI forgot to mention that the unverified oppo file they got a FISA with had been paid for and put together by Trump's opponent in an election.

The FBI has a lot of Ooopsies lately.

Did they have another Ooopsie when they raided a whistleblower who'd given the government information about the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One?

Whistleblower activists condemned the FBI's raid of a recognized whistleblower, Dennis Cain.

Cain had previously shared documents with Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

The documents contained potential wrongdoing regarding the Clinton Foundation, the Uranium One deal and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to Cain's lawyer.

Whistleblower advocates across the political spectrum condemned an FBI raid on the home of a recognized whistleblower who reported potential wrongdoing surrounding the Clinton Foundation, the Uranium One deal and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Daily Caller News Foundation, in a bombshell report, detailed how 16 FBI agents raided the home of Dennis Cain, a former employee of an FBI contractor, on Nov. 19. They rummaged through his home for six hours even though he told them that Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz awarded him whistleblower status, according to Cain;s lawyer, Michael Socarras.

...

Everyone TheDCNF interviewed said the raid should never have occurred. They said it appeared Cain followed the rules in accordance to the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, which protects federal whistleblowers from retaliation.

...

"This isn’t how we should be treating whistleblowers who are coming forward with information about high level wrongdoing," [an expert] told TheDCNF. "It sends a very strong message that you will be treated as a criminal even though what you're trying to do is expose crime or a potential crime."

Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, the liberal advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, told TheDCNF: "Well it certainly sounds like an absolute violation of the spirit of what the whistleblower law is supposed to be all about."

The documents Cain possessed, which he gave to the special agent leading the search, show that federal officials failed to investigate potential criminal activity pertaining to Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and the Russian company that purchased Uranium One, according to a document TheDCNF reviewed.

...

A conservative attorney on ethics law, Cleta Mitchell, questioned whether the FBI was truthful when it sought the court order.

"If they did not fully advise the court of his whistleblower status, then I would find that to be extremely troublesome," she said. "The main question is whether or not they properly informed the court that this individual is a whistleblower and that he had gone through the procedures to receive whistleblower status."

"Until Mr. Cain's attorney is able to see what the FBI or the U.S. Attorney presented to the court in order to obtain this search warrant, then we have no way of knowing and he has no way of knowing whether they fully and properly advised the court that he had whistleblower status, and whether they informed the judge that he had gone through all of the proper procedures," Mitchell continued.


...

"If the search warrant for Mr. Cain’s property was based on an affidavit that purposely or recklessly omitted his whistleblower status, like my client's case against the Smith County Sheriff [in Texas], the search could be ruled unreasonable and hence a Fourth Amendment violation," [a lawyer] said.

"Material information may occasionally inadvertently be left out of a search warrant affidavit, but it is rare and dangerous when it is done purposely or recklessly," Baggish continued.
The documents relating to the raid and the warrant application materials are all conveniently under seal.
Title: Mueller's gift to Obama
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2018, 12:23:35 PM
Mueller’s Gift to Obama
Shouldn’t the special counsel investigate the crimes that drew Flynn into his probe?
550 Comments
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Dec. 6, 2018 6:32 p.m. ET

Robert Mueller looks to be approaching his endgame, and the press is alive with speculation as to how bad the special counsel’s report will be for President Trump. It’s also worth noticing how good Mr. Mueller has been to another president, Barack Obama, and his team.

This benevolence was on display in the sentencing document the special counsel’s office filed on Tuesday for Mike Flynn. The former Trump national security adviser, we are told, has provided “substantial assistance,” sitting for 19 interviews that aided in “several ongoing investigations.” In light of this help, the Mueller team recommends leniency—perhaps even sparing him prison time.

That would be just. The special counsel provides no evidence Mr. Flynn was part of any collusion with Russia. He was instead brought up on a charge of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And it’s not even clear he did that. The FBI officials who first interviewed Mr. Flynn didn’t think he lied about his interactions with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. More likely, Mr. Flynn copped a plea to save his son from worse treatment at Mr. Mueller’s hands.

But what about the potential crimes that put Mr. Flynn in Mr. Mueller’s crosshairs to begin with? On Jan. 2, 2017, the Obama White House learned about Mr. Flynn’s conversations with Mr. Kislyak. The U.S. monitors phone calls of foreign officials, but under law they are supposed to “minimize” the names of any Americans caught up in such eavesdropping. In the Flynn case, someone in the prior administration either failed to minimize or purposely “unmasked” Mr. Flynn. The latter could itself be a felony.

Ten days later someone in that administration leaked to the Washington Post that Mr. Flynn had called Mr. Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016. On Feb. 9, 2017, someone leaked to the Post and the New York Times highly detailed and classified information about the Flynn-Kislyak conversation.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has called this leak the most destructive to national security that he seen in his time in Washington. Disclosing classified information is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison. The Post has bragged that its story was sourced by nine separate officials.

The Mueller team has justified its legal wanderings into money laundering (Paul Manafort) and campaign contributions (Michael Cohen) on grounds that it has an obligation to follow up on any evidence of crimes, no matter how disconnected from its Russia mandate. Mr. Flynn’s being caught up in the probe is related to a glaring potential crime of disclosing classified material, yet Mr. Mueller appears to have undertaken no investigation of that. Is this selective justice, or something worse? Don’t forget Mr. Mueller stacked his team with Democrats, some of whom worked at the highest levels of the Obama administration, including at the time of the possible Flynn unmasking and the first leak.

The Flynn sentencing document, meanwhile, contained yet another outrageous gift to Obama alumni. In laying out the “serious” nature of Mr. Flynn’s crimes, the document asserts that one of the questions about the Flynn-Kislyak discussion was whether “the defendant’s actions violated the Logan Act,” a 1799 statute that criminalizes negotiation by unauthorized persons with foreign governments that are in dispute with the U.S.

Only two defendants have ever been charged under the Logan Act, the more recent one in 1852, and neither was convicted. It is normal for members of a presidential transition team to talk to their foreign counterparts, and on all manner of subjects. Yet Democrats seized on the Logan Act in the waning days of the Obama administration as a pretext to investigate the Trump team, and to intervene in the Flynn case. It was on Logan Act grounds that then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates dispatched FBI agents to interview Mr. Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017—the interview now central to Mr. Mueller’s charge that he lied to investigators.

It’s hard to overstate how unserious the Logan Act claim is. If Mr. Mueller has no case to make that Mr. Flynn violated the Logan Act, he has no business bringing it up. The only conceivable reason to throw it in was to give cover to the Obama officials who used it as their excuse to target Mr. Flynn in the first place, which they then used to help justify the appointment of a special counsel. Mr. Mueller’s deputy, Andrew Weissman, worked for Ms. Yates, and before Mr. Trump fired her for insubordination, Mr. Weissman emailed her to say he was “proud” and “in awe” of her for defying the president.

The Mueller team in its document praises Mr. Flynn’s “exemplary” military and public service, but concluded that “senior government leaders” should nonetheless “be held to the highest standards.” If only Mr. Mueller believed that applied to all public officials, including Obama Democrats.

Write to kim@wsj.com.

Appeared in the December 7, 2018, print edition.
Title: Re: Mueller's gift to Obama
Post by: DougMacG on December 08, 2018, 07:50:13 PM
The facts against Flynn open up an important question, who illegally unmasked and leaked and when will they get prosecuted?  How does he prosecute a crime without prosecuting the crime that led him to the crime?  And  coincidentally have it all fall on one side of the political spectrum...  We have US$40 million into this so far.  The American people deserve a just result.

From the article:
"The U.S. monitors phone calls of foreign officials, but under law they are supposed to “minimize” the names of any Americans caught up in such eavesdropping. In the Flynn case, someone in the prior administration either failed to minimize or purposely “unmasked” Mr. Flynn. The latter could itself be a felony.

Ten days later someone in that administration leaked to the Washington Post that Mr. Flynn had called Mr. Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016. On Feb. 9, 2017, someone leaked to the Post and the New York Times highly detailed and classified information about the Flynn-Kislyak conversation.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has called this leak the most destructive to national security that he seen in his time in Washington. Disclosing classified information is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison. The Post has bragged that its story was sourced by nine separate officials."

Nine identifiable felonies?  Not counting the unmasker.

[Unmasking Flynn] "could itself be a felony."

This reaches to the very high heights in the Obama administration.  Why the kid gloves on just one side and throwing the book at the other?  
Title: Re: Mueller's gift to Obama
Post by: G M on December 08, 2018, 08:50:13 PM
The facts against Flynn open up an important question, who illegally unmasked and leaked and when will they get prosecuted?  How does he prosecute a crime without prosecuting the crime that led him to the crime?  And  coincidentally have it all fall on one side of the political spectrum...  We have US$40 million into this so far.  The American people deserve a just result.

From the article:
"The U.S. monitors phone calls of foreign officials, but under law they are supposed to “minimize” the names of any Americans caught up in such eavesdropping. In the Flynn case, someone in the prior administration either failed to minimize or purposely “unmasked” Mr. Flynn. The latter could itself be a felony.

Ten days later someone in that administration leaked to the Washington Post that Mr. Flynn had called Mr. Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016. On Feb. 9, 2017, someone leaked to the Post and the New York Times highly detailed and classified information about the Flynn-Kislyak conversation.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has called this leak the most destructive to national security that he seen in his time in Washington. Disclosing classified information is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison. The Post has bragged that its story was sourced by nine separate officials."

Nine identifiable felonies?  Not counting the unmasker.

[Unmasking Flynn] "could itself be a felony."

This reaches to the very high heights in the Obama administration.  Why the kid gloves on just one side and throwing the book at the other?  


Because they can. Who is stopping them?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on December 09, 2018, 04:18:08 AM
"Because they can. Who is stopping them?"

answer : no one.

When even Trump's ex lawyer comes out after leaving the Trump's defense legal team and exclaims: Mueller is a "great man" then we can see how deep the swamp is.
After just defending Trump he comes out to protect his own interests not those of his previous client.

Nearly everyone connected, looking out for themselves, and in on the DC game.


Title: Outstanding summary of Mueller's unequal application of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2018, 04:33:15 AM


https://outline.com/3npHvL
Title: Re: Outstanding summary of Mueller's unequal application of law, VDH
Post by: DougMacG on December 11, 2018, 05:32:10 AM
https://outline.com/3npHvL

Saving this in its entirety.

NATIONAL REVIEW
One-Eyed-Jack Law
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON DECEMBER 04, 2018

Robert Mueller’s legal team may write a damning report on Trump’s ethics, based mostly on flipping minor former business associates of Trump’s and transient campaign officials by threatening them with long prison sentences.

So far, we know that the U.S. government decided to intervene in a political campaign to help one candidate and to smear the other — under the pretext of Russian “collusion.” And so it hired or made use of spies and informants including Hank Greenberg, Stefan Halper, Felix Sater, and others to contact Trump campaign officials to catch them in supposed collusion traps. It enlisted the help of foreign intelligence agencies, specifically the British and Australians. It misled FISA courts into granting warrants to spy on Americans and, post factum, threatened long prisons sentences with those surveilled and interviewed. And as a result, it has so far found no collusion but may well find some misleading statements in hundreds of hours of testimonies from the likes of Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, and perhaps Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone.

Mueller cannot fulfill the hype of the past 18 months, which forecast that the “all-stars,” the “dream-team,” and the Mueller “army” would make short work of the supposedly buffoonish Trump by proving that he colluded with Russia to swing an election. Collusion, remember, was hyped as doing what the Logan Act, the emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, impeachment, media frenzy, and assassination-chic rhetoric had not.

By indicting a number of minor characters on charges that so far have nothing to do with collusion — for purported crimes mostly committed after the special-counsel appointment — Mueller has emphasized the quantity rather than the quality of indictments.

Mueller was tasked to find collusion (itself not a crime) committed during 2015 and 2016, not to prompt more purported crimes by setting perjury traps, and purported obstruction-of-justice liabilities. If in May 2017 the frenzied media had known that 18 months later Mueller would end up targeting the provocateur Roger Stone and Inforwars’ Jerome Corsi, it would have been sorely humiliated.

Mueller has already weaponized politics, making a crime out of the tawdry business of opposition research — but only sort of, since his interests in doing so are highly selective. And so his chief legacy will have little to do with whatever he finds on Donald Trump. He has already established the precedent that there is now no real equality under the law, at least as Americans once understood fair play and blind justice.

Once Mueller deviated from his prime directive of determining whether Donald Trump colluded — sought help from the Russian to win the 2016 election in exchange for the promise of later benefits — and turned to indicting political operatives for supposedly giving false testimonies about political shenanigans and engaging in illegal business practices, lobbying, and tax avoidance, he either knowingly or unknowingly established a precedent that the serial misdeeds of 2016 would be treated unequally under the law.

Russian Collusion
The 13 Russian nationals whom Mueller symbolically indicted will not come to the U.S. to face trial, and they will certainly not be extradited, a fact known by Mueller.

Yet Christopher Steele, a British subject and de facto unregistered foreign agent, is imminently indictable and extraditable. He was paid through two firewalls (Fusion GPS and Perkins Coie) by Hillary Clinton to tap Russian sources to compile a smear dossier on her opponent, with the intent of warping the U.S. election — a classic example of foreign-agent interference in an American campaign. If we were to take away that one purchased document, then the FISA court warrants, the informants, and all the CIA, FBI, and DOJ machinations would likely have disappeared or never arisen.

Obama-administration officials Bruce Ohr (whose wife worked on the dossier) at Justice, James Comey at the FBI, and John Brennan at the CIA all in some manner colluded with Steele, either directly or indirectly, to monitor the Trump campaign and then to seed the dossier among government agencies and courts, both to ensure its leakage and to brand it with a stamp of official seriousness, warranting investigations and media sensationalism.

Speaking of FBI informants, quite a different one has testified that Putin’s Russia had sent millions of dollars to a U.S. lobbying firm, in hopes of persuading Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to use her influence with federal officials to close the so-called Rosatom Uranium One deal. At roughly the same time, Bill Clinton was given a lucrative half-million-dollar fee for speaking in Moscow, while millions of dollars from Uranium One investors had poured into the Clinton Foundation — which after Clinton’s 2016 defeat has seen its contributions precipitously decline.

In another related matter of Russian collusion, Barack Obama in a hot-mic exchange with then–Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, in March 2012, eight months before Obama’s reelection, asked Medvedev to give Putin the assurance that if Putin would give Obama “space” during his reelection campaign, then Obama in turn would have “more flexibility” on issues such as missile defense “after my election.” That quid pro quo was clarified six months later when an unusually quiet Putin darkly announced to the world that any deployment of U.S.-led NATO missile-defense systems would be targeted against Russia in a Romney administration — as compared with the actions in supposedly less bellicose Obama presidency. And after expressing no interest in interfering in an American election, Putin clearly made it evident that he preferred an Obama victory.

Most observers now laugh off this entire sordid incident. But in the present climate, if Donald Trump had been caught in a similar hot-mic exchange with a top Russian official, and had Putin later expressed the idea that he preferred a Trump presidency to a Democratic one, and had U.S.-led missile-defense efforts abruptly stalled in Eastern Europe, then Robert Mueller would be hot on Trump’s trail — given that such an overt quid pro quo, benefiting a candidate’s reelection campaign, is far more explicit than anything Mueller’s 18-month investigation has yet turned up.

Perjury and False Testimony
Bruce Ohr filed a false federal disclosure affidavit, in that he did not reveal, as required, that his wife was employed by Fusion GPS to work on the Steele dossier. Nor did he disclose that after the election he had been in contact with Steele, offering his help in the effort to find proof of collusion.

James Comey, along with Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, and Sally Yates, at various times submitted requests to a FISA court that deliberately never disclosed that their chief evidence for such surveillance was 1) paid for by Hillary Clinton (instead, the applications claimed vaguely that it was a product of generic opposition research, likely and by design confusing its Republican-primary origins with its maturity under Clinton auspices), 2) used as a circular source for news accounts produced in turn to establish its fides, 3) unsubstantiated and either not fact-checked or found to be impossible to verify, 4) compiled by an author already dismissed by the FBI as a unreliable asset.

Either Andrew McCabe or James Comey has likely perjured himself; or both may have. Their conflicting testimonies about leaking information to the media, and the relative importance of the Steele dossier for FISA court warrants, cannot be reconciled.

Comey deliberately leaked memos of presidential conversations to a friend in the media; these memos were classified as secret or confidential and perhaps in at least one case actually contained classified info. His intent, according to his own testimony, was to alter the nature of a Department of Justice investigation by having a special counsel appointed. A short time later Robert Mueller, a friend and former working associate of Comey’s, was appointed as the special counsel.

John Brennan has never fully or honestly explained his conversations with Senator Harry Reid concerning the Steele dossier, or Reid’s purported version that Brennan was briefing Reid in order to make sure that such intelligence — leaked widely — would be seeded with the FBI. And the FBI has never explained whether, at the height of a presidential campaign, it hired informants to be inserted into the Trump campaign or to associate with minor Trump officials in order to draw them out about the Steele dossier or set perjury traps for them.

Brennan has never faced consequences for admittedly lying under oath to Congress about collateral drone damage and surveillance of Senate staff computers; James Clapper likewise admittedly lied to Congress about NSA surveillance and faced no consequences. Has any administration ever had its two top intelligence officials admit to lying under oath on matters of national policy and security, and with impunity to a congressional committee?

Both Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills likely lied to FBI investigators about the extent of their knowledge of Clinton’s private email server. In Orwellian fashion, FBI investigator Peter Strzok claimed that Abedin and Mills were not truthful to the federal investigators, while he concluded that General Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser, had been.

Yet Flynn was targeted for giving false information to federal officials, while Abedin and Mills never were. Of course, Clinton herself lied when she insisted that she had transmitted no classified information over the server, and she destroyed over 30,000 emails Congress had subpoenaed — all without any criminal liability.

Obstruction of Justice and Conflicts of Interests
Bruce Ohr, while a Justice official, was negotiating with Fusion GPS on a variety of matters, while his spouse was employed by Fusion founder Glenn Simpson to research the Steele dossier.

Glenn Simpson deliberately misled a congressional investigation about his post-election efforts to collect anti-Trump information, and he sought to disguise the fact that he was actively operating with donors and activists to smear the Trump team during their transition to the White House.

No one has ever seriously investigated the activities of Daniel Jones, who worked for Fusion GPS and was apparently a former FBI agent and staff investigator for Senator Dianne Feinstein, and who as a freelancer received millions of dollars from anti-Trump donors (reportedly Silicon Valley activists and George Soros) and, after Trump was president, in March 2017, met with FBI officials to share information gathered by his Penn Quarter Group designed to harm the Trump presidency.

Andrew McCabe’s spouse was a recipient of huge contributions from a Clinton-affiliated super PAC for her 2016 candidacy in Virginia, and not much later her husband was tasked to exercise key oversight in the Clinton email scandal.

Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel, signed a dubious FISA warrant request. Such surveillance was apparently useful to his appointee Robert Mueller’s ability to issue indictments against some minor Trump officials. Was Mueller ever going to examine whether Rosenstein improperly helped produce a FISA court warrant that was central to Mueller’s own investigation?

The Podesta brothers had long had ties with Russian business interests approximating Paul Manafort’s own Russian connections, and John Podesta occupied a key role in Hillary Clinton’s reelection bid (analogous to Manafort’s in the Trump campaign) — with the difference that he was never fired but played an increasingly important role in Clinton’s campaign efforts.

Leaking and Improper Transfer of Classified Information
In addition to the leaking by the FBI’s two top officials, James Comey and Andrew McCabe, we know that several top Obama officials requested the unmasking of names of U.S. citizens swept up in FISA surveillance. And some names then found their way into the media cycles before the election and during the presidential transition.

In the voluminous text correspondence between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, there is also reference to a planned joint “media leak strategy with DOJ” to smear Carter Page. Again, no one has been charged with the deliberate leaking of government documents and communications to the media for the expressed intent of harming a presidential campaign and transition.

CNN, relying on government and congressional officials’ leaks, falsely reported a number of damaging Trump stories: that transition official Anthony Scaramucci had colluded with a Russian financial official about easing sanctions; that Donald Trump knew in advance of a meeting that his son had agreed to with a Russian operator; that Trump Jr. knew in advance of the contents of the WikiLeaks Podesta trove; and that James Comey would testify to Congress that he never had assured Trump he was not under investigation.

These were all fake news stories, prompting retractions or resignations, and they came from deliberate government leaks floated to harm the Trump administration — in the manner later outlined in a September 5, 2018 op-ed by a Trump-administration official who admitted to actively impeding, with other veritable saboteurs, the actions of the president, in the belief that many of the “resistance” like him in the executive branch had a moral duty to thwart the actions of a duly elected president.

One-Eyed Jacks
In sum, a group of Obama-administration officials and appointees in 2016 colluded with Clinton-campaign personnel to ensure that Donald Trump would not be elected in 2016 and, later, to make sure that his transition and early presidency would fail or be aborted.

Such officials took great risks (some 25 FBI and DOJ officials subsequently retired or were fired or reassigned) in working with foreign interests such as Christopher Steele and by extension his Russian sources to break U.S. laws and to attempt to warp an election — in the belief that there was almost no chance that Trump would be elected. In a Clinton presidency, their beyond-the-call-of-duty insurance work would be rewarded rather than punished.

These efforts failed to stop Trump from winning, and they did not derail his transition. Yet deliberate leaking to the media of the now-stale Steele dossier, “research” from FBI informants planted among minor Trump campaign officials, and improperly warranted government surveillance of former Trump-related officials created a media frenzy, out of which a fired James Comey helped engineer a new lever against Trump: the special-counsel investigation.

In the subsequent 18 months, Robert Mueller assembled a highly partisan team of lawyers and investigators that included a number of Clinton donors; lawyers who had represented either the Clinton Foundation, a Clinton aide, or an Obama official; and rank anti-Trump partisans such as Lisa Page and Peter Strzok. Their task was to investigate the charges of Russian collusion as planted by those in government and Christopher Steele and his abettors.

Such skullduggery poses the question of whether Mueller’s investigation has been simply derailed by partisanship. Or has it effectively served as a deliberate distraction from the felonious behavior of dozens of Obama-administration and Clinton-campaign officials — all determined to ensure, by any means necessary, that Trump would never be president?

 http://outline.com/3npHvL
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2018, 05:35:04 AM
GOOD IDEA!
Title: AGree with VDH
Post by: ccp on December 11, 2018, 11:36:52 AM
But then you have Bill Kristol's favorite candidate, David French just a few days ago, posting this:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/republicans-must-reject-russia-hoax-conspiracies-and-examine-the-evidence/
Title: Re: AGree with VDH
Post by: DougMacG on December 11, 2018, 04:18:19 PM
But then you have Bill Kristol's favorite candidate, David French just a few days ago, posting this:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/republicans-must-reject-russia-hoax-conspiracies-and-examine-the-evidence/

A deeply flawed column. After 2 years of Investigation, none of us have seen evidence or reason to believe Trump colluded illegally with Russia. The crimes committed by Hillary are a matter of public record. What is the comparison?
Title: Obama DOJ skullduggery
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 31, 2018, 09:28:25 AM


https://www.theepochtimes.com/obama-doj-treated-clinton-and-trump-unequally-house-probe-concludes_2752181.html
Title: Did Brennan & Clapper hack FISA judge, Chief Justice Roberts? Comey cover up?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 03, 2019, 09:09:30 AM


https://bigleaguepolitics.com/evidence-brennan-and-clapper-hacked-fisa-court-judge-reggie-walton-comey-covered-it-up/
Title: NO compromise possible . period
Post by: ccp on January 05, 2019, 04:24:41 PM
bills be submitted to abolish the electoral college,  to make DC 51 st state

to ignore and promote massive immigration
is NOT compromise

This is designed to wipe us out (on the right ).

Obviously some rinos including Mitt don't care.  (he is rich so what the hell does he care)

I do and I don't want to just simply lie down .

Title: Re: NO compromise possible . period
Post by: DougMacG on January 05, 2019, 07:39:59 PM
ccp:  "bills be submitted to abolish the electoral college"

It can start in Congress but requires a constitutional amendment and 38 states to ratify.  As posted previously, South Dakota is the 38th most liberal state.  Mathematically, we will switch to electing Presidents by majority rule (whatever California wants) and eliminate the Senate with two Senators per state as soon as states like South Dakota want to give up all power to the more populous states.  Never.  Same with repealing the Second Amendment, etc.

How does DC become a state?  https://wamu.org/story/16/05/02/dc_wants_to_become_the_51st_state_and_heres_how_it_plans_on_going_about_it/

Puerto Rico statehood?  https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/11/15782544/puerto-rico-pushes-for-statehood-explained


Title: Re: NO compromise possible . period
Post by: G M on January 05, 2019, 08:33:11 PM
bills be submitted to abolish the electoral college,  to make DC 51 st state

to ignore and promote massive immigration
is NOT compromise

This is designed to wipe us out (on the right ).

Obviously some rinos including Mitt don't care.  (he is rich so what the hell does he care)

I do and I don't want to just simply lie down .



We are a hated minority that the left wishes to wipe out. They have decided that we Neo-Kulaks are what is preventing them from realizing their eutopia.

Plan accordingly.
Title: The most successful coverup
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 07, 2019, 04:36:17 PM
Hat tip to our GM

https://spectator.org/the-most-successful-coverup/


Democrats get away with a much worse crime than Watergate.
Since Watergate, the Washington wisdom has always held that it’s not the crime, it’s the coverup that sinks a politician. But that’s only the case when the coverup fails.

But what if the coverup succeeds?

It’s horribly simple. The crimes are never uncovered and the perpetrators are never brought to justice no matter how serious their crimes may be. That is precisely what has happened because of the FBI and Justice Department’s coverup of their abuses of power and illegal actions during the 2016 election.

In this case, the FBI and the Justice Department have succeeded in the most significant coverup in American political history. The abuses of power and crimes they have succeeded in covering up are not only against the law: they are crimes against our system of law and government. They were perpetrated by employees of the government, under color of law, with the intention of affecting the outcome of an election.

For almost two years an investigation into the abuses of power — and probable crimes — committed by the FBI and Justice Department during the election has been conducted by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes (R-Cal).  Rep. Bob Goodlatte — chairman of the Judiciary Committee — and Trey Gowdy — chairman of the Oversight and government reform committee — tried to investigate other aspects of the FBI and DoJ actions.

These investigations have been stonewalled by the refusal of the FBI and Justice Department to produce the documents and provide access to witnesses that would, in all likelihood, prove that the major abuses of power and crimes had been committed.

Nunes, Goodlatte, and Gowdy had effectively split their inquiries: Nunes investigating possible crimes and abuses of power under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Goodlatte and Gowdy jointly investigating the FBI’s mishandling and improper actions in its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private, insecure email system for conversations with her staff — and Obama — on top secret information, including special access programs and satellite intelligence.

The two important products of those investigations were the 18 January 2017 memo declassified by President Trump and released by Nunes and the newly released 28 December 2018 letter from Goodlatte and Gowdy addressed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, and DoJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

If this is the first you’ve heard of the 28 December letter, that’s because it’s been studiously ignored by the media.

The key facts revealed by the Nunes memo were:

(1) that the FBI used, as the factual basis for the Foreign Intelligence Act Surveillance Court warrant applications, information from the Steele dossier, a compilation of anti-Trump information that the FBI had not verified. The FBI nevertheless swore to the truth of that information to obtain surveillance warrants on Carter Page, a one-time Trump campaign advisor; and

(2) that in the process of obtaining the search warrants the FBI failed to inform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

As I wrote at the time of the memo’s release, and on several occasions since, the Nunes memo showed that the actions of the FBI and Justice Department, sometimes in conjunction with the Obama White House, were worse than Watergate.

The Nunes investigation is over, but myriad questions remain. Among them:

What other FISA warrants were obtained to surveil the communications of Americans, particularly those of the Trump campaign advisors and Trump himself?
Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, was asking for and obtaining hundreds of “unmaskings,” revealing of U.S. citizens’ identities when their communications were intercepted by the FBI and NSA as part of intelligence operations. Whose names were unmasked, was this information used to Trump’s disadvantage in the campaign, why did the unmaskings occur, and what information was shared by Rice with Obama and/or Clinton?
What direction did the FBI, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies receive from Obama, Rice, and Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, with respect to the monitoring of Trump-related communications?
Most, if not all, of that information could be gleaned from documents and testimony the FBI and DoJ have withheld from congressional investigators.

The latest, and almost certainly last, effort to expose the facts of this scandal are contained in the Goodlatte-Gowdy letter. They are the last exposé because the Democrats have stopped these investigations cold. There will be no more hearings, no more testimony, and no further attempts to get the documents and testimony from the FBI and Justice Department that have been withheld.

The Goodlatte-Gowdy letter is as revealing as was the Nunes memo. The two outgoing committee chairmen chose to focus on the importance of decisions made and not made by the FBI and DoJ, the bias of some agents and attorneys involved, and the evidently disparate treatment of the Clinton email investigation and the counter-intelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.

Under 18 US Code Section 793(f) it is a felony to handle classified information in a “grossly negligent” manner. The Goodlatte-Gowdy letter flatly says that the FBI and DoJ read elements into the “gross negligence” law that do not exist. In then-FBI director James Comey’s 5 July 2016 televised statement exonerating Clinton, the FBI read into the law a higher level of scienter — intent and knowledge of the unlawfulness of conduct — than the law required.

Moreover, the letter says, there is little or no evidence investigators made any effort to identify evidence that could have satisfied the FBI-devised scienter element that is not in the law.

We should remember Comey’s televised statement in which he said that “no reasonable prosecutor” would have brought a case against Clinton under the gross negligence law. He also said that the decision not to do so was unanimous among those involved.

That was one of Comey’s biggest lies. As the Goodlatte-Gowdy letter points out, FBI General Counsel James Baker told them that he did believe a case could be made and the recommendation not to charge Clinton wasn’t unanimous.

Goodlatte and Gowdy point out that Comey’s exoneration memo was drafted before all of the relevant witnesses had been interviewed. What they fail to mention is that the FBI and DoJ were handing out immunity from prosecution agreements to Clinton staffers as freely as if the agreements were Halloween candy.

Immunity agreements are given to key witnesses in criminal investigations for a price: their testimony against a target of the investigation which could not otherwise be obtained. There is no evidence whatsoever that any of the witnesses involved — Clinton staffers such as Cheryl Mills, her chief of staff at the State Department — gave any evidence that justified the immunity agreements.

The Goodlatte-Gowdy letter also points out that the Comey exoneration memo was changed before it was issued, but fails to specify the biggest change. Originally a part of the memo said that Clinton and her staff handled classified information in a “grossly negligent” manner. Comey changed that to read “extremely careless,” clearly to prevent the law from being applied. The only difference between the two phrases is that one appears in the statute and one doesn’t, but Comey nevertheless stated that there was no prosecutable case.

Comey also, according to the letter, overlooked evidence that foreign actors had accessed Clinton’s emails, and probably those of her staffers, including at least one containing “Secret” information. That information, too, was excised from Comey’s draft exoneration memo for the purpose of helping Clinton.

The only conclusion possible — which Goodlatte and Gowdy do not state — is that Comey’s FBI intentionally gave Clinton a pass when they should have recommended to the Justice Department that she be prosecuted.

Comey is not the only malfeasant named in the Goodlatte-Gowdy letter. The other is former FBI agent Peter Strzok, he of the thousands of text messages sent to or received from his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, that showed he — and she and others in the FBI — weren’t only biased against Trump, but had an abiding hatred of him.

Strzok’s central role in the Clinton and Trump investigations probably ended in 2017 when Special Counsel Robert Mueller removed him from the Mueller team. Before that, as the letter says, Strzok:

Conducted the interview of Clinton (which wasn’t recorded or transcribed contrary to normal procedure) and participated heavily in other aspects of the Clinton investigation;
Initiated the Russia investigation of the Trump campaign and helped draft— and possibly swore to — the FISA warrant applications;
Promised to stop Trump from becoming president and openly discussed an “insurance policy” if Trump won;
Called Trump “destabilizing; and
Interviewed Michael Flynn, leading to Flynn’s indictment for lying to the FBI.
Strzok was finally fired from the FBI in August 2018. We — including Nunes, Goodlatte and Gowdy — don’t know whether he was involved in the investigation of the Trump campaign after Mueller removed him in 2017.

Comey’s appearances in congressional hearings have yielded nothing of value because he has been instructed by FBI lawyers not to answer any of the critical questions.

Another possible malfeasant, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, has been equally protected. As the Goodlatte-Gowdy letter explains, former FBI general counsel James Baker testified that after Trump fired Comey there were discussions among FBI staff about Trump’s fitness for office and invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump.

Baker testified that he was told — by then-acting FBI director Andrew McCabe and Strzok’s lover, Lisa Page — that Rosenstein had proposed wearing a recording device in conversations with President Trump. To record what? Rosenstein was supposed to be interviewed by the Goodlatte-Gowdy investigators but was never available. Rosenstein has denied that he said anything about wearing a recording device in conversations with Trump.

The only avenue that was left to find the truth was for President Trump to have ordered the documents declassified and provided to Congress. But he never acted and now the investigations are closed. The Senate won’t reopen them, nor will acting AG Whitaker or IG Horowitz. The only hope resides in U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber, an Obama appointee, who then-AG Jeff Sessions tasked to investigate FBI misconduct in the election. Those who place their hopes in Huber will be disappointed.

The stain on our system of justice and the 2016 election created by the abuses of power and probable crimes committed by FBI and DoJ officials during and after the 2016 presidential campaign will not be erased. Their coverup has succeeded.
Title: Bugsy "Bug Eyes" Pelosi goes candid
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 14, 2019, 05:23:36 PM
Not sure where to put this extraordinary moment of candor from Bugsy "Bug Eyes" Pelosi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vMOfQwywMg


 :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o :-o
Title: Another lie of the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 16, 2019, 08:54:50 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-trump-hid-his-meetings-with-putin-stories-begin-to-unravel/
Title: Bundy charges dismissed with prejudice
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2019, 09:17:00 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/23/justice-department-seeks-appeal-stinging-defeat-ag/?bt_ee=hku%2BDc5%2FvUOfyRN9mF2NxQfO9xHOv1QLEiTcGuUJjnsaF3xTD48ViO7kuTYbQM4S&bt_ts=1548358852921
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on January 26, 2019, 10:57:17 AM
"     Bndy charges dismissed with prejudice
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/23/justice-department-seeks-appeal-stinging-defeat-ag/?bt_ee=hku%2BDc5%2FvUOfyRN9mF2NxQfO9xHOv1QLEiTcGuUJjnsaF3xTD48ViO7kuTYbQM4S&bt_ts=1548358852921"

Another win for JW !!!   :-)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 26, 2019, 01:25:01 PM
I regularly donate to Judicial Watch.
Title: Lisa Page, FBI, sought deal with State Dept.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 13, 2019, 11:47:41 AM


https://www.dailywire.com/news/43399/new-emails-confirm-fbi-tried-work-deal-state-dept-james-barrett?utm_medium=email&utm_content=021319-news&utm_campaign=position1
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on February 13, 2019, 03:50:16 PM

"Lisa Page, FBI, sought deal with State Dept."
if only we could get a real dissection of this fix like they are trying to do to Trump.
Too many connected swamp things to get real justice apparently.

JW does it again.


Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 13, 2019, 08:54:19 PM
JW is awesome.  I donate regularly.
Title: huff post early 25 th amendment discussions
Post by: ccp on February 14, 2019, 07:13:38 AM
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/andrew-mccabe-fbi-trump-25th-amendment_n_5c6561d4e4b0aec93d3bf72b

the HP I assume has this as headline due to their interpretation this reflects badly on Trump
I feel it is just the OPPOSITE, and is admission of deep state trying to arrange a coup to remove a duly elected President from office because they did not like him.

It is certainly not like we did not know who Donald was/is.
Title: Re: huff post early 25 th amendment discussions
Post by: DougMacG on February 15, 2019, 07:18:58 AM
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/andrew-mccabe-fbi-trump-25th-amendment_n_5c6561d4e4b0aec93d3bf72b

The HuffPost I assume has this as headline due to their interpretation this reflects badly on Trump
I feel it is just the OPPOSITE, and is admission of deep state trying to arrange a coup to remove a duly elected President from office because they did not like him.

It is certainly not like we did not know who Donald was/is.

Right, it was the McCabe (among others) before his firing going rogue, attempting a coup.  Luckily the VP is from the same party and is scandal-free, sane, constitutional, conservative and patriotic.  Strange to think the Left probably fears Pence more than Trump and yet does all this.  They only know fight mode and we only know to roll over and play dead, cf. healthcare reform,  Odd to risk so much to just get someone else from the same side to take down next and so on.  But incrementalism is what they do and it worked with Bork and almost worked with Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. 

Under the rules before 1804 and the 12th amendment, the second place Presidential candidate became VP.  Hillary Clinton would be President after a removal of Trump.  Talk about moral hazard.

Before the 25th amendment in 1965, the office of VP sat vacant from the moment LBJ became President in Nov 1963 until inauguration Jan 1965.  If that was true today and Trump was removed from office, Nancy Pelosi would be next in line to President Mike Pence. 

But the same is still true now that R's lost the House.  If Trump was removed from office, Pence's pick for VP would require majority approval of the House and Senate.  The  Dem House would vote down everyone Pence picked and leave the office empty with Nancy next in line, one breath away.

Trump is not going to be removed from office but losing the House in 2018 was a BIG, unnecessary loss.

Back to Mueller for a second.  One goal of the resistance is to put a cloud over Trump, keep him busy and hurt his already horrible press coverage, but if the special counsel's office had ANYTHING remotely relevant to impeachment they needed to come forward with it instantly.  Timeliness was everything and now more than two years has gone by.  If Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors in office or attaining office that should have been known before the midterms, before a hundred judicial picks including two to the Supreme Court (three?) and before all the other Article Two powers he has exercised.  This means of course that after all we have been through in fake news they have nothing except the collision of his opponents in and out of their own high offices.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on February 15, 2019, 07:38:30 AM
Doug wrote :

****But the same is still true now that R's lost the House.  If Trump was removed from office, Pence's pick for VP would require majority approval of the House and Senate.  The  Dem House would vote down everyone Pence picked and leave the office empty with Nancy next in line, one breath away.****

OMG !!!!   :-o :-(
Title: WSJ: The tasks for Bill Barr
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 15, 2019, 09:10:33 AM
Bill Barr’s Hot Mess
He arrives at a Justice Department that is in desperate needs of an infusion of credibility.
338 Comments
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Feb. 14, 2019 7:02 p.m. ET
Attorney General William Barr testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, Jan. 15.
Attorney General William Barr testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, Jan. 15. Photo: Jeff Malet/Zuma Press

It’s fitting that William Barr’s confirmation as attorney general happened just as two powerful law-enforcement figures were trading accusations involving President Trump. Mr. Barr’s greatest challenge isn’t antitrust deals, immigration policy or even handling special counsel Robert Mueller. His overriding challenge is to reboot a Justice Department that has shredded its reputation and lost the confidence of Congress and the public.

It’s hard to feel confident in law enforcement when a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Andrew McCabe, reveals that a small cabal of unelected senior law-enforcement officers held meetings in May 2017 to plot Mr. Trump’s removal from office. In an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Thursday and a forthcoming book, Mr. McCabe says he and other officials, including Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, did head-counts of which cabinet officials might vote to declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” under the 25th Amendment. Mr. McCabe claims Mr. Rosenstein repeatedly offered to wear a wire when meeting with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Rosenstein, who’s expected to resign soon, responded Thursday with a Justice Department statement blasting the claims as “factually incorrect” and highlighting that Mr. McCabe was fired for lying to the department’s inspector general. The rest of the statement was pure spin, in which Mr. Rosenstein never denied the McCabe claims.

That’s the Justice Department Mr. Barr arrives to lead—a hot mess of finger-pointing, leaks, planted press narratives, obstruction and extraordinary self-righteousness. Since the FBI presumed to investigate two active presidential campaigns, more than two dozen Justice and FBI officials have been fired, demoted or resigned. Yet no one in authority has acknowledged the mistakes that led to this bloodbath, explained how these institutions failed so spectacularly, or offered a plan for ending the dysfunction.

That’s Mr. Barr’s opening. For the first time in this presidency, the Justice Department will have a leader who is apart from the Russia stink—neither accused of “collusion” nor obsessed with finding it. He’s also uniquely suited to understand the importance of credibility and accountability, having worked in the 1970s at the Central Intelligence Agency, then under intense fire. The first measure of the “independence” Mr. Barr promised in his confirmation hearings will be his ability to assess ruthlessly the institution he’s about to join and come clean with the public on two key questions—the “whether” and the “how” of 2016.

Whether the Justice Department’s and FBI’s most controversial actions were appropriate. Is it acceptable for the FBI to use opposition research as an excuse to surveil a political campaign? To use back channels to stay in touch with sources it fired? To open counterintelligence investigations (as opposed to criminal ones) into political figures? To actively hide those investigations from congressional overseers? To hold meetings about removing presidents? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, Americans deserve to know that this is the brave new world they live in.

If not, how did it happen, and how can leaders make sure it never happens again? What protections are there against the clear bias that permeated law enforcement’s upper ranks (Peter Strzok), or insubordination (Jim Comey) or obsessive media cultivation (Mr. McCabe)? What are the lines of authority, and what are the consequences for breaking the rules? How is it (as we learned this week from newly revealed emails) that Hillary Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, was able to reach the FBI’s general counsel on the phone? How many Americans get that courtesy? The public will never trust a law-enforcement agency that has different standards for the powerful, or appears to prosecute only in one political direction, or operates as a law unto itself.

This accounting is important for the country, but also for the Justice Department and FBI themselves—and their ability to protect the country. Lawmakers, for instance, remain furious about the abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It’s a bedrock tool for combating terrorism, yet it was stretched for use against American citizens involved in political campaigns. Top Republicans have made clear they will refuse to reauthorize parts of FISA until the Justice Department acknowledges that it overstepped its bounds and explains what reforms it will take.

Mr. Barr may be tempted to fob all this off on the investigations by the U.S. attorney for Utah, John Huber, or the Justice Department inspector general. But Mr. Huber appears to have done little by way of investigation, the inspector general’s report could still be a long way out, and in any event these questions merit answers from the nation’s top legal officer. Mr. Barr needs this job like he needs a hole in the head. But if he spends the next years rebuilding trust in federal law enforcement, he’ll have performed an immense public service.
Title: Dems don't want ICE notified when illegal aliens try to buy guns
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 20, 2019, 09:59:07 AM


http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/democrats-dont-want-ice-notified-when-illegal-aliens-try-to-purchase-guns/
Title: Re: Dems don't want ICE notified when illegal aliens try to buy guns
Post by: G M on February 20, 2019, 11:05:33 AM


http://www.capoliticalreview.com/capoliticalnewsandviews/democrats-dont-want-ice-notified-when-illegal-aliens-try-to-purchase-guns/

The dems only favor gun laws that disarm law abiding Americans.
Title: Unintended consequences of FARA by Mueller
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2019, 09:17:07 AM
https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/02/20/muellers-foreign-agent-prosecutions-may-lead-to-probes-of-green-groups/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVRoaVlqSmlZVFprWVdRNSIsInQiOiJRdGxxMW5wU3FoN1dMUWlDcGx3V3MrcmVrOFpUMUc3aElKclg5WHlydUEzZ2NFZCtjWUJ3WkZGdlNGSmdEUG5zUEY5R1hFVXpFa29oZ2xDTFBQdVNrUk1kenN3dWdPaUZWK0pNZnNFalJEMVFZRHA2VWs0ZGJkcXdaSE0wSWh0KyJ9
Title: VDH: The Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2019, 07:02:08 PM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/deep-state-nothing-new-american-politics/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-03-06&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Damage to Democracy and Rule of Law in February 2019
Post by: bigdog on March 07, 2019, 04:57:53 AM
https://www.justsecurity.org/62769/norms-watch-damage-democracy-rule-law-february-2019/
Title: 2016: Operation Fast & Furious
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2019, 09:18:02 AM


https://nypost.com/2016/05/21/the-scandal-in-washington-no-one-is-talking-about/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site+buttons&utm_campaign=site+buttons&fbclid=IwAR11sMscKRCgHikfJ-AtxUwGMgJjR-LmB0AgV56Vmn-SyRuiS93_Vlrx7GY
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2019, 09:32:28 AM
From BD's "Norms Watch" piece above:

1)

"Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Feb. 20 that a woman who left Alabama to join ISIS in Syria when she was 20 years old is not a U.S. citizen and would not be allowed to return. Hoda Muthana had said she made a mistake in joining the group and now wants to return with her 18-month-old son. Pompeo claimed that Muthana has no “legal basis” to claim American citizenship, but gave no details on how the determination was made. News reports said the decision might have been based on the fact that her father had been a Yemeni diplomat posted at the United Nations when she was born. But a family representative told the New York Times that wasn’t a valid reason to deny her claim to citizenship because Muthana was born in New Jersey a month after her father had completed his term."

Well, if we go beyond what an apparently anonymous "family representative" says we discover that the father's status here in the US at the time of her birth was still based upon his diplomatic status.


2)

"Voters who support Trump often excuse even his most blatant lies by arguing that “all politicians lie.” But the Washington Post’s Fact Checker database by early November had catalogued 6,420 false or misleading claims by Trump over 649 days in office. In his Feb. 5 State of the Union (SOTU) address alone, he made nearly 30 statements containing “stretched facts and dubious figures,” according to the Post. CNN analysts John Kirby and Samantha Vinograd commented that Trump’s SOTU “indicated that he will continue to focus on manufactured emergencies that he ostensibly thinks play well politically, rather than on a prioritized set of threats to American national security.”

Jeff Bezos's Pravda on the Potamac?  CNN?  Seriously?  Spend some time surfing the Media thread for a numerous examples of dishonest slanting and propaganda.

3)

"CNN anchor Jake Tapper produced a package exposing Trump’s lies during a rally in El Paso on one of the president’s favorite subjects of demagoguery — the alleged national security threat posed by migrants, a risk contradicted by the facts. Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, said in a comment on Twitter, “Trump’s lies are not fibs or misleading statements. They are Orwellian in that they are complete inversions of the truth.”

C'mon!

4) 

"Trump’s vociferous public criticism of the Special Counsel and congressional investigations into possible coordination between his campaign and Russia during the 2016 elections has become familiar — “a witch hunt,” he calls it. An analysis at the New York Times counted more than 1,100 instances of condemnation from Trump’s Twitter page, official speeches, rallies, media interviews, and press events. He calls those who cooperate with the probes “rats.” The comments also reflect actions he has taken to pressure those who aid or fail to hinder the investigations or to install officials who he sees as potential loyalists into positions where they might be able to undermine the investigations."

We've been around the Mulberry Bush on the investigation by Mueller, Andrew Weissman, Hillary lawyer _______ Rhee and various other Dem donor lawyers etc. quite a bit around here.  The conclusory language here adds zero to the conversation.

5)

"The U.S. gave the required six-month notice to Russia on Feb. 1 that it intends to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The treaty dates to 1987 and the waning days of the Soviet Union. Withdrawal risks a domino effect of undermining other treaties. Germany is so concerned about a pattern of U.S. action, including the planned INF withdrawal, that it is reassessing its longstanding arrangement that puts Germany under the U.S. nuclear shield."

Let's see, this would be the economic powerhouse of Germany currently spending 1.4% (working from memory) of GDP on NATO instead of the 2% promised? (IIRC they have SIX working military jets) The Germany that looks to back stab NATO ally Poland by seeking to bypass its receipt of natural gas from Russia?  Instead of buying it from the US?  The Germany that back stabs our efforts to reign in Iran's nuke program? 

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 07, 2019, 10:33:29 AM
also from Norm whoever this "partisan" is:

"declaring a national emergency as an end-run around Congress

President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Feb. 15 to gain the authority that Congress refused to give him to fund the construction of a wall on the southern border. It was a move intended to keep a campaign promise to his base, though that pledge had included forcing Mexico to pay for it.

At least 16 states and a host of organizations filed suit to stop the move, and Democrats in Congress passed a resolution to nullify the declaration, sending it to the Senate for a vote (Trump has vowed to veto the bill). At least 58 former U.S. national security officials from Democratic and Republican administrations signed a letter asserting that “no plausible assessment of the evidence” would justify the emergency declaration and that, in fact, it could undermine U.S. interests by diverting funding from necessary military expenditures and weakening America’s diplomacy. A poll conducted after the announcement found that more than 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of the emergency declaration, and almost that many don’t believe there is an emergency at the southern border and think Trump is abusing his presidential authority.

Earlier in the month, the Pentagon announced it would send 3,750 additional U.S. forces to the southern border for three months to support border agents, raising the total number of active-duty forces there to about 4,350. The rationale of the subsequent emergency declaration for using the military construction funding relies in part on the presence of military forces at the border."

So these same people who have decided on their OWN not to enforce immigration law are annoyed that someone is trying to enforce the law?

These people are corrupt officials
if they won't enforce the law to protect us then yup it has gotten to a point of emergency
We have heard nexuses for decades
and now we can see many are not only looking the other way when immigrants are flooding the country illegally they actually are blocking enforcement of it.

I seriously doubt 6 in 10 Americans are against the wall.
I don't believe that for a second

Title: pentagon to approve funding for wall
Post by: ccp on March 07, 2019, 04:58:39 PM
from soldiers pay and pensions

My first reaction what the hell is this deep state shit !

They can't reduce by one F 35 to pay for the damn wall

This is obviously to make Trump look bad:

https://apnews.com/ba6c2bc1fa024393801131bfbaa9cd89

Even the pentagon refuses to accommodate the CIC
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2019, 07:04:15 PM
I'd want a better source than Dick Durbin on that , , ,
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on March 07, 2019, 07:04:55 PM
I'd want a better source than Dick Durbin on that , , ,

Exactly.
Title: DOJ leaned on FBI to protect Hillary
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 15, 2019, 04:00:56 PM


https://www.foxnews.com/politics/chart-reveals-doj-informed-investigators-not-willing-to-charge-clinton?fbclid=IwAR1SUP_qzzqHQxWh9S6qFWJZw1Y96ZQJBMlCHHqvPZS64NtnAwBnnU9-3ZM
Title: JW gets judicial order against recalcitrant FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 16, 2019, 12:55:31 PM
   
 

Judicial Watch's Weekly Update: Court Victory Against Deep State FBI

 

Judge Declares FBI’s Search for Peter Strzok Records Inadequate
 
A petulant child or employee will perform a task halfway and wait to see if he can get away with it. Such seems to be the strategy of the entire Deep State bureaucracy.
 
The FBI is particularly good at this, and we are particularly good at calling them on it. Luckily for the American people we have judges who respect the Freedom of Information Act.
 
A case in point: U.S. District Court Judge Christopher R. Cooper for the District of Columbia has agreed with that the FBI did not adequately search for records related to the removal and reassignment of Peter Strzok from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team. He was a former deputy to the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI.
 
In granting our request, Judge Cooper ordered the FBI to further search their records.  (The original, deficient search had only returned 14 pages.)

The order comes in the December 2017 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit we filed after the DOJ failed to respond to and August 17, 2017, request (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. Federal Bureau of Investigation (No. 1:17-cv-02682)). Judicial Watch seeks:
 
•   All records regarding the assignment of FBI Supervisor Peter Strzok to the special counsel’s investigation led by former Director Robert Mueller.
•   All records related to the reassignment of FBI Supervisor Peter Strzok from the special counsel’s investigation to another position within the FBI.
•   All SF-50 and/or SF-52 employment forms, as well as all related records of communication between any official, employee, or representative of the FBI and any other individual or entity.
 
On July 31, 2018, we released the first 14 pages of FBI documents produced in this FOIA lawsuit, showing that Strzok insisted on retaining his FBI security clearance before moving to the Mueller team and confirmed that Strzok played a pivotal role in the flawed Hillary Clinton email investigation.
 
In his decision, Judge Cooper called the FBI’s search “overly cramped:”
 
Notwithstanding that Judicial Watch’s request referred to Mueller by name … the Bureau searched only for the term “special counsel.” But surely one would expect that Agent Strzok and other FBI personnel might use the Special Counsel’s name — “Mueller” — rather than his title when discussing Strzok’s assignment to the Russia investigation, especially in informal emails. Another logical variation on “special counsel” is its commonly used acronym “SCO,” which appears to be used within the Special Counsel’s Office itself, as reflected by documents that the FBI uncovered and produced to Judicial Watch.
 
The ruling also stated that the FBI did not adequately respond to our FOIA lawsuit because it limited its search to only Strzok’s email account.

Judge Cooper ordered that the FBI must conduct a new search that includes “the email accounts of any of Agent Strzok’s superiors or other Bureau officials who were involved in the decision to assign him to the Special Counsel’s Office or the decision to reassign him to the FBI’s Human Resources Division after his removal from the Mueller investigation.”

The FBI must also expand its search to other forms of communication in addition to email. Given Strzok’s well-known use of text messaging, “it strikes the Court as reasonably likely that he discussed his assignment to the Special Counsel’s Office in text messages—which again is the standard for assessing an agency’s selection of search locations.”

Strzok was reportedly removed from the Mueller investigative team in August 2017 and reassigned to a human resources position after it was discovered that he and then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page exchanged text messages during the Clinton investigation and 2016 election season that raised serious questions about his anti-Trump/pro-Clinton bias. They were also engaged in an extramarital affair. Strzok infamously texted “there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.”

Strzok reportedly oversaw the FBI’s interviews of former National Security Adviser, General Michael Flynn; changed former FBI Director James Comey’s language about Hillary Clinton’s actions regarding her illicit email server from “grossly negligent” to “extremely careless;” played a lead role in the FBI’s interview of Clinton and is suspected of being responsible for using the unverified dossier to obtain a FISA warrant in order to spy on President Trump’s campaign.

The Court rightly slammed the FBI for its gamesmanship in searching for records about one of the most notorious FBI agents of all time – Peter Strzok. The FBI leadership is in cover-up mode on its abuses targeting President Trump, and we’re pleased a federal court pushed back on this stonewall.
 
 
Judicial Watch Sues for Key Anti-Trump Coup Doc
 
Perhaps you remember the 1964 film “Seven Days in May,” in which a Deep State cabal plotted a takeover of the government. Burt Lancaster starred, and Rod Serling, appropriately, wrote script.
 
Now we’re living through a real life “Eight Days in May” featuring Rod Rosenstein, the disgraced former FBI official Andrew McCabe and a slew of characters conniving to bring down a real life President.
 
In the latest scene we are suing the Department of Justice for the communications of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein between May 8 and May 17, 2017.
 
We filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit after the DOJ failed to respond to a September 21, 2018, FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-00481)). We are seeking:
 
Any and all e-mails, text messages, or other records of communication addressed to or received by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein between May 8, 2017, and May 22, 2017.
 
This time period is critical. On May 8, 2017, Rosenstein wrote a memo to President Trump recommending that FBI Director James Comey be fired. The next day, President Trump fired Comey. On May 17 Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
 
Between May 8 and May 17, Rosenstein met with then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and other senior Justice Department FBI officials and discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump and whether Rosenstein and others should wear a wire to secretly record conversations with the President.
 
We previously filed a FOIA lawsuit seeking the communications of former FBI Deputy Director McCabe, the Office of the Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or the Office of Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein discussing the 25th Amendment or presidential fitness. Additionally, that lawsuit seeks all recordings made by any official in the Office of the Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General of meetings in the Executive Office of the President or Vice President.
 
These critical days in May, a scant three months into President Trump’s term, included extraordinary targeting of President Trump by Rod Rosenstein and other Deep State officials at the DOJ and FBI. Our focused FOIA lawsuit aims to uncover exactly what Mr. Rosenstein’s role was in any discussions to overthrow President Trump.
 
I don’t have much use for Hollywood, but sometimes it ominously foreshadows reality.
 
 
Judicial Watch Files Ethics Complaint Against Congressman Adam Schiff
 
The plot deep within the Justice Department to bring down President Trump is but one of three legs: The DOJ/FBI maneuver has been given covering fire all along by the media, and it has been buttressed by members of the Congress, whose unhinged behavior has seriously eroded that institution’s credibility.
 
No one has been more eager to get in front of the cameras and spout knowingly false conspiratorcy theories than Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who is, remarkably, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
 
We have now filed an official complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics about Rep. Schiff’s controversial communications and contacts with two congressional witnesses: Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS and Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer.
 
We are asking that Rep. Schiff be investigated in connection with recent revelations that he met with Simpson in Aspen, Colorado, in July 2018 and that he and his staff coordinated with Michael Cohen on Cohen’s recent testimony to congressional committees. Cohen’s testimony is alleged to be false in several important respects.
 
You will recall that we filed an ethics complaint on April 13, 2018, against Rep. Schiff and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) for improperly confirming classified information in violation of House rules but the Committee has yet to take any public action on the complaint.
 
Rep. Schiff has an ethics problem. His and his staff’s irregular communications with anti-Trump witnesses reflect poorly on the credibility of the House and its committees’ investigations. It has long been apparent that Rep. Schiff can’t be trusted to lead the Intelligence Committee, so we hope that Democrats on the Ethics Committee stop protecting Mr. Schiff and take action.
 
In our complaint we elaborate on our concerns:
 
Dear Chairman Skaggs,
 
Judicial Watch is a non-profit, non-partisan educational foundation, which promotes transparency, accountability and integrity in government and fidelity to the rule of law. We regularly monitor congressional ethics issues as part of our anti-corruption mission.
 
This letter serves as our official complaint to the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) concerning the activities of Rep. Adam Schiff. Rep. Schiff appears to have violated House Code of Official Conduct, Rule 23, clauses 1 and 2, by inappropriately communicating with witnesses. Clauses 1 and 2 provide:
 
1. A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.
 
2. A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall adhere to the spirit and the letter of the Rules of the House and to the rules of duly constituted committees thereof.
 
Rep. Adam Schiff attended the Aspen Security Forum conference in July 2018, which was also attended by Glenn Simpson, the founder of the firm Fusion GPS. Press reports have detailed evidence of a meeting and discussion between Rep. Schiff and Glenn Simpson at the July 2018 Aspen Security Forum. As noted in The Hill newspaper:
 
At the time of the encounter, Simpson was an important witness in the House Intelligence Committee probe who had given sworn testimony about alleged, but still unproven, collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
 
Fusion GPS is the political opposition research firm involved in procuring “unverified” information claiming the Trump presidential campaign had “colluded” with Russia, among other things. That Fusion GPS-supplied information was the basis upon which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance warrants against Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.
 
Mr. Simpson’s leadership of Fusion GPS and his centrality to events resulted in his having to testify before congressional committees or their staffs. Specifically, Mr. Simpson testified before the House Intelligence Committee, of which Rep. Schiff was the ranking Democratic member, on October 16, 2018 – approximately three (3) months after the Aspen Security Forum.
 
We note that following revelations in 2017 that Rep. Devin Nunes had informed President Trump that U.S. intelligence agencies had been engaging in “incidental collection” of his campaign’s communications, Rep. Schiff demanded that Rep. Nunes, then Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, recuse himself from any investigations involving alleged Trump collusion with Russia. Indeed, Rep. Schiff wrote the following on twitter:
 
This is not a recommendation I make lightly … But in much the same way that the attorney general [Jeff Sessions] was forced to recuse himself from the Russia investigation after failing to inform the Senate of his meetings with Russian officials, I believe the public cannot have the necessary confidence that matters involving the president’s campaign or transition team can be objectively investigated or overseen by the chairman.
 
Then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi concurred with Rep. Schiff’s call for Mr. Nunes to recuse himself.
 
The July 2018 contacts between Rep. Schiff and Mr. Simpson create, at a minimum, the appearance of impropriety. As a result of Rep. Schiff’s previously undisclosed, private discussions with Mr. Simpson, the public’s confidence in Mr. Schiff’s ability to objectively and impartially carry out his duties as Committee Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has been gravely damaged.
 
Further, Rep. Schiff’s contacts with Mr. Michael Cohen should also be scrutinized in the same light as the Simpson contacts. Journalists have reported:
 
President Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen told House investigators this week that staff for Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., traveled to New York at least four times to meet with him for over 10 hours immediately before last month’s high-profile public testimony, according to two sources familiar with the matter – as Republicans question whether the meetings amounted to coaching a witness.
 
The sources said the sessions covered a slew of topics addressed during the public hearing before the oversight committee – including the National Enquirer ‘s “Catch and Kill” policy, American Media CEO David Pecker and the alleged undervaluing of President Trump’s assets.
 
Again, Rep. Schiff’ s conduct creates the appearance of unethical collusion and synchronization of efforts that calls into question whether Cohen’s testimony was a legitimate congressional hearing or well-rehearsed political theatre.
 
During Mr. Cohen’s congressional testimony, he was questioned by Rep. Mike Turner concerning the number, nature and subject of his [Cohen’s] contacts with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Rep Jim Jordan pressed Cohen on the subject in subsequent questioning. Cohen hesitantly acknowledged that he had spoken with Schiff “about topics that were going to be raised at the upcoming hearing.”
 
A pattern of conduct on the part of Rep. Schiff in these matters would exponentially increase the gravity of the prejudice and harm to the public’s confidence in the institution of the House of Representatives.
 
Rep. Schiff’s conduct and contacts with witnesses must be treated with the same gravity that Reps. Schiff and Pelosi accorded Rep. Nunes’s actions. Rep. Nunes recused himself for a time from certain oversight responsibilities with respect to the Russia-Trump investigations.
 
In the least, Rep. Schiff and his staff communications with Glenn Simpson and Michael Cohen, undermine the “credibility of the House” and its committee proceedings, especially given Mr. Cohen’s subsequent alleged false testimony.
 
We call upon the OCE to investigate Rep. Schiff and his previously undisclosed, inappropriate contact with key witnesses in congressional investigation over which that Member holds significant sway.
 
Thank you for your attention.
 
The ethics process in the House is a mess so I don’t expect something quickly to happen, but it is important that we put the House on official notice so no politician there has an excuse to let Adam Schiff 'suntoward behavior slide.
 
Clinton Email Scandal Witness Testimony Begins
 
In January U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered senior Obama Administration officials — including Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Jacob Sullivan, and FBI official E.W. Priestap – to respond under oath to our questions regarding Benghazi and the Clinton email scandal.
 
We now have a schedule for the depositions.
 
This court-ordered discovery comes in our July 2014 FOIA lawsuit filed after the U.S. Department of State failed to respond to a May 13, 2014 FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Judicial Watch seeks:
 
Copies of any updates and/or talking points given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency concerning, regarding, or related to the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
 
Any and all records or communications concerning, regarding, or relating to talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency.
 
Remember that this lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.
 
Our discovery will seek answers to: 
•   Whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system;
•   whether the State Department’s efforts to settle this case beginning in late 2014 amounted to bad faith; and
•   whether the State Department adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.
The confirmed discovery schedule now includes:
 
March 12: State Department’s responses to interrogatories and document requests were due.
 
March 14: Deposition of Justin Cooper, a former aide to Bill Clinton who reportedly had no security clearance and is believed to have played a key role in setting up Hillary Clinton’s non-government email system.
 
April 5: Deposition of John Hackett, a State Department records official “immediately responsible for responding to requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act.”
 
April 16: Deposition of Jacob “Jake” Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s former senior advisor and deputy chief of staff.
 
April 23: Deposition of Sheryl Walter, former State Department Director of the Office of Information Programs and Services/Global Information Services.
 
April 26: Deposition of Gene Smilansky, a State Department lawyer.
 
April 30. Deposition of Monica Tillery, a State Department official.
 
May 7: Deposition of Jonathon Wasser, who was a management analyst on the Executive Secretariat staff. Wasser worked for Deputy Director Clarence Finney and was the State Department employee who actually conducted the searches for records in response to FOIA requests to the Office of the Secretary.
 
May 14: Deposition of Clarence Finney, the deputy director of the Executive Secretariat staff who was the principal advisor and records management expert in the Office of the Secretary responsible for control of all correspondence and records for Hillary Clinton and other State Department officials.
 
June 11: 30(b)(6) Deposition, which will be designated by the State Department.
 
June 13: Deposition of Heather Samuelson, the former State Department senior advisor who helped facilitate the State Department’s receipt and release of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
 
As yet to be determined is the deposition date for Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell, who wrote a March 2, 2009, internal memorandum titled “Use of Blackberries on Mahogany Row,” in which he strongly advised that the devices not be allowed.
 
Written questions under oath are to be answered by:
 
Monica Hanley, Hillary Clinton’s former confidential assistant at the State Department.
 
Lauren Jiloty, Clinton’s former special assistant.
 
E.W. Priestap, is serving as assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division and helped oversee both the Clinton email and the 2016 presidential campaign investigations. Priestap testified in a separate lawsuit that Clinton was the subject of a grand jury investigation related to her BlackBerry email accounts.
 
Susan Rice, President Obama’s former UN ambassador who appeared on Sunday television news shows following the Benghazi attacks, blaming a “hateful video.” Rice was also Obama’s national security advisor involved in the “unmasking” the identities of senior Trump officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.
 
Ben Rhodes, an Obama-era White House deputy strategic communications adviser who attempted to orchestrate a campaign to “reinforce” Obama and to portray the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack as being “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy.”
 
We’re doing the heavy lifting in the Clinton email scandal, even as Congress dropped the ball and DOJ and State continued to obstruct our quest for the truth. The Court in our case wants real answers on the Clinton email scandal, which is why our request for basic discovery was granted.
 
Judicial Watch is #1 on FOIA!
Since 2001 we have led all nonprofit organizations in filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, according to figures released late last year by The FOIA Project of Syracuse University.
We are announcing this in honor of “Sunshine Week,” March 10-16, which is an “annual nationwide celebration of access to public information.”
 
According to the FOIAproject.org’s most recent study, we were again No. 1 on the top ten list of most frequent Nonprofit/Advocacy Groups (Jan 21, 2001-July 2018) challenging federal government withholding in court and for the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations.
 
Overall Top 10 FOIA Filers (Jan 21, 2001 – July 2018)
Rank         Plaintiff in FOIA Suit   Number Filed
1.           Judicial Watch   391
2.           American Civil Liberties Union   130
3.           Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility   94
4.           Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington     88
5.           Electronic Privacy Information Center   74
6.           Natural Resources Defense Council   59
7.           Center for Biological Diversity   47
8.           Cause of Action Institute   44
9.           American Oversight   43
10.           Electronic Frontier Foundation   43





The FOIA Project “aims to: (1) create a shaming mechanism by which agencies and officials who ignore the law are held accountable, and (2) arm the public with the full record of FOIA efforts that have and haven’t worked, so anyone can more effectively surmount frequently used roadblocks to public access.”
 
We use the open records or freedom of information laws and other tools to uncover misconduct by government officials and hold to account those who engage in corrupt activities. When agencies balk at releasing information that is of value to the public, we sue.
 
The Freedom of Information Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 to improve public access to government records. The FOIA Project says there is wide agreement that the FOIA’s administrative process has many flaws, with federal agencies frequently resisting its mandates by either refusing to provide properly requested records or ignoring the requirements that the documents be made available within specified time periods.
 
The most-sued agency is the Department of Justice, which has been the defendant in 2,312 FOIA suits since 2001. Within the DOJ, the FBI has been the most sued division with 712 suits. We frequently clash with the DOJ and FBI in court, often in cases involving IRS malfeasance, the Clinton email scandal, and the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation. Judicial Watch currently is pursuing 40 lawsuits against the DOJ.
 
We are the most important transparency watchdog organization in the country. For 25 years, we’ve led the way in holding the government to account as both the media and Congress have gone AWOL. Most of what we know about government corruption – from Clinton emails to Deep State abuses – are as a result of our historic FOIA lawsuits.
 
We couldn’t have done this without the loyalty of our many supporters. Thank you.
 
Until next week,


 

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton
 




Title: JW gets judicial order for Obama officials to answer questions over Clinton
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 17, 2019, 07:18:07 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-16/former-obama-officials-ordered-judge-answer-questions-over-clinton-emails?fbclid=IwAR3LUxIQgk95crVCvCJSxWDOR4KIFFh3VsLt9gfmnZROeGg-GgQ_h3KkRhw
Title: The three tiers of American anarcho-tyranny
Post by: G M on March 26, 2019, 12:53:01 PM
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/03/26/jussie-smollett-charges-dropped/

1. Rich/powerful/famous/elites (Leftists) have the top tier. Hillary Clinton and Jussie Smolett are good examples.

2. Illegal Aliens enjoy their own degrees of protection and rewards. As do the left's cultivated underclass voters.

3. The bottom tier is the tax cattle that consist of the remaining productive elements of American society. No one is cutting this group a break and this group is increasingly the object of outright hatred.


Title: Re: The three tiers of American anarcho-tyranny
Post by: G M on March 26, 2019, 02:17:59 PM
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/03/26/jussie-smollett-charges-dropped/

1. Rich/powerful/famous/elites (Leftists) have the top tier. Hillary Clinton and Jussie Smolett are good examples.

2. Illegal Aliens enjoy their own degrees of protection and rewards. As do the left's cultivated underclass voters.

3. The bottom tier is the tax cattle that consist of the remaining productive elements of American society. No one is cutting this group a break and this group is increasingly the object of outright hatred.

Another perfect example: http://ace.mu.nu/archives/380494.php
Title: You’re A Sucker For Not Believing That The System Is Rigged
Post by: G M on March 29, 2019, 02:43:44 PM
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2019/03/28/youre-a-sucker-for-not-believing-that-the-system-is-rigged-n2543819

You’re A Sucker For Not Believing That The System Is Rigged
 Kurt Schlichter

Imagine you spent two years completely screwing up at your job, I mean not merely getting every single thing wrong but loudly, proudly getting in everyone else’s face about how right you are. You’d get fired, terminated, 86’d, and Schiff-canned. But not the mainstream media. The media hacks failed for two years-plus, nonstop and without equivocation, but are they ever going to be held to account? No, they’re just going to gather in a big circle and Pulitzer each other.

Imagine you committed a racial hate crime where you falsely accused people who didn’t look or think like you of a horrible atrocity, and that you’d have gladly picked some poor saps with the wrong skin tone out of a line-up and sent them to prison for decades given the chance. Now imagine the two half-wits you hired to help you managed to get caught on video buying their stereotype get-up and spilled it all to the fuzz, though the fact you paid them with a check – because you’re a criminal mastermind – was already enough to get a grand jury to indict your sorry AOC. Now, what are the chances the DA is going to transform your 16 felony counts into a $10K fine and a couple days community servicing? Your chances of said outcome are poor. They are poor because your pals are neither Mrs. Obama or Willie Brown’s gal pal.

Now imagine that you studied really hard while the rich kids partied and smoked dope and splattered water on you by running their BMWs through puddles as you walked home from high school. Imagine your last name is “Chang,” or that your dad is a soldier and not a hedge fund manager, or that your mom is a waitress and not a TV bimbo. Now imagine how you feel when Durwood Richguy IV gets admitted to Harvard when he can’t count past 10 with his Gucci loafers on and you get slotted on a waiting list for Gumbo State.

Imagine you handled classified information and you took it home and put it on your iPad. Do you think the FBI would be super-concerned with your feels about it and give you a pass, like Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit got from Jim Comey, or would you be bunking with Michael Cohen? And speaking of that Looming Doofus, if you lied under oath in front of Congress, do you think you’d be free to wander the country, posting stupid tweets of yourself staring at trees and beaches?

Yeah, sure, that would totally happen.

The American dream has morphed into the American grift. And we normal people are the marks.

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop accepting the ruling class’s lies. And let’s stop lying to ourselves. America has changed. There used to be one standard, one set of laws, one set of rules. Now, there are two.

The one set of rules for normal people is designed to jam us up, to keep us down, to ensure that the power of the powerful never gets challenged.

And the one set of rules for the elite can be summed up like this: There are no rules.

The media howls about the rule of law. Democrat poohbahs cry about the rule of law. The Fredocon gimps whimper about the rule of law. But the “rule of law” they aspire to is merely their rule over you. To them, the rule of law is not some transcendent principle. Its purpose is not to ensure equality and fairness in our society. It’s a weapon designed to make sure nothing disrupts their scam.

Why do you think our elite is so eager to pass new laws and regulations? Is it because normal people like you and me are running wild in the streets? No, of course not. They don’t want to regulate political campaigns to make sure elections are fair. They want to regulate them so they will always win and we never will again. They don’t want a Green New Deal because they care about the weather in 2219, but because they want to take our power and our money for themselves. They don’t want to ban our guns because we’re dangerous to other Americans but because, armed and ready to defend our rights, we’re dangerous to their power.

Do you, even for a second, think any of the rules, regulations, statutes or laws they propose are even going to be applied to them? Do you see the DOJ ever indicting some liberal Dem or some pliable submissivecon for “campaign finance violations?” We know the answer to that because Hillary is wandering around the woods, with a goblet of screw-top Chardonnay glass in her withered paw, free as a bird.

Do you see them giving up their SUVs and trudging to work on foot or riding in some greasy, stinky bus? Will they give up their air travel? How about their beef? Tofu veggie burgers are for peasants. And their minions will always have guns even as you are rendered disarmed and defenseless.

Our elite is not elite. Instead, it’s a bunch of bums who somehow got a little money and took the reins of power and are now shaking-down our great nation for every penny they can wring out of it. We owe them nothing – not respect, not gratitude and certainly not obedience.

If you still wonder how we got Trump, just look around you. He’s a cry for help, a scream against the injustice we’re surrounded by. This injustice is poison to our country. This injustice is what makes republics fall apart, when the worthless ruling class pushes its contempt in the people’s collective face so hard and for so long that the population finally screams “The hell with this!”

It can’t continue. It won’t continue.

That’s the essential message of my novels People's Republic, Indian Country and Wildfire, about an America split apart into red and blue nations and going uphill and way, way downhill, respectively. Check ‘em out so that when the consequences of our failed elite’s venal, stupid decisions arrive, you won’t be surprised.
Title: The Woke Dismissal of Jussie Smollet
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 30, 2019, 07:17:17 AM
https://www.city-journal.org/jussie-smollet-indictment-dismissal?fbclid=IwAR06B_Sckg6D5T5JumKzz2BxXRzCEjeeBy_-k2upiLQxAYy5zk_zz1CIQxY
Title: Kim Foxx fuct up
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 30, 2019, 07:45:12 AM


https://www.theblaze.com/news/kim-foxx-ipba-letter-unethical?utm_content=bufferedcb5&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=glennbeck&fbclid=IwAR31FQ1BQmFAQW8nAElVFPC3Q-eQQqm5CGgsXo3Pld8RC9pY2qvGWwTXFb8
Title: More of obama packing government with partisans and ideologues
Post by: ccp on April 20, 2019, 08:10:04 PM
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/u-s-intelligence-institutionally-politicized-toward-democrats/

https://www.ccn.com/ex-cia-agent-obama-bent-hiring-rules-to-build-anti-trump-deep-state
Title: Obama White House knew of Clinton lies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 12, 2019, 04:58:43 PM
Judicial Watch announced that it obtained 44 pages of records from the State Department through court-ordered discovery revealing that the Obama White House was tracking a December 2012 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records concerning then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecure, non-government email system. Months after the Obama White House involvement, the State Department responded to the requestor, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), falsely stating that no such records existed.

Judicial Watch’s discovery is centered upon whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system and whether the State Department acted in bad faith in processing Judicial Watch’s FOIA request for communications from Clinton’s office. U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides, as well as E.W. Priestap, to be deposed or answer written questions under oath. The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

“These documents suggest the Obama White House knew about the Clinton email lies being told to the public at least as early as December 2012,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “A federal court granted Judicial Watch discovery into the Clinton emails because the court wanted answers about a government cover-up of the Clinton emails. And now we have answers because it looks like the Obama White House orchestrated the Clinton email cover-up.”

More from our press release here: http://jwatch.us/oam3mf
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on May 12, 2019, 09:58:36 PM
We knew this of course but never expected to be able to prove it.  This changes the game completely.  Trump's misdeeds were relevant because he is President ("and will be in jail when he is out") and Hillary's misdeeds were irrelevant because she lost and will never be President.  Now we have Trump's whole team innocent, but a President was guilty and we can see liberals ready to dart, weave, and backtrack on the idea of putting guilty ex Presidents in jail.

Lock him up.

It also kills the Joe Biden candidacy storyline.  Now he can deny his involvement in that administration.  He had no part in Fast and aFurious, no part in IRS targeting, no part in the Benghazi cover-up, no part in the email corruption, no part in Uranium One, no part in FISA abuse, no real part at all in any of it.

That's what we thought.
Title: anyone care to wager
Post by: ccp on May 14, 2019, 08:04:30 PM
on which way this judge will decide on whether Elijah Cummings can see years of Trump's financial records?

I give odds 9 to 1 he rules in favor of the LEFT with twisted explanations as to interpretation of precedent:

https://news.yahoo.com/judge-hear-suit-over-trump-financial-records-demand-042928691--politics.html
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 14, 2019, 11:55:40 PM
Let's take this one over to the Lawfare thread.
Title: 2016 NY Post: Operation Fast & Furious
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 27, 2019, 02:11:28 PM
Up from the memory hole , , ,

https://nypost.com/2016/05/21/the-scandal-in-washington-no-one-is-talking-about/?fbclid=IwAR1CiAveQTiTUNXurI4eKk7TFjLxI1WITUYlpQqHjNkBW6e8I9dPsfdbSHk
Title: Andrew McCarthy on McCabe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2019, 02:54:12 PM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/andrew-mccabe-sues-justice-department-seeks-clemency/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-08-29&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: McCArthy on McCabe
Post by: ccp on August 30, 2019, 03:52:31 PM
good article but he is too genteel in my opinion

an analogy is NOT 'a doctor with a great career who makes a mistake
should his/her career be judged by the mistake'

For McCabe the analogy should be  a doctor with a good career who at the end completely ignored ethics (and the law ) risking patients lives just for the money doing unnecessary procedures.  That in my opinion blots out previous successes

Mc Cabe with his cabal broked laws policy ethics because he did not like the guy running for president and did not enforce the law to protect a candidate he wanted to win.

For me  I could care less about the rest of his career.  This is bad news enough . and is exactly what he should be remembered for.
This was not a mistake or simple bad judgement .  This was a concerted premeditated series of crimes.
Title: Re: Andrew McCarthy on McCabe
Post by: G M on August 30, 2019, 04:54:21 PM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/andrew-mccabe-sues-justice-department-seeks-clemency/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202019-08-29&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

The FBI should be considered on a level with other law enforcement entities such as the Policia Munincipal de Tijuana and the Chinese Ministry for State Security.

If you are ever contacted by the FBI, your only word to them should be "Lawyer".

If you ever serve on a jury, the credibility of the testimony given by anyone affiliated by the FBI should reflect the known level of integrity the agency has earned.

If you or I did anything that the various deep staters have done, we would be in federal custody. We live in a multi-tiered justice system. Plan accordingly.

Title: WSJ, Strassel: Sneaky, Leaky Comey
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2019, 08:56:11 PM


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    Opinion Potomac Watch

Sneaky, Leaky James Comey
The inspector general takes apart the former FBI director’s excuses for his actions.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Aug. 29, 2019 7:24 pm ET
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Opinion: James Comey Mishandled Sensitive Government Information
Opinion: James Comey Mishandled Sensitive Government Information
On August 29, 2019, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice released a report exposing former FBI Director Comey and his handling of government documents. Image: Alex Kraus / Bloomberg

Of all the tall tales James Comey has told, none compare to the line he fed President Trump at their infamous January 2017 dinner. As recounted in the former Federal Bureau of Investigation director’s memo about that evening, “I said I don’t do sneaky things, I don’t leak, I don’t do weasel moves.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general begs to differ. In a new report about Mr. Comey’s handling of those memos, Michael Horowitz demonstrates that Mr. Comey in 2017 was consistently leaky and sneaky. The report refutes any claim that the then-director was justified in taking these actions. He repeatedly, and knowingly, broke the rules.
James Comey's FBI Rules
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For more than two years, we’ve heard Mr. Comey’s characterization of his actions, popularized by an adoring media: He felt compelled to memorialize his private discussions with the president, to protect the FBI. He had no choice but to use an intermediary to leak memo contents, to save the nation by forcing the appointment of a special counsel. He was entitled to do so because the memos were his personal papers, and by that time he was a “private citizen.”

The inspector general calmly and coolly dismantles these claims. There’s good reason to suspect Mr. Trump was the focus of the bureau’s counterintelligence probe from the start, since that is the only way to explain the FBI’s outrageous decision to hide the probe from the president. The inspector general reports that Mr. Comey’s first briefing of the president-elect, on Jan. 6, 2017, was partly done in the hope that “Trump might make statements about, or provide information of value to,” that probe. That may be the real reason everyone on the FBI leadership team agreed “ahead of time that Comey should memorialize” what happened.

Mr. Horowitz’s report methodically skewers Mr. Comey’s claim that his memos were “personal” and therefore his to keep and use. It notes that he interacted with Mr. Trump only in his capacity as the FBI director, in official settings. He shared the memos with senior FBI leaders. Some memos touch on official investigations, while others contain classified information, which “is never considered personal property.” The report makes clear Mr. Comey knew his claim that the memos were personal was a sham. That characterization, Mr. Horowitz writes, is “wholly incompatible with the plain language of the statutes, regulations, and policies defining Federal records.”

Mr. Comey’s attempt to dig himself out of his disingenuous characterization heightens its absurdity. Asked by the inspector general how a memo describing an official dinner between the FBI director and the president could be considered a “personal” document, Mr. Comey explains that he was also present in his capacity as a “human being.”


Anyone in Mr. Comey’s position would know that the memos were FBI documents and that he had no right to keep them after Mr. Trump fired him. He nonetheless gave them to his attorneys, and scanned and emailed the sensitive information on unsecure equipment. (This is the man who called Hillary Clinton ’s handling of official secrets “extremely careless.”) The inspector general found it “particularly concerning” that Mr. Comey didn’t tell the FBI he’d retained copies, even when bureau officials came to his home to inventory and remove FBI property.

Mr. Horowitz is equally appalled the former director “made public sensitive investigative information” via a friend, giving it to the media “unilaterally and without authorization.” The report notes that “the civil liberties of every individual”—presumably even the president—depend on the FBI’s safeguarding information. Just as important, the inspector general lambastes Mr. Comey for the purpose of the leak—to achieve a “personally desired outcome,” the appointment of a special counsel. “By not safeguarding sensitive information,” and “by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees,” Mr. Horowitz writes.

This is the nub of it. Mr. Comey clearly detested Mr. Trump from the start. He abused his power and used leaky, sneaky tricks to undermine the presidency. Mr. Comey told the inspector general he had to do it because it was important to “the Nation,” and “I love this country.” Mr. Horowitz has no time for such self-justification: “Comey’s own, personal conception of what was necessary was not an appropriate basis for ignoring the policies and agreements governing the use of FBI records.” The report points out that if every FBI official acted on “personal convictions,” the bureau “would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly.”

This is the real merit of the inspector general’s report—its clear, ringing reminder that the rules apply to all. Still, it should disturb Americans that a man who has now been repeatedly admonished for “acting unilaterally”—and who so dishonestly spins his actions and history—held positions of such power for so long.

Write to kim@wsj.com.
Title: Levins' take on Horowitz report on one James Comes
Post by: ccp on August 31, 2019, 11:26:30 AM
I distinctly remember Mark saying he had (hopeful confidence in Comey's integrity and skills  to investigate  Hillary Clinton during her email period prior to the '16 election (that turned out to be fixed cover up) and I am sure he would / could  never have foreseen all this then:

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/levin-wasnt-jim-comey-theyd-going-prison/
Title: Judges order Antifa prosecution
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 05, 2019, 11:17:09 AM


http://ace.mu.nu/archives/383141.php
Title: Boston Antifa case Judge
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 09, 2019, 10:35:45 AM


https://wbsm.com/boston-antifa-judge-under-fire-for-contempt-charges-opinion/
Title: with regard to the opposite situation to above Doug's post
Post by: ccp on September 09, 2019, 03:58:32 PM
the "rogue " judges:
Barr is getting some starting traction :

https://www.conservativereview.com/news/ag-barr-getting-better-fighting-rogue-judges-needed/
Title: AG Barr getting better on fighting rogue judges
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 10, 2019, 11:29:39 AM


https://www.conservativereview.com/news/ag-barr-getting-better-fighting-rogue-judges-needed/
Title: Schumer on the Deep State in the Intel Community
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 28, 2019, 08:18:47 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBA2bl8iGGA&fbclid=IwAR2xh-YHPL5WX63eVKxWnTSEcFMsN5ZsZWcUxTv_-GNFAlOVWzFnq_NxF_s
Title: JW: New documents confirm Clinton email cover-up
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 26, 2019, 12:45:50 PM

New Benghazi Documents Confirm Clinton Email Cover-Up

Foggy Bottom, the nickname given to the State Department’s neighborhood in the District of Columbia, would seem an appropriate term for the fog its bureaucrats create and use to cover the email irregularities of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Here’s the latest. We released new Clinton emails on the Benghazi controversy that had been covered up for years and would have exposed Hillary Clinton’s email account if they had been released when the State Department first uncovered them in 2014.
The long withheld email, clearly responsive to our lawsuit seeking records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack,” contains Clinton’s private email address and a conversation about the YouTube video that sparked the Benghazi talking points scandal (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Our FOIA lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.
The Clinton email cover-up led to court-ordered discovery into three specific areas: whether Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA; whether the State Department’s intent to settle this case in late 2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to our request. The court also authorized discovery into whether the Benghazi controversy motivated the cover-up of Clinton’s email.  (The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”)

The September 2012 email chain begins with an email to Clinton at her private email address, “hdr22@clintonemail.com,” from Jacob Sullivan, Clinton’s then-senior advisor and deputy chief of staff. The email was copied to Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s then-chief of staff, and then was forwarded to then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategic Communications and Clinton advisor Phillipe Reines:
From: Sullivan, Jacob J
Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2012 11 :09 AM
To: 'hdr22@clintonemail.com' <hdr22@clintonemail.cont>
Cc: Mills, Cheryl D
Subject: Key points
 
HRC, Cheryl -
 
Below is my stab at tp’s for the Senator call. Cheryl, I've left the last point blank for you. These are rough but you get the point.
 
I look forward to sitting down and having a Hillary~to-John conversation about what we know. l know you were frustrated by the briefing we did and I'm sorry our hands were tied in that setting.

It's important we see each other in person, but over the phone today I just wanted to make a few points.

First, we have been taking this deadly seriously, as we should. I set up the ARB in record time, with serious people on it. l will get to the bottom of all the security questions. We are also in overdrive working to track down the killers, and not just through the FBI. We will get this right.

Second, the White House and Susan were not making things up. They were going with what they were told by the IC [Intelligence community].

The real story may have been obvious to you from the start (and indeed I called it an assault by heavily armed militants in my first statement), but the IC gave us very different information. They were unanimous about it.

Let me read you an email from the day before Susan went on the shows. It provides the talking points for HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] and for her public appearance. It's from a very senior official at CIA, copying his counterparts at DNI [Director of National Intelligence], NCTC [National Counterterrorism Center], and FBI:

Here are the talking points ...

--The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the US Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the US Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.

-This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and as currently available information continues to be evaluated.

--The investigation is on-going, and the US Government is working with Libyan authorities to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths US citizens.

That is exactly what Susan said, following the guidance from the IC. She obviously got bad advice. But she was not shading the truth.

Third, you have to remember that the video WAS important. We had four embassies breached because of protests inspired by it. Cairo, Tunis, Khartoum, and Sanaa. We had serious security challenges in Pakistan and Chennai and some other places. All this was happening at the same time. So many of the contemporaneous comments about the video weren't referring in any way to Benghazi. Now of course even in those countries it was about much much more than the video, but the video was certainly a piece of it one we felt we had to speak to so that our allies in those countries would back us up.
(In fact, as we famously uncovered in 2014, the “talking points” that provided the basis for Susan Rice’s false statements were created by the Obama White House.)

We requested records related to the Benghazi talking points in May 2014. In July 2014, we filed suit. The Clinton email finally released this month was first identified by the State Department in September, 2014 but was withheld from us despite it specifically referencing talking points. After it was specifically described in an Office of the Inspector General report, the court ordered its production. It was only after we informed the State Department that we were prepared to file a motion with the court to compel production of the records that the Department relented and produced the 2012 email in question.
 
(In an August 22, 2019, hearing, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered production of the record in granting us significant new discovery in the case. Judge Lamberth said, “There is no FOIA exemption for political expedience, nor is there one for bureaucratic incompetence.” The judge also stated that the government has mishandled this case and the discovery of information including former Secretary Clinton’s emails so poorly that Judicial Watch may have the ability to prove they acted in “bad faith.”)
 
This email is a twofer – it shows Hillary Clinton misled the U.S. Senate on Benghazi and that the State Department wanted to hide the Benghazi connection to the Clinton email scheme. Rather than defending her email misconduct, the Justice Department has more than enough evidence to reopen its investigations into Hillary Clinton.

The court is considering whether to allow us to question Hillary Clinton and her top aide in person and under oath about the email and Benghazi controversies.

Last month, the State Department, under court order, finally provided us a previously hidden email, which shows top State Department officials used and were aware of Hillary Clinton’s email account.

Our discovery over the last several months found many more details about the scope of the Clinton email scandal and cover-up:
•   John Hackett, former Director of Information Programs and Services (IPS) testified under oath that he had raised concerns that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s staff may have “culled out 30,000” of the secretary’s “personal” emails without following strict National Archives standards. He also revealed that he believed there was interference with the formal FOIA review process related to the classification of Clinton’s Benghazi-related emails.
•   Heather Samuelson, Clinton’s White House liaison at the State Department, and later Clinton’s personal lawyer, admitted under oath that she was granted immunity by the Department of Justice in June 2016.
•   Justin Cooper, former aide to President Bill Clinton and Clinton Foundation employee who registered the domain name of the unsecure clintonemail.com server that Clinton used while serving as Secretary of State, testified he worked with Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, to create the non-government email system.
•   In the interrogatory responses of E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, he stated that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the President.
•   Jacob “Jake” Sullivan, Clinton’s senior advisor and deputy chief of staff when she was secretary of state, testified that both he and Clinton used her unsecure non-government email system to conduct official State Department business.
•   Eric Boswell, former assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, testified that Clinton was warned twice against using unsecure BlackBerry’s and personal emails to transmit classified material.
The Deep State has a secure home at the State Department.




 
Title: Leaks of Trump's call w foreign leaders were intel products
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2019, 06:22:19 AM


https://www.theepochtimes.com/leaks-of-trumps-calls-with-foreign-leaders-were-intelligence-products-devin-nunes-says_3130740.html?ref=brief_News&utm_source=Epoch+Times+Newsletters&utm_campaign=e02a4551ad-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_30_02_28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4fba358ecf-e02a4551ad-239065853
Title: The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 03, 2019, 06:52:27 PM
https://andmagazine.com/talk/2019/11/03/deep-state-no-longer-fake-news-clean-house/
Title: Who Watches the Watchmen?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 08, 2019, 10:25:37 AM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/who-watches-the-watchmen/?fbclid=IwAR2Xg9XOD8MhnJQ0NS0h1-WYSvHh13cJgqNxpx8ddEp4drBbWEPWcFbKxNo
Title: Future FBI FISA warrants to be audited?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2019, 01:45:22 PM


https://reason.com/2019/12/10/the-fbi-will-be-audited-to-see-how-frequently-they-screw-up-other-fisa-warrants/?fbclid=IwAR2dwWA7WBuw8x_zfKCp6cfrDODCmlv8ToXVnk5t-R23AJFbte5jliFWMWE
Title: FISA court pist off at FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2019, 02:56:34 PM
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/secret-fisa-court-issues-highly-unusual-rebuke-fbi-mistakes-n1103451
Title: Re: FISA court pist off at FBI
Post by: G M on December 17, 2019, 07:10:35 PM
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/secret-fisa-court-issues-highly-unusual-rebuke-fbi-mistakes-n1103451

"Secret FISA court issues highly unusual public rebuke of FBI for mistakes"

"Mistakes". That's a funny way to spell "felony crimes".

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 18, 2019, 03:31:40 AM
WSJ

Our media friends want to ignore the FBI’s abuse of power in seeking secret warrants to spy on Carter Page, but the country deserves a thorough accounting and clean up. One step in the right direction arrived Tuesday when a clearly outraged head of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court told the government to shape up and fast.

In a blistering order that she made public, presiding FISC Judge Rosemary Collyer responded to last week’s Inspector General report on the FBI’s dishonest applications. She notes that the FBI appears before her court without a competing pleader, and that the government thus “has a heightened duty of candor to the [FISC] in ex parte proceedings.”

Impeachment Eve/Jim Comey Spins


SUBSCRIBE
She adds that the IG report found “troubling instances in which FBI personnel provided information” to the court “which was unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession.” FBI officials also hid information from the court that was detrimental to their claim of probable cause that Mr. Page was an “agent of a foreign power.”

Judge Collyer’s order demands that the government, no later than Jan. 10, inform the court “in a sworn written submission” what it has done and plans to do to make sure future FISA warrant applications aren’t tainted. This is useful and is the first public evidence we’ve had that the FISA judges believe they were deceived.

Yet it also underscores how the FISA process dilutes political accountability. The FBI has tried to say its applications were kosher because a court approved them, while the court now fingers the FBI for deception. But so far no individuals have been held accountable, and the abuses would never have been discovered without the digging of former House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes.

Congress created FISA in the late 1970s to protect against previous FBI wiretap abuses. Clearly it hasn’t worked, and more bureaucratic hurdles won’t stop FBI officials who lie or alter email evidence. Injecting judges into secret executive-branch national security decisions was always a mistake, and now we know it abets abuse more than prevents it.
Title: FISC begins to defend itself
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 18, 2019, 11:44:37 AM


https://www.fisc.uscourts.gov/sites/default/files/MIsc%2019%2002%20191217.pdf
Title: History of Operation Fast & Furious
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 21, 2019, 11:53:48 AM
Not familiar with this site, but certainly we need a summary of OF&F:

https://ammo.com/articles/operation-fast-and-furious-atf-gunwalking-scandal-forgotten-history

Title: JW hits Shifty Schiff with FOIA suit
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 21, 2019, 01:23:30 PM
https://www.theblaze.com/news/judicial_watch_sues_adam_schiff_foia?utm_content=bufferc06d9&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=fb-theblaze
Title: For Whom the New Rules?
Post by: G M on December 21, 2019, 09:20:13 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/18/for-whom-the-new-rules/

For Whom the New Rules?
So egregious have been the ruling class’s attacks on Donald Trump, so shameless has been the sanctimony with which men such as William Webster have defended their biased governing rules, that the rest of us are well nigh compelled to give it a double dose of its own medicine.

 Angelo Codevilla - December 18th, 2019
Print Friendly, PDF & Email
When Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s December 9 report did not challenge the claim by the FBI (and the CIA) that its surveillance and investigation of all things Trump were properly “premised”; when it failed to address the illegality of officials’ trafficking to the media information from said surveillance; when it downgraded the FBI’s misdeeds to “performance failures,” that report offered the deep state the opportunity to claim that its interference in American politics is a good thing.

William Webster, the only person ever to have headed both FBI and CIA, seized that opportunity with an op-ed in the New York Times, in which he claims both agencies acted to protect “the rule of law,” and that they should continue to do so. That claim abstracts from the undeniable—and undenied—clash between the FBI and CIA’s anti-Trump campaign and current law.

Nevertheless, given the power of precedent, as well as the unpunished permanence of the officials who established the precedent, yes: America’s national security apparatchiks  effectively have changed the meaning of current law. They have established the propriety—maybe even the necessity—of adulterating or manufacturing allegations as premises for investigations the purpose of which is to hurt candidates or officials of whom they disapprove.

None would suggest, however, that Webster or any of our reigning security-crats intend what amount to new rules will be applicable generally; i.e. that they mean to grant to others the presumption of  immunity from “second-guess[ing] discretionary judgments;” nor the right to surveil and investigate political enemies and then, laws on classified information notwithstanding, to spread results and innuendo so as to defeat or drive them from office.

In short, Webster’s “rule of law” amounts to the assertion that he and people like himself are the law. Hence, to criticize them is to criticize the rule of law.

And yet, regardless of what anyone might wish, the Left’s cynical use of the Steele dossier as a pretend-predicate for its activities has freed one and all to ignore the heretofore sacrosanct Fourth Amendment restriction that “no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause . . . .” Unless that restriction is reinstated by prosecuting and punishing the liberals and leftists who trashed it, the Right, too, will use the powers of intelligence, turbo-charged by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to its own advantage.

That is because unilateral adherence to law is untenably stupid.

There is no reason why President Trump, or any successor, should not appoint to FBI, CIA, or any of the nation’s sundry intelligence and law enforcement agencies, people who will make whatever “discretionary judgments” they need to come up with “predicates” for covering major opposition candidates with webs of surveillance and research into their every act and utterance; and who then will gin up campaigns of vilification that vie for virulence with the ones that Trump has suffered since 2016.

The Left wrote the playbook on using intelligence to launch attacks and on claims of national security to shield the attackers from scrutiny. Anyone may speak the playbook’s words. One may hope only that the Right’s self-justifications might be less oily and foul than Webster’s.

Moreover, the Right’s investigations might actually aim at facts. That would be novel because, never forget, the “investigations” into Trump were not about unearthing facts, so much as to to validate and spread negative opinions under the color of authority.

The 2020 field of Democratic presidential candidates offers plentiful opportunities for the Right to inflict the new rules’ consequences upon their authors.

Consider: To what extent do South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s father’s extensive Communist contacts continue to influence his son? Mayor Pete grew up among ideas and persons hostile to America. These need to be identified, and questions need to be examined about whether and to what extent any continue to influence this presidential candidate.

Mayor Pete also has a history of illegal drug use. Who have his suppliers been? Tied to which cartels? What sort of leverage might they have on him? People need to be identified and examined under oath. Discrepancies in testimony need to be prosecuted. So do whatever crimes they may have committed. The anti-Trump investigations turned related persons’ “process crimes” into indictments of Trump. Democratic candidates should experience no less.

On their face, the Biden family’s financial profiting from the several offices Joe Biden has held involves the violation of numerous ordinary laws. Detailing the manner and extent to which the family’s enrichment have paralleled its access to power seems to be part of federal law enforcement’s core duties.

But arguably the foremost rule by which the ruling class has lived is avoidance of any and all matters that might inconvenience its members’ powers, prestige, and money.

So egregious have been the ruling class’s attacks on Donald Trump, so shameless has been the sanctimony with which men such as William Webster have defended their biased governing rules, that the rest of us are well nigh compelled to give it a double dose of its own medicine.

Angelo Codevilla
Angelo M. Codevilla is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and the author of To Make...
Title: Rogers of NSA working with Durham?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 23, 2019, 05:57:23 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-6HB8HJjhA
Title: Dems push for Durham to resign
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 26, 2019, 01:26:27 PM
https://www.courant.com/politics/hc-pol-democrats-insist-durham-resign-20191225-lsm74a4kqvaj7ggirbjccaomtm-story.html
Title: FISA Court: Are you fg kidding me?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 11, 2020, 06:28:52 PM
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/01/we-now-know-the-kris-cross.php
Title: Re: FISA Court: Are you fg kidding me?
Post by: G M on January 11, 2020, 07:08:42 PM
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/01/we-now-know-the-kris-cross.php

Why it's almost like there is some sort of lawless deep state that has taken over the federal government...
Title: FISA Court: Are you fg kidding me? 2.0
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 13, 2020, 01:22:47 PM
A better and deeper article:

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/01/13/fisa-court-selects-lawyer-who-vehemently-denied-fbi-misled-fisa-to-oversee-fbi-reforms/
Title: Re: FISA Court: Are you fg kidding me? 2.0
Post by: G M on January 13, 2020, 04:25:42 PM
A better and deeper article:

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/01/13/fisa-court-selects-lawyer-who-vehemently-denied-fbi-misled-fisa-to-oversee-fbi-reforms/

This is pretty much the Deep State flipping us the bird and saying "What are you going to do about it?".
Title: Tresury bureaucrat caught leaking Trump documents
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 14, 2020, 05:45:25 PM
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/treasury-natalie-edwards-leaking-trump-documents-guilty-plea?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200114224232
Title: Anit-Trumpers conduct Shadow Government
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2020, 10:09:35 PM


https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/anti-trumpers-conduct-shadow-government/
Title: Summary of the FBI scandal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 03, 2020, 12:31:35 AM


https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-fbi-scandal/
Title: Why the security establishment can't stand Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 03, 2020, 12:33:29 AM
second post

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/01/25/why_the_us_security_establishment_cant_stand_trump.html
Title: The Deep State and John Solomon's laptop
Post by: G M on February 03, 2020, 02:43:59 PM
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/02/02/paul_sperrys_notebook_theft_near_white_house_of_investigative_reporter_john_solomons_laptop_122236.html
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on February 03, 2020, 03:07:51 PM
"Authorities suspect the thief or thieves used an electronic jamming device to open the car door lock."

The same thing happened to me in my old Caddy
Crooks would sit near when I push the remoteless entry pick up the code and then
get in my car or open the trunk whenever  they want
saw this many times

Another possibility is a code that is easy to hack into.
They have them where the code supposedly is encrypted and or changes each time.   

Or another possibility is they get access to your key
  while you are in gym in the house etc

Probably other ways to do it that I have never dreamed of

Master criminals do this apparently all the time
from what my experience is

Can only imagine what spy agencies from the US government can do.......

Another method is when you bring your car to the dealer for repairs as I did the dealer repairman is bribed to fiddle with your vehicle
If they are union members forget it.

I
 have been a victim of all of it.

Try proving it.
Most police officers just think your crazy.

Though not all - some did try ......

Title: The FBI caught again
Post by: G M on February 07, 2020, 04:10:14 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/01/breaking-exclusive-fbi-covered-up-strzok-and-page-emails-regarding-seth-rich-now-the-fbi-is-doubling-down-in-their-cover-up/
Title: Roger Stone
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 12, 2020, 06:54:56 PM
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/02/12/nolte-good-riddance-to-muellers-monstrous-roger-stone-prosecutors/
Title: There Is No Law In America; Why Should We Be The Only Ones to Pretend There Is?
Post by: G M on February 14, 2020, 09:48:39 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/385856.php


Truth hurts.
Title: McCarthy on McCabe
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2020, 03:11:55 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/why-wasnt-andrew-mccabe-charged/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202020-02-16&utm_term=WIR-Smart
Title: Not sure why trump does not simply commute sentence or issue pardon
Post by: ccp on February 16, 2020, 04:38:38 PM
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/02/16/more-than-1100-former-doj-staffers-including-current-msnbc-and-cnn-analysts-call-on-ag-bar-to-resign-n2561407

That said there is no equal application of the law as we know when we compare what happens to Trump's associates compared to long time Deep State operatives

Title: D1: The Deep State Strikes Back
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 03, 2020, 04:48:05 AM


https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/03/president-winning-his-war-american-institutions/163450/?oref=defenseone_today_nl
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Schumer, SCOTUS, and the Mob
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2020, 07:12:08 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/schumer-the-supreme-court-and-the-mob/
Title: Snarky judge vs. AG Barr
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2020, 08:22:14 AM
Judge Walton’s Political Aside
He gets his facts wrong in a broadside against unpopular Bill Barr.
By The Editorial Board
March 6, 2020 7:08 pm ET

Attorney General William Barr speaks at the Justice Department in Washington, DC, March 5.
PHOTO: MICHAEL REYNOLDS/SHUTTERSTOCK

Judges aren’t shy about criticizing prosecutors when they are displeased. But few would go as far as federal Judge Reggie Walton, who on Thursday used a procedural ruling to offer a needless and inaccurate opinion that seems dubiously political.

In a 23-page ruling demanding that the Justice Department turn over an unredacted version of the Mueller report, Judge Walton accused Attorney General William Barr of a “lack of candor.” He said the AG’s pubic statements led him to question whether Mr. Barr had made “a calculated attempt” to “influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump” when he first summarized the findings.

When Mr. Barr sent Congress a four-page summary of the report’s “principal conclusions” in March 2019, special counsel Robert Mueller complained that it “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusion.” Mr. Mueller did not claim that Mr. Barr’s summary was false or inaccurate.

He didn’t because it wasn’t. In April Justice made public a mildly redacted version of the full report that confirmed the essence of Mr. Barr’s summary, as he had promised he would at his confirmation hearing. Mr. Barr had no incentive to mischaracterize a report he knew would be released.

Judge Walton’s logic appears to be that because he believes partisan critics who claim Mr. Barr wasn’t honest in his letter summarizing a report he didn’t write, somehow the redactions weren’t honest either. The absurdity is that Mr. Barr didn’t make these redactions.

As the Justice Department explained Friday: “The original redactions in the public report were made by Department attorneys, in consultation with senior members of Special Counsel Mueller’s team, prosecutors in U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and members of the Intelligence Community. In response to [Freedom of Information Act] requests, the entire report was then reviewed by career attorneys, including different career attorneys with expertise in FOIA cases—a process in which the Attorney General played no role.”

Judge Walton’s ruling came in what should have been a straightforward FOIA case. He could have issued his demand for the unredacted Mueller Report without any of the incendiary language that has now captured the headlines. His decision to add his political broadside raises more questions about the judge than about the Attorney General.
Title: Strassel: Schumer and the War on Judges
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2020, 08:27:06 AM
second post

Schumer and the War on Judges
From court-packing plans to intimidation, the Democrats pursue a losing strategy.

By Kimberley A. Strassel
March 5, 2020 7:05 pm ET

Potomac Watch: During an abortion-rights rally in front of the Supreme Court, Senator Chuck Schumer vowed that Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch would “pay the price” for releasing “the whirlwind." Image: Caroline Brehman/Zuma Press
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s verbal threats against two Supreme Court justices aren’t surprising, in light of three years of “resistance” hostility to Trump judicial picks. What is remarkable is that Democratic leaders continue to take such a losing approach to an issue that will be central to the 2020 election.

Mr. Schumer did hit a new low Wednesday, when he stood outside the Supreme Court and rallied a mob of abortion-rights activists by vowing that Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch would “pay the price” for releasing “the whirlwind.” “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions,” he thundered. When even liberal legal scholar Larry Tribe called the remarks “inexcusable,” Mr. Schumer made a halfhearted attempt to walk them back, saying he “shouldn’t have used the words.”


Yet the Schumer threats are of a piece with today’s standard Democratic approach to the court: Attack and intimidate. Of everything Democrats lost to Donald Trump in 2016, the forfeiture of the judicial branch still grates the most. They remain furious that Obama nominee Merrick Garland never got his Supreme Court robe. They are livid that the Kavanaugh confirmation provided the high court its first solid conservative majority in decades. They are outraged that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has confirmed nearly 200 Trump judges, including 51 on the appellate courts.

Unable to stop the appointments, Democrats have shifted to threatening the appointees. These have included attacks on individual judges. The hit job in 2018 on Judge Kavanaugh was about defeating his nomination, or at least cowing him into more liberal rulings. Since his confirmation, Democrats have continued to hold the threat of impeachment over his head, again in the hope of intimidating him into taking their side on key cases.

Or take Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s sucker punch of Chief Justice John Roberts during the Trump impeachment trial, in which she forced him to read aloud her question challenging his “legitimacy.” Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor got in on the action, with a recent opinion that outrageously suggested her fellow conservative justices were biased in favor of Mr. Trump.

Then there are the ceaseless threats to the institution. Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse and four other senators last year filed a friend-of-the-court brief warning of political consequences if the justices didn’t side with them against gun rights. “The Supreme Court is not well,” the brief asserted. “Perhaps the court can heal itself before the public demands it be ‘restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.’ ”

Liberal proposals to remake the judicial branch are a dime a hundred. Some propose packing the Supreme Court by increasing its size and creating new vacancies for a Democratic president and Senate to fill. Others demand term limits, though that would require a constitutional amendment. Yet others propose stripping or curtailing the judicial branch’s authority to review entire swaths of legislation.

Mr. McConnell, in a Thursday floor speech rebuking Mr. Schumer, likened the left’s message to a gangster’s intimidation: “That’s some nice judicial independence you got over there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”

The attacks and threats thrill the progressive base, but they are about as politically wise as impeachment. The most important step Mr. Trump took on his path to the presidency was releasing his list of proposed replacements for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. That inventory of impressive jurists not only reassured conservatives but motivated them to vote.

Mr. Trump will make sure his court successes are at the center of his re-election campaign. He will again highlight the stakes, especially for the Supreme Court. And here are Democrats making his case more powerful by promising not only to put an end to Trump picks, but to undo his court victories to date. Talk about a Republican turnout motivator.

Democratic court radicalism also has the potential to turn off centrist voters. This week saw Super Tuesday voters offer a stark rebuke to Bernie Sanders’s burn-it-down politics. (Mr. Sanders’s proposal is to transfer the high court’s conservatives to a different court and replace them with his own picks.) A 2019 Rasmussen poll found only 27% of Americans open to court packing. Even as American faith plummets in most government institutions, the public retains broad support for the Supreme Court. They don’t appreciate the attacks.

Instead of trashing the court, maybe Democrats could make their own lists of Supreme Court picks. They’ll need to do something, because the court issue is coming at them like a freight train. And all they’ve got is venom.

Write to kim@wsj.com.
Title: DOJ's upper echelon innocent until you get off scott free
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2020, 02:03:26 PM
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/03/25/in_dojs_upper_echelon_you_are_innocent_until_you_get_off_scot-free_122897.html
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 25, 2020, 04:53:12 PM
".Government employees have job protections that few in the private sector enjoy."

yup

Title: Andrew McCarthy: Pandemic Law Enforcement
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 28, 2020, 10:54:25 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-law-enforcement-in-a-time-of-crisis/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202020-03-28&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: IG Horowitz follow up: Lots of FISA applications error ridden
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 31, 2020, 09:43:10 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ig-horowitz-found-apparent-errors-or-inadequately-supported-facts-in-every-single-fbi-fisa-application-he-reviewed/
Title: Re: IG Horowitz follow up: Lots of FISA applications error ridden
Post by: G M on March 31, 2020, 11:43:45 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ig-horowitz-found-apparent-errors-or-inadequately-supported-facts-in-every-single-fbi-fisa-application-he-reviewed/

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/386609.php

Title: Famous But Incompetent (and Corrupt) FISA edition
Post by: G M on April 03, 2020, 06:31:27 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/386674.php

Nothing to see here, move along!
Title: President Trump right to fire IG Atkinson
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 07, 2020, 02:34:33 PM
https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/06/why-inspector-general-michael-atkinson-roundly-deserved-to-be-fired/
Title: variation of Muelle investigation and impeachment
Post by: ccp on April 07, 2020, 07:46:34 PM
https://www.westernjournal.com/schiff-already-planning-commission-blame-trump-coronavirus-crisis/

new hit job on Trump ,  excuse me , I mean commission to investigate "what went wrong"

led of course by the same democrat mob



Title: 13 Revelations
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 13, 2020, 12:28:10 PM
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/13-revelations-showing-fbi-never-really-had-russia
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on April 13, 2020, 01:39:26 PM
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/13-revelations-showing-fbi-never-really-had-russia

Funny how to get anything on the Democratic mob we need Judicial Watch to have to spend years to go to the courts to get the information revealing what happened. 

but when it is about Trump the NYT can get information via leaks, jilted insiders, and immediate cooperation from agencies via freedom of info. act
apparently any time they want.
Title: The war on the rule of law; Deep State, Eli Lake, FBI FISA Abuse
Post by: DougMacG on April 22, 2020, 06:24:57 PM
The FBI Can’t Be Trusted With the Surveillance of Americans
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-31/fbi-inspector-general-report-shows-agency-cannot-be-trusted?srnd=opinion

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued a new report that found systematic errors of fact in the FBI’s applications for warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The memo does not speak to the materiality or significance of those errors — but they are startling nonetheless.
...
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved more than 99% of all applications.
...
Out of 42 applications, the report says, 39 included major defects. All told, the inspector general uncovered 390 deficiencies, including “unverified, inaccurate, or inadequately supported facts, as well as typographical errors.”
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2020/a20047.pdf
Title: General Flynn
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 28, 2020, 05:42:04 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/criminalizing-politics-the-investigation-of-general-flynn/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/explosive-revelations-in-the-flynn-case/

Title: McCarthy: FBI framed Gen. Flynn
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 29, 2020, 11:05:05 PM
https://www.foxnews.com/media/andy-mccarthy-fbi-planned-flynn-set-up
Title: Mexico wants to know about Operation Fast & Furious
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2020, 04:04:14 PM
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20200519/mexico-demands-explanation-for-obama-era-gun-walking-scandal?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ila_alert
Title: Bringing Operation Fast & Furious up from the Memory Hole
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2020, 04:07:13 PM
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2017/06/08/nets-ignore-oversight-report-showing-holder-impeded-fast-and

Nets Ignore Oversight Report Showing Holder Impeded Fast and Furious Investigation
 
By Nicholas Fondacaro | June 8, 2017 12:46 AM EDT


While the Big Three Networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) spent Wednesday focusing on a Senate hearing they were hoping would implicate President Trump in obstruction of justice, they ignored a House Oversight Committee report that showed President Obama’s administration did just that. “An absolutely blistering report tonight out saying the Obama administration in general and former Attorney General Eric Holder in particular repeatedly lied to the family of a slain Border Patrol officer about the weapons used in his death, and stonewalled efforts to get at the truth,” announced Fox News’ Bret Baier on Special Report.

Baier handed the segment off to Correspondent William LaJeunesse, who reported that “Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died in December 2010, killed by guns tied to an Obama administration plan that armed Mexicans. A scandal officials tried to hide by wrongly claiming executive privilege.”

“The [Justice] Department’s belated admission that those 64,000 pages were not privileged, puts the gold seal of authenticity on the House's bipartisan vote to hold the attorney general in contempt,” testified Senator Chuck Grassley at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.

According to the committee’s report, the evidence of the federal government’s knowledge of the botched program was damning. “Emails contained in the House Oversight Committee’s report shows top officials knew the ATF sent guns to Mexico even before Terry’s death,” LaJeunesse explain. There was even correspondence between high-ranking officials blowing off the danger they put people in. As was mentioned in the report:


“It's a tricky case given the number of guns that have walked,” said a deputy attorney general. A colleague replied: “It's not going to be any big surprise that a bunch of U.S. guns are being used in Mexico, so I’m not sure how much grief we get for guns walking.” Months later, two of those guns were used against agent Terry, a fact denied to Congress and Terry’s family.
“My only goal was to make sure he was laid to rest with honors. That honor has been insulted by cover-ups and deception by the very people he served,” condemned Josephine Terry, Brain Terry’s mother, at the Wednesday hearing. “Only one possible motivation remains for all those involved who have covered up Fast and Furious. That is to conceal their own shame and disgrace.”

LaJuenesse also noted how “the report claims the administration try to stop the investigation by discrediting whistleblower John Dodson.” “I was lied about and disparaged, publicly attacked, ridiculed, libeled, I've been transferred 11 times, denied promotion, ostracized, barred from government workplaces, and banned from public buildings,” Dodson told the House panel.

Ignoring breaking developments in the Operation Fast and Furious scandal is nothing new for the Big Three Networks. Back in mid-April of this year, they skipped over the news that Mexican and U.S. officials had arrested Brian Terry’s murderer. “The suspected shooter in the 2010 murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry has been arrested…” announced CNN’s Jake Tapper at the time, “38-year-old Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes was taken into custody in Mexico Wednesday, it was part of a joint operation between the two countries.”

Transcript below:

<<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>>

DONATE
FNC
Special Report
June 7, 2017
6:18:37 PM Eastern

BRET BAIER: An absolutely blistering report tonight out saying the Obama administration in general and former Attorney General Eric Holder in particular repeatedly lied to the family of a slain Border Patrol officer about the weapons used in his death, and stonewalled efforts to get at the truth. Correspondent William La Jeunesse tonight on Operation Fast and Furious.

[Cuts to video]

JOSEPHINE TERRY: My only goal was to make sure he was laid to rest with honors. That honor has been insulted by cover-ups and deception by the very people he served.

WILLIAM LAJEUNESSE: Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died in December 2010, killed by guns tied to an Obama administration plan that armed Mexicans. A scandal officials tried to hide by wrongly claiming executive privilege.

CHUCK GRASSLEY: The [Justice] Department’s belated admission that those 64,000 pages were not privileged, puts the gold seal of authenticity on the House's bipartisan vote to hold the attorney general in contempt.

LAJEUNESSE: Emails contained in the House Oversight Committee’s report shows top officials knew the ATF sent guns to Mexico even before Terry’s death. “It's a tricky case given the number of guns that have walked,” said a deputy attorney general. A colleague replied: “It's not going to be any big surprise that a bunch of U.S. guns are being used in Mexico, so I’m not sure how much grief we get for guns walking.” Months later, two of those guns were used against agent Terry, a fact denied to Congress and Terry’s family.

TERRY: Only one possible motivation remains for all those involved who have covered up Fast and Furious. That is to conceal their own shame and disgrace.

LAJEUNESSE: Even the Border Patrol which sent Terry’s team into the desert, didn’t know about the operation.

ROBERT HEYER: I believe that if Brian Terry and his team had known this information, chances are Brian would be alive today.

LAJEUNESSE: The report claims the administration try to stop the investigation by discrediting whistleblower Don Dotson.

JOHN DODSON: I was lied about and disparaged, publicly attacked, ridiculed, libeled, I've been transferred 11 times, denied promotion, ostracized, barred from government workplaces, and banned from public buildings.

[Cuts back to live]

LAJEUNESSE: Lawmakers noted no one from the ATF or Justice Department was fired or seriously disciplined for the cover up.
Title: OF&F
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2020, 04:08:00 PM
third post

Also see

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430153/fast-furious-obama-first-scandal
Title: VDH: The Arts of Government Criminality
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2020, 10:27:02 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/the-arts-of-government-criminality/
Title: Judicial Watch
Post by: ccp on May 30, 2020, 05:23:30 AM
I donated a bit to JW
and I receive the Verdict

for those conservatives interested in deep state affairs
I highly recommend it.

https://www.judicialwatch.org/donate/the-verdict/
Title: Roger Stone ungagged
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 02, 2020, 12:31:45 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/31/stone-now-that-im-ungagged-id-like-to-say-a-few-things-about-my-prosecution/?utm_source=deployer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newslink&utm_term=members&utm_content=20200602160350
Title: FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 14, 2020, 12:39:01 PM
Hat tip GM

https://national-justice.com/trove-leaked-fbi-fusion-center-and-dhs-documents-provide-insight-antifa-charlottesville-political

Trove of Leaked FBI, Fusion Center and DHS Documents Provide Insight Into Antifa, Charlottesville, Political Bias, and the Erosion of Civil Liberties
Eric StrikerJul 10, 2020 | 2200 words  7,322
MORE:CURRENT EVENTS
fedskneeling2.jpg

On June 22nd, a group of anarchist hackers called DDoSecrets dumped 270 gigabytes worth of internal documents belonging to regional police fusion centers, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The documents provide interesting insight into state surveillance tactics, political bias and dynamics, and how "threats" are prioritized.

The files -- dated from 2015 to 2020 in the sample National Justice looked at -- show a massive contradiction between the FBI's ideologically selective priorities and the actual intelligence being provided to them by regional police centers, which often stress the role of "antifa" as instigators of violence.

Police Know Anarchist Extremists Always Instigate Violence At Rallies

Law enforcement is fully aware of who provokes the fighting and rioting at riots: the left. The documents from fusion centers across the country (intelligence provided by local police departments) repeatedly report this.

An intelligencePDF iconassessment by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center regarding the Berkeley Riots of Spring 2017, where anarchists and free speech activists faced off, painstakingly details the various criminal tactics "antifa" groups used to disrupt and physically injure lawful protesters and police officers.

The anarchist extremist groups in question continue to use the same tactics to this day, yet rarely face any criminal charges. The FBI is fully informed on the matter, including where the anarchists in California train in paramilitary tactics, yet refuses to investigate or prosecute any anarchist group for conspiring to commit acts of violence.

The Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC)PDF iconreported similar information in its investigation of the Boston Free Speech Rally on August 19th, 2017. BRIC noted that the nationalist and free speech demonstrators, about 60 of them in total, had a permit for the event, while the anarchist groups that showed up to heckle-veto them were there illegally.

The leftist rioters began attacking the protesters, and later, began engaging in gratuitous yet apparently coordinated violence against police officers attempting to intervene, causing multiple injuries.

The most interesting document of all is an intelligence assessment by DHS in the run up to the now famous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which starkly contradicts the mainstream media and FBI's narrative.

In aPDF icondocument dated August 9th, 2017, DHS wrote "We assess that anarchist extremists’ use of violence as a means to oppose racism and white supremacist extremists’ preparations to counterattack anarchist extremists are the principal drivers of violence at recent white supremacist rallies."

In other words, the DHS accurately predicted, through its intelligence gathering resources, that the nationalist groups in Charlottesville would only engage in self-defense if attacked. The Charlottesville Police Department, Mayor, and Governor were all warned in advance that Unite the Right had the potential to be the most violent rally to date, yet according to the Heaphy investigation, they -- either through incompetence but most likely through malice -- enabled the carnage by ordering the police not to intervene when the anarchists attacked the nationalists.

DHS' Ulterior Motive For Placing Russian Nationalist Group on Terror Watch List

Both the FBI and to a lesser extent the Department of Homeland Security are far more concerned with political ideology and creating propaganda than upholding the law.

A pair of documents outlining the rationale behind the seemingly random designation of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) as an international terrorist group demonstrates this.

According to a DHS internal release dated May 15th, 2020, adding RIM to the list of global terrorists is more of a pilot program to test the ability of nations to share intelligence on such groups and their willingness to engage in surveillance against their own law-abiding citizens.

The federal government admits in between the lines that it is breaking new ground in attempts to violate civil liberties of citizens using counter-terrorism powers intended to combat Islamic extremism: "This is the first ever US designation of RMVE (Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist) terrorists and the United States joins a short but growing list of Western countries who over the last year have applied counterterrorism authorities to designate RMVEs and white supremacist extremists.

Such designations will enable formalized information sharing on RIM affiliates and other RMVE actors through HSPD-6 and PCSC agreements, dependent upon the foreign partner and their level of sharing. Information sharing between counties on RMVE groups and identities is often difficult as this issue is still in its infancy stages, so the designation provides an opportunity to share and collect information on its leaders, thereby giving us previously unknown insights as to its members and their associated networks."

An earlier report on RIM from the National Counterterrorism Center dated April 2020 shows that the Russian-based organization's designation is purely political.

In a section labeled "Threat to the Homeland and US Interests," the NCTC states that RIM does not pose any threat to the United States or its interest abroad, but merely has in the past reached out to nationalists in Europe and North America for ideological discussion. The document notes that the groups who have had contact with RIM are generally not violent.

The sole instance of potential contact in recent memory between Americans and RIM -- which is an above ground ultraconservative organization rather than a racialist one -- is likely the 2015 International Russian Conservative Forum in St Petersburg. The conference attracted numerous above-ground, mainstream political parties, intellectuals and Christian organizations from around the world, ranging from Marine Le Pen's Front National to Jared Taylor. The RIM terrorist designation is likely little more than an attempt to force right-wing populists in Europe to stay loyal to Washington.

FBI Prioritizes Ideology Over Fighting Crime

One particularly laughable bulletin from the FBI provided to regional police departments is warnings about "incels" (men who are involuntarily celibate) and something called "clowncels" (incels who are fans of the movie Joker).

In the memo, the FBI admits that it "has no information indicating specific, credible threats to particular locations or venues," yet commands police departments to pay special attention to this community.

The FBI's obsession with incels in lieu of any intelligence regarding credible threats reveals that the FBI is allowing Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League to set its investigatory priorities. Last year the ADL arbitrarily declared men incapable of procuring romantic partners a domestic terror threat.

Another document dated October 16th, 2018 on "voter suppression" demonstrates the FBI's lack of respect for free speech. The FBI declared that it would begin investigating memes posted on Twitter intended to satirize low civic education by telling people to vote for Hillary Clinton via text message as a "Conspiracy Against Rights Provided by the Constitution and Laws of the United States" -- a federal crime written to prevent physical violence or threats at the ballot box that can get a prosecuted person years in prison.

As for tech censorship and surveillance, the NCTC released an outline of the various social media platforms that should be watched. They distinguish between mainstream social media platforms (Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Twitch, etc), chat apps (Telegram, Wire and Discord) and alternative-audience platforms (Daily Stormer, Gab, 4chan, Fascist Forge, 8Kun, and Stormfront).

In recent months, people have been reporting an explosion in the presence of undercover federal agents and informants desperately trying to entrap users on Telegram, Discord, Gab, the Chans and Fascist Forge.

For mainstream platforms, the NCTC notes that tech companies are eager to pursue "terrorist activity online," but often lack the resources to do it completely: "Technology companies that are willing to counter terrorist activity online but lack extensive resources to monitor content or automated takedown mechanisms would probably benefit from expanded US Government and NGO information-sharing to identify how RMVEs are using their platforms."

The close working relationship between mainstream social media companies, the FBI and "NGOs" (the ADL and SPLC) is clear and assumed, adding a new layer of understanding when it comes to tech censorship and the power of privately run organizations that are not subject general ethics or government accountability.

Ideological uniformity is important in the FBI's relationship with local law enforcement, aPDF iconflyer sent to law enforcement personnel in Texas shows.

The event, hosted by the FBI for local cops, featured lectures on "hate" (which is not a crime) from a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church and the ex-lead singer of a skinhead rock band. The conference was hosted in December 2017, so one can only imagine this indoctrination has gotten more intense since then.

Ultimately, we can gather from these documents a climate of incompetence, rejection of facts for political reasons, and a culture of selective prosecution. Those who post memes making fun of the election are treated as conspirators against the Constitutional rights of others, while anarchists who actively conspire in the open to do the same are rarely prosecuted by the FBI.

The most disturbing aspect of all this is how groups like the Anti-Defamation League appear to have more sway over the FBI's investigative priorities than intelligence provided to them by local fusion centers.

It appears that in defense of their power, our elites are willing to do away with all liberal pretenses and take on "emergency orders" that ultimately punishes peaceful dissent while allowing real criminals to go free.
Title: Fed judge's son murdered, husband wounded
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 20, 2020, 05:51:21 AM
https://abcnews.go.com/US/federal-judges-son-shot-killed-husband-injured-attack/story?id=71871708
Title: The rule of law strikes back! AG Barr announces unmasking investigation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2020, 06:07:41 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/barr-appoints-texas-prosecutor-to-review-obama-officials-unmasking-requests/2020/05/27/c32c6ddc-a089-11ea-9590-1858a893bd59_story.html
Title: Re: The rule of law strikes back! AG Barr announces unmasking investigation
Post by: G M on August 03, 2020, 06:59:24 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/barr-appoints-texas-prosecutor-to-review-obama-officials-unmasking-requests/2020/05/27/c32c6ddc-a089-11ea-9590-1858a893bd59_story.html

Yawn.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on August 03, 2020, 07:23:16 AM
".Yawn."

agree
not holding my breath; whatever comes out before election
MSM will ignore it or have Larry Lib Tribe come on and say this has all been debunked a conspiracy theory or right propaganda from a rogue AG.

or if continues past election
Biden will of course kill it.


Title: WSJ: Florida, Felons, and Judicial Bullying
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 13, 2020, 01:20:19 PM
Florida, Felons and Judicial Bullying
Democratic Senators try to intimidate federal judges into recusing.
By The Editorial Board
Aug. 12, 2020 7:06 pm ET


The 10 Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to three federal judges recently, demanding that they “explain” how their conduct in a pending case doesn’t break ethics rules. It’s another attempt by Democrats to intimidate the judiciary, similar to their threat last year that if the Supreme Court upheld gun rights, it might be “restructured.”

Jones v. Governor of Florida is being heard en banc by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. It involves Florida’s Amendment 4, passed in 2018, which restores voting rights to many felons “upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.” Do fines, court fees and restitution count as “terms of sentence”? If so, felons would have to pay financial obligations before voting.


The Florida Supreme Court took up that question in a Nov. 6 oral argument. Two of the sitting judges, Barbara Lagoa and Robert Luck, were soon thereafter, on Nov. 19 and 20, confirmed by the Senate to the federal bench on the Eleventh Circuit. On Jan. 16, the state Supreme Court issued an advisory opinion saying Amendment 4 “can only reasonably be understood” as saying that felons must settle debts before voting.

Meantime, felons and advocacy organizations sued in federal court. In May a federal judge ruled that Florida’s “pay-to-vote system,” as he called it, violates the U.S. Constitution as applied to felons who “are genuinely unable to pay,” and also those for whom the owed amounts “cannot be determined with diligence,” given aging and disorderly paperwork.

Once the Eleventh Circuit took up the case en banc, there was a push to force Judges Lagoa and Luck off of it. Their colleague Judge Andrew Brasher, who also received a Senate nastygram, has recused, reasonably enough, citing an amicus brief in the case filed by his old employer, the Alabama Attorney General’s office.

For Judges Lagoa and Luck, the recusal argument was nothing but furious pounding of the table. “While a member of the Florida Supreme Court, you participated in an Advisory Opinion on this very issue,” wrote the 10 Senators, who included Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris, Sheldon Whitehouse and Amy Klobuchar. They cited the judicial Code of Conduct, which tells judges to recuse from “a proceeding” if they “participated as a judge (in a previous judicial position)” or have “expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case.”

Judges Lagoa and Luck sat for oral argument in an Amendment 4 case, but they left long before the ruling came down. Also: It was a different case. After they exited, the Florida Supreme Court offered an interpretation of the phrase “all terms of sentence,” while insisting it would “express no opinion on any question other than the narrow one presented.” Judges Lagoa and Luck are not prejudiced in a completely separate federal lawsuit asking whether Amendment 4 violates the U.S. Constitution.

Late last month Judges Lagoa and Luck denied a court motion to disqualify them, saying “there is no occasion for us to recuse.” But it’s obvious why the 10 Democratic Senators might prefer to try them in public. The Eleventh Circuit has 12 active judges, seven nominated by Republicans and five by Democrats. If three Trump appointees were recused, it might be enough to shift the outcome.

It’s clear this is what the Senators wanted, since they wrote that the case implicates “the voting rights of 750,000 Florida residents.” It’s another example of Democrats in Congress trying to bully judges to rule the way they demand.
Title: selective prosecution of illegal use of money
Post by: ccp on August 20, 2020, 06:46:41 AM
fi guilty than woe is Bannon

but I post here because
(I presume) the SDNY has not as far as I know not gone after anyone not a REpublican or not affiliated with Trump

they are resistant:

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/former-trump-campaign-manager-steve-bannon-indicted-for-fraud-in-ny/2325517/

also just a coincidence now during DNC show?
Title: Re: selective prosecution of illegal use of money
Post by: DougMacG on August 20, 2020, 07:07:43 AM
fi guilty than woe is Bannon

but I post here because
(I presume) the SDNY has not as far as I know not gone after anyone not a REpublican or not affiliated with Trump

they are resistant:

https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/national-international/former-trump-campaign-manager-steve-bannon-indicted-for-fraud-in-ny/2325517/

also just a coincidence now during DNC show?

If he was defrauding Americans, conservative donors in this case, he can go to jail. 

My inbox gets filled with requests that sound great from unknown sources I never respond to.  Go straight to the candidate's website of your choice and give there.  We will have a wall (or an economy) if we elect enough people who support that.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on August 20, 2020, 07:33:35 AM
".My inbox gets filled with requests that sound great from unknown sources I never respond to"

yes 2x match 4 times match 5 times match if you donate now etc..

really

who is matching ?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on August 20, 2020, 08:16:54 AM
".My inbox gets filled with requests that sound great from unknown sources I never respond to"

yes 2x match 4 times match 5 times match if you donate now etc..

really

who is matching ?

If they have the 5x they promise, why don't those fat cats just give without me?
I would give money but I don't want to be on their lists.
Otherwise I recommend giving small amounts.  More donors and a lower average donation looks good in the hotly contested races.
Title: there has to be a political side to this
Post by: ccp on August 20, 2020, 02:58:39 PM
wait till now to arrest him when he is Chinese yacht . Were CNN crews tipped of ahead of time?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8647401/Steven-Bannon-arrested-INDICTED-multi-million-wall-fraud.html

that said, Ben Shapiro warned us about Bannon long time ago:

https://www.businessinsider.com/breitbart-editor-ben-shapirostephen-bannon-2016-8

BTW think anyone at FBI will go after the "Lincoln" project grifters for doing the same thing?
Title: How CIA's Brennan overruled dissenting analysts
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 24, 2020, 12:39:17 PM
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/09/24/secret_report_how_cias_brennan_overruled_dissenting_analysts_who_thought_russia_favored_hillary_125315.html

A savy friend comments:

"This tracks with my guess on what happened.  That said, it’s always wise to be skeptical of stories that support what you already believe.  It will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of this. I’m definitely ready to believe that Schiff sat on information that would have blown up the Russia lie, though."
 
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on September 24, 2020, 02:53:07 PM
we need this investigation to finish

another reason Trump MUST win and we hold the Senate.

Title: Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity!
Post by: G M on September 24, 2020, 04:27:50 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/390463.php

Did anyone resign in protest? Any complaints the the FBI's OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) or the DOJ's IG?

Title: Re: Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity!
Post by: G M on September 24, 2020, 04:57:25 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/390463.php

Did anyone resign in protest? Any complaints the the FBI's OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) or the DOJ's IG?

(https://cdn.locals.com/images/answers/134602/134602_3w6xg9sxakcb1to_full.jpeg)
Title: Revealed: Christopher Steele's Primary Subsource Was Branded a National Security
Post by: G M on September 25, 2020, 12:25:13 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/390472.php
Title: Run from the top
Post by: G M on September 25, 2020, 02:06:03 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/09/breaking-newly-released-documents-reveal-fbi-agent-general-flynn-case-claims-run-top-no-crimes/
Title: Guilty until proven Trump supporter: Jake Gardner
Post by: G M on September 25, 2020, 07:31:07 PM
https://anncoulter.com/2020/09/23/innocent-until-proven-trump-supporterxxxx/

Title: Andrew McCarthy: Allegation Hillary orchestrated it all
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2020, 03:36:09 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/allegation-hillary-clinton-orchestrated-collusion-hoax-to-distract-from-her-emails-according-to-russian-intel/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=most-popular&utm_term=first
Title: The Deep State omits Antifa as threat
Post by: G M on October 09, 2020, 01:15:04 PM
https://lidblog.com/threat-assessment-omits-antifa/

Title: antifa an idea
Post by: ccp on October 09, 2020, 02:30:29 PM
white supremacy is an idea only

racism is an idea

anti semitism is an idea

Title: Laws are for the little people-Biden crime family
Post by: G M on October 14, 2020, 09:04:51 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/10/fbi-seized-hunter-biden-computer-december-2019-ignored-crimes-nothing-gave-biden-family-complete-pass/

Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 15, 2020, 05:15:21 AM
"How many stories landed with the FBI that were ignored because the participants were on the team protected by the FBI?  How many criminals walk free because the FBI buries their crimes and refuses to investigate?  Maybe it is time to shut down the FBI and start over."

if Biden wins we will NEVER know.

DC = daunting corruption
Title: Your FBI will entrap you
Post by: G M on October 16, 2020, 08:23:27 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/15/your-fbi-will-entrap-you/
Title: Faking Bogus Investigations
Post by: G M on October 18, 2020, 10:58:30 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/10/update-ring-leader-plot-kidnap-wretched-governor-whitmer-alleged-fbi-informant-pushed-entire-plan/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 18, 2020, 11:32:15 AM
"UPDATE: Suspects Say Ring Leader in Plot to Kidnap Wretched Governor Whitmer Was an Alleged FBI Informant — Who Pushed the Entire Plan"

Again I will ask, why is Wray not thrown out?

Where is Barr?
Where is Trump?

Didn't Hoover do stuff like this so he could get headlines?

conveniently this comes out after Fay Wray tells us white supremacy is out biggest threat
   
all the while blocking the release of any and all documents that could implicate FBI or the Democrats  for as long as he can......

Title: The Deep State owns the MSM
Post by: G M on October 27, 2020, 03:10:25 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/26/dangerous-spygate-denials-show-intelligence-now-controls-media/
Title: proud to do everything possible to hurt a duly elected POTUS
Post by: ccp on October 28, 2020, 03:24:28 PM
https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/miles-taylor-anonymous/

 :x

can he brought up on some sort of criminal charges?

gets lincoln project job.

  meaning help the democrat party

more on Miles
he works for Google ! who hired him in 2019. presumable he has never trumper on his resume

was a  W. appointee

whose brother lost because he would not fight for us like Trump

so this guy decides he will fight for the Democrats
says "lifelong Republican" on site

not anymore and questionable what he was other then swamp boy
Title: Welcome to my world
Post by: ccp on October 28, 2020, 10:46:00 PM
https://thepostmillennial.com/damning-hunter-biden-documents-suddenly-vanish

assuming it is Fed Ex
remember this is not a federal crime to tamper with their packages

like it would be if USPS

that said it would have made no difference

the package just need to be out someones eye view for less than a minute

that is all it takes
the Fedex guy could even have simply been paid to look the other way

or stopped to get a cup of coffee or take a piss

the contents will not be found

Title: Tucker tells us it was UPS not Fedex
Post by: ccp on October 30, 2020, 05:23:08 AM
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2020/10/30/tucker-gives-an-update-on-ups-package-that-vanished-n2579087

One caution I suggest do not use ups if important - those guys are union and I would steer away from union employees in mHo

Tucker pointed out there are not cameras in one location
so this being an inside job that is exactly where someone would pick up the package

the lack of explanation as to what happened is very suspicious and very like what happens to us

the company will say we found it , if they do , and say thats it folks
you got your stuff so whether is was copied , searched , or tampered with is not important - end of our responsibility to you
    period , done

I would have to assume someone wanted to take the device and then when called on it , they take it out of the hiding place and it suddenly mysteriously appears and made to look as though an accident.

as what we have seen in copyright - when we have evidence of its existence - it re appears miraculously - (oh now we can find it - and called a mistake) . if we don't then it is never found

we don't have the ability to put it on national TV like Tucker -

and in the end no one is held accountable  etc



Title: Harvey Silverglate reminds me of someone...
Post by: G M on October 31, 2020, 06:26:52 PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV9m9N8gP9c

Author of "3 Felonies a day".
Title: Why does AG Barr let FBI's Wray get away with it?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2020, 03:22:26 AM
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16691/barr-wray
Title: Re: Why does AG Barr let FBI's Wray get away with it?
Post by: G M on November 01, 2020, 11:44:41 AM
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16691/barr-wray

Deep state Barr.
Title: The other armed wing of the DNC
Post by: G M on November 01, 2020, 12:08:21 PM
https://nypost.com/2020/11/01/fbi-investigating-trump-train-swarming-of-biden-bus-in-texas/

The FBI can't be bothered to investigate Antifa, but this is a priority!
Title: FBI hiding Seth Rich docs
Post by: G M on November 02, 2020, 02:14:05 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/turns-fbi-hiding-seth-rich-documents/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 03, 2020, 05:59:39 AM
Who is Seth Rich?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on November 03, 2020, 06:02:08 AM
Who is Seth Rich?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/seth_rich_the_murder_washington_doesnt_want_solved.html
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 03, 2020, 06:27:13 AM
Ah, I remember now.
Title: Corrupt DA and BLM
Post by: G M on November 06, 2020, 07:11:41 PM
https://www.captainsjournal.com/2020/11/04/kenosha-district-attorney-michael-graveley-is-a-black-lives-matter-apparatchik/
Title: deep stater Richard Pilger resigns
Post by: ccp on November 10, 2020, 06:39:17 AM
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/richard-pilger-resignation-elections-barr/2020/11/10/id/996281/

more on this partisan Democrat hack who serves not us , but his beloved Democrats :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pilger

Title: The Deep State tried to crush the USPS Whistleblower
Post by: G M on November 12, 2020, 12:26:26 PM
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=391233

He did not recant.
Title: There is no deep state
Post by: G M on November 13, 2020, 06:22:08 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/391280.php

We are a nation of laws!

My vote counts!
Title: No DOJ investigation
Post by: G M on November 23, 2020, 02:46:03 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/23/rand-paul-no-doj-investigation-into-funding-behind-the-thugs-who-attacked-republicans-after-rnc-event-in-august/

Stop expecting justice from the Department of Justice.
Title: Re: No DOJ investigation
Post by: G M on November 24, 2020, 09:35:21 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/23/rand-paul-no-doj-investigation-into-funding-behind-the-thugs-who-attacked-republicans-after-rnc-event-in-august/

Stop expecting justice from the Department of Justice.

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/doj-lawyer-argues-us-can-kill-its-own-citizens-without-review-when-state-secrets-are-involved
Title: Re: No DOJ investigation
Post by: G M on November 30, 2020, 10:28:21 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/23/rand-paul-no-doj-investigation-into-funding-behind-the-thugs-who-attacked-republicans-after-rnc-event-in-august/

Stop expecting justice from the Department of Justice.

(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/060/285/014/original/9a8bd5ac425e8fbf.png)
Title: Re: No DOJ investigation
Post by: DougMacG on December 01, 2020, 06:13:49 AM
Sidney Powell: “Frankly, I’m Beginning to think the Entire FBI and Dept. of Justice need to be Hosed Out with Clorox and Firehoses!”
——------------

I like Bill Barr and believe he said and did some grest things as US AG.  But his mid term appointment and leadership did not create followership of a very biased, corrupt and leftist agenda driven deep state lawyers and 'investigators' that dominate the department and the agencies.
Title: AG Barr appoints Durham as Special Counsel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 01, 2020, 01:37:42 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/barr-appoints-durham-as-special-counsel-to-continue-probe-under-biden/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=22262087
Title: Re: AG Barr appoints Durham as Special Counsel
Post by: G M on December 01, 2020, 01:51:18 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/barr-appoints-durham-as-special-counsel-to-continue-probe-under-biden/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=22262087

More kicking the can down the road to pacify the rubes! Awesome!


Failure theater at it's finest.
Title: Re: No DOJ investigation
Post by: G M on December 01, 2020, 04:57:27 PM
https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/1333898563022172166

Deep State Barr doing his thing!



Sidney Powell: “Frankly, I’m Beginning to think the Entire FBI and Dept. of Justice need to be Hosed Out with Clorox and Firehoses!”
——------------

I like Bill Barr and believe he said and did some grest things as US AG.  But his mid term appointment and leadership did not create followership of a very biased, corrupt and leftist agenda driven deep state lawyers and 'investigators' that dominate the department and the agencies.
Title: Andrew McCarthy on the Durham appt.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2020, 07:19:40 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/russia-probe-in-overtime-unpacking-barrs-latest-durham-appointment/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-12-02&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: Andrew McCarthy on the Durham appt.
Post by: G M on December 02, 2020, 10:04:33 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/russia-probe-in-overtime-unpacking-barrs-latest-durham-appointment/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202020-12-02&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

I call BS!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on December 03, 2020, 05:19:37 AM
someone last night on Hannity ? i think said the corona virus slowed down the investigation

I would guess it had a 1% of getting real results (jail time for anyone other then the secretary who makes the coffee)
under Trump

Under biden

even the secretary will be on CNN and getting called  a hero for "saving democracy"
Title: Gatestone: Durham as Special Counsel
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2020, 05:01:42 AM
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16830/durham-special-counsel
Title: Trump's judges
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2020, 08:57:18 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/the-glory-of-trumps-judges/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MJ_20201211&utm_term=Jolt-Smart
Title: Deep State Barr
Post by: G M on December 11, 2020, 09:45:02 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/391649.php
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2020, 11:56:53 AM
Is that fair? 

Hasn't the long standing policy (completely fuct during the Hillary investigation) been that investigations are not announced so as to not damage the name of the subject(s)?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on December 11, 2020, 02:46:57 PM
Is that fair? 

Hasn't the long standing policy (completely fuct during the Hillary investigation) been that investigations are not announced so as to not damage the name of the subject(s)?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/lowering-barr-lloyd-billingsley/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/agent-ford-pocket-whistleblower-fbi-oig-harassed-reporting-truckload-illegal-ballots/

https://nlpc.org/2020/10/21/newsmaxtv-why-did-fbi-sit-on-hunter-bidens-laptop/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2020, 04:23:01 PM
All of those are genuinely interesting but none are responsive to the point I was making.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on December 11, 2020, 04:51:27 PM
All of those are genuinely interesting but none are responsive to the point I was making.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/29/explosive-new-flynn-documents-show-fbi-goal-was-to-get-him-fired/

You are aware it's been a longstanding practice for the FBI/DOJ to leak as needed, yes?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2020, 04:54:51 PM
A tip of the hat to the master of snark  :lol:
Title: LA is doing great!
Post by: G M on December 13, 2020, 10:50:07 AM
https://the-pipeline.org/social-justice-comes-to-los-angeles/
Title: Obama's Secret Army
Post by: G M on December 16, 2020, 08:56:45 AM
https://stpaulresearch.com/2019/10/31/obamas-secret-stay-behind-army/
Title: intelligence report to be made public
Post by: ccp on December 17, 2020, 01:03:39 PM
On Jan 20th.   :-(

How is it the Left controls all levers of government like this?

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/12/17/kt-mcfarland-explains-why-the-intelligence-report-on-the-election-is-being-delayed-n2581739
Title: Deep State Barr continues to deliver
Post by: G M on December 21, 2020, 10:31:19 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/391787.php

Department of Justice!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on December 21, 2020, 10:50:29 AM
"Grim Tidings: Barr Says There's No Reason to Appoint a Special Counsel in the Hunter Biden Scandal"

Wait , I thought he resigned

it is obvious he is looking for his own wide ass now.

Biden , says he will not talk to his AG about his son's investigation

Come on man , you think we are THAT stupid

yes your son ON crack is smarter than you.

barr = thumbs down
 all hot air .
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 21, 2020, 11:05:16 AM
Fk.
Title: We know the answer
Post by: G M on December 21, 2020, 11:58:24 AM
https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/060/878/411/original/b52290dcf5f85bc1.jpg

(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/060/878/411/original/b52290dcf5f85bc1.jpg)

No.
Title: The Deep State-ATF
Post by: G M on December 25, 2020, 04:25:20 PM
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2020/03/04/the-siege-of-waco-and-the-deep-state/

My top suspects in the TN bombing: ATF
Title: What exactly?
Post by: G M on December 26, 2020, 01:58:58 PM
https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/12/KiQSgjp.jpg?resize=396%2C600&ssl=1

(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/12/KiQSgjp.jpg?resize=396%2C600&ssl=1)
Title: Re: What exactly?
Post by: G M on December 26, 2020, 02:43:10 PM
https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/12/KiQSgjp.jpg?resize=396%2C600&ssl=1

(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/12/KiQSgjp.jpg?resize=396%2C600&ssl=1)

Well, they do ruin innocent people's lives as well.

https://jimbovard.com/blog/2020/09/17/the-fbis-forgotten-crimes-against-richard-jewell/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 27, 2020, 06:16:42 AM
Trump’s Weissmann Pardons
Political clemency will inevitably follow political prosecutions.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 25, 2020 3:06 pm ET



President Trump’s flurry of pardons and grants of clemency this week are being denounced far and wide, and many of them appear to be undeserved, or worse. But the critics would have more credibility if they tried to understand why tens of millions of Americans will discount these as the Andrew Weissmann pardons.

Mr. Weissmann is the former deputy to special counsel Robert Mueller on the Russia collusion probe. He’s a Democratic partisan who can be seen even now on MSNBC suggesting that Mr. Trump obstructed justice in the probe that never turned up evidence of collusion. He and his fellow prosecutors spent two years, with the full resources of the federal government, trying to prove a case that didn’t exist.


Instead they indicted individuals in the Trump orbit of crimes unrelated to their main purpose. They pursued Paul Manafort on a foreign-lobbying statute that is rarely enforced and then turned up evidence of tax fraud. They coerced George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan into copping pleas on a single count of making false statements. Roger Stone was convicted of obstructing a Congressional investigation.

Mr, Manafort’s tax offenses are serious crimes, and that’s how a jury saw them. He and Mr. Stone, former business partners, have long been political scoundrels of the type Mr. Trump likes to have around him. But there’s no doubt they were targeted not for their specific offenses but because they associated with Mr. Trump. Prosecutors were out to get Mr. Trump—many of them still are—and they were happy to take down others in the hope they would have evidence against the President.


Yet the targeted men had nothing to offer beyond what prosecutors turned up from other sources. It was inevitable that Mr. Trump would pardon these former associates before he left office. If the good and righteous want to avoid political pardons, they should be more critical of political prosecutions.

These points don’t apply to the pardons for former GOP CongressmenDuncan Hunter and Chris Collins. Both men admitted to violating the public trust and at most deserved to have their sentences commuted, not to have their convictions expunged.

The pardons of four Blackwater security guards convicted of killing civilians in Iraq are also hard to justify. It reminds us of Mr. Trump’s previous intervention to save the Trident pin for Navy Seal team chief Eddie Gallagher, whose peers refused to defend his behavior. These decisions show disrespect for American soldiers who must be disciplined under great stress on the battlefield.

The pardons that most seem to exercise the Washington political class, however, are those related to the Mueller-Weissmann probe. And on those they might contemplate their own complicity. The Russia collusion saga has damaged American trust in government institutions far more than its promoters recognize. Their refusal to admit its damage, and their own role in it, feeds the cynicism that Mr. Trump is only too happy to exploit.
Title: Funny what they can do when they try
Post by: G M on December 28, 2020, 01:14:56 AM
https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/056/841/original/fc0edf5bd45471ac.png

(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/056/841/original/fc0edf5bd45471ac.png)
Title: Still accurate
Post by: G M on December 29, 2020, 10:54:42 PM
https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/091/529/original/aeb76911b3ccdf60.png

(https://gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/061/091/529/original/aeb76911b3ccdf60.png)
Title: Deep State to postpone census count till after the demented. one is in
Post by: ccp on December 31, 2020, 08:08:33 AM
bureauCRATS  to screw us over again:

https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/census-bureau-to-miss-deadline-potentially-foiling-trumps-plan-to-exclude-undocumented-immigrants

which DC lawyer(s) came up with this scam?

Shakespeare was only partly right he should have said partisan Democrat lawyers
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 31, 2020, 03:25:45 PM
This will have big consequences.
Title: remove all potential whistle suckers
Post by: ccp on December 31, 2020, 03:35:14 PM
https://www.chron.com/news/article/Secret-Service-to-add-former-Biden-agents-to-15837230.php

I wonder if this was done for DJT?

suddenly whistle suckers are a THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.
Title: Andy "Deep State" McCarthy
Post by: G M on January 07, 2021, 02:20:15 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392027.php

Still think he's credible?
Title: The Deep State has found that the Deep State did nothing wrong.
Post by: G M on January 20, 2021, 07:23:30 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/01/feds-quietly-close-flynn-leak-investigation-find-no-wrongdoing-crooked-obama-officials/
Title: Will never be investigated or prosecuted
Post by: G M on January 26, 2021, 12:18:17 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/392334.php

Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity!
Title: Careful what you say, Big Brother is hunting Badthinkers!
Post by: G M on January 27, 2021, 05:06:35 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/florida-man-arrested-over-2016-election-memes-designed-trick-hillary-voters
Title: Re: Careful what you say, Big Brother is hunting Badthinkers!
Post by: G M on January 28, 2021, 10:37:50 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/florida-man-arrested-over-2016-election-memes-designed-trick-hillary-voters

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/063/561/171/original/7a54fab559981060.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/063/561/171/original/7a54fab559981060.png)
Title: Andrew McCarthy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 28, 2021, 05:21:07 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/the-justice-departments-ridiculous-voter-disinformation-prosecution/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-01-28&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: Andrew McCarthy
Post by: G M on January 28, 2021, 07:40:53 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/the-justice-departments-ridiculous-voter-disinformation-prosecution/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-01-28&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

You know you fcuk'ed up when you lose Andy "Deep State Shill" McCarthy.
Title: Henninger
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2021, 08:10:11 PM
Joe Biden’s Rule of Law Problem
Without resistance, the U.S. is tipping toward the mob style in politics—on the left and right.

By Daniel Henninger
Jan. 27, 2021 5:48 pm ET

WSJ Opinion: Joe Biden’s Rule of Law Problem

Wonder Land: Public and political condemnation of the Capitol riot is virtually universal, and rightly so. But why does condemnation of the violence committed during the summer's Black Lives Matter protests remain selective, at best. Images: Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly



The Capitol occupation and riot of Jan. 6 will haunt American political life for years. Condemnation of the invasion of the Capitol is virtually universal, as is support for prosecuting those arrested inside.

By contrast, condemnation of the violence committed during the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests remains selective. Prosecutions for crimes against property or assaults on police are minimal. Last week, New York state Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against the New York City Police Department for violating “individuals’ basic right to peacefully protest.”

The press is now doing long takeouts on right-wing militias, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists such as QAnon. That’s fine by me. These nuts should be locked up if convicted of crimes.

Meanwhile, the continuing and quite shocking anarchist, left-wing violence in Seattle and Portland, Ore., is inside-page news, if it’s reported at all.



At the White House Tuesday, President Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, was asked whether a federal intelligence-agency review of the Capitol occupiers would extend to the Portland rioters. She said that “all violence happening around the country will be reviewed.” Next question.

Amid 2020’s turbulence, I still think one of the most troublesome political events was that no speaker at the Democratic National Convention mentioned, much less criticized, the violence and looting in numerous U.S. cities.

It is naive and dangerous for the press and responsible political leaders—whether Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump —to think that closing their eyes to lawlessness won’t break down broader respect for the rule of law itself, assuming that still matters.

If you still need a cold-water bath to wake up to where this is going, it is this quotation in a Journal article about police and military veterans involved in the Capitol invasion. Jacob Fracker, a cop from Virginia, defended himself on Facebook —after his arrest:

“I can protest for what I believe in and still support your protest for what you believe in.”

In other words: Both sides now believe that no matter what they do, they should be able to get away with it. You rationalized your criminality during the summer as politically justified, and so we will rationalize ours for the same reason.

The highbrow explanation for staying quiet about the crimes committed this summer is that the greater moral need is elevating public consciousness about systemic racism, which requires defending at all costs, including looking away from the flames.


In a system that claims to be governed by equality before the law, a bedrock measure of even-handedness should be the reality of prosecution for crimes committed. The Capitol invaders face the likelihood of felony charges, while most of those arrested this summer in hundreds of violent protests were charged with misdemeanors, such as violating curfews.


One purpose of prosecution is that otherwise, you “get away with it.” This isn’t just a social observation. Letting off people arrested for clear crimes has become public policy—known as “restorative justice”—in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and other progressive cities, where arguably this is what the voting public wants.

Only inside the cult of critical race theory can a public confused about the content of justice be a good thing. If prosecutors in major cities are dumbing down violent crime, what is the point of giving the system respect? One feels foolish for doing so. The police on the beat have already defaulted to that conclusion.


Slippery slope is a cliché, but a colleague once noted that phrases become clichés because they are true. This is a slippery slope. Instead of respect for the rule of law, the majority develops contempt for the rules. Sometime soon, we may tip toward what one might call the mob style in American politics and not just among anarchists. If justice is biased, well, you do what you gotta do. Law-abiding parents thinking they had to bribe coaches to get their children into college were a portent.

Adrian Diaz, Seattle’s new police chief, said Saturday that protesters who vandalize private property will be arrested and prosecuted. But there is no evidence that City Attorney Pete Holmes will prosecute them for much of anything.

Mr. Diaz replaced Carmen Best, who resigned when Seattle’s City Council abandoned the cops and effectively embraced the mobs. Mr. Diaz, may be the final test of whether equality before the law is officially moribund.

Mr. Trump never spoke forcefully enough against the violence below the surface on his side. At her White House news conference Monday, Ms. Psaki did say Mr. Biden condemns the Seattle violence. But sentiment isn’t enough.

At one of Mr. Biden’s executive-order signings, a reporter should ask the president whose side he’s on in Seattle—Chief Diaz, who wants the book thrown at protesters who commit crimes, or City Attorney Holmes, who just won’t do it. One might even say this is one of those presidency-defining lines in the sand.
Title: You are the target
Post by: G M on February 01, 2021, 01:57:57 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/31/how-our-oligarchy-crushes-terrorism/
Title: It's almost like there are different rules for different people!
Post by: G M on February 01, 2021, 06:45:41 PM
https://nypost.com/2021/02/01/capitol-officer-who-killed-ashli-babbitt-not-likely-to-face-charges/
Title: Re: It's almost like there are different rules for different people!
Post by: DougMacG on February 01, 2021, 07:35:42 PM
https://nypost.com/2021/02/01/capitol-officer-who-killed-ashli-babbitt-not-likely-to-face-charges/

It sure looked like a targeted assassination to me on the original video.

"was climbing through a window that had been shattered by protesters when she was killed."

That's not what I remember seeing.
Title: Re: It's almost like there are different rules for different people!
Post by: G M on February 01, 2021, 08:08:48 PM
I can't wait to hear all the outrage from the left over this in 3, 2, never.


https://nypost.com/2021/02/01/capitol-officer-who-killed-ashli-babbitt-not-likely-to-face-charges/

It sure looked like a targeted assassination to me on the original video.

"was climbing through a window that had been shattered by protesters when she was killed."

That's not what I remember seeing.
Title: How the "justice" system works
Post by: G M on February 03, 2021, 11:43:01 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/fbi%20doj%20decision%20making%2001.jpg

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/fbi%20doj%20decision%20making%2001.jpg)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State, Kevin Clinesmith, WTF?
Post by: DougMacG on February 03, 2021, 01:22:52 PM
$100 fine?  Probation??  The cost of this with the Mueller probe alone was $32 million.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://twitter.com/amuse/status/1356726820834541568

@amuse
BREAKING: The DC District Court refused to disbar convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith for his crimes against the President of the United States. Instead they simply suspended him while on probation and until he pays his $100 fine. He should never be allowed to practice law again.
4:10 PM · Feb 2, 2021·Twitter

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EtQPnA8XUAoIXh-?format=png&name=900x900)
Title: Durham
Post by: ccp on February 03, 2021, 02:25:31 PM
I think it was on Lou Dobbs
he had guest on:    "probe" is over

with zero results

as expected

DC swamp wins again

another fiasco of an "investigation "

DC Dem Lawyers always come out on top
  always

and get filthy rich doing it.

Barr ruled in Trumps favor on the Mueller thing

beyond that not sure what if anything he accomplished other than worrying about not looking too partisan
Title: Famous But Incompetent
Post by: G M on February 08, 2021, 07:28:58 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/02/fact-check-true-fbi-got-punked-included-pornstars-photo-official-report-us-capitol-protesters-arrest/
Title: Psyops and the destruction of the rule of law
Post by: G M on March 08, 2021, 08:52:26 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/07/the-perversion-of-law-as-psychological-warfare/
Title: The FBI says...
Post by: G M on March 09, 2021, 07:58:13 AM
https://cdn.locals.com/images/posts/originals/129306/129306_e7t5x5t3d3nlekn.jpeg

(https://cdn.locals.com/images/posts/originals/129306/129306_e7t5x5t3d3nlekn.jpeg)
Title: The Deep State destroying all our institutions
Post by: G M on March 10, 2021, 08:47:01 PM
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/03/10/trust-in-the-military-is-dropping-significantly-new-survey-suggests/
Title: Re: The Deep State destroying all our institutions
Post by: DougMacG on March 11, 2021, 03:42:39 AM
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2021/03/10/trust-in-the-military-is-dropping-significantly-new-survey-suggests/

Striving to be second best in tbe world.  Under a second term with Kamala, I wonder how many other countries besides China will pass us up.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 11, 2021, 04:42:43 AM
somehow Biden seems to be able to give readings off telepromter

not unusual with dementia

they have good and bad days
perhaps with good night sleep and some stimulants
   they can perk him up enough to read his lines
sooner or later he will fail
if we are lucky it will be tonight

not that any one except us will comment on it.

Title: Capitol investigation seeks to criminalize political dissent
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 16, 2021, 07:26:53 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/15/capitol-investigation-seeks-to-criminalize-political-dissent/
Title: You better pay attention to this
Post by: G M on March 16, 2021, 09:32:33 PM
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/will-fbi-chats-send-conservatives-to-prison/
Title: above post: "Will FBI ‘Chats’ Send Conservatives To Prison?"
Post by: ccp on March 17, 2021, 05:07:43 AM
"The federal false statements law conveys so much power that, according to Clinton administration Solicitor General Seth Waxman, federal agents can “escalate completely innocent conduct into a felony.” One federal judge condemned the law for encouraging “inquisition as a method of criminal investigation.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria#/media/File:Lavrenty_Beria.jpg
Title: No big deal, just the USG illegally spying on an American...
Post by: G M on March 19, 2021, 07:09:34 PM
https://sharylattkisson.com/2021/03/sharyl-attkisson-statement-on-government-computer-intrusion-court-decision/
Title: This is where we are now
Post by: G M on March 21, 2021, 05:46:00 PM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/069/356/140/original/e66a48706dadf106.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/069/356/140/original/e66a48706dadf106.jpeg)

Imagine where we will be...
Title: The Deep State and the Boston Bombers
Post by: G M on March 23, 2021, 05:52:19 PM
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2017/04/09/tamerlan-tsarnaev-fbi-informant/
Title: The US Intelligence Community being weaponized and targeting Americans...
Post by: G M on March 24, 2021, 11:44:30 AM
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-us-intelligence-community-flouting
Title: I've got a bad feeling about this...
Post by: G M on March 24, 2021, 10:32:03 PM
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/cia-plans-to-move-division-to-denver/
Title: It must be nice to have this immunity from consequences...Hunter's gun
Post by: G M on March 25, 2021, 10:21:32 AM
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/25/sources-secret-service-inserted-itself-into-case-of-hunter-bidens-gun-477879
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 25, 2021, 01:02:52 PM
"The incident did not result in charges or arrests"

how about a psych eval for the gun owner

crack addicted money laundering lying criminal ("alleged" , of course ) could easily pass a background check set up by Dems

could anyone image if this one of Trump's sons the MSM outrage and 24/7 nonstop bashing of this.
could the secret service or ATF agents been able to ignore all the bribes they would have gotten for such dirt

and don't tell me msm were not bribing insiders.
Title: Re: It must be nice to have this immunity from consequences...Hunter's gun
Post by: G M on March 25, 2021, 05:05:59 PM
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/25/sources-secret-service-inserted-itself-into-case-of-hunter-bidens-gun-477879

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/393349.php
Title: The Department of Injustice lies about Jan 6
Post by: G M on March 25, 2021, 05:09:47 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/393345.php
Title: Sentiment analysis
Post by: G M on March 31, 2021, 08:15:29 PM
https://www.revolver.news/2021/03/fbi-deploys-creepy-sentiment-analysis-tools-to-screen-national-guard-for-pro-trump-sympathies/
Title: Incompetent AND Corrupt
Post by: G M on April 22, 2021, 12:44:35 PM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/04/21/fbi-labeled-steve-scalise-and-gop-assassination-attempt-as-suicide-by-cop-not-domestic-terrorism-or-political-violence/
Title: This is your KGB
Post by: G M on April 24, 2021, 06:01:07 PM
https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/no-longer-peoples-fbi-now-democrats-kgb.jpg?w=490&ssl=1

(https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/no-longer-peoples-fbi-now-democrats-kgb.jpg?w=490&ssl=1)
Title: Re: This is your KGB
Post by: G M on April 24, 2021, 06:14:46 PM
https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/no-longer-peoples-fbi-now-democrats-kgb.jpg?w=490&ssl=1

(https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/no-longer-peoples-fbi-now-democrats-kgb.jpg?w=490&ssl=1)

https://jimbovard.com/blog/2021/04/23/the-feds-are-coming-for-libertarians/
Title: FBI releases some documents on death of Seth Rich
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 25, 2021, 06:38:55 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/fbi-releases-documents-on-investigation-into-death-of-democrat-national-committee-worker-seth-rich_3789686.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-04-25&mktids=a3c631a4873a8bea89656ca33fcf7bf4&est=lojbNRpy2lEMmTUSuq363NEuDhCrnxroEqaUTV8AGRa5yfNVb0mwBF1tqOzJdwwB5l8k
Title: FBI's BS "death by cop"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 25, 2021, 06:42:43 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/gop-lawmaker-asks-fbi-to-reassess-decision-concluding-2017-baseball-shooting-was-suicide-by-cop__trashed_3789618.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-04-25&mktids=a3c631a4873a8bea89656ca33fcf7bf4&est=aT8ufeHCnI00hrNez%2B5DtkA88bS8EfQCXmnPNwdRI8vMZ3ns6Fzuw7sYj7cXLUCscVlm
Title: Re: This is your KGB
Post by: G M on April 25, 2021, 06:05:12 PM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/072/523/288/original/38a59df2c723b554.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/072/523/288/original/38a59df2c723b554.jpeg)

https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/no-longer-peoples-fbi-now-democrats-kgb.jpg?w=490&ssl=1

(https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/no-longer-peoples-fbi-now-democrats-kgb.jpg?w=490&ssl=1)

https://jimbovard.com/blog/2021/04/23/the-feds-are-coming-for-libertarians/
Title: the Deep State targets Gaetz
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 25, 2021, 08:12:02 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/25/the-deep-state-targets-matt-gaetz/
Title: More FBI abuses
Post by: G M on April 26, 2021, 09:47:24 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/declassified-fisa-opinion-shows-more-fbi-abuses
Title: Feds raid Rudy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 28, 2021, 01:50:48 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/28/conservatives-cry-foul-after-biden-fbi-raids-rudy-giulianis-apartment/
Title: Andy McCarthy on Rudi raid by the Leftist deep state
Post by: ccp on April 28, 2021, 03:55:28 PM
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/andy-mccarthy-calls-federal-agents-raiding-rudy-giulianis-new-york-city-apartment-an-aggressive-move
Title: Obama, Psaki, et al unveiled by federal court
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 28, 2021, 06:33:43 PM
https://aclj.org/government-corruption/breaking-aclj-secures-big-win-against-the-deep-state-in-federal-court?view=original%3Futm_source%3DFacebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=d-04282021_top-GC_seg-jayfb_con-psakirecap_typ-AR&fbclid=IwAR2iu6pwvQ3Y12qRsehZLxoBqxTXhPf9PmsEKKKSlbbQPawmBgqIWEpypyc
Title: Where's Durham?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 13, 2021, 07:17:19 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/may/13/wheres-durham-investigation-russia-collusion-probe/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=ZKaf08MaDfoEvCygijKi4bvWEI%2FfWVsMOcasWVvAlssE144qvhkwf0HqV2El0vak&bt_ts=1620913073779
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on May 13, 2021, 07:24:44 AM
I would Durham is up against an army of mobster DC democrat lawyers

I am sure he gets no help from Merrick
Title: Failure to faithfully execute
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 05, 2021, 07:45:57 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/biden-and-harris-flout-constitutional-immigration-duties_3843852.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-06-05&mktids=7fed606d021d3f8d1c8724cf617eba3c&est=YfF1XE%2Fb1y7FRGv19OUmsgVFJYiy7ksCDL7CPV3KF2S5oEc16D5Uhm%2FIHcB%2Bp%2BnU%2BCvX



"On the other hand, the duty imposed upon him [the president] to take care, that the
laws be faithfully executed, follows out the strong injunctions of his oath of
office, that he will "preserve, protect, and defend the constitution." The great
object of the executive department is to accomplish this purpose; and without it, be
the form of government whatever it may, it will be utterly worthless for offence, or
defence; for the redress of grievances, or the protection of rights; for the
happiness, or good order, or safety of the people."

--Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833
Title: Definitive Judicial Watch Compilation of Fauci's lies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2021, 05:29:40 PM
https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/?fbclid=IwAR35IF7EiXxzdkW141BXEHZjx72SmAClv229a5dt4wtqAaWMp5_sXyPwvP0

also see

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/us-gave-more-money-to-chinese-lab-for-bat-research-than-fauci-claimed-documents_3845561.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-06-06&mktids=2517e8e569cdc3a592c811b2d7d102b5&est=fXEcCytwEnv3hQQmAQsVLH3TcsEOd5TuFQbV94aur9u43Qb7nPkoO5%2FOUMqVZozP2NgC
Title: Re: Definitive Judicial Watch Compilation of Fauci's lies
Post by: G M on June 06, 2021, 05:45:57 PM
https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/?fbclid=IwAR35IF7EiXxzdkW141BXEHZjx72SmAClv229a5dt4wtqAaWMp5_sXyPwvP0

I can't wait until he gets prosecuted, just like Lois Lerner!
Title: Re: Definitive Judicial Watch Compilation of Fauci's lies
Post by: G M on June 06, 2021, 10:13:11 PM
https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/?fbclid=IwAR35IF7EiXxzdkW141BXEHZjx72SmAClv229a5dt4wtqAaWMp5_sXyPwvP0

I can't wait until he gets prosecuted, just like Lois Lerner!

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/076/007/941/original/eb65c0f54b2309d6.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/076/007/941/original/eb65c0f54b2309d6.png)
Title: Re: Definitive Judicial Watch Compilation of Fauci's lies
Post by: G M on June 07, 2021, 02:03:23 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/06/a-serious-country-would-jail-anthony-fauci/

https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/?fbclid=IwAR35IF7EiXxzdkW141BXEHZjx72SmAClv229a5dt4wtqAaWMp5_sXyPwvP0

I can't wait until he gets prosecuted, just like Lois Lerner!

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/076/007/941/original/eb65c0f54b2309d6.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/076/007/941/original/eb65c0f54b2309d6.png)
Title: WSJ: ule of law wins one!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 08, 2021, 08:46:17 AM
https://www.wsj.com/articles/judges-immigrants-and-the-rule-of-law-11623104715?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

t’s usually a good day at the Supreme Court when Justices left and right agree unanimously on the law, helping to restrain lower judges with overactive political imaginations. That happened Monday in Sanchez v. Mayorkas, as the High Court put a corner of immigration law back in proper order.

The case was brought by Jose Santos Sanchez, who came to the U.S. illegally in 1997. When earthquakes struck his native El Salvador in 2001, Mr. Sanchez received permission to stay in the U.S. and work under the shelter of Temporary Protected Status. After 20 years of “temporary” status, he and his wife have built a life.

TPS recipients can seek permanent residency, but the key statutory provision is limited to people who were lawfully “admitted.” So a foreigner arriving on a student or tourist visa, say, might get TPS after a disaster at home and then eventually receive a green card. Because of Mr. Sanchez’s initial illegal entry, he was denied permanent residency. But he argued that the grant of TPS itself constituted a legal “admission.”


Mr. Sanchez lost at the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, but the judiciary was split on the matter. In a 2013 case, the Sixth Circuit accepted an argument akin to Mr. Sanchez’s. That ruling featured a footnote chastising the U.S. Code “that using the term ‘alien’ to refer to other human beings is offensive and demeaning.”

A little of this spirit seems to live at the Supreme Court: In a case last month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave a quote from a 1987 opinion by the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, but she conspicuously edited the line to say “noncitizen” instead of “alien.”

No Justice adopted a strained reading of immigration law in the Sanchez case. “Sanchez was not lawfully admitted, and his TPS does not alter that fact,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the Court. “He therefore cannot become a permanent resident of this country.”

As salutary as this is for the rule of law, it’s a sad day for Mr. Sanchez. He and his wife have lived in the U.S. for decades. He has worked as a mechanic and paid taxes. Their youngest son was born here. They deserve a permanent resolution, but it must come from Congress. Judges who try to pry open loopholes are relieving lawmakers of the pressure to act.
Title: WSJ: Return of the IRS Scandal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 08, 2021, 09:40:24 PM
Return of the IRS Scandal
Someone leaked the tax information of individuals to serve the left’s agenda.
By The Editorial Board
June 8, 2021 6:39 pm ET



That didn’t take long. Less than half a year into the Biden Presidency, the Internal Revenue Service is already at the center of an abuse-of-power scandal. That news broke Tuesday when ProPublica, a website whose journalism promotes progressive causes, published information from what it said are 15 years of the tax returns of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and other rich Americans.

Leaking such information is a crime, since under federal law tax returns are confidential. ProPublica says it received the files from “an anonymous source” and doesn’t know who provided them, how they were obtained, or what the source’s motives are.

Allow us to fill in that last blank. The story arrives amid the Biden Administration’s effort to pass the largest tax increase as a share of the economy since 1968. The main Democratic argument for a tax hike is that the rich should pay their “fair share.” The ProPublica story is a long argument that somehow the rich don’t pay enough. The timing here is no coincidence, comrade.

Someone at the IRS—or someone who hacked the IRS—leaked the documents to influence the debate in Congress. And right on time, Ron Wyden, the Senate’s chief tax writer, opened a Finance Committee hearing Tuesday by mentioning the ProPublica data dump.


“What this data reveals is that the country’s wealthiest—who profited immensely during the pandemic—have not been paying their fair share,” Mr. Wyden said. “I’ll have a proposal to change that.” You can bet he will.

***
Yet the striking fact of the initial ProPublica story—it says the disclosures will continue for months—is how undramatic the findings are. It turns out that billionaires are very good at reducing their taxable income. Who knew?

Investors and entrepreneurs like Messrs. Buffett and Bezos make most of their money from the appreciation in the value of their assets. Most of Mr. Bezos’s wealth comes from the rising value of his stock in Amazon, which he founded. Mr. Buffett has long admitted he pays a relatively low income-tax rate because his wealth is based in the value of his company, Berkshire Hathaway.


There is no evidence of illegality in the ProPublica story. As these columns keep pointing out, the rich can afford to hire lawyers and accountants to exploit every part of the tax code to pay the minimum amount of income tax the law allows.

ProPublica knows this, so its story tries to invent a scandal by calculating what it calls the “true tax rate” these fellows are paying. This is a phony construct that exists nowhere in the law and compares how much the “wealth” of these individuals increased from 2014 to 2018 compared to how much income tax they paid. ProPublica says that Mr. Buffett’s “true tax rate” over that period was only 0.10%.

But wealth and income are different, and what Americans pay is a tax on income, not wealth. ProPublica makes much of the fact that these billionaires pay a lower rate on capital gains and dividends than they do on income. The story suggests this is unfair, but it isn’t.

The preferential rate for capital gains and dividends has been a central part of the tax code for decades, and for good reasons. Congress has wanted to encourage capital investment; assets are often held for decades and gains are only realized upon their sale; gains can’t be adjusted for inflation over the years they are held; and investors can’t deduct net capital losses from income beyond $3,000 a year. Bipartisan majorities have long supported this part of the tax code.

But this has changed as the political left has risen in the Democratic Party, and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders ran for President calling for a new tax on wealth. The ProPublica story essentially argues for the Warren-Sanders agenda. We’ll leave the case against such a tax for another day, but the political point is that Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders lost. Mr. Biden didn’t run on a wealth tax.

***
This still leaves the real scandal, which is that someone leaked confidential IRS information about individuals to serve a political agenda. This is the same tax agency that pursued a vendetta against conservative nonprofit groups during the Obama Administration. Remember Lois Lerner ?


This is also the same IRS that Democrats now want to infuse with $80 billion more to chase a fanciful amount of uncollected taxes. As part of this effort, Mr. Biden wants the IRS to collect “gross inflows and outflows on all business and personal accounts from financial institutions.” Why? So the information can be leaked to ProPublica?

The IRS says it has begun an investigation into the tax-return disclosure, and by all means send the guilty to prison. But Congress should also not trust the IRS with any more power and money than it already has.
Title: FBI Dir. Wray vs. the Rule of Law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 13, 2021, 08:23:11 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/13/no-director-wray-the-fbi-is-not-all-in-on-antifa-blm-riot-cases/
Title: Your FBI
Post by: G M on June 14, 2021, 11:52:34 AM
https://twitter.com/FBIWFO/status/1404091386346065925?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1404091386346065925%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Face.mu.nu%2F
Title: The IRS tax leak
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 15, 2021, 08:13:33 PM
We can save the pros and cons of a wealth tax for another day, but notice how gratuitous was ProPublica’s use of stolen tax data for 25 wealthy taxpayers (and it claims to have data on thousands more Americans).

By definition, these returns don’t contain information about unrealized stock-market, real estate and other asset gains that aren’t “income” under U.S. tax law but ProPublica has decided should be. For almost the entirety of its purpose, ProPublica relies on Forbes’s long-running research into the wealth of the richest Americans.


Forbes did the work, tracking down and valuing the wealthy’s assets for the years 2014 to 2018. More to the point, at any time in the past three years, anyone could have calculated how much the wealthy would have owed if unrealized gains were taxed. And did. Using the same Forbes data, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, in a single sentence in a Washington Post op-ed in April, said everything ProPublica really had to say.

Forbes engaged in enterprising journalism. Whoever stole the tax returns was enterprising in another sense. ProPublica was enterprising only in inventing a piffling rationalization for publishing the stolen data and proclaiming itself the author of an important scoop.


This rationalization comes down to a conceit: a taxpayer’s actual payment in a given year, which ProPublica extracts from the stolen returns, compared against their Forbes unrealized gains reveals what “we’re going to call . . . their true tax rate.”

This is a misuse of the word “true.” So Jeff Bezos paid a tax rate of just 0.98% during years when he paid taxes of $973 million because the unrealized appreciation of his Amazon shares was $99 billion. Follow-up press reports all trumpeted this 0.98% “true” rate but it’s a hypothetical rate based on a hypothetical change in the tax code. At least engage in the thought experiment honestly and recognize that such a tax would also affect the market value of his shares. ProPublica doesn’t because the true tax rate is just a contrivance thrown in to give a role to the stolen documents.

ProPublica’s outgoing chief Richard Tofel claims the piece is “the most important story we have ever published. . . . The findings are extraordinary.”

A more cogent reaction was that of economist and blogger Tyler Cowen : “ProPublica acted unethically, and in fact nothing fundamentally new or interesting or surprising was learned from their act as accessory” to data theft.

Let’s step back. When journalists are handed confidential information by a source, they aren’t under any obligation to interpret the data or put the construction on it the source wants.




In this case, ProPublica claims not to know who provided the tax returns; it could have been a foreign intelligence agency. I doubt the 25 richest taxpayers, much less thousands of others, all use the same careless tax preparer or have the same angry niece.

This is the information ProPublica laundered into the public domain—laundered is the right word here because, in this first installment at least, ProPublica didn’t meet its own stated standard of bringing information to light sufficiently extraordinary to justify the privacy violation.

ProPublica is free to make its own judgment but marched predictably and exploitably to the tune of its source, whom ProPublica said claimed to support the outfit’s “previous coverage of issues surrounding the IRS and tax enforcement.” Realistically, was there a chance ProPublica would refuse the data? When it didn’t, it had to find something in it to justify its meretricious scoop. That’s the significance of the “true tax rate” gimmick ProPublica came up with.


Picture a group of editors and reporters pretending to labor to a conclusion that was foreordained because the world knows how to play on the vanity of journalists.

Meanwhile, it’s news that tax returns of thousands of Americans, which the government is pledged to protect, now are in the hands of unknown numbers of private parties and criminals.

This is the real abuse—ProPublica describes itself as a “nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.”

Let’s end by noticing the relevance to a story that has exploded in the last few days about Trump-era investigations of leaks to journalists. Anonymity is supposed to protect sources but it also protects journalists. It protects them from the public finding out whom they are being manipulated by. It protects them from accountability for untruths they serve as conduits for. They can always claim they accurately reported the words of sources who can’t be asked if their words were accurately reported or if the relationship to the reporter was arm’s-length and skeptical rather than conspiratorial.

The very wealthy are deemed public figures for press purposes; their tax payments arguably are newsworthy. The people who stole the tax documents might go to jail, but the journalists won’t unless they conspired in or facilitated a criminal act. Undoubtedly ProPublica at least hires some smart lawyers, but a bigger help would be for journalists to conduct themselves nondisingenuously in the matters that the public can see so it will have reason to trust them in matters that it can’t.
Title: A POV: DOJ's spying on Schiff et al was wrong
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 22, 2021, 10:45:18 AM
https://dailycaller.com/2021/06/21/clark-the-justice-depts-spying-on-congress-journalists-to-find-leakers-is-a-disturbing-unconstitutional-development/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2360&tpcc%3D=newsletter&pnespid=hLRhoPtVCg_N8u3XqrFjIt.KAJpUMvopFG.U5EQD
Title: No longer your military
Post by: G M on June 22, 2021, 12:03:55 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/394397.php
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 22, 2021, 12:12:12 PM
From Don't Ask, Don't Tell

to

We are telling you to watch the show and tell.
Title: The Deep State defeat of Trump
Post by: G M on June 24, 2021, 11:47:12 AM
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/the-deep-state-defeat-of-donald-trump/
Title: Re: Why does AG Barr let FBI's Wray get away with it?
Post by: G M on June 29, 2021, 11:07:59 AM
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16691/barr-wray

Deep state Barr.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/06/28/president-trump-releases-a-statement-about-bill-barr-the-deep-state-attorney-general-who-conned-the-white-house/
Title: This is justice in the FUSA now
Post by: G M on June 30, 2021, 12:03:39 PM
https://summit.news/2021/06/30/blm-rioter-who-smashed-car-window-in-a-toddlers-face-avoids-jail-after-lawyer-says-it-was-an-emotional-time/
Title: MSFT VP on targeting of Americans
Post by: ccp on June 30, 2021, 01:05:01 PM
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2021/06/30/microsoft-vp-federal-targeting-of-americans-texts-emails-data-routine/

well if there is a court order
   or for crime purposes
   but what about political hit jobs?

Title: Re: FBI hiding Seth Rich docs
Post by: G M on July 09, 2021, 09:57:47 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/turns-fbi-hiding-seth-rich-documents/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/fbi-seth-rich-documents-emails-suggest-assassination-discussions/
Title: Not intended by the founders
Post by: G M on July 14, 2021, 07:01:21 PM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/079/044/801/original/8c4042b5404429e4.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/079/044/801/original/8c4042b5404429e4.png)
Title: FBI as usual
Post by: G M on July 14, 2021, 07:10:20 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/394744.php

No consequences, except for the victims.
Title: Re: FBI as usual
Post by: G M on July 18, 2021, 11:11:25 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/394744.php

No consequences, except for the victims.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/17/the-fbi-turned-a-blind-eye-while-larry-nassar-assaulted-hundreds/
Title: Did the CIA kill Kiki Camerena?
Post by: G M on July 19, 2021, 11:35:07 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/18/when-the-cia-kills-americans/
Title: S/A R. Trask
Post by: G M on July 19, 2021, 08:55:28 PM
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/07/19/fbi-agent-whitmer-kidnap-case-arrested-following-domestic-incident-richard-trask/8013618002/
Title: Shocking disclosure!
Post by: G M on July 20, 2021, 10:02:58 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/394837.php

 :roll:
Title: Defendants accuse FBI entrapment in Whitmer kidnap conspiracy case; dining out
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 21, 2021, 06:18:24 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/21/fbi-may-have-instigated-alleged-plot-to-kidnap-michigan-governor-gretchen-whitmer-report/

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/senior-fbi-official-improperly-took-gifts-from-journalists-amid-trump-investigation-doj-watchdog_3910078.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-07-21&mktids=6216e7cd37b5c65c3fbae1cfa6aa558e&est=[EMAIL_SECURE_LINK]
Title: More Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity!
Post by: G M on July 22, 2021, 06:10:22 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/youinterferinginformants

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/youinterferinginformants)

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/394858.php
Title: Re: S/A R. Trask
Post by: G M on July 23, 2021, 10:45:31 AM
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/07/19/fbi-agent-whitmer-kidnap-case-arrested-following-domestic-incident-richard-trask/8013618002/

https://thepostmillennial.com/fbi-agent-involved-in-whitmer-kidnap-case-allegedly-attacks-wife-after-swingers-party?utm_campaign=64470
Title: Re: S/A R. Trask
Post by: G M on July 23, 2021, 10:51:11 AM
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/07/19/fbi-agent-whitmer-kidnap-case-arrested-following-domestic-incident-richard-trask/8013618002/

https://thepostmillennial.com/fbi-agent-involved-in-whitmer-kidnap-case-allegedly-attacks-wife-after-swingers-party?utm_campaign=64470

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/079/985/766/original/c7533935338fcad2.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/079/985/766/original/c7533935338fcad2.jpg)
Title: More on FBI entrapment plots
Post by: G M on July 24, 2021, 02:27:28 AM
https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/07/23/the-tangled-web-more-on-the-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-the-fbi-and-entrapment/
Title: Re: More on FBI entrapment plots
Post by: G M on July 26, 2021, 08:32:20 AM
https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/07/23/the-tangled-web-more-on-the-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-the-fbi-and-entrapment/

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/26/the-fbis-whitmer-kidnapping-case-looks-like-a-potemkin-terror-plot/
Title: Re: More on FBI entrapment plots
Post by: G M on July 27, 2021, 06:48:55 AM
https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/07/23/the-tangled-web-more-on-the-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-the-fbi-and-entrapment/

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/26/the-fbis-whitmer-kidnapping-case-looks-like-a-potemkin-terror-plot/

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/26/did-the-fbi-manipulate-the-michigan-kidnapping-plot-to-influence-the-election/
Title: Biden to bypass immigration courts
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 30, 2021, 06:42:25 AM
https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2021/07/29/biden-officials-asylum-claims-bypassing-courts-expanding-eligibility/
Title: The war on the rule of law, Deep State, BLM v. Jan 6 comparison
Post by: DougMacG on July 30, 2021, 08:07:50 AM
(https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/wp-content/uploads/riots-blm-trump-1-345x181.jpg)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on July 30, 2021, 09:11:16 AM
Doug
the
best come back to your previous post -

would be to show all the left rioters who are in jail (zero?)
and all those who entered the Capitol in jail (dozens in jail or under investigation hundreds)

for contrast

Title: Byron York : shameful FBI anniversary
Post by: ccp on July 31, 2021, 09:46:25 AM
Russia collusion hoax:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-for-the-fbi-a-shameful-anniversary

next up the 1/6 Congress show

and for what?

we all know what happened .  it was right in front of our eyes
those involved already investigated
and many in solitary

etc.....

what a joke
the Dems make a mockery of us.


Title: Not an accident
Post by: G M on August 06, 2021, 10:19:40 PM
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-deliberate-destruction-of-rule-of.html
Title: IMPEACH BIDEN-HARRIS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 07, 2021, 06:53:55 PM
For the past couple of weeks I have prefaced many of my FB posts with IMPEACH BIDEN-HARRIS.

Here Andrew McCarthy catches up to me:

--------------------------------

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/why-the-border-crisis-is-here-to-stay/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202021-08-07&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: The good guys win one!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 10, 2021, 07:39:34 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/10/appellate-court-overturns-pre-trial-detention-for-j6-detainee/
Title: Great Zeus! Has the Rule of Law been restored at the Border?!?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 14, 2021, 04:35:10 PM
https://www.dailywire.com/news/judge-orders-biden-to-reimplement-key-trump-border-policy-as-bidens-border-catastrophe-worsens?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=benshapiro&fbclid=IwAR1ccKa2Np2VvPdPgmrY2FN2FFLk8J5eAbu-Qjoqq4JxdlRyC9Wo5i_bjDE
Title: The Department of Injustice
Post by: G M on August 16, 2021, 07:37:06 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/12/the-justice-departments-troubling-discovery-delays/
Title: Above the law
Post by: G M on August 16, 2021, 05:08:33 PM
https://nypost.com/2021/08/15/fbi-dodged-ilhan-omar-bro-wed-probe-devine/

https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/how-long-is-the-status-of-limitations-on-immigrati-1466606.html
Title: Re: More on FBI entrapment plots-Framing the innocent, destruction of evidence
Post by: G M on August 17, 2021, 06:05:57 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/fbi-told-informant-whitmer-kidnapping-case-lie-frame-innocent-man-delete-text-messages/

https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/07/23/the-tangled-web-more-on-the-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-the-fbi-and-entrapment/

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/26/the-fbis-whitmer-kidnapping-case-looks-like-a-potemkin-terror-plot/
Title: Re: More on FBI entrapment plots-Tucker is correct
Post by: G M on August 21, 2021, 11:44:02 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/tucker_carlson_sees_coverup_plot_behind_announcement_fbi_found_little_evidence_of_coordination_among_jan_6_demonstrators_.html

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/08/fbi-told-informant-whitmer-kidnapping-case-lie-frame-innocent-man-delete-text-messages/

https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/07/23/the-tangled-web-more-on-the-whitmer-kidnapping-plot-the-fbi-and-entrapment/

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/26/the-fbis-whitmer-kidnapping-case-looks-like-a-potemkin-terror-plot/

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/tucker_carlson_sees_coverup_plot_behind_announcement_fbi_found_little_evidence_of_coordination_among_jan_6_demonstrators_.html
Title: MY on Tucker's point
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2021, 01:19:33 PM
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/979937/fbi-lying-again-saying-capital-attack-not-centrally-planned
Title: photos say it all at the "rally for J6
Post by: ccp on September 19, 2021, 08:53:14 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/setup-press-police-undercover-agents-ray-bans-protesters-j-6-rally-washington-dc/

My favorites are ones showing the media mob trying to make a headline story where there is none.

and the Capitol Police wearing their Hollywood Darth Vater clown suits
and the more than obvious Fed agents all looking like clones in "civilian" clothing wearing the same issued Secret Service like Ray Bans........

Even the Huff shitpost had to admit is set up fizzled .  You can go to their site to see it yourself.

I don't want to post because I was there once this past week to see if they carried the non story and indeed they did . I would rather not annoy my self and go there more than once per week .

Title: Take the FBI at their word
Post by: G M on September 19, 2021, 09:16:53 PM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/09/19/lets-take-the-fbi-at-their-word/
Title: War on the rule of law; Deep State collusion, Andy McCarthy
Post by: DougMacG on September 21, 2021, 06:09:20 AM
https://nypost.com/2021/09/20/dem-plot-to-steele-the-white-house-anatomy-of-a-political-dirty-trick/



There is a long game and a short game going on in special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann on a false-statements count.

The short of it is this: A false statement was allegedly made by Sussmann to the FBI’s then-general counsel, James Baker, on Sept. 19, 2016. In federal law, the false-statement crime has a five-year statute of limitations, meaning it had to be charged by last Sunday (Sept. 19, 2021). Consequently, even if Durham would probably have preferred to wait until his full investigation was concluded before filing indictments, by delaying beyond Sunday, he would have lost what appears to be an eminently provable felony charge. If he was going to indict Sussmann on this conduct, it was now or never.

It is unusual for a one-count false-statements charge, which can be alleged in a paragraph, to be presented as a 27-page speaking indictment. But Durham wrote a highly detailed account of the facts and circumstances surrounding the false-statements charge. It is significant in that it tells us far more about his investigation.

Here is where the prosecutor appears to be going: The Trump–Russia collusion narrative was essentially a fabrication of the Clinton campaign that was peddled to the FBI (among other government agencies) and to the media by agents of the Clinton campaign — particularly, its lawyers at Perkins Coie — who concealed the fact that they were quite intentionally working on the campaign’s behalf, and that they did not actually believe there was much, if anything, to the collusion narrative. It was serviceable as political dirt but would not amount to anything real for criminal or national-security purposes.

Fresh proof the Russiagate ‘scandal’ was created by the Hillary Clinton campaign

Sussmann allegedly told Baker that he was not working for any client when he brought Baker sensitive information — even though Perkins Coie client-billing records obtained by Durham show that Sussmann was logging his time as spent working for the firm’s Clinton campaign account. The indictment describes the information Sussmann gave Baker as expert analyses (mainly in the form of white papers), which showed a backchannel connection between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. The back channel was said to be established by Internet communications between servers at Trump Tower and at Alfa Bank (a top Russian bank said to have Putin-regime connections).

In fact, the indictment alleges, Sussmann was working for the Clinton campaign and another client — an unidentified cyber expert and executive (Tech Executive-1) — who was expecting to get an important government cybersecurity job if Clinton was elected. (The executive made clear that he — the indictment describes a he — had no interest in working for Trump.)

What Durham describes in the indictment will confirm many people in their most cynical perceptions of a sinister Washington deep state. Tech Executive-1 owned Internet companies that offered domain name system “resolution services.” The indictment explains that these involve the lucrative business of translating recognizable Internet domain names (e.g., http://www.google.com) to numerical IP addresses (e.g. 123.456.7.89.). These private companies have arrangements with the government that provide them with access to a great deal of nonpublic information about Internet traffic.

Must see: NY Post graphic
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/09/21.2N016.TargetTrump_web.jpg?quality=90&strip=all

The government provides this privileged access because the companies are supposed to help with cybersecurity. But Tech Executive-1 and Perkins Coie are said to have exploited this access for political purposes.



Tech Executive-1 was having contact with Sussmann and another Perkins Coie lawyer (who is not identified in the indictment, but appears to be Marc Elias, who was the main lawyer at the firm for Clinton and the DNC), and with what is identified as a “U.S. investigative firm.” That firm appears to be Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson’s oppo-research outfit that was retained by Perkins Coie, on behalf of the Clinton campaign, to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump — the exercise that resulted in the farcical “Steele Dossier,” generated principally by Christopher Steele, the former British spy recruited by Simpson for that purpose.

In a nutshell, then, people closely connected to the Clinton campaign use privileged access to nonpublic information for political purposes. They concoct it into a political narrative that they know is baseless but can be convincingly spun to suggest Trump is in cahoots with Putin.

They then simultaneously peddle that storyline to the media and the FBI — the latter of which opens an investigation of Trump because the Clinton team, in this instance Sussmann, misrepresents its intentions. Sussmann was supposedly bringing this alarming “evidence” to the FBI not for political purposes but because he and his associates were well-meaning citizens concerned about national security.

Naturally in this cozy world, Sussmann is a former Department of Justice cybersecurity official who traded on his long-standing professional relationship with Baker, the bureau’s lawyer.


A federal grand jury hande dup an indictment Thursday against a prominent Democratic attorney, alleging that he falsely claimed to the FBI that he was not representing Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign when he raised concerns about purported ties between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.

Attorney linked to Hillary Clinton campaign indicted in Durham Russia origins probe

The indictment details that researchers at Tech Executive-1’s companies were very uncomfortable being tasked to run extensive queries about Trump and his campaign in their databases, but they did it because Tech Executive-1 was a powerful person. The researchers also highlighted significant weaknesses in the Trump–Russia narrative that they were being asked to weave, to the point that even Tech Executive-1 acknowledged it was a “red herring.”

But because the objective was to craft a political theme that would damage Trump, rather than to prove an actual national-security peril, this information was kept from the government.

Durham’s speaking indictment, then, is much more interesting than the single false-statements charge against Sussmann.

There is one last thing that I find interesting but that is not in the indictment. Among the many risible aspects of the Steele Dossier is that Steele, the great Russia expert, obviously doesn’t know much about Alfa Bank . . . which he repeatedly misspells as “Alpha” Bank. One of Steele’s “intelligence reports” from September 2016 makes extravagant claims about connections and favors exchanged between the owners of Alfa Bank and Putin. Consequently, the owners sued Steele for libel in London.

In British court, Steele was deposed. He related that he didn’t know about any Alfa Bank–Trump connection. So why put it in the dossier? Well, he was told about the alleged corrupt Alfa Bank–Trump tie by . . . wait for it . . . yes . . . Michael Sussmann.

So, the Clinton lawyers at Perkins Coie give information to Steele, who folds it into the collusion tall tale he presses on the FBI, without telling the bureau that he’s working for the Clinton campaign (through his cutouts, Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS).

Simultaneously, the Clinton lawyers are getting suspect information from a cyber-exec client who is hoping for a big job in the anticipated Clinton administration, and one of the lawyers — Sussmann — presses it on the FBI while allegedly lying in order to conceal that he’s actually working for both the Clinton campaign and the selfsame cyber exec who’s hoping for a job in the Clinton administration.

Meantime, having orchestrated the creation of all this smoke, the Clinton campaign exploits it to tell the media and the American people, “See, Trump is a Kremlin mole!”

I suddenly think the eventual Durham report could be very interesting reading.

Andrew C. McCarthy is the author of “Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.” Reprinted with permission from National Review.
Title: Anyone think there will be legal consequences for this?
Post by: G M on September 23, 2021, 11:11:20 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395730.php

Rule of law!
Title: Eh tu, Tapper?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2021, 03:10:04 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2021/09/26/tapper-challenges-mayorkas-on-cbp-horse-patrol/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2360&tpcc%3D=newsletter&pnespid=pLM_Uj5MNrkZgubMoCWqTpGPvhCyCZRnJvq33Pcyp0xmvT0AAT5JcmrecsCrftJ3bg3Q5OUy
Title: Lawless
Post by: G M on September 27, 2021, 11:06:12 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-admin-loses-daca-appeal-texas-so-theyre-just-making-new-rule
Title: Fed Bureau of Memes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 29, 2021, 05:34:37 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/27/the-federal-bureau-of-meme-material/
Title: Durham issues new subpoenas including Clinton campaign law firm
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 30, 2021, 04:45:55 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/durham-issues-new-subpoenas-including-to-clinton-campaign-law-firm/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=25195494
Title: Justice Alito
Post by: ccp on September 30, 2021, 05:58:00 PM
"unprecedented"
intimidation tactics

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/justice-alito-says-the-supreme-court-didn-t-nullify-roe-v-wade-in-texas-abortion-decision-this-portrayal-feeds-unprecedented-efforts-to-intimidate-the-court/ar-AAP0PQi

the leftist media is stepping up attacks on the SCOTUS
starting to see frequent articles including one today
from sotomayor
who is fretting

for her to claim anything about the right leaning court being too partisan is such typical leftist partisanship
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State, Durham analysis
Post by: DougMacG on October 01, 2021, 06:14:01 AM
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/09/30/more-federal-indictments-issued-against-hillarys-lawyer-for-russia-hoax-op-n1520798
Title: Inspector General Audit finds widespread problems with FBI FISA applications
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 01, 2021, 10:21:33 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/inspector-general-audit-finds-widespread-problems-with-fbis-fisa-applications-2_4025260.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-10-01&mktids=e6b092ac984bb68800444fc52ddf3a39&est=bGbhNLiGATXsJ0phLD6ZKBDm26HPTtt2%2BxH%2BnqefK%2FMZryanwVT3pSzwm698m8VogIrr
Title: DOJ Inspector Generals Report Exposes a broken FISA system
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 02, 2021, 08:15:43 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/doj-inspector-generals-report-exposes-a-broken-fisa-system/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202021-10-02&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Note that the authors were in on the hoax
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 03, 2021, 04:55:57 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/02/us/politics/john-eastman-trump-memo.html?referringSource=articleShare

Also see:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/conservative-lawyer-penned-6-page-memo-on-how-mike-pence-could-hand-the-2020-election-to-trump/ar-AAOG7gm

https://www.businessinsider.com/eastman-memo-law-professor-says-trump-attorney-abused-his-work-2021-9

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/20/politics/trump-pence-election-memo/index.html

Yes they are propaganda, but we are bright enough to see that.
Title: The Deep State targets activist parents
Post by: G M on October 04, 2021, 07:23:08 PM
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1445167453105897475

https://twitter.com/andrewcmccarthy/status/1346961865977581570?lang=en

Deep State Andy approves!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 04, 2021, 09:00:46 PM
I begin to understand your animus towards AMcC.  That certainly is a deeply disappointing comment.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on October 04, 2021, 09:37:51 PM
I begin to understand your animus towards AMcC.  That certainly is a deeply disappointing comment.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/12/fbi-agent-peter-strzok-justice-department/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2021, 02:45:30 AM
Justice delayed but not denied

The Durham probe creeps toward culprits

Motion and emotion make eyes flutter wide open, stultifying inaction and bloodless narratives make eyelids droop. The 30-month probe into the roots of the FBI’s Russian collusion investigation has elicited little but yawns, but that is changing. New revelations are emerging that could ultimately expose the shadowy forces which played havoc with voter sentiments and unfairly tarnished the 2016 candidacy and subsequent presidency of Donald Trump. The culprits may yet reap their just rewards.

Special Counsel John Durham has buttressed his recent indictment of an attorney for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign by serving the Perkins Coie law firm with new subpoenas. With lawyer Michael Sussmann charged last month with lying to the FBI, these new demands for records from his employer, first reported Thursday by CNN, indicate a systematic effort to widen the search for parties responsible for setting the Trump-Russia collusion deception in motion.

Mr. Sussmann’s 27-page indictment states he alleged, falsely, that the Trump Organization maintained a secret communication channel with Alfa Bank, a Russian enterprise with ties to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin. The tip sent the FBI on a wild goose chase seven weeks before the Trump-Clinton vote. No evidence was found.

Mr. Sussmann also failed to disclose to the FBI his ties to the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and a technology industry executive who was working in coordination with Clinton associates to collect “non-public” opposition research. The material included the bogus Alfa-Bank tale, which was used to discredit Mr. Trump.

The individual, described in the indictment as “Tech Executive- 1,” has not been charged -- yet. Neither has “Campaign Lawyer-1,” who worked with the two to spread the false Trump-Russia narrative to “the media and others.” Also unindicted thus far is “Researcher-1,” who bluntly admitted the deficiency of the Trump-Russia narrative in an email to fellow schemers: “Do you realize we will have to expose every trick we have in our bag to even make a very weak association?”

Despite their flimsy case intended to frame Mr. Trump, Mr. Sussmann et al. successfully weaponized the political attack when the FBI’s subsequent investigation of Trump associates made headlines. As The Washington Times’ Rowan Scarborough has pointed out in news coverage, Sussmann colleague at Perkins Coie, superlawyer Marc Elias, kept Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook and communications director Jennifer Palmieri in the loop about the Trump smear campaign.

Americans should keep an eye open for additional developments in the Durham probe. The trail of bread crumbs clearly meanders through the offices of lawyers, tech experts, and Clinton campaign bigwigs. As the investigators continue to unravel the plot to handcuff Mr. Trump to Russia’s Mr. Putin, the anonymity of individuals involved could end with additional indictments.

In the fullness of time, Americans might even learn what Hillary knew about the scheme to frame her rival. Justice delayed might not mean justice denied, after all
Title: AG Garland goes after parents
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2021, 06:23:09 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/05/merrick-garland-mobilizes-fbi-to-investigate-parents-who-protest-school-boards/

https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/04/merrick-garland-directs-fbi-to-target-parents-responsible-for-disturbing-spike-in-harassment-intimidation-against-schools/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2906&pnespid=rbV6Gn9DKbxBhvjGpj_0CsLdvA2nUpgnc_Wtmbc2sxNmn3Nlbavt2zK5E_ljRE19QvaOYp9.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State, Andrew McCarthy
Post by: DougMacG on October 05, 2021, 07:24:11 AM
I begin to understand your animus towards AMcC.  That certainly is a deeply disappointing comment.

Oct 2021: AG Garland uses FBI wrongly and dangerously against parents speaking out as responsible citizens.

Jan 2021:  Andy McCarthy said DOJ in good hands under Merrick Garland.

Note the reverse time line.

This means (to me) McCarthy got that wrong, and other things wrong, not that McCarthy endorses Garland today or the deep state takeover.  In Jan, Garland looked like NOT a woke, squad type pick for the office.  Now it looks like they have something on him and he does exactly what he is instructed to do by the same people who pull Joe Biden's strings.

I recall Rush Limbaugh spoke regularly of Andy McCarthy as his friend, taken to mean a like minded, trusted ally on these matters and his go to person for legal analysis and insights.  I don't think that is possible over a long period of time if McCarthy is an enemy of our interests.
Title: Re: War on the rule of law; Deep State collusion, Andy McCarthy
Post by: G M on October 05, 2021, 07:38:50 AM
Don’t be surprised when this goes nowhere.


https://nypost.com/2021/09/20/dem-plot-to-steele-the-white-house-anatomy-of-a-political-dirty-trick/



There is a long game and a short game going on in special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Democratic Party lawyer Michael Sussmann on a false-statements count.

The short of it is this: A false statement was allegedly made by Sussmann to the FBI’s then-general counsel, James Baker, on Sept. 19, 2016. In federal law, the false-statement crime has a five-year statute of limitations, meaning it had to be charged by last Sunday (Sept. 19, 2021). Consequently, even if Durham would probably have preferred to wait until his full investigation was concluded before filing indictments, by delaying beyond Sunday, he would have lost what appears to be an eminently provable felony charge. If he was going to indict Sussmann on this conduct, it was now or never.

It is unusual for a one-count false-statements charge, which can be alleged in a paragraph, to be presented as a 27-page speaking indictment. But Durham wrote a highly detailed account of the facts and circumstances surrounding the false-statements charge. It is significant in that it tells us far more about his investigation.

Here is where the prosecutor appears to be going: The Trump–Russia collusion narrative was essentially a fabrication of the Clinton campaign that was peddled to the FBI (among other government agencies) and to the media by agents of the Clinton campaign — particularly, its lawyers at Perkins Coie — who concealed the fact that they were quite intentionally working on the campaign’s behalf, and that they did not actually believe there was much, if anything, to the collusion narrative. It was serviceable as political dirt but would not amount to anything real for criminal or national-security purposes.

Fresh proof the Russiagate ‘scandal’ was created by the Hillary Clinton campaign

Sussmann allegedly told Baker that he was not working for any client when he brought Baker sensitive information — even though Perkins Coie client-billing records obtained by Durham show that Sussmann was logging his time as spent working for the firm’s Clinton campaign account. The indictment describes the information Sussmann gave Baker as expert analyses (mainly in the form of white papers), which showed a backchannel connection between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. The back channel was said to be established by Internet communications between servers at Trump Tower and at Alfa Bank (a top Russian bank said to have Putin-regime connections).

In fact, the indictment alleges, Sussmann was working for the Clinton campaign and another client — an unidentified cyber expert and executive (Tech Executive-1) — who was expecting to get an important government cybersecurity job if Clinton was elected. (The executive made clear that he — the indictment describes a he — had no interest in working for Trump.)

What Durham describes in the indictment will confirm many people in their most cynical perceptions of a sinister Washington deep state. Tech Executive-1 owned Internet companies that offered domain name system “resolution services.” The indictment explains that these involve the lucrative business of translating recognizable Internet domain names (e.g., http://www.google.com) to numerical IP addresses (e.g. 123.456.7.89.). These private companies have arrangements with the government that provide them with access to a great deal of nonpublic information about Internet traffic.

Must see: NY Post graphic
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2021/09/21.2N016.TargetTrump_web.jpg?quality=90&strip=all

The government provides this privileged access because the companies are supposed to help with cybersecurity. But Tech Executive-1 and Perkins Coie are said to have exploited this access for political purposes.



Tech Executive-1 was having contact with Sussmann and another Perkins Coie lawyer (who is not identified in the indictment, but appears to be Marc Elias, who was the main lawyer at the firm for Clinton and the DNC), and with what is identified as a “U.S. investigative firm.” That firm appears to be Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson’s oppo-research outfit that was retained by Perkins Coie, on behalf of the Clinton campaign, to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump — the exercise that resulted in the farcical “Steele Dossier,” generated principally by Christopher Steele, the former British spy recruited by Simpson for that purpose.

In a nutshell, then, people closely connected to the Clinton campaign use privileged access to nonpublic information for political purposes. They concoct it into a political narrative that they know is baseless but can be convincingly spun to suggest Trump is in cahoots with Putin.

They then simultaneously peddle that storyline to the media and the FBI — the latter of which opens an investigation of Trump because the Clinton team, in this instance Sussmann, misrepresents its intentions. Sussmann was supposedly bringing this alarming “evidence” to the FBI not for political purposes but because he and his associates were well-meaning citizens concerned about national security.

Naturally in this cozy world, Sussmann is a former Department of Justice cybersecurity official who traded on his long-standing professional relationship with Baker, the bureau’s lawyer.


A federal grand jury hande dup an indictment Thursday against a prominent Democratic attorney, alleging that he falsely claimed to the FBI that he was not representing Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign when he raised concerns about purported ties between the Trump Organization and a Russian bank.

Attorney linked to Hillary Clinton campaign indicted in Durham Russia origins probe

The indictment details that researchers at Tech Executive-1’s companies were very uncomfortable being tasked to run extensive queries about Trump and his campaign in their databases, but they did it because Tech Executive-1 was a powerful person. The researchers also highlighted significant weaknesses in the Trump–Russia narrative that they were being asked to weave, to the point that even Tech Executive-1 acknowledged it was a “red herring.”

But because the objective was to craft a political theme that would damage Trump, rather than to prove an actual national-security peril, this information was kept from the government.

Durham’s speaking indictment, then, is much more interesting than the single false-statements charge against Sussmann.

There is one last thing that I find interesting but that is not in the indictment. Among the many risible aspects of the Steele Dossier is that Steele, the great Russia expert, obviously doesn’t know much about Alfa Bank . . . which he repeatedly misspells as “Alpha” Bank. One of Steele’s “intelligence reports” from September 2016 makes extravagant claims about connections and favors exchanged between the owners of Alfa Bank and Putin. Consequently, the owners sued Steele for libel in London.

In British court, Steele was deposed. He related that he didn’t know about any Alfa Bank–Trump connection. So why put it in the dossier? Well, he was told about the alleged corrupt Alfa Bank–Trump tie by . . . wait for it . . . yes . . . Michael Sussmann.

So, the Clinton lawyers at Perkins Coie give information to Steele, who folds it into the collusion tall tale he presses on the FBI, without telling the bureau that he’s working for the Clinton campaign (through his cutouts, Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS).

Simultaneously, the Clinton lawyers are getting suspect information from a cyber-exec client who is hoping for a big job in the anticipated Clinton administration, and one of the lawyers — Sussmann — presses it on the FBI while allegedly lying in order to conceal that he’s actually working for both the Clinton campaign and the selfsame cyber exec who’s hoping for a job in the Clinton administration.

Meantime, having orchestrated the creation of all this smoke, the Clinton campaign exploits it to tell the media and the American people, “See, Trump is a Kremlin mole!”

I suddenly think the eventual Durham report could be very interesting reading.

Andrew C. McCarthy is the author of “Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.” Reprinted with permission from National Review.
Title: The officially sanctioned paramilitary of the left
Post by: G M on October 05, 2021, 07:40:31 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/fbi-admits-dont-track-violence-radical-left-antifa-video/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State, Durham investigation
Post by: DougMacG on October 05, 2021, 07:46:44 AM
 "Justice delayed might not mean justice denied, after all"

No, it does mean justice denied, IMHO.  We could have used this information in a (Mueller) interim report that never happened before Pelosi, Omar, Tlaib and left winger Dean Phillips wrongfully took over the House of Representatives under the cloud that the President was a Russian spy.  Likewise, we could have used an interim Durham report coming into the 2020 election where voters (allegedly) elected the party of corruption for the House, Senate and Presidency.  36 months later he may indict more people we never heard of and the real cheating will go forever unpunished.

History should tell the real story but the victors tend to write history, and already control all the media and classrooms.
Title: The radical leftist federal prosecutor waging lawfare against American dissident
Post by: G M on October 05, 2021, 07:53:45 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/04/the-radical-prosecutor-in-charge-of-the-january-6-investigations/
Title: The Sword and Shield of the dems raids NYPD Sgt's union
Post by: G M on October 05, 2021, 09:49:50 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fbi-raids-nypd-sergeants-union-headquarters-headed-outspoken-president
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 05, 2021, 09:53:02 AM
I think the moral of the story with regards to Andrew McCarthy being wrong about Merrick Garland.

is

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE ANY DEMOCRAT OF BEING A PARTISAN PRICK.

Title: Re: AG Garland goes after parents
Post by: G M on October 05, 2021, 09:54:25 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/05/merrick-garland-mobilizes-fbi-to-investigate-parents-who-protest-school-boards/

https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/04/merrick-garland-directs-fbi-to-target-parents-responsible-for-disturbing-spike-in-harassment-intimidation-against-schools/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2906&pnespid=rbV6Gn9DKbxBhvjGpj_0CsLdvA2nUpgnc_Wtmbc2sxNmn3Nlbavt2zK5E_ljRE19QvaOYp9.

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395877.php
Title: Re: AG Garland goes after parents
Post by: G M on October 05, 2021, 10:00:36 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/05/merrick-garland-mobilizes-fbi-to-investigate-parents-who-protest-school-boards/

https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/04/merrick-garland-directs-fbi-to-target-parents-responsible-for-disturbing-spike-in-harassment-intimidation-against-schools/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2906&pnespid=rbV6Gn9DKbxBhvjGpj_0CsLdvA2nUpgnc_Wtmbc2sxNmn3Nlbavt2zK5E_ljRE19QvaOYp9.

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395877.php

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/the-biden-justice-departments-lawless-threat-against-american-parents/

Deep State Andy ready to condemn the Deepartment of Injustice?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State, Andrew McCarthy
Post by: G M on October 05, 2021, 10:25:58 AM
I begin to understand your animus towards AMcC.  That certainly is a deeply disappointing comment.

Oct 2021: AG Garland uses FBI wrongly and dangerously against parents speaking out as responsible citizens.

Jan 2021:  Andy McCarthy said DOJ in good hands under Merrick Garland.

Note the reverse time line.

This means (to me) McCarthy got that wrong, and other things wrong, not that McCarthy endorses Garland today or the deep state takeover.  In Jan, Garland looked like NOT a woke, squad type pick for the office.  Now it looks like they have something on him and he does exactly what he is instructed to do by the same people who pull Joe Biden's strings.

I recall Rush Limbaugh spoke regularly of Andy McCarthy as his friend, taken to mean a like minded, trusted ally on these matters and his go to person for legal analysis and insights.  I don't think that is possible over a long period of time if McCarthy is an enemy of our interests.

"According to Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and longtime friend of Jim Comey,"

https://patriotpost.us/alexander/49008-trump-cans-fbi-director-comey-2017-05-10

A higher loyalty?
Title: McCarthy: AG Garland's lawless threats
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2021, 01:03:39 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/the-biden-justice-departments-lawless-threat-against-american-parents/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-10-05&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: McCarthy: AG Garland's lawless threats
Post by: G M on October 06, 2021, 08:10:48 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/10/the-biden-justice-departments-lawless-threat-against-american-parents/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202021-10-05&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/05/ag-merrick-garlands-daughter-married-to-co-founder-of-company-selling-critical-race-theory-resource-material-to-school-districts/
Title: WSJ: More FBI FISA skullduggery
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2021, 01:11:06 PM


Congress has failed to reform federal surveillance laws, despite the FBI’s 2016 abuse of a secret court to spy on the Trump presidential campaign. The latest report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the FBI’s other surveillance abuses is more evidence of the need to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Mr. Horowitz’s 2019 report found the FBI had gulled the FISA court into letting it spy on former Trump aide Carter Page by presenting false information. The scandal inspired the Horowitz team to conduct a broader audit of FBI compliance, and the results are damning.


The FBI must abide by what are known as Woods Procedures that include a file supporting every factual assertion in a warrant application. As the IG notes, surveillance warrants are among the Justice Department’s “most intrusive investigative authorities” and must be “scrupulously accurate.”

The IG’s preliminary look last year into a sample of 29 wiretap applications said the FBI couldn’t locate Woods files for four applications, and the IG found errors in the remaining 25. As last week’s full report explains, the FBI and Justice have since acknowledged the 29 applications contained a total of 209 errors. These range from typographical (38) and date (42) errors, to unsupported facts (17), misidentified sources of information (15), and deviations from source documents (93).


The IG also found 209 examples in the 29 applications of the FBI failing to provide “adequate documentation to support factual assertions.” In all “there were over 400 instances of non-compliance with the Woods Procedures.”


Most alarming are the four errors that DOJ and the FBI admit were “material”—serious enough to have potentially changed the FISA court’s determination of “probable cause” to issue a warrant. The errors related to three applications in which the FBI omitted important or relevant information about targets, or provided outdated or unverified facts.

In response to the IG’s preliminary findings last year, the FBI reviewed more than 7,000 FISA applications from January 2015 to March 2020, and the IG reports that for 183 of them “the required Woods File was missing, destroyed, or incomplete.” This is supposed to be America’s premier law-enforcement body.

The IG criticizes an FBI culture that believes it is above the rules, and he devotes an entire section to spanking its leadership for its reaction to the 2020 preliminary findings. While FBI director Christopher Wray instituted some reforms, the agency minimized the findings with statements that “appeared to display a tolerance for error.”

No one has taken responsibility—including Mr. Wray, on whose watch many of these mistakes happened. He has proposed more reforms to the very (Woods) reforms instituted 20 years ago to improve FBI behavior. Sure.

Introducing the Constitution’s independent Article III judges into intelligence collection in the executive branch was always a mistake, as we wrote in the 1970s. The system dilutes accountability for wiretaps, letting the court and FBI blame each other for mistakes and political abuses like those in 2016.

Congress should abolish the FISA court and return authority to the law enforcement leaders making surveillance decisions. Then hold them accountable, including jail time for abuses.
Title: Helluva coincidence AG Garland!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2021, 01:34:58 PM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/05/ag-merrick-garlands-daughter-married-to-co-founder-of-company-selling-critical-race-theory-resource-material-to-school-districts/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2021, 03:13:32 PM
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/83253?mailing_id=6181&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.6181&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=body
Title: The DemStasi indoctrinating Special Agents with CRT
Post by: G M on October 07, 2021, 08:46:28 AM
https://thepostmillennial.com/fbi-program-teaches-agents-to-deconstruct-identities?utm_campaign=64471

Title: Mueller senile?
Post by: G M on October 07, 2021, 02:16:55 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395910.php
Title: Keep this in mind
Post by: G M on October 09, 2021, 11:36:57 AM
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/opoMv10J-24437311-729x1024.jpeg

(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/opoMv10J-24437311-729x1024.jpeg)
Title: The war on the rule of law; Andy McCarthy
Post by: DougMacG on October 10, 2021, 10:11:39 PM
What's behind the rise in violent crime?

Progressive prosecutors not prosecuting.

Andrew McCarthy

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/576078-whats-behind-rising-violent-crime-progressive-prosecutors-non
Title: Which one is being investigated by the FBI?
Post by: G M on October 15, 2021, 09:18:36 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg)
Title: The Deep State takes care of it's own
Post by: G M on October 16, 2021, 10:54:08 AM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/087/862/798/original/a4a9a9ee3758d20b.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/087/862/798/original/a4a9a9ee3758d20b.jpg)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 16, 2021, 11:13:08 AM
Yes
And CNN stepped in to give him a nice job till the Left got power back
and so elephant man Merrick

could essentially pardon this corrupt official

Title: Why innocent people plead guilty
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 17, 2021, 06:09:30 AM
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty/
Title: Taibbi on the deep state
Post by: G M on October 17, 2021, 08:35:00 AM
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/yes-virginia-there-is-a-deep-state?justPublished=true
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 17, 2021, 09:36:49 AM
can't read the whole post

due to subscription needed
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on October 17, 2021, 09:45:31 AM
can't read the whole post

due to subscription needed

Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State
A major untold story of the Trump era has been the political comeback of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, who thanks to an ingenious marketing campaign now enjoy widespread support among young liberals
Matt Taibbi   17 hr ago   
156

On The Young Turks the other night, during a segment called — this is not a joke — “RebelHQ,” commentator Ben Carollo extolled the virtues of the CIA. In one section, he described how intelligence officials responded to “Donald Trump trying to plan some ridiculous scheme to maintain himself as president”:

It’s not a conspiracy theory to say that these government officials wanted to listen to congress and cared about Democratic norms and respected the constitutional structure of the way the United States is today.

When I first heard Carollo talking about the desire of intelligence officials to “listen to congress,” I thought he was being literal.

Maybe, I thought, he meant that time in 2014, when the CIA spied on the the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into its torture program, wiring up Senate computers and reading staffers’ emails. Or perhaps he meant that time in 2015, when the Obama administration was using the NSA to listen to Israeli critics of his Iran deal, and ended up with “inadvertent” access to phone calls back and forth with political opponents in the U.S. congress, on both sides of the aisle.

Or, maybe Carollo also meant that time when the CIA intercepted communications between the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and congressional staff, about pending whistleblower complaints. As the ICIG put it in one of its declassified notifications, “CIA security compiled a report that includes excerpts of these whistleblower-related communications, and this report was eventually shared with CIA management.” This way, the CIA bosses could know ahead of time who was going to congress with complaints about abuses! Good times.

Alas, Carollo didn’t mean intelligence officials are listening to congress in that sense. His video essay entitled, “Fact-checking Glenn Greenwald’s stunt on Fox News,” was designed to refute the apparently ridiculous notion that “there’s some sort of secret deep state working behind the scenes.” A central part of his argument is that unlike agencies like Homeland Security, formed under the Republican administration of George W. Bush and designed to be “far more shielded from congressional oversight,” the CIA reports to congress and basically does what it’s told.

The agencies with the real power to color outside the lines, Carollo tells us, are DHS-sub-operations, “specifically ICE, and Customs and Border Control,” which “have far less congressional oversight and far less structure in place for there to be those checks and balances.” Because of that, Carollo says, “Donald Trump was more than capable of enacting an extremely racist border policy.”


Even the Pentagon and the defense intelligence agencies are less of a concern, he said, because “when it comes to something like the military, there’s a long history of deep congressional oversight,” and “many checks and balances that are put into place.”

Carollo looks like he’s about six, and I say that fully conceding jealousy over his full head of hair. It’s relevant only because he’s representative of a generation of young, left-leaning intellectuals who grew up in the Trump years believing the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other such agencies to be trusted, straight-and-narrow defenders of democratic “norms.” These credulous kids with piercings and chin-beards who think the secret services are on their side are the fruits of one of the great P.R. campaigns of our time.

Six or seven years ago, “Deep State” was a term you would only see in left-leaning media. Bill Moyers explored the theme on his site from time to time, and when The Nation asked Edward Snowden about it, he said, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.”

The “deep state” was on the liberal left’s front burner then because a spate of horrendously ugly revelations put it there. We learned via Snowden that the NSA was collecting the communications of people all around the world in secret (Carollo might want to mark down that congress wasn’t informed) in a program the U.S. Court of Appeals just last year declared illegal.

We found out top intelligence officials like CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to congress, among other things about the warrantless surveillance program, and got away without perjury charges despite a furious outcry from legislators (another useful factoid for Carollo, on the oversight front). We learned about the CIA’s systematic use of torture techniques, ranging from anal feeding to threatening to rape and murder relatives to induced hypothermia, another fun set of pastimes the agency decided not to burden congress with knowledge of.

Worst of all, we learned Barack Obama and his staff held regular “Terror Tuesdays” meetings to decide who they would and would not kill by secret drone assassination, a program which many Americans were surprised to learn was run not by the military but by the CIA. Obama — who would eventually be quoted joking that it “turns out I’m really good at killing people” and “I didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine” — widened the secret “kill list” to include Americans.

When Trump arrived, it almost immediately became obvious his historical destiny was to be the best thing that ever happened to the secret services. In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the “Deep State” became a myth the moment Trump and his minions started saying they believed in it.
Title: thank you GM
Post by: ccp on October 17, 2021, 11:26:58 AM
"Worst of all, we learned Barack Obama and his staff held regular “Terror Tuesdays” meetings to decide who they would and would not kill by secret drone assassination, a program which many Americans were surprised to learn was run not by the military but by the CIA. Obama — who would eventually be quoted joking that it “turns out I’m really good at killing people” and “I didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine” — widened the secret “kill list” to include Americans."

Obama, a typical leftist

if this was a different age we would already have been wiped out or forced to convert to the Democrat party - the new religion.

Title: Re: thank you GM
Post by: G M on October 17, 2021, 11:42:16 AM
"Worst of all, we learned Barack Obama and his staff held regular “Terror Tuesdays” meetings to decide who they would and would not kill by secret drone assassination, a program which many Americans were surprised to learn was run not by the military but by the CIA. Obama — who would eventually be quoted joking that it “turns out I’m really good at killing people” and “I didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine” — widened the secret “kill list” to include Americans."

Obama, a typical leftist

if this was a different age we would already have been wiped out or forced to convert to the Democrat party - the new religion.

They are going as fast as they can!
Title: Re: Which one is being investigated by the FBI?
Post by: G M on October 18, 2021, 04:01:05 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg)

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/037/974/original/9fd0e0f894eca072.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/037/974/original/9fd0e0f894eca072.png)
Title: glib lib larry at it again: Trump lawsuit "laughable"
Post by: ccp on October 21, 2021, 08:13:07 AM
partisan Dem weighs in :

https://www.yahoo.com/news/harvard-law-professor-explains-why-080844310.html

“And his argument that there is no legitimate legislative purpose is truly laughable,” Tribe added.


I admit this may be true
partisan Dems will try to use any information to try to come up with legislation that would hurt Republicans.

otherwise , obviously this is a partisan Dem party media show
Title: Jim Jordan on AG Garland
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2021, 05:27:51 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBlksv-LPiQ
Title: Deep State Andy hardest hit!
Post by: G M on October 22, 2021, 11:01:24 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396126.php

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg)

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/037/974/original/9fd0e0f894eca072.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/037/974/original/9fd0e0f894eca072.png)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 22, 2021, 01:29:29 PM
"Merrick Garland testified -- or testilied, really-- in Congress yesterday."

Eric holder on steroids

to think our chief law enforcements sit there and lie and play dumb
and claim they are not political when obviously they are

and to think this guy was almost a Supreme Court Justice!

he is just a tool of the LEFT just like J'Biden
Title: Re: Deep State Andy hardest hit!
Post by: G M on October 23, 2021, 09:52:50 AM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/514/612/original/57af24449976a267.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/514/612/original/57af24449976a267.png)

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396126.php

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg)

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/037/974/original/9fd0e0f894eca072.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/037/974/original/9fd0e0f894eca072.png)
Title: NSBA apologizes
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 23, 2021, 04:52:30 PM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/23/nsba-apologizes-letter-linking-rowdy-school-board-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=PbFzJ2JLZAqbaOcQ%2BCJLsLTvKdU5nt%2F02kCtaqijnjlsSqa8%2B0piwWNSD6gDXFe0&bt_ts=1635009356907
Title: national school board head named to new post
Post by: ccp on October 26, 2021, 03:06:32 PM
or is an additional post?:

https://nypost.com/2021/10/26/viola-garcia-to-sit-on-national-assessment-governing-board/

the usual Leftist middle finger the nation
with wack a mole games

this is not a "club"

it is a *mob"

akin to mafia

Title: Re: Deep State Andy hardest hit!
Post by: G M on October 27, 2021, 03:56:24 PM

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396200.php



https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/514/612/original/57af24449976a267.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/514/612/original/57af24449976a267.png)

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396126.php

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg)

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/037/974/original/9fd0e0f894eca072.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/037/974/original/9fd0e0f894eca072.png)
Title: COINTELPRO tactics used against parents
Post by: G M on October 28, 2021, 01:38:14 PM
https://summit.news/2021/10/28/mother-claims-biden-garland-sent-feds-to-school-board-meeting-after-she-complained-about-pedo-porn-on-curriculum/


http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396200.php



https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/514/612/original/57af24449976a267.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/514/612/original/57af24449976a267.png)

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396126.php

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg)

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/037/974/original/9fd0e0f894eca072.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/088/037/974/original/9fd0e0f894eca072.png)
Title: The FBI “lost” exculpatory evidence in the Rittenhouse show trial
Post by: G M on November 04, 2021, 10:27:15 AM
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/11/rittenhouse-trial-day-1-defense-dominates-opening-statements-first-witness-testimony/

Who knew they had to preserve evidence for a murder trial?
Title: The unquestionably corrupt FBI targets Project Veritas
Post by: G M on November 05, 2021, 03:30:16 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396347.php
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on November 05, 2021, 04:14:28 PM
"FBI Raids Project Veritas Reporters' Apartments, Because Someone Offered Them What Might Or Might Not Have Been Joe Biden's Daughter's Diary"

suddenly this is a crime?  worthy of an FBI raid?

after all the left wing leaks to the news media?

sounds like the gestapo to me
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on November 05, 2021, 04:24:55 PM
"FBI Raids Project Veritas Reporters' Apartments, Because Someone Offered Them What Might Or Might Not Have Been Joe Biden's Daughter's Diary"

suddenly this is a crime?  worthy of an FBI raid?

after all the left wing leaks to the news media?

sounds like the gestapo to me

At least they arrested all those Antifa and BLM rioters!

Oh wait, they KNEELED to BLM.

Sorry, my mistake.

https://saraacarter.com/blog/2020/06/06/why-the-fbi-shouldnt-take-a-knee-but-did-concerns-mount-over-fbis-role-in-protests/
Title: Pravda on the Hudson's version of FBI raid of Veritas
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 06, 2021, 06:46:46 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/us/politics/project-veritas-investigation-ashley-biden-diary.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20211105&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=cta&regi_id=60855337&segment_id=73679&user_id=08fbc2bcd133a3d190d20b9d83832608
Title: Re: Pravda on the Hudson's version of FBI raid of Veritas
Post by: G M on November 06, 2021, 08:42:40 AM
Paywalled.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/05/us/politics/project-veritas-investigation-ashley-biden-diary.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20211105&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=cta&regi_id=60855337&segment_id=73679&user_id=08fbc2bcd133a3d190d20b9d83832608
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 06, 2021, 09:18:47 AM
People Tied to Project Veritas Scrutinized in Theft of Diary From Biden’s Daughter
The F.B.I. carried out search warrants in New York as part of a Justice Department investigation into how pages from Ashley Biden’s journal came to be published by a right wing website.



James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., in February.
James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., in February.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Michael S. SchmidtWilliam K. RashbaumPrecious FondrenAdam Goldman
By Michael S. Schmidt, William K. Rashbaum, Precious Fondren and Adam Goldman
Nov. 5, 2021

The Justice Department searched two locations associated with the conservative group Project Veritas as part of an investigation into how a diary stolen from President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, came to be publicly disclosed a week and a half before the 2020 presidential election, according to people briefed on the matter.

Federal agents in New York conducted the court-ordered searches on Thursday — one in New York City and one in suburban Westchester County — targeting people who had worked with the group and its leader, James O’Keefe, according to two of the people briefed on the events. The investigation is being handled by F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors in Manhattan who work on public corruption matters, the people said.

After this article was initially published online on Friday, Mr. O’Keefe put out a video confirming that current and former Project Veritas employees had their homes searched on Thursday.

He said the group had recently received a grand jury subpoena and acknowledged that Project Veritas had been involved in discussions with sources about the diary. But he offered a lengthy defense of his group’s handling of the diary, saying that he and his colleagues had been operating as ethical journalists.


“It appears the Southern District of New York now has journalists in their sights for the supposed crime of doing their jobs lawfully and honestly,” Mr. O’Keefe said, referring to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. “Our efforts were the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step.”

Project Veritas did not publish Ms. Biden’s diary, but dozens of handwritten pages from it were posted on a right wing website on Oct. 24, 2020, at a time when President Donald J. Trump was seeking to undermine Mr. Biden’s credibility by portraying his son, Hunter, as engaging in corrupt business dealings. The posting was largely ignored by other conservative outlets and the mainstream media.


The website said it had obtained the diary from a whistle-blower who worked for a media organization that refused to publish a story about it before the election. It claimed to know where the actual diary was located and that the whistle-blower had an audio recording of Ms. Biden admitting it was hers.

The Trump administration Justice Department, then led by Attorney General William P. Barr, opened an investigation into the matter shortly after a representative of the Biden family reported to federal authorities in October 2020 that several of Ms. Biden’s personal items had been stolen in a burglary, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. O’Keefe said in the video that “tipsters” had reached out to Project Veritas in 2020 to alert them to the existence of the diary, saying that they had stayed in a room that Ms. Biden had recently been in. But Mr. O’Keefe said that his group could not authenticate the diary and made an “ethical” decision to not publish it.



He said that Project Veritas gave the diary to “law enforcement” and attempted to return it to a lawyer representing Ms. Biden, who he said “refused to authenticate it.” Mr. O’Keefe portrayed the investigation as politically motivated, questioning why the Justice Department under Ms. Biden’s father was pursuing the case.

In recent weeks, federal investigators have reached out to at least one person who worked for Project Veritas to question that person about the diary, one of the people briefed on the case said.

Project Veritas has a history of targeting Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations, news media and others. The group conducts sting operations, using hidden cameras and fake identities. At one point, Project Veritas relied on a former British spy named Richard Seddon to help train its operatives, teaching them espionage tactics such as using deception to secure information from potential targets.

Flyover Media, the company that owns the website that published the pages from the diary, is registered to the same Sheridan, Wyo., address as Mr. Seddon’s company, Branch Six Consulting International. Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address.


Project Veritas has a pending libel suit against The New York Times over a 2020 story about a video the group made alleging voter fraud in Minnesota.

Ms. Biden, 40, is Mr. Biden’s youngest child. She has maintained a low profile and attracted far less attention than Hunter Biden, her half brother. In 2019, Mr. Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine at the same time he pressured that country’s president for support in investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, leading to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.



An F.B.I. spokesman in New York would not comment on the investigation, saying only that agents had “performed law enforcement activity related to an ongoing investigation” at two locations. One of the searches took place in an apartment on East 35th Street near the Midtown Tunnel and the other in Mamaroneck, N.Y., north of New York City.



A spokesman for the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.

In Manhattan, a neighbor a floor above the apartment that was searched on East 35th Street said she was woken out of her sleep early Thursday morning by agents pounding on a door and repeatedly shouting “Open Up!” and “F.B.I.!”

“I thought it was a joke,” said the neighbor, Mychael Green, 23. “For 10 minutes they were knocking on his door obviously really loud,” and eventually forced their way into the apartment, Ms. Green said. Hours later, the doorjamb was clearly broken and the door was hanging ajar.

Spencer Meads, the longtime Project Veritas operative and confidante of Mr. O’Keefe, has lived in that apartment since 2019, according to public records.

Ms. Green said that the agents were yelling “Spencer, open up!”

A former Project Veritas employee said that Mr. Meads had been involved in recruiting operatives. A website that tracks Project Veritas operatives said that Mr. Meads had also been involved in undercover operations for the group.

Mr. Meads did not respond to an email and a text message seeking comment.

The Justice Department finds itself in a highly unusual situation in regards to Mr. Biden’s children. Not only is it investigating the case of Ms. Biden’s diary, but Hunter Biden disclosed last year that Justice Department prosecutors in Delaware were investigating his taxes.

The pages were posted online under the byline of Patrick Howley, a reporter who has worked for several conservative outlets in recent years. He was the first to disclose a yearbook photo from the page of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia that showed one individual in a Ku Klux Klan outfit and another individual in blackface.



Mr. Howley also disclosed damaging text messages between Cal Cunningham, a Democrat running for Senate in North Carolina, and a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

While the disclosure of Ms. Biden’s diary was largely ignored, some far right outlets and supporters of Mr. Trump jumped on the news of the diary as further evidence that Mr. Biden was unfit to be president. Alex Jones, a prominent far right radio host, brought up the diary on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Mr. Trump used Twitter to send or promote positive comments about Project Veritas at least six times in the last two years of his presidency. Mr. Trump boosted Project Veritas content even before he became president, and shortly after he announced his campaign for president in 2015, Mr. O’Keefe visited Trump Tower and showed Mr. Trump footage he was intending to release to damage Hillary Clinton, the most likely Democratic nominee.

In 2016, a Project Veritas operative infiltrated Democracy Partners, a political consulting firm, using a fake name, fabricated résumé and made secret recordings of the staff.

Democracy Partners later sued Project Veritas. In a ruling last month in the lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman said that Democracy Partners could refer to the conduct by Project Veritas as a “political spying operation” in the upcoming trial.

Kitty Bennett and Matthew Cullen contributed research.


An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the steps that Project Veritas said it took in dealing with the diary. In a video, the group's founder, James O'Keefe, said Project Veritas had returned the diary to law enforcement and had attempted to return it to a lawyer for Ashley Biden. He did not say that the group had attempted to return it to the Justice Department and a lawyer for Ms. Biden.

Michael S. Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike

William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer on the Metro desk, where he covers political and municipal corruption, courts, terrorism and law enforcement. He was a part of the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. @WRashbaum • Facebook

Adam Goldman reports on the F.B.I. and national security from Washington, D.C., and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He is the coauthor of “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America.”  @adamgoldmanNYT
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on November 06, 2021, 09:47:43 AM
"Flyover Media, the company that owns the website that published the pages from the diary, is registered to the same Sheridan, Wyo., address as Mr. Seddon’s company, Branch Six Consulting International. Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address."

Only someone ignorant of Wyoming corporate laws or someone intending to be deceptive would say the above.
Title: How does the FBI have jurisdiction?
Post by: G M on November 06, 2021, 10:01:11 AM
How would the theft of a diary be a federal matter? I haven't found a copy of the search warrants in the Veritas linked case. They would cite the applicable statutes. They may currently be under seal.

Inadvertently, this action by the feds tends to validate that the diary was legitimate.

https://nationalfile.com/bombshell-new-york-times-fbi-confirm-legitimacy-of-ashley-biden-diary/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on November 06, 2021, 10:57:18 AM
anything good in the diary?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on November 06, 2021, 11:06:34 AM
anything good in the diary?

She claimed she was sexually molested as a child (Hunter?) and her dad (Pedo Joe Biden) used to take "inappropriate showers" with her.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 06, 2021, 12:55:21 PM
Whoa!

Do we have any citations for that?
Title: if true that would explain the gestapo measures
Post by: ccp on November 06, 2021, 01:39:14 PM
https://then24.com/2021/11/06/diary-leak-biden-daughter-ashley-describes-inappropriate-shower-with-joe/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 06, 2021, 04:24:37 PM
Whoop!  There it is!
Title: Re: if true that would explain the gestapo measures
Post by: G M on November 06, 2021, 05:06:46 PM
https://then24.com/2021/11/06/diary-leak-biden-daughter-ashley-describes-inappropriate-shower-with-joe/

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/089/786/591/original/2becbe397527e2e0.png

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Title: Ashley Biden is the SECOND member of the family to make incest allegations
Post by: G M on November 07, 2021, 08:01:08 PM
Now that the FBI was nice enough to validate the diary…



https://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/11/06/owens-points-out-bidens-daughter-is-second-person-in-family-to-make-incest-allegations-after-diary-entry-1159250/

https://then24.com/2021/11/06/diary-leak-biden-daughter-ashley-describes-inappropriate-shower-with-joe/

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/089/786/591/original/2becbe397527e2e0.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/089/786/591/original/2becbe397527e2e0.png)
Title: Re: Ashley Biden is the SECOND member of the family to make incest allegations
Post by: G M on November 09, 2021, 03:25:59 PM
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/investigation-into-bidens-stolen-diary-reveals-agencys-selectivity/

Now that the FBI was nice enough to validate the diary…



https://www.bizpacreview.com/2021/11/06/owens-points-out-bidens-daughter-is-second-person-in-family-to-make-incest-allegations-after-diary-entry-1159250/

https://then24.com/2021/11/06/diary-leak-biden-daughter-ashley-describes-inappropriate-shower-with-joe/

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/089/786/591/original/2becbe397527e2e0.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/089/786/591/original/2becbe397527e2e0.png)
Title: If you think you won’t be targeted for local level activism, you’re wrong
Post by: G M on November 11, 2021, 06:40:09 AM
https://dailycaller.com/2021/11/10/scottsdale-school-board-parents-information/


https://summit.news/2021/10/28/mother-claims-biden-garland-sent-feds-to-school-board-meeting-after-she-complained-about-pedo-porn-on-curriculum/


http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396200.php



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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396126.php

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211015%2009.jpg)

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Title: Utterly corrupt FBI
Post by: G M on November 11, 2021, 10:27:13 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/lawless-fbi-raids-project-veritas-james-okeefes-home-last-week-leaks-private-documents-new-york-times-week/
Title: FBI is corrupt
Post by: ccp on November 12, 2021, 06:02:38 AM
" The New York Times reveal the extent to which the group has worked with its lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws."

is this not a good thing?
PV is trying to stay legal.

UNLIKE THE NYT THAT GETS ILLEGALLY LEAKED MATERIAL ALL THE TIME AND TURNS AROUND AND PRINTS IT , and 98% OF THE TIME IT IS IN FAVOR OF DEMOCRATS.

This was not about a diary
it is a political hit plain and simple
targeting political enemies and
establishing lists of sources contacts
and then the surveillance begins.



Title: Best I can do is...
Post by: G M on November 12, 2021, 09:19:18 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211112%2004.jpg

(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211112%2004.jpg)
Title: Re: Utterly corrupt FBI
Post by: G M on November 12, 2021, 09:25:24 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/lawless-fbi-raids-project-veritas-james-okeefes-home-last-week-leaks-private-documents-new-york-times-week/

https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Screen-Shot-2021-11-12-at-8.50.44-AM.png

(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Screen-Shot-2021-11-12-at-8.50.44-AM.png)
Title: Re: Utterly corrupt FBI
Post by: G M on November 12, 2021, 09:53:17 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/lawless-fbi-raids-project-veritas-james-okeefes-home-last-week-leaks-private-documents-new-york-times-week/

https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Screen-Shot-2021-11-12-at-8.50.44-AM.png

(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Screen-Shot-2021-11-12-at-8.50.44-AM.png)

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396465.php

Read it all.
Title: National School Board Association Changed Language In Its "Domestic Terrorism"
Post by: G M on November 12, 2021, 10:47:14 AM
National School Board Association Changed Language In Its "Domestic Terrorism" Letter At White House's Suggestion, FOIA'd Emails Reveal

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396466.php
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 12, 2021, 12:49:17 PM
 :x :x :x
Title: Obama judge ruled against FBI !
Post by: ccp on November 12, 2021, 01:02:04 PM
moved to correct thread  :-D:

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/11/11/breaking-judge-orders-fbi-to-stop-search-of-project-veritas-founder-okeefes-phone-following-raid-n1532173

shocking

even an Obamster judge
calls this out

Wray et al, involved in this need to be first on the "need fire list"
as soon as Repubs get back into the driver's seat ( if we do)
Title: Re: Obama judge ruled against FBI !
Post by: DougMacG on November 12, 2021, 04:58:01 PM
O'Keefe is right; his people have to operate within the law.  That said, he is my journalist hero.  His brand of embedded, domestic reporting is exactly what we need - at inner city vote count operations for example.

Good for this judge, if what happened is he had the courage to do the right thing no matter who it benefits.
Title: A spark of good news out of the FBI?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 12, 2021, 07:06:47 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2021/11/11/exclusive-fbi-director-told-former-agents-the-bureau-will-stay-in-its-own-lane-and-wont-be-attending-school-board-meetings/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=recaps&tpcc%3D=recaps&pnespid=rKJgU3xNMaQfgv3Z9zbrF56crUL_D4ZyKuWjxflrqwZmlPf8RWvg1EeNgE.aMGPhifMlpJ01
Title: Re: A spark of good news out of the FBI?
Post by: G M on November 12, 2021, 07:13:40 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2021/11/11/exclusive-fbi-director-told-former-agents-the-bureau-will-stay-in-its-own-lane-and-wont-be-attending-school-board-meetings/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=recaps&tpcc%3D=recaps&pnespid=rKJgU3xNMaQfgv3Z9zbrF56crUL_D4ZyKuWjxflrqwZmlPf8RWvg1EeNgE.aMGPhifMlpJ01

Bullshit. The FBI has made it very clear it’s the DNC-Stasi.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 12, 2021, 07:16:59 PM
Agreed, yet this statement by Wray is to the good.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on November 12, 2021, 07:31:26 PM
Agreed, yet this statement by Wray is to the good.

I think it’s been well established that Wray is a f’ing liar.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/09/25/howie-carr-abolish-the-fbi-you-heard-it-here-first/amp/

reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN2AU22P
Title: FBI leaks to the NYT
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 13, 2021, 09:09:56 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-fbi-and-the-new-york-times-collude-against-project-veritas/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202021-11-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: FBI leaks to the NYT
Post by: DougMacG on November 15, 2021, 08:50:33 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-fbi-and-the-new-york-times-collude-against-project-veritas/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202021-11-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart


FBI and NYT collude?  That is a hard hitting piece by Rush L's friend Andy McCarthy.  He is going to lose his deep state membership card with this - if he ever had one.
Title: Re: FBI leaks to the NYT
Post by: G M on November 15, 2021, 12:20:12 PM
Paywalled, as usual.


https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/11/the-fbi-and-the-new-york-times-collude-against-project-veritas/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202021-11-13&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart


FBI and NYT collude?  That is a hard hitting piece by Rush L's friend Andy McCarthy.  He is going to lose his deep state membership card with this - if he ever had one.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 15, 2021, 02:31:53 PM
The FBI and the New York Times Collude against Project Veritas
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
November 12, 2021 7:59 PM


Left to right: FBI building in Washington, D.C.; Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe at CPAC in 2019; the New York Times building in New York City. (Aaron P. Bernstein, Yuri Gripas, Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
You don’t need to love Project Veritas to be offended by the blatant government leaking of confidential information and the Times’ hypocritical coverage.


Want to understand how outrageous Friday’s New York Times coverage of the FBI’s seizure of Project Veritas’s proprietary documents is? Just imagine what the Times would be saying if what is happening to PV were happening to . . . well . . . the Times itself.

What if federal prosecutors had had the temerity to seek, and managed to obtain, court-authorized search warrants against Times reporters, on the allegation that the paper was in possession of evidence of a crime — perhaps even that some of its reporters were somehow complicit in the crime? The screams of bloody murder from West 40th Street would be audible across America.

Let’s start with the government leaks.

The reason that prosecutors and police are permitted covertly to seek judicial warrants to seize evidence, and that the courts keep the government warrant applications under seal, is that investigations are supposed to be kept confidential. This is to protect people who have not been charged with crimes — their privacy and their presumption of innocence. Government agents are not permitted to publicize such information, much less selectively leak it to the press. The information does not belong to them. They are given a legal privilege to acquire access to it for investigative purposes only.


Moreover, as no one knows better than the Times, there are special considerations when the government targets the press in a search or other information demand. A free-press right is guaranteed in the First Amendment. Amazingly under the circumstances, the Times’ default position — at least when rights of the Times and the rest of the media-Democrat complex are at stake — is that our constitutional system is threatened if the government demands or seizes information from reporters.

In point of fact, this is not true. The First Amendment prohibits the government from telling the press what it can publish — i.e., no prior restraints. Yet members of the media have the same obligations as every person in this country to provide evidence if demanded by a lawful subpoena. The government has the same power to seize evidence from reporters as from ordinary citizens.

Because of the constitutional recognition of free-press rights, the Justice Department (DOJ) has internal guidelines that require high-level approval before prosecutors and the FBI may demand information from the media. The guidelines discourage such demands unless the case is important and there is no alternative source. But that is discretionary government restraint, not mandatory. The media regularly advocate “press shield” laws precisely because the Constitution does not empower journalists to withhold information and guarantee confidentiality to their sources.

So, contrary to a lot of overheated commentary by PV sympathizers in conservative media, it is not a violation of the Constitution for the Justice Department — specifically, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), working with the FBI — to seize documents and other items from PV members. It is stunning, however, to find Times reporters, of all people, cheerleading this investigative gambit and publishing its fruits.

Let’s back up.

Reportedly, the government’s investigation revolves around a diary that was stolen from President Biden’s 40-year-old daughter, Ashley. A website called National File later published what it described as portions and has claimed to have the complete diary.

I confess to being curious about the basis relied on by the Justice Department — evidently, the Trump Justice Department, in October 2020, at then-candidate Biden’s request — to open a criminal investigation. The stealing of personal items from a non-government official is not a federal crime.

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To be clear, I am curious; I am not saying it was necessarily improper for the Justice Department to look into the theft. Joe Biden, at the time, was not just a former vice president, for whose protection the government is responsible; he was running for (and favored to win) the presidency. While we don’t know all the relevant facts, it is thus easy to conjure up legitimate federal interests in the robbery investigation.

Sometimes, for example, there is federal-government jurisdiction for robbery — if, for example, stolen items involve federal-government materials or such interstate-commerce items as narcotics. It could be a federal crime to transfer or sell stolen items in interstate commerce. A theft involving a close family member of a high government official (or candidate for high office) could also be part of a bigger scheme; there could be a federal crime if the robbery of his daughter signaled a threat to Biden’s own safety, perhaps, or an effort to blackmail or extort him.

So we’d be getting out over our skis to pronounce that the FBI and federal prosecutors had no business looking into the robbery. Plus, it’s not like the Justice Department went off on its own hook here. A federal district court judge issued a search warrant. That is only supposed to happen if there is probable cause to believe that a federal crime has occurred (or is occurring) and that the location to be searched probably contains evidence of that crime.

Now, yes, judges sometimes get it wrong on warrants. The vast majority of the time, though, once the pertinent facts are known, it turns out that the judge had a solid legal basis for issuing warrants. And a federal judge knows very well, just as the Justice Department knows very well, that search warrants targeting journalists — even such unconventional journalists as PV staffers — are fraught with constitutional implications. I bet we will learn that the search warrants were sought and granted only after very careful consideration at the FBI, DOJ, and the court. With due respect to PV founder James O’Keefe, we should not assume that his public explanations, which understandably cast PV in a favorable light, are necessarily the whole story here.

All that said, it is not a crime for journalists to come into possession of unlawfully converted documents. And it is to be expected that journalists zealously guard their right to publish such materials — or at least to consider doing so. We see this play out often when Times reporters receive classified leaks from intelligence officials — it being both against the law for government officials to disseminate the information to unauthorized persons, and potentially criminal for the press to publish national-defense secrets (though doubts about constitutionality make such a prosecution highly unlikely).

So why isn’t the press closing ranks around Project Veritas? Because the so-called mainstream media despise PV.

That, too, is to be expected: PV uses against the Left, very much including against left-leaning media, the Left’s own sandbag tactics — e.g., covert investigation, spying informants who pretend to befriend the people they investigate, and selective publication of the fruits of the investigation in order to paint the target in the worst possible light. If Saul Alinsky had been a right-winger, James O’Keefe would be his favorite student. But PV’s unpopularity cannot mean that it does not merit the status of journalist, with all of the free-press protection that status implies.

O’Keefe concedes that PV came into possession of the diary. He says PV elected not to publish it after becoming aware of it through “tipsters.” To the extent that PV had physical custody of the diary, or some part of it, or a copy of it, O’Keefe says, “Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner.”

Regardless of whether that turns out to be a true and complete version of events, it is highly irregular for investigative journalists to be subjected to such intrusive government investigative tactics as search warrants. Furthermore, if what has been reported by the Times is indicative of the scope of the searches permitted by the court, then clearly the warrants were not narrowly tailored to authorize seizure only of evidence related to the stolen diary. To the contrary, the FBI grabbed extensive PV work product and attorney-client communications.

Thus does the Times report today:

Project Veritas has long occupied a gray area between investigative journalism and political spying, and internal documents obtained by The New York Times reveal the extent to which the group has worked with its lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws.

The documents, a series of memos written by the group’s lawyer, detail ways for Project Veritas sting operations — which typically diverge from standard journalistic practice by employing people who mask their real identities or create fake ones to infiltrate target organizations — to avoid breaking federal statutes such as the law against lying to government officials.

Two of the Times’ A-team national reporters, Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti, then elaborate in detail on advice that PV has received from its lawyer, in connection with PV investigations going back for years. In the main, the advice is what you’d expect: How to navigate the perils of collecting information through ethically questionable tactics that skate along the razor’s edge between the legitimate and the lawless — something you’d be right to suppose that the Times knows a thing or two about.

Significantly, what has been leaked to the Times, and what the Times has editorially chosen to publish, is not confined to the Ashley Biden–diary investigation. The Times is heedless of Project Veritas’s right to counsel and to the constitutionally based confidentiality of its attorney-client communications. Given how the Times would react were the shoe on the other foot, which is hardly inconceivable, this is shocking. Not surprisingly, SDNY judge Analisa Torres, the Obama appointee who issued the search warrants, has now abruptly ordered the government to stop extracting materials from the PV operatives’ digital files. Plainly, the Justice Department is running roughshod over PV’s right to counsel.

I can only assume the Gray Lady’s judgment is skewed. It is not so much reporting a newsworthy story as exploiting the opportunity for full-bore scrutiny of PV as a journalistic enterprise. And scrutiny with barely disguised disdain: Because of PV’s political motivations, which the Left finds noxious — which, in fact, have resulted in prominent progressive figures and institutions being targeted, sometimes to their humiliation — PV operatives are somehow unworthy of being regarded as reporters, presumed to enjoy constitutionally driven deference from government investigators.

Judge Torres should be infuriated by the leaks to the Times. And she should do more than merely fulminate.

The judge should order the SDNY’s Biden-appointed U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, to provide the court, immediately, with affidavits detailing communications with the media from every prosecutor, FBI agent, and support staffer who is either involved in the investigation or has had access to the items seized from the current or former PV officials. Judge Torres should ask that Attorney General Merrick Garland immediately refer the matter to Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz for a thorough investigation of how the search-warrant information came to be transmitted to the Times.

Garland and Horowitz should announce that the Justice Department will conduct the investigation requested by the court, and Horowitz should be given the affidavits so his office can hit the ground running. Judge Torres should ask for periodic updates to stress to the Justice Department and FBI that the court is troubled by the government’s apparently pretextual exploitation of coercive judicial processes in order to fuel media coverage. That coverage has imperiled the constitutional rights of PV members to freedom of the press, due process, privacy, and assistance of counsel.

You don’t need to love Project Veritas to be offended by the blatant government leaking of confidential investigative information and by the Times’ hypocritical coverage: the crown jewel of American journalism branding PV as a lower caste, not entitled to the presumptions of privacy and legitimacy that the Times demands for its own information-collection practices.
Title: I’m sure the FBI will get right on this!
Post by: G M on November 15, 2021, 07:08:19 PM
https://mobile.twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1460370334700371971
Title: Andrew McCarthy, The FBI and NYT Collude against Project Veritas
Post by: DougMacG on November 15, 2021, 09:46:32 PM
From the article:

"You don’t need to love Project Veritas to be offended by the blatant government leaking of confidential investigative information and by the Times’ hypocritical coverage: the crown jewel of American journalism branding PV as a lower caste, not entitled to the presumptions of privacy and legitimacy that the Times demands for its own information-collection practices."


Everyone should be offended - but they aren't.
Title: Re: Andrew McCarthy, The FBI and NYT Collude against Project Veritas
Post by: G M on November 15, 2021, 09:59:01 PM
From the article:

"You don’t need to love Project Veritas to be offended by the blatant government leaking of confidential investigative information and by the Times’ hypocritical coverage: the crown jewel of American journalism branding PV as a lower caste, not entitled to the presumptions of privacy and legitimacy that the Times demands for its own information-collection practices."


Everyone should be offended - but they aren't.

The left is cheering.
Title: Even worse than we thought
Post by: G M on November 16, 2021, 02:05:38 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-whistleblower-reveals-biden-doj-activated-counterterrorism-division-against
Title: AMcC: Garland's Bannon Indictment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2021, 07:08:31 PM
Garland’s Bannon Indictment: A Self-Defeating Act of Politicized Prosecution
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
About Andrew C. McCarthy
Follow Andrew C. McCarthy On Twitter
November 16, 2021 6:30 AM

Left: Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice, June 25, 2021. Right: Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon outside U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., November 15, 2021. (Ken Cedeno, Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
The prosecution will make America’s political divisions worse still.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
Attorney General Merrick Garland waxed self-reverential after indicting Trump confidant Steve Bannon last week. “Since my first day in office,” he droned, “I have promised Justice Department employees that together we would show the American people, by word and deed, that the Department adheres to the rule of law, follows the facts and the law, and pursues equal justice under the law. Today’s charges reflect the Department’s steadfast commitment to these principles.”

No, they don’t. Last Friday’s indictment of Bannon for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena is a sop to the Democrats’ Trump-deranged base.

The criminal-contempt charges, on which Bannon surrendered on Monday, stem from a House January 6 Committee subpoena directing him to testify and produce documents. The Justice Department has rarely brought such an indictment in American history and hasn’t tried to do so in nearly 40 years. Nor has it escaped notice that DOJ has shown no interest in prosecuting government officials who, for example, misled the FISA Court on Russiagate or refused to cooperate in Congress’s probe of such Obama-era scandals as the IRS’s harassment of conservative groups and the ATF’s “gun-walking” debacle.

While the Bannon indictment was met with glee in the media-Democrat complex, it will confirm in the minds of half the country that the Biden/Garland Justice Department is a crude weapon of the political Left — with no real interest in “equal justice under the law.” Politics aside, the indictment is counterproductive, and not just because the case is weak. If the real objective is to obtain Bannon’s testimony about the Capitol riot, then even a stronger indictment at this juncture would have been self-defeating.

MORE IN CAPITOL RIOT
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Bannon will fight the case for months, maybe even for a couple of years. And now, he can add his Fifth Amendment privilege to Trump’s still-live executive privilege as a basis for refusing to cooperate. Meantime, the courts are already rapidly ruling against Trump’s privilege claim. That litigation elucidates that (a) Bannon has a legally defensible argument for declining to testify until the courts rule on the privilege claim, but (b) Bannon would lose, and probably soon, if the committee were to press its subpoena in court, as the Supreme Court encouraged Congress to do in last year’s Trump v. Mazars ruling. Thanks to the indictment, though, he is now better positioned to avoid testifying at all.

This is not about Bannon, Donald Trump’s formerly estranged White House adviser, who has groveled his way back from presidential punching bag to pardon grantee to Mar-a-Lago courtier. The issue here is the politicization of the Justice Department.

Bannon v. J-6 Committee on Executive Privilege

Let’s stipulate that executive privilege protects from disclosure not just communications between presidents and their advisers, but also the “deliberative process” — i.e., communications between executive subordinates who carry out the president’s policies.

The committee is correct that, even if Trump’s privilege claim were persuasive, much of what it wants to ask Bannon about would not conceivably be covered. Bannon was not a government official during the post-election controversy. Even assuming arguendo that communications between presidents and their private (nongovernment) advisers fit within the privilege’s carapace, the protection would be narrower than for communications involving actual government officials. More to the point, the committee wants to grill Bannon on his own actions and nonpresidential communications; on such matters, an executive-privilege claim is frivolous.

Still, the committee clearly does want to inquire into Bannon’s communications with Trump. In addition, it appears to be taking the legally untenable position that, as a former president, Trump may not assert executive privilege in an effort to block congressional inquiries into his communications during his presidency.

In a perfect world, Bannon would be required to show up for the committee deposition and, on a question-by-question basis, refuse to answer if he believes Trump’s privilege invocation applies, but otherwise respond. Analogously, regarding subpoenaed documents, he should be required to itemize, category by category, documents he is refusing to disclose on privilege grounds, but turn over any responsive documents as to which no privilege arguably applies.

Of course, we’re not in a perfect world: Bannon and Trump have an extravagant notion of what the privilege covers; the committee, on the other extreme, does not believe a former president may assert privilege at all, and even if he arguably may in some instances, he may not with respect to communications with nongovernment officials (such as Bannon was at the relevant time). Plainly, this disagreement is going to have to be sorted out by the judiciary. It would thus be more just and more efficient to get a court ruling before the questioning proceeds. And it is common for committees and prosecutors to litigate privilege claims that way — i.e., to assume that the witness will refuse to answer all questions, rather than going through the motions of making a question-by-question record before proceeding to court.

To be clear, Bannon should lose in the end. He is entitled, however, to argue that the privilege applies and to litigate its application in the courts. That is how due process works. We don’t tell a defendant that he can’t have a trial or move to suppress evidence just because the facts and law appear to be against him. The Justice Department’s obligation is to do justice, not win one for the Democrats. It is the guardian of a system in which we give people their day in court when there is a real legal dispute.

And here, there is such a dispute. Bannon and Trump are not fabricating an executive privilege for former presidents out of whole cloth. They are relying on an explicit, if ill-conceived, Supreme Court opinion.

A Low-Risk Soap Box for Bannon

There are two criminal contempt counts in the indictment. Yet, contrary to DOJ’s bombast, they are just misdemeanors. The indictment is not a real threat to Bannon; it is a low-risk soapbox. For his burgeoning career as MAGA’s media majordomo, the indictment is a coup. On the other side of the equation, Bannon stands a good chance of acquittal (for reasons we’ll come to). Even if he were finally convicted, after a year or two of trial and appeals, he would be facing no more than a month or three in jail.

Ergo, his incentive is to jump with both feet into a public battle against a committee that Republicans overwhelmingly disfavor — seeing it as a partisan hatchet job designed either to persecute Trump (according to the GOP’s pro-Trump faction), or to keep Trump relevant while Biden flails (according to the GOP’s growing “I wish Trump would just fade away” faction).

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Email Address
Now, why do I say Bannon has a good chance of beating the case? Because a contempt charge is not easy to prove.

The controlling statute requires prosecutors to establish that the defendant acted willfully in defaulting on a congressional subpoena. In any criminal case, the government must establish the defendant’s criminal intent (mens rea) beyond a reasonable doubt. Of the criminal law’s various gradations of mens rea, willfulness is the toughest one to prove. As explained by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the Supreme Court in Ratzlaf v. United States (1995), to demonstrate that a defendant acted willfully, the government must show that he knew what the law required and acted with a bad purpose to disobey that mandate.

With that in mind, let’s turn to the indictment. It recounts that when Bannon refused to produce documents as directed by the subpoena on October 7, 2021, his attorney informed the committee of former President Trump’s instruction that he was asserting executive privilege and that Bannon should withhold testimony and documents “to the fullest extent permitted by law” (emphasis added).

Take note of that, for it is the antithesis of a bad purpose to break the law. Bannon did not say he was unwilling to comply with what the law required. Rather, in subsequently explaining why he would not appear to testify on October 14, Bannon’s counsel advised the committee that his client would stand down “until such time as you reach an agreement with President Trump or receive a court ruling as to the extent, scope and application of executive privilege.”

How could it be willful noncompliance with the law to say, in effect, “I will follow the directive of a court of law” — especially when, as we shall see, the Supreme Court has both invited the privilege claim at issue and indicated that any dispute over its scope is properly resolved by courts?

Bannon’s position is no different from that taken by some Republican witnesses during the House impeachment proceedings in 2019 (e.g., former Trump national-security adviser John Bolton and his deputy, Charles Kupperman). House Democrats grumbled but took no action to censure or sue those witnesses — plainly fearing they’d lose in court.

In other instances, moreover, House Democrats have insisted that sweeping assertions of executive privilege should be resolved by the courts — exactly what Bannon claims here. For example, the House Judiciary Committee went to court to try to force former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn to testify about privileged communications with President Trump in one of its impeachment investigations. And after Biden took office, that committee even acceded to White House demands for strict limitations on what McGahn could be asked — notwithstanding that (a) Trump was no longer in office, and (b) while in office, Trump had waived his privilege to allow McGahn to cooperate with the Mueller probe.

Bannon’s defense has a lot to work with here.

Do Former Presidents Retain Executive Privilege?

As I have explained, I believe the constitutional claim of confidentiality for executive communications, which is rooted in separation of powers, is a privilege that belongs only to the incumbent president. A former president — a private citizen who has no executive power — should not be able to claim a privilege that belongs not to a person (i.e., not even to Joe Biden, who is president at the moment) but to the executive branch of the United States government, to be invoked only by the sitting chief executive.

Thus, if we were writing on a blank slate, I’d agree with the January 6 Committee that former President Trump has no business asserting executive privilege. But we’re not on tabula rasa. The Supreme Court has explicitly said that former presidents retain executive privilege.

To be sure, the scope of this privilege depends on the circumstances, such as the nature and importance of the inquiry, the subject matter of the communications at issue, and whether the incumbent president supports the privilege claim. But the fact that post-presidential executive privilege is a valid claim is not open to credible dispute. In addition, because fixing the scope of the privilege in any particular situation calls for a variegated, fact-intensive inquiry, it is reasonable — and certainly not contemptuous of Congress — to maintain that court intervention is warranted.

A constitutional conservative can empathize with the committee’s exasperation (though not with the Justice Department’s heavy-handedness). Again, former presidents should have no right to claim executive privilege. For the Supreme Court to have said otherwise undermines the unitary executive — the theory that the Constitution reposes all executive power in one officer, the president, which was memorably articulated in Justice Antonin Scalia’s famous Morrison v. Olson (1988) dissent, and reaffirmed last year by Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the Court in Seila Law v. CFPB. Nevertheless, the Court has endorsed the concept that former presidents retain executive privilege — albeit a very qualified privilege. As Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, put it in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1977):

The confidentiality necessary to this exchange [of information between a president and his advisers] cannot be measured by the few months or years between the submission of the information and the end of the President’s tenure; the privilege is not for the benefit of the President as an individual, but for the benefit of the Republic. Therefore the privilege survives the individual President’s tenure. [Emphasis added.]

The Justice Department’s Disingenuous Indictment

Garland’s indictment of Bannon relates that committee chairman Bennie G. Thompson rejected the privilege claim when Bannon raised it, pointing out that “President Trump had not made any privilege assertion to the Committee.” This is remarkably disingenuous.

As the DOJ well knows, the issue is not that a congressional committee, which is controlled by partisan Democrats who badly want the information at issue, has unsurprisingly rejected the Trump privilege claim. The issue is that the Supreme Court has explicitly recognized the privilege claim on which Bannon is relying. Yet nowhere in the nine-page indictment does the DOJ see fit to mention Nixon v. Administrator.

Moreover, how can the DOJ suggest in its indictment that “President Trump has not made any privilege assertion to the Committee,” when the DOJ knows well that President Trump has sued the committee in federal court precisely over his privilege claim? The case, in fact, is laboriously titled “Donald J. Trump v. Bennie G. Thompson in his official capacity as Chairman of the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.”

Not only that. Three days before Bannon’s indictment was announced, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, an Obama appointee to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., issued a 39-page opinion, in which she acknowledged that the Supreme Court had “found, as a threshold matter that [executive] privilege survives the end of a president’s term in office.” That is, Judge Chutkan conceded that Trump’s claim of privilege was not improper, but that it had to be weighed against the competing considerations — which considerations, she proceeded exactingly to show, outweighed the executive branch’s interest in confidentiality.

That’s the bottom line. Trump’s privilege claim is not entitled to win, but it is entitled to be asserted and weighed by the courts against the committee’s demands for information.

If that were not made clear enough by the district court’s opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stayed the lower-court ruling to enable Trump to litigate his privilege claims on appeal. Given the DOJ’s misleading assertion in the Bannon indictment that Trump has not asserted executive privilege, it is worth quoting from the short order — issued the day before the attorney general personally announced the indictment. Garland’s former colleagues on the D.C. Circuit bench stated that, “The purpose of this administrative injunction is to protect the court’s jurisdiction to address [Trump’s] claims of executive privilege” [emphasis added].

One of a federal prosecutor’s most important tasks is to provide the grand jury with objective instructions on points of law. To obtain Bannon’s indictment, prosecutors would have to have instructed the grand jury that Bannon’s alleged contempt was willful — i.e., that (a) he knew the law required him to provide testimony and documents, and (b) he refused to do so with bad intent.

In point of fact, Bannon, with advice of counsel, informed the committee that the former president had in fact asserted a privilege against disclosure. Thus, Bannon’s position was that he did not know what the law required under the circumstances — the legislative branch was ordering him to appear while insisting that Trump could not assert a privilege covering communications with Bannon, while Trump insisted that his presidential communications with Bannon should be withheld from Congress under a former president’s privilege recognized by the Supreme Court.

Bannon did not outright refuse to testify, as the Justice Department alleges. He represented that he was willing to testify and provide documents if the court ruled that the privilege had been overcome (or if Trump and the Committee came to an agreement about the scope of disclosure).

Given all that, it would be interesting to know exactly what legal instructions Garland’s prosecutor gave the grand jury regarding the required mens rea element of willfulness. Was the grand jury told — notwithstanding the indictment’s suggestion to the contrary — that Trump had asserted privilege and was currently litigating that assertion against the committee in court? Was the grand jury told that Supreme Court jurisprudence, for over 40 years, has said former presidents may assert executive privilege? Was the grand jury told that, in past instances, Congress has disagreed with such assertions and turned to the courts to resolve them — as Bannon was asking the committee to do?

Conclusion

The Biden Justice Department’s highly unusual and patently politicized congressional contempt indictment of Steve Bannon is a doleful development on every level. It will exacerbate Republican disillusion about the House January 6 Committee. On the other hand, if you believe a congressional investigation of the Capitol riot is important, and that the committee should get Bannon’s evidence, the indictment makes that less likely.

Meanwhile, Bannon has a good chance of beating the rap, after long delay. The Justice Department, which has to know this prosecution will be tough to win, brought it anyway, even though doing so was certain to bolster the belief that Democrats are weaponizing law enforcement — a belief gripping much of the country after Attorney General Garland’s inexcusable threat of federal investigations against parents protesting progressive indoctrination in the schools.

Joe Biden ran as the candidate who would bridge America’s deep divide. He has made things much worse, and his Justice Department’s Bannon prosecution will make them worse still.
Title: More on FBI vs. Veritas
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2021, 04:35:39 PM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/biden-administration-urges-court-not-to-appoint-special-master-in-project-veritas-case_4115123.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-11-20-3&mktids=5e73278288408faada19ce236adc65f8&est=7OnpE7jbftDgl25gcbzygFka4K9TUnAshFMq0460PIsHSxEdGIdWornUvpwcE2lFUud0
Title: another link to article that does not require subscribing
Post by: ccp on November 20, 2021, 09:27:59 PM
https://www.ntd.com/biden-administration-urges-court-not-to-appoint-special-master-in-project-veritas-case_704484.html

Judge blocks NYSlimes from publishing "materials " concerning the rightwing activist group Project Veritas, a rare step that the newspaper said violated decades of first amendment constitutional protections.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/nov/19/judge-temporarily-blocks-new-york-times-publication-project-veritas

ME: 
What "materials"?

I can only assume the FBI has leaked ProjVeritas  files  to the NYSLIMES.


So Proj Veritas  are not allowed to publish the Biden chick's diary (which O'Keefe claimed they were NOT going to do anyway since they could not verify it)

Yet the Times wants to publish out Project Veritas' seized documents leaked to them from the Deep State Feds. --->>.  :x

Funny how Freedom of Speech with regards to Deep State leaks only works for the LEFT.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 20, 2021, 10:41:05 PM
Biden Administration Urges Court Not to Appoint Special Master in Project Veritas Case
BY ZACHARY STIEBER November 20, 2021 Updated: November 20, 2021 biggersmaller Print
A federal judge should not accept a proposal by Project Veritas to appoint a special master after FBI agents raided homes linked to the journalism group, U.S. government lawyers argued in a court filing on Friday.

After agents executed search warrants on several homes linked to Project Veritas, including a residence of founder James O’Keefe, the group’s lawyers asked a judge to appoint a special master, or a retired judge, to sift through material seized by federal agents and separate out certain files.

Agents seized cell phones and other electronic devices from O’Keefe and two former Project Veritas journalists earlier this month, according to court documents.

The raids were motivated by the apparent belief that the group committed crimes in its handling of a diary said to be penned by Ashley Biden, daughter of President Joe Biden. Project Veritas says it was given the diary last year, but passed it onto law enforcement when it could not verify its authenticity.

“The extraordinary actions taken by the government, most significantly the use of search warrants to seize news gathering materials from journalists, appear to be founded on the premise that the diary does belong to Ashley Biden. That fact, however, does not warrant the exercise of federal criminal authority to investigate and punish journalists who merely obtained the diary and possessed it temporarily,” lawyers for the group wrote in a motion to the court.

Even more troublesome, there were no limits imposed in the search warrants on the government’s access to material it seized, lawyers said, which enables it to access privileged material, whistleblower material, and material about news investigations.

“The appointment of a special master to review the seized materials is necessary to protect core First Amendment interests and attorney-client privileged information,” they added.

District Court Judge Analisa Torres, an Obama nominee, halted the extraction of files from the seized devices last week as she considers the request.

In the Nov. 19 filing, government lawyers said they have already employed a “filter team” of government employees to sift through the seized material and asserted Project Veritas lawyers “have offered no persuasive explanation why that practice would not be sufficient here to protect any qualified journalistic privilege or First Amendment privilege that might exist or to protect any attorney-client or work product privilege.”

The warrants were supported by detailed affidavits and authorized by a federal magistrate judge, the government noted.

Agents say they’re investigating whether Project Veritas was involved in a conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines.

Journalists are legally allowed to publish stolen materials as long as they themselves did not steal them, according to a Supreme Court ruling in Bartnicki v. Hopper, which has been upheld in subsequent rulings, Project Veritas lawyers said.

The government, though, indicated it has reason to believe Project Veritas was involved in acquiring the diary. However, the proof backing this claim was redacted in the version of the filing released publicly.

Further, the government argued Project Veritas employees aren’t journalists.

“Project Veritas is not engaged in journalism within any traditional or accepted definition of that word. Its ‘reporting’ consists almost entirely of publicizing non-consensual, surreptitious recordings made though unlawful, unethical, and or/dishonest means,” lawyers said.

Project Veritas lawyers have until Nov. 24 to file a response.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on November 21, 2021, 10:32:33 AM
****Further, the government argued Project Veritas employees aren’t journalists.

“Project Veritas is not engaged in journalism within any traditional or accepted definition of that word. Its ‘reporting’ consists almost entirely of publicizing non-consensual, surreptitious recordings made though unlawful, unethical, and or/dishonest means,” lawyers said.

Project Veritas lawyers have until Nov. 24 to file a response.****

Oh so now we get definitions of what a journalist is?
So *JURNOlisters* are seeking truth when nearly all of what they publish in coordinated  one side Democrat Partisan
word games
 r
Title: FBI election raid in Colorado
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 21, 2021, 12:56:15 PM
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/amid-politicization-fbi-raids-homes-mesa-county-clerk-and-rep-boeberts
Title: Re: FBI election raid in Colorado
Post by: DougMacG on November 21, 2021, 07:16:41 PM
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/amid-politicization-fbi-raids-homes-mesa-county-clerk-and-rep-boeberts

They see nothing wrong in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Phoenix, but they're hot on the trail of it in Grand Junction where a Trump supporting representative won.  Just following the facts, wherever they lead.
Title: FBI downplays Left Terror Activity
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 02, 2021, 08:14:06 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/02/how-the-fbi-downplays-leftist-terror-activity/
Title: Convicted FBI Russiagate lawyer returned to good standing
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2021, 08:36:12 AM
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/16/dc_bar_lets_convicted_fbi_russiagate_lawyer_back_in_good_standing_as_court_cuts_him_more_slack_807964.html
Title: FBI and the Whitmer kidnap plot
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2021, 09:41:58 AM
second

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/fbi-michigan-kidnap-whitmer
Title: Charges dropped against Cuomo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 04, 2022, 06:41:04 AM
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10366717/Groping-charges-against-disgraced-ex-NY-Governor-dropped.html
Title: Re: Charges dropped against Cuomo
Post by: G M on January 04, 2022, 07:37:12 AM
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10366717/Groping-charges-against-disgraced-ex-NY-Governor-dropped.html

Being a dem politician means never having to say “I’m guilty”.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on January 04, 2022, 07:47:48 AM
the wrong words to some girlies ( or maybe and unwanted pinch)

is a far, far worse thing(s) he do

then
screwing up and sending many elderly to die and later lie about it for political face saving and to be sure he reap 5 million bucks on some shady book deal .

Also note he  gets to keep the $5 mill. just to be even more of an injustice

the whole thing is a farce



Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on January 04, 2022, 09:18:02 AM
Speaking of Dem politicians, and CNN MSNBC hosts, same thing, Chris Matthews sure disappeared quietly.  It was right at the start of covid and the subject changed quickly.  He says he "did something wrong" and seems okay that he lost a big career over it.  I guess we don't get to know the 'crime(s)' , but if this was the RNC or Heritage instead of left journalism people might call it a culture of that and want to shut the whole thing down.
Title: oh , he gets off for "assault charges" too
Post by: ccp on January 04, 2022, 09:25:40 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/01/04/andrew-cuomos-criminal-sexual-assault-charges-dropped/

so what was all the fuss to start with ?

 :roll:

need to get rid of the white guy?  but he is a Dem , doesn't that excuse being white?



Title: Re: oh , he gets off for "assault charges" too
Post by: G M on January 04, 2022, 09:30:44 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/01/04/andrew-cuomos-criminal-sexual-assault-charges-dropped/

so what was all the fuss to start with ?

 :roll:

need to get rid of the white guy?  but he is a Dem , doesn't that excuse being white?

It’s the same pass Comey gave Hillary for multiple serious felonies.

Title: Re: oh , he gets off for "assault charges" too
Post by: G M on January 04, 2022, 09:39:19 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/01/04/andrew-cuomos-criminal-sexual-assault-charges-dropped/

so what was all the fuss to start with ?

 :roll:

need to get rid of the white guy?  but he is a Dem , doesn't that excuse being white?

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/andrew-cuomo-charged-with-forcible-touching-after-criminal-probe/3359554/

https://codes.findlaw.com/ny/penal-law/pen-sect-130-52.html



It’s the same pass Comey gave Hillary for multiple serious felonies.
Title: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity!
Post by: G M on January 07, 2022, 12:37:50 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/15/six-fbi-agents-accused-of-soliciting-prostitution-trafficking-drugs-while-on-overseas-assignments/

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 07, 2022, 02:30:44 PM
Regarding Cuomo:

Generally, I have a very cynical attitude regarding charges, especially conveniently timed political ones, based on "he grabbed my ass/boob/pussy" twenty years ago. 

Thus, for me the bringing of the charges is more the dirty deed than the dropping of them.
Title: Mexico charges 7 in F&F weapons trafficking
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 11, 2022, 01:37:55 PM


https://www.kgun9.com/news/national/mexico-charges-7-in-fast-and-furious-weapons-trafficking?fbclid=IwAR1BnJCr72XuBIy_x9wqC83SpH7VzsR9EWdAXmwuFwbvawcf3f_IM31Ic9w
Title: Re: Mexico charges 7 in F&F weapons trafficking
Post by: G M on January 11, 2022, 01:39:47 PM


https://www.kgun9.com/news/national/mexico-charges-7-in-fast-and-furious-weapons-trafficking?fbclid=IwAR1BnJCr72XuBIy_x9wqC83SpH7VzsR9EWdAXmwuFwbvawcf3f_IM31Ic9w

Can we extradite Buraq and Holder down there?
Title: Federal coverup of a murder
Post by: G M on January 11, 2022, 04:09:01 PM
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/01/06/capitol_police_officer_who_shot_ashli_babbitt_refused_to_answer_investigators_questions_810720.html
Title: As usual, the FBI pisses on our legs and tells us it's raining
Post by: G M on January 17, 2022, 11:50:59 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397423.php

Title: Re: As usual, the FBI pisses on our legs and tells us it's raining
Post by: G M on January 17, 2022, 11:54:59 AM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397423.php

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/054/355/original/87260ac95c285457.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/054/355/original/87260ac95c285457.jpg)
Title: Re: As usual, the FBI pisses on our legs and tells us it's raining
Post by: G M on January 17, 2022, 01:05:07 PM
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397423.php

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/054/355/original/87260ac95c285457.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/054/355/original/87260ac95c285457.jpg)

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/052/305/original/7fc24a9f248b0308.jpg)

Title: Another "Known Wolf" FBI failure
Post by: G M on January 18, 2022, 12:39:44 PM
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-60038207
Title: SCOTUS rejects attempt to block mask mandate for autistic 4 year old on airplane
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2022, 03:15:42 PM
Supreme Court Rejects Attempt to Block Mask Mandate on Airplanes
By Zachary Stieber January 18, 2022 Updated: January 18, 2022biggersmaller Print
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a renewed bid to block the Biden administration’s requirement to wear masks on airplanes.

The application to stay the mask mandate was denied by the court after a referral by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump nominee.

Michael Seklecki and his son, an autistic 4-year-old, have been seeking to get courts to block the mask mandate, which was imposed in January 2021 by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) head David Pekoske under the direction of President Joe Biden.

Seklecki of Florida, along with Lucas Wall of Washington, said they and the boy are medically unable to wear masks.

“Being denied the right to fly because we can’t wear masks jeopardizes my son’s life as it’s not practical for us to make the lengthy drive to and from Boston every time he has a medical appointment. Should TSA be allowed to continue to mandate masks, my son could miss critical medical care, which could be fatal. My family and I would suffer enormous irreparable harm,” Seklecki said in a sworn declaration.

Wall has said he suffers from generalized anxiety disorder, and that when he wore masks he had to remove them after about five minutes because he starts hyperventilating.

The pair submitted the stay to Gorsuch several weeks after Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush nominee, rejected an earlier application.

Neither rejection was explained by the nation’s top court, which last week blocked a COVID-19 vaccine mandate imposed by the Biden administration against businesses with 100 or more workers that included requirements for unvaccinated workers to wear masks and get tested weekly, ruling the mandate exceeded the authority conferred upon the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

“Given that the Supreme Court just last week blocked OSHA’s mandate that all companies with 100-plus workers must ensure their employees get vaccinated against COVID-19 or endure forced masking in the workplace, it’s bewildering why the justices have declined to take similar action to stop a transportation security agency from overstepping its legal authority by regulating health matters,” Wall told The Epoch Times in an email.

“It’s terribly frustrating the justices have refused to block TSA’s illegal mask mandate given the negative impact it has on millions of Americans with medical conditions who can’t wear face masks including the 4-year-old autistic boy who is my co-petitioner. The court’s decision today does not align with its holding last week that federal agencies may not order pandemic mandates that Congress has not authorized.”

The TSA last extended the mandate, which also applies to some buses and railroads, through March 18, 2022.

The administration said when first announcing the requirements that they would “help prevent further spread of COVID-19 and encourage a unified government response.”

The Supreme Court in an order list (pdf) released Tuesday did not grant any requests for review but did ask for the view of Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar regarding claims that a hospice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania paid doctors to refer patients to the facility.

The court also rejected writs of certiorari in dozens of cases, including a case against American Airlines, a suit against Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough, and a case against Google.
Title: SCOTUS lets Congress go fishing in Trump's comms
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 19, 2022, 04:12:07 PM
Jan 19 2022   The application for stay of mandate and injunction pending review presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is denied. The questions whether and in what circumstances a former President may obtain a court order preventing disclosure of privileged records from his tenure in office, in the face of a determination by the incumbent President to waive the privilege, are unprecedented and raise serious and substantial concerns. The Court of Appeals, however, had no occasion to decide these questions because it analyzed and rejected President Trump’s privilege claims “under any of the tests [he] advocated,” Trump v. Thompson, 20 F. 4th 10, 33 (CADC 2021), without regard to his status as a former President, id., at 40–46. Because the Court of Appeals concluded that President Trump’s claims would have failed even if he were the incumbent, his status as a former President necessarily made no difference to the court’s decision. Id., at 33 (noting no “need [to] conclusively resolve whether and to what extent a court,” at a former President’s behest, may “second guess the sitting President’s” decision to release privileged documents); see also id., at 17 n. 2. Any discussion of the Court of Appeals concerning President Trump’s status as a former President must therefore be regarded as nonbinding dicta. Justice Thomas would grant the application. Statement of Justice Kavanaugh respecting denial of application.
Title: Whitmer Kidnapping Trial
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 24, 2022, 06:32:11 AM
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/us/whitmer-kidnapping-trial.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=News-Roundup20220124&utm_term=NewsRoundup-Smart

Roles of F.B.I. and Informants Muddle the Michigan Governor Kidnapping Case
Before five men stand trial in March, prosecutors and defense lawyers are examining more than 1,000 hours of secretly recorded conversations.
Neil MacFarquhar
By Neil MacFarquhar
Jan. 24, 2022, 3:00 a.m. ET

On a rainy night in northern Michigan in September 2020, a group of armed men divided among three cars surveyed the landscape around the vacation cottage of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, considering how to kidnap her as payback for her Covid-19 lockdown measures.

Two men descended from the lead car to inspect a bridge on Route 31 in nearby Elk Rapids, assessing what was needed to blow it up to delay any police response to the house on nearby Birch Lake.

Later, after team members returned to the rural camp where they had already conducted military-style training exercises, a man identified as “Big Dan” in government documents asked the assembled group, “Everybody down with what’s going on?” Another man responded, “If you are not down with the thought of kidnapping, don’t sit here.”

Of the dozen men on that nighttime surveillance mission, four of them including “Big Dan” were either government informants or undercover F.B.I. agents, according to court documents.

The events of that night will be a key element when, on March 8, five men charged with plotting to abduct the Democratic governor from her vacation cottage will go on trial in U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids, Mich.

The trial is being closely watched as one of the most significant recent domestic terrorism cases, a test of Washington’s commitment in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to pursue far-right groups who seek to kindle a violent, anti-government insurgency or even a new civil war.


Image
This property in Munith, Mich., is where the Wolverine Watchmen, a paramilitary group, carried out armed, military-style exercises. Some members of the group were later charged with either plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or with material support for terrorism.
This property in Munith, Mich., is where the Wolverine Watchmen, a paramilitary group, carried out armed, military-style exercises. Some members of the group were later charged with either plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or with material support for terrorism. Credit...Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News, via Associated Press

The effort to prosecute the kidnapping plot is sprawling. Both the prosecution and the defense are relying heavily on more than 1,000 hours of conversations and other events secretly recorded by informants or undercover agents. The defense lawyers want the case thrown out on entrapment grounds, accusing investigators of “egregious overreaching” by manipulating the accused men to drive the plot forward. Prosecutors will attempt to prove that the suspects were inclined toward the violence from the start.

In another challenge for the case, prosecutors have made an unusual decision not to call to the witness stand three F.B.I. agents with high-profile roles in the investigation. One agent was fired last summer after being charged with domestic violence. Another agent, while supervising “Big Dan,” tried to build a private security consulting firm based in part on some of his work for the F.B.I.



All 14 suspects arrested in October 2020 were members of the Wolverine Watchmen or other armed, paramilitary groups. One of the six facing a federal kidnapping conspiracy charge pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against the rest. The other eight, who participated in some military-style training, were accused in two separate, ongoing state cases on a lesser charge of providing material support for terrorism.

In recent weeks, the already complicated case has become more entangled, with the two sides arguing over what evidence can be presented in federal court.

The informant known as “Big Dan” or “Confidential Human Source-2” in government papers will be the star witness for the prosecution. Descriptions of Dan’s interactions with the suspects are rife throughout the court documents, and he already testified extensively in one state case last year.

Around March 2020, Dan, a veteran in his mid-30s who was wounded in the Iraq war, was working at the post office, looking online for ways to practice his military skills, according to the court documents, when the Wolverine Watchmen’s Facebook page popped up. Members were adherents of the so-called boogaloo movement who seek to speed a societal collapse.


Alarmed by their discussions about targeting law enforcement officers, Dan reported them to local police and eventually agreed to become an F.B.I. informant, he said in state court. He was paid about $54,000 over the course of the roughly six-month investigation.

He was not alone. The F.B.I. deployed at least 12 informants, as well as several undercover agents, according to defense filings. On the nighttime surveillance operation of the governor’s cottage, for example, the defense described “Big Dan” as the main organizer. Stephen Robeson, with a long history of both past crimes and work as an informant, was there too. The “explosives expert” who could topple the bridge was actually an undercover F.B.I. agent, as was a man in another vehicle.



The defense lawyers using that same trove of evidence material have built an entirely different scenario of what happened. They depict the accused as reluctant puppets entrapped by the F.B.I. agents and informants whom they say came up with the kidnapping plot.

Within weeks of joining, Dan took over the training exercises, introducing a much higher level of military tactics, defense lawyers said. They describe him as consulting closely with his main handler, Agent Jayson Chambers, on matters like who should participate in two surveillance trips to Ms. Whitmer’s cottage.

The suspects discussing violence on the recordings or in encrypted chats was just inflammatory rhetoric, the defense says. Prosecutors say Adam Fox, 38, the group’s ringleader, was living in the basement of a friend’s vacuum cleaner shop where he worked, talking about assaulting the Michigan statehouse just as “Big Dan” was getting involved.

The defense lawyers in the federal case either declined or ignored requests to comment, while a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in Western Michigan said the office would not discuss pending criminal matters. The F.BI referred questions to the U.S. attorney.

Sting operations using informants are a thorny tactic in terror cases. In those developed after the 9/11 attacks, F.B.I. agents often got involved when someone expressed interest in joining Al Qaeda or in fomenting some kind of terrorist act. If the suspects had trouble agreeing on a plot or acquiring weapons, the informants or undercover agents would sometimes help them as a way of gauging criminal intent.

Critics of such F.B.I. methods like Michael German, a former undercover F.B.I. agent, accuse the agency of acting like Cecil B. DeMille, manufacturing complicated, theatrical scenarios rather than pursuing the more complex task of unearthing actual extremist plots.

Mr. German, who is now a fellow at the Liberty & National Security Program of the Brennan Center for Justice, said, “Rather than focus on those crimes and investigating them, there appears to be more interest in this method of manufacturing plots for the FBI to solve.”


Prosecutors argue that they remove real threats. Nils R. Kessler, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the kidnapping suspects, has drawn parallels between their plans and the Jan. 6 attack. “As the Capitol riots demonstrated, an inchoate conspiracy can turn into a grave substantive offense on short notice,” he wrote.


Still, prosecutors have sought to distance themselves from Mr. Robeson, 58, another pivotal F.B.I. informant. A paving contractor from Wisconsin and the leader of a paramilitary group, he pleaded guilty in October to federal charges of possessing a high-powered sniper rifle, illegal for a felon. His list of felonies and other crimes dating back to the 1980s included forgery, jumping bail and battery.

Mr. Robeson organized a meeting in Dublin, Ohio, in June 2020 involving members of armed paramilitary groups from half a dozen states as far away as Virginia and Missouri. He also hosted a field training exercise in Wisconsin in July and helped to survey the governor’s cottage. He received nearly $20,000.

In an extraordinary filing in early January seeking to bar recorded statements by Mr. Robeson from the trial, prosecutors called him a “double agent” who had worked “against the interests of the government.” He attempted to get evidence destroyed and offered the defendants funds from a charity to buy weapons, among other acts, they said.

His lawyer, Joseph Bugni, declined to comment.

The entrapment defense has not been uncommon in terrorism cases after 9/11, but is one that juries have not embraced.

“It is a really hard defense. You are saying my client did it, but you should not punish him anyway because it wasn’t fair, somebody manipulated him into it,” said Jesse J. Norris, an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Fredonia.


Federal law on entrapment boils down to two issues: whether the suspect was induced to commit the crime, and to what extent he was predisposed toward it. The latter is a gray area, because prosecutors can use almost any conversation referencing violence as proof, legal experts said. The three defendants in one state case are also seeking to have it dismissed on entrapment grounds.

Defense attorneys in the federal case say in court papers that it was Mr. Robeson, an informant, who broached the kidnapping idea at the Ohio meeting, where four of the 15 militia representatives were informants.

The prosecution holds that two of the men charged, Mr. Fox and Barry Croft, first proposed the idea. In denying Mr. Croft bail, a judge quoted him from a recording made at the Ohio meeting. In a conversation that included threats of hurting people, Mr. Croft said, “I’m going to do some of the most nasty, disgusting things that you have ever read about in the history of your life.”


Image
Barry Croft, left, and Adam Fox first proposed the idea of kidnapping Ms. Whitmer, federal prosecutors say. Defense lawyers say an informant broached the idea first.
Barry Croft, left, and Adam Fox first proposed the idea of kidnapping Ms. Whitmer, federal prosecutors say. Defense lawyers say an informant broached the idea first. Credit...Delaware Department of Justice, via Associated Press
Mr. Croft is among several of the accused who also face federal weapons charges for exploding a homemade bomb.

When the trial begins, the prosecution will have to build its case without some of the F.B.I. agents who were central to the investigation.

After the suspects were arrested, Agent Robert J. Trask II was the main government witness, taking the stand during the first court hearings to describe the entire scenario.


The F.B.I. fired him in July after he was arrested and charged with beating his wife during an argument over an orgy that the two had attended at a hotel in Kalamazoo, Mich. In pleading no contest last December, Mr. Trask said he could not remember that night.

Two other F.B.I. agents have prompted objections from defense attorneys.

Defense attorneys accused Mr. Chambers of trying to leverage his role in the case to help build a private security consulting firm that he eventually disbanded in October 2021. As evidence of the significance of his role, they noted that Mr. Chambers wrote 227 reports about his exchanges with “Big Dan.” Prosecutors said the defendants failed to prove that Mr. Chambers had a financial stake in the case’s outcome.

Defense lawyers in both the federal and state cases have raised questions in court about Henrik Impola, Dan’s other handler, who has testified in court in the investigation. A lawyer in a separate federal case had complained to the F.B.I. that Mr. Impola had committed perjury, they said. Federal prosecutors in the Whitmer case called the accusation “unfounded,” noting that the court in that case made no finding of misconduct against Mr. Impola.

Nonetheless, the government announced in court papers last month that it would not be calling any of the three men to testify, and sought to bar mention of the incidents, saying that they “carry a high risk of unfair prejudice, confusion and misleading the jury.” It has endeavored to downplay the significance of the three men, noting that dozens of agents worked on the investigation.

Even if it is impossible to fully assess a case before the trial reveals all the facts, said Mr. German, the former undercover F.B.I. agent, the revelations thus far have encumbered the prosecution’s task. “There is certainly a lot of lumber that this case seems to have given defense attorneys to build a story about what happened,” he said.
Title: PP: Tackling FBI corruption
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2022, 12:21:53 PM
Tackling FBI Corruption
Are we attacking the symptoms and not the disease?

Harold Hutchison


Some recent controversies over the FBI, including, but not limited to, Spygate, the Steele dossier and the bureau's inability to stop jihadist attacks, have led some to suggest abolishing or reforming the agency. While there is no denying that there are real problems at the FBI, we ask you to take a trip down memory lane first.

In 1996, hundreds of FBI files "found" their way to the Clinton White House, and FBI brass were reportedly worried that they had become "political dupes." That was then. These days, abuses far greater than that, whether it was the IRS targeting the Tea Party and the aforementioned Spygate, among others, end up being essentially whitewashed by the purported watchdogs. In fact, the watchdogs even cheer said abuses.

So, something has clearly changed over the last quarter-century, and not for the better. The fact that massive swaths of the press are cheering these abuses on and that many government bureaucrats were also willing to go along with them are alarming. It leads to one conclusion: While reforms and new guardrails are necessary for everything from preventing government abuse to securing the integrity of our elections at all levels, that may not be enough.

Why might reforms not be enough? Because the assumption of reform is that we have a civil service willing to do the essential work for the country without playing politics. Take a look at Alexander Vindman, Michael McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Lois Lerner, and you have Exhibits A, B, C, D, and E that too many bureaucrats are willing to go along with political abuses.

Don't take our word for it. Look at the jihad that New York Attorney General Letitia James is waging against the National Rifle Association and Donald Trump. The former is a target because of its Second Amendment advocacy, and James pretty much said so in an interview with Ebony magazine, where she also smeared the NRA as a "terrorist organization." Grassroots Patriots also know that the real reason that the investigation of the Trump Organization is going on is because Trump dared to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

It's increasingly obvious that career officials are gladly going on with "investigations" conducted in the spirit of Lavrentiy Beria, who famously said, "Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime."

How is that possible? The answer, believe it or not, really came to light during the pandemic. Those who go into the law enforcement and many government bureaucracies are being indoctrinated via our education system, and that has been going on for a long time. Many laughed at the politically correct antics in the 1990s, but they masked a growing left-wing radicalization of those who ran the schools.

The "woke" bureaucrats then worked their way up and eventually began deciding who would be hired. Now, we have public school systems rife with teachers who laugh when people mention parental rights and who push mentally and emotionally poisonous stuff like Critical Race Theory.

Where do the rank-and-file at places like the FBI, your local prosecutor's office, the military, the intelligence community, and many other essential government functions come from? They come through our educational system. College used to be the only worry, but now left-wing indoctrination is reaching all the way to preschool.

The harsh reality for grassroots Patriots is that reforming the FBI may only address the symptoms as opposed to the underlying problem. The real problem is that those who get the education needed to join the FBI (or other agencies that are supposed to implement policy at the federal, state, and local level) are getting filled with the notion that those who don't buy the left-wing line are evil.

Unless we can fix the situation in our schools and institutes of higher learning, reforming the FBI may well turn out to be putting a Band-Aid on malignant melanoma. After all, these agencies ultimately come down to the people working in them. Are they "woke" social justice warriors, or will they be Patriots?
Title: Re: PP: Tackling FBI corruption
Post by: G M on January 25, 2022, 03:16:20 PM
Tackling FBI Corruption
Are we attacking the symptoms and not the disease?

Harold Hutchison


Some recent controversies over the FBI, including, but not limited to, Spygate, the Steele dossier and the bureau's inability to stop jihadist attacks, have led some to suggest abolishing or reforming the agency. While there is no denying that there are real problems at the FBI, we ask you to take a trip down memory lane first.

In 1996, hundreds of FBI files "found" their way to the Clinton White House, and FBI brass were reportedly worried that they had become "political dupes." That was then. These days, abuses far greater than that, whether it was the IRS targeting the Tea Party and the aforementioned Spygate, among others, end up being essentially whitewashed by the purported watchdogs. In fact, the watchdogs even cheer said abuses.

So, something has clearly changed over the last quarter-century, and not for the better. The fact that massive swaths of the press are cheering these abuses on and that many government bureaucrats were also willing to go along with them are alarming. It leads to one conclusion: While reforms and new guardrails are necessary for everything from preventing government abuse to securing the integrity of our elections at all levels, that may not be enough.

Why might reforms not be enough? Because the assumption of reform is that we have a civil service willing to do the essential work for the country without playing politics. Take a look at Alexander Vindman, Michael McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Lois Lerner, and you have Exhibits A, B, C, D, and E that too many bureaucrats are willing to go along with political abuses.

Don't take our word for it. Look at the jihad that New York Attorney General Letitia James is waging against the National Rifle Association and Donald Trump. The former is a target because of its Second Amendment advocacy, and James pretty much said so in an interview with Ebony magazine, where she also smeared the NRA as a "terrorist organization." Grassroots Patriots also know that the real reason that the investigation of the Trump Organization is going on is because Trump dared to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

It's increasingly obvious that career officials are gladly going on with "investigations" conducted in the spirit of Lavrentiy Beria, who famously said, "Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime."

How is that possible? The answer, believe it or not, really came to light during the pandemic. Those who go into the law enforcement and many government bureaucracies are being indoctrinated via our education system, and that has been going on for a long time. Many laughed at the politically correct antics in the 1990s, but they masked a growing left-wing radicalization of those who ran the schools.

The "woke" bureaucrats then worked their way up and eventually began deciding who would be hired. Now, we have public school systems rife with teachers who laugh when people mention parental rights and who push mentally and emotionally poisonous stuff like Critical Race Theory.

Where do the rank-and-file at places like the FBI, your local prosecutor's office, the military, the intelligence community, and many other essential government functions come from? They come through our educational system. College used to be the only worry, but now left-wing indoctrination is reaching all the way to preschool.

The harsh reality for grassroots Patriots is that reforming the FBI may only address the symptoms as opposed to the underlying problem. The real problem is that those who get the education needed to join the FBI (or other agencies that are supposed to implement policy at the federal, state, and local level) are getting filled with the notion that those who don't buy the left-wing line are evil.

Unless we can fix the situation in our schools and institutes of higher learning, reforming the FBI may well turn out to be putting a Band-Aid on malignant melanoma. After all, these agencies ultimately come down to the people working in them. Are they "woke" social justice warriors, or will they be Patriots?

Exactly.
Title: Yes it is
Post by: G M on January 27, 2022, 12:57:36 PM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/980/489/original/702c360489742df1.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/980/489/original/702c360489742df1.jpg)

You aren't voting your way out of this.
Title: Re: Yes it is
Post by: G M on January 27, 2022, 12:59:45 PM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/980/489/original/702c360489742df1.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/980/489/original/702c360489742df1.jpg)

You aren't voting your way out of this.

https://nypost.com/2022/01/26/leaked-video-reveals-joe-bidens-hush-hush-migrant-invasion/
Title: Re: Yes it is
Post by: G M on January 28, 2022, 10:08:31 AM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/980/489/original/702c360489742df1.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/096/980/489/original/702c360489742df1.jpg)

You aren't voting your way out of this.

https://nypost.com/2022/01/26/leaked-video-reveals-joe-bidens-hush-hush-migrant-invasion/
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/397600.php
Title: Who is really running this country?
Post by: G M on February 01, 2022, 07:28:00 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/if_you_wanted_proof_biden_isnt_in_charge_of_his_own_administration_here_it_is.html

Obama from the shadows?
Title: Judge to face prosecution for blocking ICE arrest
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 02, 2022, 07:56:59 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/massachusetts-judge-to-face-prosecution-for-allegedly-blocking-ice-arrest_4311292.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-03-02-1&utm_medium=email2&est=hiaWojIifG77cN0Ubopch7WX5cl6D7zvfydTd5aX5LnERvrnkQFY%2B5BEet%2FtSdgOgMvv
Title: Re: No DOJ investigation
Post by: G M on March 11, 2022, 10:10:55 PM
https://postlmg.cc/JtFzhNm6

(https://i.postimg.cc/3J84n1qT/BarrBook.jpg)

https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/1333898563022172166

Deep State Barr doing his thing!



Sidney Powell: “Frankly, I’m Beginning to think the Entire FBI and Dept. of Justice need to be Hosed Out with Clorox and Firehoses!”
——------------

I like Bill Barr and believe he said and did some grest things as US AG.  But his mid term appointment and leadership did not create followership of a very biased, corrupt and leftist agenda driven deep state lawyers and 'investigators' that dominate the department and the agencies.
Title: The Deep State element of the coup-Hunter Biden laptop smear
Post by: G M on March 19, 2022, 07:33:04 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/03/18/intelligence-experts-refuse-to-apologize-for-smearing-hunter-biden-story/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=pasteboard_app
Title: Re: The Deep State element of the coup-Hunter Biden laptop smear
Post by: G M on March 20, 2022, 04:05:20 PM
https://nypost.com/2022/03/18/intelligence-experts-refuse-to-apologize-for-smearing-hunter-biden-story/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=pasteboard_app

The spies who lie.

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/03/20/fringe-minority-report-26/#more-263678
Title: More on the Deep State's targeting of Project Veritas
Post by: G M on March 22, 2022, 10:43:23 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/03/breaking-biden-doj-spied-project-veritas-journalists-sealed-search-warrants-concealed-communications-federal-judge-video/

Russia!Russia!Russia!

Ukraine!

Pay no attention to the end of America.
Title: Judge rules Mayorkas rule illegal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 23, 2022, 01:49:06 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/22/federal-judge-rules-bidens-lax-deportation-policy-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=FDcLCjMjG3%2BQAof7OQypMC%2BVf6iBo15Gn8UQPYeH8DH9k24sK4DJDRaY7xHqaIwS&bt_ts=1647974466306
Title: Biden's Praetorian Guard at it again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 23, 2022, 02:27:59 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-authorities-secretly-accessed-project-veritas-emails-court-documents_4354988.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-03-22-4&utm_medium=email&est=j%2FHT1DSh5adBOLJxnzDJlsMDelVFoi%2BuGUbTV0xNKOOHH%2Bz54%2FfX1WrkPWO5zEtSoXZv
Title: Re: Biden's Praetorian Guard at it again
Post by: G M on March 23, 2022, 02:44:05 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-authorities-secretly-accessed-project-veritas-emails-court-documents_4354988.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-03-22-4&utm_medium=email&est=j%2FHT1DSh5adBOLJxnzDJlsMDelVFoi%2BuGUbTV0xNKOOHH%2Bz54%2FfX1WrkPWO5zEtSoXZv

I am still waiting for someone to explain what federal criminal statute applies to an alleged theft of a diary.
Title: Your apolitical FBI
Post by: G M on March 24, 2022, 06:47:09 AM
https://freebeacon.com/politics/read-the-emails-advertising-fbi-event-to-honor-ketanji-brown-jacksons-nomination/
Title: FBI agent pleads guilty
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 25, 2022, 05:11:58 AM
Former FBI Agent Pleads Guilty to Tampering With Evidence
By Zachary Stieber March 24, 2022 Updated: March 24, 2022biggersmaller Print
A former FBI agent who was involved in an investigation of former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens in 2018 pleaded guilty to misdemeanor tampering with evidence in the case on March 23, a day before jury selection was set to start in his trial on seven felony counts, including perjury.

William Don Tisaby, 69, who is now a private investigator, was hired by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner to investigate allegations against Greitens in an invasion of privacy case. Greitens resigned in 2018 after the investigation began.

Tisaby was indicted on seven felonies, including perjury and evidence tampering, in 2019.

He acknowledged in the plea agreement that he said in a deposition that certain documents didn’t exist when, in fact, they did, Robert Russell, the special prosecutor in the case, told reporters outside of the courthouse in St. Louis after the deal was reached.

“He’s admitting to hiding or at least testifying that the notes that Ms. Gardner gave to him were not given to him by testifying that he did not take any notes, when in fact he did take notes on those notes Ms. Gardner gave him,” Russell said.

Tisaby also took notes from an interview with a witness and sent them to Gardner, but falsely testified that he never did.

Gardner is set to face a disciplinary hearing soon for allegedly hiding details about the Greitens investigation from members of her team.

Russell said prosecutors “have an ethical obligation to correct and make sure the record is clear” regarding documents and that they should correct witnesses who offer false information.

The deal means that Tisaby, who was facing serious prison time, won’t serve any time in jail. He will serve one year of probation and must pay court costs.

Epoch Times Photo
Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, right, during a rally in St. Charles, Mo., in a file image. (Whitney Curtis/Getty Images)
“I think we’ve reached an appropriate resolution for Mr. Tisaby in this case based on what occurred,” Russell said, noting that it’s important to make sure anybody attached to law enforcement is held accountable for being untruthful.

Jermaine Wooten, an attorney for the defendant, told reporters that while he and his colleagues were prepared to go to trial, Tisaby wanted to put the case behind him because of his age and health.

“I think it was just more of an issue of just negligence in this matter. It was a slew of documents that he had and he just went into that deposition not prepared. There was no malice in this man’s heart,” Wooten said, noting that no one instructed his client to hide the existence of the documents.

But Russell pushed back on that depiction, describing the guilty plea as an admission that the defendant purposefully shielded evidence.

“I think he just didn’t want anybody to see what he had done,” Russell said.

The investigation in question was looking into whether Greitens snapped a picture of a woman at his house in 2015. The alleged picture has never been found.

Greitens, who’s running for a U.S. Senate seat, said on Steve Bannon’s show that the guilty plea was “a great victory.”

“The corrupt former FBI agent, William Tisaby, pled guilty,” he said. “What everyone recognizes now is what we said from the beginning, is that this was a criminal witch hunt against me.”
Title: WT: Who Watches the Watchmen? “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 31, 2022, 09:32:59 AM
Who watches the watchmen? We need to reassess the CIA, FBI, DHS and DOJ By Michael McKenna I

n 1975, Sen. Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, gaveled in a new select committee constructed specifically to examine legal and other transgressions engaged in by the CIA and other elements of the American foreign policy apparatus.

The probe, which lasted about 15 months, eventually widened to include the FBI and the Department of Justice. In its lengthy final report, the committee concluded that the CIA, the FBI and other elements of the federal government had often acted illegally, imprudently and without sufficient authorization from their superiors or from elected officials.

At the time, there was a general sense on the political right that the Church committee was an unnecessary and politically motivated hit job on law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and had done an enormous disservice to the country by weakening our domestic and international capabilities.

As recently as 10 years ago, it was commonplace to find Republican senators, including those, ironically enough, who served as chairs of the successor committee — the Senate Committee on Intelligence — who viewed Mr. Church’s work with residual anger.

Forget all that. We need a new Church committee.

The pattern of lawbreaking and indifference to political, social, legal and governmental norms among the bureaucracies of the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Justice has now become so obvious and so egregious that Congress must make both a systemic and a granular examination of the activities of those charged with safeguarding the United States and her citizens.

The unfortunately lengthy and troubling list of criminal and pathological behavior on the part of the intelligence and federal law enforcement communities precludes regular order and reliance on any specific committee. Many of the committees that have jurisdiction over these agencies have already failed to conduct or in many cases even initiate meaningful oversight.

Some congressional committee members and staff with jurisdiction are themselves part of the problem. The same old, same old haphazard attempts to conduct this examination through standing committees will inevitably devolve into the same old partisan incompetence and fail.

Citizens require and should demand a special commission or committee be empaneled, preferably led by a serious senator or House member. This is not a moment for the TikTok or Twitter members. This is a matter of the gravest urgency and will require an equally sober, deliberate and nonpartisan assessment of the depth of the crisis and the changes that need to be made.

Those involved in such an examination should be clear about the stakes. Despite all the nonsense on both sides about insurrection (still, no one charged with that), elections being stolen and votes being suppressed and democracy dying in the darkness, the real and immediate risk to the republic is that some of those charged with safeguarding it have, in fact, become its enemies.

For instance, we know that some in the FBI and the DOJ wanted to select the president in 2016 and 2020 and fabricated evidence to do so. We know that law enforcement surveilled presidential campaign staff in 2016. We know that the Department of Homeland Security surveilled reporters and others. We know that some of those in the intelligence community and federal law enforcement have lied before Congress and elsewhere. We know that former senior members of the intelligence community intentionally occluded efforts prior to the 2020 election to thoroughly examine the contents and provenance of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The Washington Times has recently reported that FBI agents have recently violated the bureau’s own rules almost 750 times while conducting sensitive investigations involving individuals engaged in politics, government, the news media and religious groups. These are just the things we know. We also know that the media, which traditionally polices such things, is either incapable or unwilling to do so, in large measure because they are in favor of some of these actions. How have they covered the Hunter Biden laptop, even since The New York Times gave them license to report on that story?

Many in the media seem to be incapable of imagining that federal agents with guns and badges who are willing to commit transgressions to select a president will eventually want to start selecting the news people can see and read.

Almost 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal wrote: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” — who watches the watchmen themselves? Five hundred years before that, Plato grappled with the same question: How does society protect itself from the tyranny of those who wield the legitimacy of law enforcement like a weapon against the citizenry.

No one likes to think of their own watchmen as part of the problem. But at a certain point, facts become inescapable. The only right answer — and the one we face now — is to be fearless and resolute in examining the conduct of those federal watchmen who need to be watched. If we don’t have a system-wide, open, transparent and meaningful examination of the problem now, when will we? Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the co-host of “The Unregulated” podcast. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House
Title: Re: WT: Who Watches the Watchmen? “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
Post by: G M on March 31, 2022, 09:45:21 AM
THIS!


Who watches the watchmen? We need to reassess the CIA, FBI, DHS and DOJ By Michael McKenna I

n 1975, Sen. Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, gaveled in a new select committee constructed specifically to examine legal and other transgressions engaged in by the CIA and other elements of the American foreign policy apparatus.

The probe, which lasted about 15 months, eventually widened to include the FBI and the Department of Justice. In its lengthy final report, the committee concluded that the CIA, the FBI and other elements of the federal government had often acted illegally, imprudently and without sufficient authorization from their superiors or from elected officials.

At the time, there was a general sense on the political right that the Church committee was an unnecessary and politically motivated hit job on law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and had done an enormous disservice to the country by weakening our domestic and international capabilities.

As recently as 10 years ago, it was commonplace to find Republican senators, including those, ironically enough, who served as chairs of the successor committee — the Senate Committee on Intelligence — who viewed Mr. Church’s work with residual anger.

Forget all that. We need a new Church committee.

The pattern of lawbreaking and indifference to political, social, legal and governmental norms among the bureaucracies of the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Justice has now become so obvious and so egregious that Congress must make both a systemic and a granular examination of the activities of those charged with safeguarding the United States and her citizens.

The unfortunately lengthy and troubling list of criminal and pathological behavior on the part of the intelligence and federal law enforcement communities precludes regular order and reliance on any specific committee. Many of the committees that have jurisdiction over these agencies have already failed to conduct or in many cases even initiate meaningful oversight.

Some congressional committee members and staff with jurisdiction are themselves part of the problem. The same old, same old haphazard attempts to conduct this examination through standing committees will inevitably devolve into the same old partisan incompetence and fail.

Citizens require and should demand a special commission or committee be empaneled, preferably led by a serious senator or House member. This is not a moment for the TikTok or Twitter members. This is a matter of the gravest urgency and will require an equally sober, deliberate and nonpartisan assessment of the depth of the crisis and the changes that need to be made.

Those involved in such an examination should be clear about the stakes. Despite all the nonsense on both sides about insurrection (still, no one charged with that), elections being stolen and votes being suppressed and democracy dying in the darkness, the real and immediate risk to the republic is that some of those charged with safeguarding it have, in fact, become its enemies.

For instance, we know that some in the FBI and the DOJ wanted to select the president in 2016 and 2020 and fabricated evidence to do so. We know that law enforcement surveilled presidential campaign staff in 2016. We know that the Department of Homeland Security surveilled reporters and others. We know that some of those in the intelligence community and federal law enforcement have lied before Congress and elsewhere. We know that former senior members of the intelligence community intentionally occluded efforts prior to the 2020 election to thoroughly examine the contents and provenance of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The Washington Times has recently reported that FBI agents have recently violated the bureau’s own rules almost 750 times while conducting sensitive investigations involving individuals engaged in politics, government, the news media and religious groups. These are just the things we know. We also know that the media, which traditionally polices such things, is either incapable or unwilling to do so, in large measure because they are in favor of some of these actions. How have they covered the Hunter Biden laptop, even since The New York Times gave them license to report on that story?

Many in the media seem to be incapable of imagining that federal agents with guns and badges who are willing to commit transgressions to select a president will eventually want to start selecting the news people can see and read.

Almost 2,000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal wrote: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” — who watches the watchmen themselves? Five hundred years before that, Plato grappled with the same question: How does society protect itself from the tyranny of those who wield the legitimacy of law enforcement like a weapon against the citizenry.

No one likes to think of their own watchmen as part of the problem. But at a certain point, facts become inescapable. The only right answer — and the one we face now — is to be fearless and resolute in examining the conduct of those federal watchmen who need to be watched. If we don’t have a system-wide, open, transparent and meaningful examination of the problem now, when will we? Michael McKenna, a columnist for The Washington Times, is the co-host of “The Unregulated” podcast. He was most recently a deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of the Office of Legislative Affairs at the White House
Title: FBI circle firing squad
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 31, 2022, 09:49:29 AM
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/1924754/fbi-tried-to-cover-this-up-and-now-they-eat-one-another
Title: "RACE AGAINST THE CLOCK"
Post by: ccp on April 01, 2022, 05:18:29 AM
need to get the smears out in time before '22 election !!! blares Yahoo propaganda news:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/as-jan-6th-committee-races-against-the-clock-lawmakers-caution-against-raised-expectations-235058426.html

I have news, this will not affect election outcomes as much as voter fraud will.......
Title: Re: No DOJ investigation
Post by: G M on April 03, 2022, 11:15:46 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/huge-former-ag-barr-stopped-investigations-trailer-load-288000-ballots-pa-new-york-2020-election-barr-refused-provide-whistleblower-protection-now-usps-wont-pro/

https://postlmg.cc/JtFzhNm6

(https://i.postimg.cc/3J84n1qT/BarrBook.jpg)

https://twitter.com/TomFitton/status/1333898563022172166

Deep State Barr doing his thing!



Sidney Powell: “Frankly, I’m Beginning to think the Entire FBI and Dept. of Justice need to be Hosed Out with Clorox and Firehoses!”
——------------

I like Bill Barr and believe he said and did some grest things as US AG.  But his mid term appointment and leadership did not create followership of a very biased, corrupt and leftist agenda driven deep state lawyers and 'investigators' that dominate the department and the agencies.
Title: Our massively corrupt government
Post by: G M on April 10, 2022, 11:31:06 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/09/justice-has-been-and-will-be-a-long-time-coming/

Justice Has Been and Will Be a Long Time Coming
No movement without recognized legitimacy can last. That’s the good news. The bad news is that “not lasting” can describe a lengthy and turbulent time.
By Roger Kimball

April 9, 2022
On Friday, April 8, the biggest domestic news came from Grand Rapids, Michigan. On that day the world learned that a jury had voted unanimously to acquit Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta of conspiring to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the fall of 2020. The verdict, as Julie Kelly noted in her column for American Greatness that day, was a “huge defeat for the U.S. Department of Justice.” One can only hope. It was also a huge, if tardy and incomplete, win for justice, lower case, no “Department of” preceding the noun.

Kelly recounts the sordid details of this saga of FBI entrapment, deep-state political maneuvering, and media malpractice. The case made national headlines and, coming when it did, just before the 2020 presidential election, was clearly designed to affect public sentiment regarding the Donald Trump campaign. “Heavens help us! Troglodytic Trump supporters are trying to kidnap noble Democratic public servants! Can you believe it?”

Turns out you would have been foolish to believe it. But in retrospect, it seems clear that it was a sort of dry-run for that later entertainment, the January 6 worse-than-Pearl-Harbor or 9/11, Civil-War-like “insurrection” and/or attempt to “overturn the election” and/or overthrow “our democracy” at the U.S. Capitol.

There were some two dozen people involved in the “Plot to Kidnap Gretchen Whitmer” saga. Fully 12 were FBI assets. They were not there to infiltrate the loser militia members. They were there to egg them on. The FBI helped to define and finance the plot from the beginning. They even set up a fake “militia” for the others to rally around. They also helped to equip, not to mention bribe, the motley crew whom they assembled for the caper. The FBI did not uncover a plot. They were prime movers in fomenting a plot. They did not so much uncover evidence against the plotters as they entrapped them. And it’s not as if this is a one off. It is part of a pattern of abuse and irresponsibility. As the Wall Street Journal’s Holmon Jenkins put it last fall, “The agency should be scrapped and something new built to replace it.”

We do not yet know the full extent of government involvement in the January 6 jamboree, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that it was premeditated, extensive, and criminal. Scores of people have been moldering in the Washington, D.C. jail that the columnist John Zmirak calls “Gitmo on the Potomac,” most of them for trespassing, “obstructing an official proceeding,” or (the most common offense) “parading” at the Capitol. Julie Kelly has been on that case, too, and her book January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right goes a long way in connecting the dots. Perhaps the tide is beginning to turn in that case as well. Last week, Matthew Martin became the first of the January 6 defendants to be acquitted. He faced a spate of misdemeanor charges. Video evidence shows that he had been waved into the Capitol by a smiling police officer. He spent roughly 10 minutes looking around and then left. Not exactly revolutionary behavior. Nevertheless, he was arrested and jailed before being released on personal recognizance. Perhaps his acquittal will bode well for the many other political prisoners who have been charged with the same things Martin was.

The fates of Matthew Martin, Daniel Harris, and Brandon Caserta are, in one sense, heartening. It shows that justice is still possible in the American system. Eventually. All three were arrested on what now seem like dubious grounds. Justice prevailed, but only after major injustices had been perpetrated.

We do not know yet how either of these events are going to be absorbed by public sentiment. I suspect that the Gretchen Whitmer caper will just whimper its way into oblivion. It will leave behind a few smudges on the reputation of the FBI, but it will probably not have any lasting effect.

The ultimate reception of January 6 is harder to predict. The regime closed ranks in its immediate aftermath, loudly insisting 1) that it was the most serious assault on “our democracy™” in living memory and 2) that anyone who disagreed was a “conspiracy theorist” at best and a “domestic extremist” or “domestic terrorist” at worst.

It’s my sense that that attitude has been slowly dissolving as more and more evidence to the contrary comes to light. But it is still not clear how far alternative points of view will be accorded the credence they deserve. The pressure to maintain the regime narrative has been ferocious.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 emboldened the state to increase its surveillance technology and clandestine operations against the baddies. That apparatus is still in place. Perhaps it is justified. But the relevant point is that all those tools—the monitoring of telephone calls, social media, bank accounts, etc., to say nothing of the dawn raids and other “kinetic” interventions—have been turned against the American people.

Well, it’s been turned against a portion of the American people. Doubtless, the exact definition of the portion is malleable. Today’s protected class might well become tomorrow’s enemy of the state, and vice-versa (though enrollment as an enemy is much easier, and more frequent, than movement in the other direction). That’s how totalitarian movements work, after all. Arbitrariness is of the essence.

Nevertheless, it is clear that, at the moment, the primary enemy is anyone associated with MAGA populism. The definition of who belongs in that suspect class is ever shifting. A few months ago, parents who objected to local school boards endorsing the imperatives of BLM or this week’s version of sexual exoticism were on the suspect list. No less an authority than Merrick Garland, attorney general of the United States, called upon the entire police power of the state, from the FBI down to the local constabulary, to identify and ferret out “threats” and “hate speech” directed against school boards by parents angry at efforts to corrupt their children.

The publicity surrounding that imbroglio, and the success of Glenn Youngkin in making it the prime issue in his successful bid to become governor of Virginia, pushed the ill-begotten initiative into the shadows. But its very existence shows how far the radicalized state is willing to go. Ordinary parents are “domestic extremists” because they object to the perversion of their children? Really?

I think we are at a sort of crossroads. The acquittals of Messrs. Martin, Harris, and Caserta shine a light on one road out of the crossing. The activities of the deep state and its media publicity arm describe another, less sanguine path. The state, as Joe Biden memorably put it, has all the F15s and nukes. But the other side has the vast majority of people. No movement without recognized legitimacy can last. That’s the good news. The bad news is that “not lasting” can describe a lengthy and turbulent time.
Title: While the FBI was staging the Whitmer kidnapping...
Post by: G M on April 13, 2022, 10:44:05 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/blake-masters-fbi-busy-kidnapping-michigan-governor-keep-tabs-black-nationalist-nyc-subway-shooter-radar/
Title: Re: While the FBI was staging the Whitmer kidnapping...
Post by: G M on April 13, 2022, 10:47:07 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/blake-masters-fbi-busy-kidnapping-michigan-governor-keep-tabs-black-nationalist-nyc-subway-shooter-radar/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10711479/NYPD-searching-man-gas-mask-rush-hour-explosion-shooting.html
Title: Remember, this was right before the totally honest 2020 election...
Post by: G M on April 13, 2022, 01:49:40 PM
https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/fbi-gretchen-whitmer-kidnappers-entrapment.jpg?w=500&ssl=1

(https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/fbi-gretchen-whitmer-kidnappers-entrapment.jpg?w=500&ssl=1)
Title: Re: While the FBI was staging the Whitmer kidnapping...
Post by: G M on April 14, 2022, 06:28:53 AM
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/04/13/fbi-blows-it-again-knew-about-subway-terrorists-racist-videos-and-had-him-on-watch-list-n1589334

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/blake-masters-fbi-busy-kidnapping-michigan-governor-keep-tabs-black-nationalist-nyc-subway-shooter-radar/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10711479/NYPD-searching-man-gas-mask-rush-hour-explosion-shooting.html
Title: Re: While the FBI was staging the Whitmer kidnapping...
Post by: G M on April 14, 2022, 06:34:31 AM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/104/107/358/original/eb984df1f4cf7e2a.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/104/107/358/original/eb984df1f4cf7e2a.png)

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/04/13/fbi-blows-it-again-knew-about-subway-terrorists-racist-videos-and-had-him-on-watch-list-n1589334

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/04/blake-masters-fbi-busy-kidnapping-michigan-governor-keep-tabs-black-nationalist-nyc-subway-shooter-radar/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10711479/NYPD-searching-man-gas-mask-rush-hour-explosion-shooting.html
Title: Ruled by criminals
Post by: G M on April 16, 2022, 07:08:15 AM
https://www.libertystorch.info/2022/04/15/what-it-means-to-be-ruled-by-criminals/
Title: Lawyer Sussman: Trump Russia collusion was not technically plausible
Post by: ccp on April 17, 2022, 06:42:40 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/04/16/john-durham-says-cia-knew-trump-russia-plot-was-user-created__trashed/
Title: Napolitano on seizure of Russians' property
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 24, 2022, 01:23:17 PM
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/04/andrew-p-napolitano/using-war-to-assault-freedom/
Title: Brave defenders of the dems!
Post by: G M on April 25, 2022, 08:17:20 PM
https://twitter.com/bonchieredstate/status/1518525992112959488

Totally NOT the Stasi!

Title: Did the FBI target Steven Crowder?
Post by: G M on April 26, 2022, 10:44:28 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/25/did-a-key-fbi-agent-in-whitmer-plot-attempt-to-surveil-steven-crowder/
Title: Did Key FBI agent in Whitmer plot attempt to surveil Steven Crowder?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 26, 2022, 01:50:15 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/25/did-a-key-fbi-agent-in-whitmer-plot-attempt-to-surveil-steven-crowder/
Title: Worse than you think, FBI planting CP "evidence"
Post by: G M on April 29, 2022, 07:55:05 AM
https://twitter.com/nickiclyne/status/1519830860819836928

https://www.scribd.com/document/572090982/US-v-Raniere-Motion-to-Stay-Appeal
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on April 29, 2022, 08:06:31 AM
Keith Raniere?

who is this guy

watch
will claim cannot ID who planted evidence and of course NO one held accountable......

Title: Biden breaking C. again with student loans
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 30, 2022, 06:19:19 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/wapo-president-biden-is-planning-to-violate-his-oath-of-office-again/?fbclid=IwAR35U0vYfPckouYHNtRqejB7sW1tsqQBNpEPtqBEJJ6VHxidzalRPPtTek8
Title: FBI strips security clearances of agents attending J6 rally
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 06, 2022, 07:18:27 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fbi-strips-employees-of-security-clearances-for-attending-trumps-january-6th-rally/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-05-06&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: ET: Disinfo Board lacks statutory authority, State AGs threaten legal action
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 07, 2022, 05:18:06 PM
‘No Statutory Authority Exists’ to Back DHS Disinformation Board, Republican AGs Say, Warning Legal Action
By Rita Li May 6, 2022 Updated: May 7, 2022biggersmaller Print


A group of Republican attorneys general warned of legal action against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) new Disinformation Governance Board, stating that “no statutory authority” exists to back its creation.

In a letter (pdf) submitted on May 5 to DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas, Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares, joined by 19 other Republican attorneys general, asked him to “immediately” disband the board that would “police Americans’ protected speech.”

“No statutory authority exists to support your creation of a board of government censors,” reads the letter to Mayorkas.

“Although Congress has considered a variety of measures to address the perceived dangers of ‘disinformation’ in the United States, none has passed. Instead, while the people’s elected representatives continue to debate this issue, you have arrogated to yourself the power to address it without congressional authorization, despite the far-reaching effects of the Disinformation Governance Board on Americans and our political process.”

Mayorkas revealed the new initiative to lawmakers during a congressional hearing on April 27, claiming to protect civil liberties and free speech, as Russia, China, and other adversaries attempt to stoke division and spread conspiracy theories or falsehoods among Americans. White House asserted earlier this week that the recently convened board on misinformation will be “nonpartisan and apolitical.”

Yet the lack of details on how the working group will function and the potential consequences of a government entity identifying and responding to “disinformation,” have drawn widespread controversies.

Calling it “an unacceptable and downright alarming encroachment” on civil rights of free expression, the Republican attorneys general specified in the letter “a chilling effect” that it can bring about nationwide.

“Americans will hesitate before they voice their constitutionally protected opinions, knowing that the government’s censors may be watching, and some will decide it is safer to keep their opinions to themselves.”

Republican members of Congress have already called for the board to be disbanded, before attorneys general threatened legal action in their latest message.

“This is unconstitutional, illegal, and un-American,” the Thursday letter concludes. “Unless you turn back now and disband this Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board immediately, the undersigned will have no choice but to consider judicial remedies to protect the rights of their citizens,” the group said.

Attorneys general from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia joined the letter.

A spokesman from the DHS didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.

Timing
The GOP attorneys general also went after what they called “highly suspect” timing of the DHS’s announcement of the board a week ago, following Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout with the stated purpose to pursue free speech.

The Biden administration has been “flagging problematic posts” on social media by its own admission and engaged with Big Techs and private sectors to prevent “disinformation,” the group noted in the letter.

However, Twitter announced on April 25 that it had reached a final agreement to be acquired by Musk for approximately $44 billion. The billionaire tech mogul unveiled days later that the takeover attempt is to reduce the “civilizational risk” to freedom and democracy from excessive and opaque restrictions on expression, although Twitter has repeatedly denied claims of political censorship.


“As [it] apparently loses a critical ally in its campaign to suppress speech it deems ‘problematic,’ you have created a new government body to continue that work within the federal government,” the attorneys general said.

“The contemporaneous occurrence of these two events is hard to explain away as mere coincidence. It instead raises troubling questions about the extent of the Biden Administration’s practice of coordinating with private-sector companies to suppress disfavored speech.”

The appointment of the executive director of the board, Nina Jankowicz, flagged a “clearer illustration,” according to the letter.

The former disinformation fellow at Washington-based think tank Wilson Center previously questioned the veracity of stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop and suggested the COVID-19 lab-leak theory was “politically” made up at the convenience of former President Donald Trump.

Jankowicz has come under fire for parodying a Christmas song to make it sexually explicit and adapting the Mary Poppins “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” song into a tune about fake news and disinformation.
Title: MUST! VOTE! HARDER!
Post by: G M on May 08, 2022, 07:05:45 AM
Jack Posobiec:
I want to be very clear about something:

Everyone knows those Antifa are breaking federal law by showing up at judges’ homes...

And nothing will happen to them, bc they are the street thugs of the regime.
Title: Re: MUST! VOTE! HARDER!
Post by: G M on May 08, 2022, 07:07:33 AM
Jack Posobiec:
I want to be very clear about something:

Everyone knows those Antifa are breaking federal law by showing up at judges’ homes...

And nothing will happen to them, bc they are the street thugs of the regime.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/fbi-democrat-leaders-ignore-leftist-hooligans-protesting-outside-homes-conservative-scotus-justices-criminal-act-1-year-prison/
Title: Re: ET: Disinfo Board lacks statutory authority, State AGs threaten legal action
Post by: DougMacG on May 08, 2022, 08:52:04 AM
It bothers me that no Dems are troubled by this kind of thing, quashing free speech.

The only time the Left sees their swastika is when they project it on the right.

The point of the first amendment is to protect speech that some, ESPECIALLY THE GOVERNMENT, find objectionable.  Content we all agree on doesn't need protection.

How long have they violated the letter and spirit of the second amendment. They obliterated the 10th, powers left to the states.
 Why did we think they wouldn't go after first amendment rights?

I forgot the source but even left wing media called it a "botched rollout".

19 state AGs signed on to oppose this. .  Doesn't that put pressure on the others?

Notably absent from the list, all Dems including MN AG Keith Ellison. (Support his defeat this year.)
Title: Actor James Woods
Post by: ccp on May 08, 2022, 10:01:23 AM
amazing :
https://www.iq-test.net/what-is-james-wood-iq-score-pms109.html

Title: FBI panicked after Trump tweeted he knew he was being spied on
Post by: G M on May 10, 2022, 09:43:51 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/new-doj-notes-reveal-fbi-panic-after-trump-tweeted-he-knew-he-was-being-spied

Brave defenders of the nation!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 10, 2022, 09:48:15 AM
Wonder why after five years of this that President Trump might have suspected getting fuct in the election , , ,
Title: The deep state sure loves the Bidens
Post by: G M on May 10, 2022, 10:00:19 AM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399062.php

Funny how there seems to be a different standard at work here.
Title: AG (Deep State Andy approved) Garland perjury
Post by: G M on May 11, 2022, 07:20:58 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/garland-perjury-fbi-whistleblowers-say-parents-investigated-counterterrorism-threat-tag

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on May 11, 2022, 08:39:31 PM
Garland committed perjury

join the club
no biggie

go back to sleep



Title: You aren't going to vote your way out of this
Post by: G M on May 12, 2022, 07:52:12 AM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/106/365/881/original/734e2939161064b9.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/106/365/881/original/734e2939161064b9.jpg)
Title: Re: You aren't going to vote your way out of this
Post by: DougMacG on May 12, 2022, 08:25:52 AM
I don't want anything to do with the anti-vote message that keeps repeating with every bad government story and negates my interest in finding and electing better people and better policies.  - Doug
Title: Re: You aren't going to vote your way out of this
Post by: G M on May 12, 2022, 09:38:10 AM
I don't want anything to do with the anti-vote message that keeps repeating with every bad government story and negates my interest in finding and electing better people and better policies.  - Doug

Got a plan to deal with the 2000 or 4000 or 10,000 Mules?

Vote harder?
Title: The Deep State Andy approved DOJ
Post by: G M on May 14, 2022, 08:07:12 AM
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/05/blm-privilege-federal-prosecutors-seek-lenient-sentences-for-molotov-cocktail-lawyers/
Title: The Buffalo shooting was most likely an FBI OP
Post by: G M on May 17, 2022, 09:22:42 AM
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/fbi-groom-mentally-ill-right-wing-terrorist/
Title: MY: Who trained Buffalo killer?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2022, 05:14:59 PM
https://michaelyon.locals.com/upost/2151549/reports-chinese-man-attacks-taiwanese-church-in-california
Title: Re: The Buffalo shooting was most likely an FBI OP
Post by: G M on May 19, 2022, 10:08:51 AM
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/fbi-groom-mentally-ill-right-wing-terrorist/

https://www.revolver.news/2022/05/buffalo-shooting-payton-gendron-what-did-fbi-know-when-did-they-know-it/
Title: McCarthy: AG Garland-- enforce 18 USC 1507!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2022, 07:04:35 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/mr-attorney-general-dont-just-rant-do-something-about-protests-at-justices-homes/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-05-19&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Lawless and deeply corrupt
Post by: G M on May 24, 2022, 01:50:01 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399270.php

If only we could vote harder against this!
Title: Ignorant Techno-Policing
Post by: G M on May 25, 2022, 10:34:40 AM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399279.php

Ignorant Techno-Policing

Over the past year, there have been some startling revelations about government and technology and how the government uses technology to achieve its ends. The common theme in all of it is the rank incompetence and profound ignorance that seems to permeate every interface between policing and technology. The examples that come immediately to mind are the Rittenhouse and Sussman trials.

During the Rittenhouse trial, I was horrified to see how lackadaisical people are with data and their gross overestimation of their own knowledge and expertise. The DA and his team were tossing files back and forth as E-Mail or SMS attachments. No good chain of custody, no verification that the files were unchanged, no robust protocol. This is unacceptable, and no technically-savvy organization would permit such behavior. When the police enhanced a video clip that ostensibly showed Rittenhouse doing ... something, the defense challenged it and the police put their expert up for questioning. The defense dismantled him.

He was not an expert, he was an operator who used software he had been trained to use. He didn't know how the software worked, and he didn't understand what underlying technologies were used. He just knew how to click the buttons and produce an output. Everyone involved in the prosecution was a technological cargo-cultist. They went through the motions but they didn't know how anything worked. Despite their profound ignorance and blind trust, however, they were thoroughly convinced they knew everything. They called themselves experts and then got humiliated by non-expert outsiders who trapped them with their own ignorance.

The revelations around the Sussman trial do nothing to improve the perception that these people are incompetent and not motivated by justice. The entire "secret connections to Alfa Bank" was predicated not on some known data channel or evidence that Trump's businesses were colluding with Russian information ops, but instead was based on misunderstanding communications related to E-Mail spam. Per my understanding, someone at Alfa was on a mailing list for spam. This is not nefarious. In this case the feds - unlike the locals in the Rittenhouse case - did have people with enough expertise to question this. These people were ignored, because it was good enough to keep pushing forward with their crimes and besides, they knew in their guts that Trump was guilty and so the ends justified the means - and it looked great to people who don't know anything. Very high-tech.

These people who have the gall to convert a republic into a technocratic police state are also ignorant and stupid in their chosen domain. Technology is magic, and it says what they want it to say. Anyone who questions it from the inside is ignored and anyone who questions it from the outside is called a white supremacist. They're not experts. They're not even armchair enthusiasts. They just press the buttons and railroad their opponents. They don't understand (or they ignore) "garbage in, garbage out" and fall back on "the computer says he's guilty!"
Title: What exactly does the FBI do?
Post by: G M on May 26, 2022, 07:40:31 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/05/26/salvador-ramos-mightve-revealed-shooting-plan-reporttexas-shooter-may-have-revealed-sick-massacre-plan-in-video-game-rant-report/



Target enemies of the dems is what they do. Stop terror/mass shootings, not so much.
Title: Funny how they NEVER face consequences
Post by: G M on May 27, 2022, 05:32:30 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/bidens-justice-department-decides-not-press-charges-fbi-agents-botched-larry-nassar-case/

Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity!
Title: Re: What exactly does the FBI do?
Post by: G M on May 27, 2022, 07:00:33 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/05/26/salvador-ramos-mightve-revealed-shooting-plan-reporttexas-shooter-may-have-revealed-sick-massacre-plan-in-video-game-rant-report/



Target enemies of the dems is what they do. Stop terror/mass shootings, not so much.

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/authorities-investigating-if-retired-federal-agent-knew-of-buffalo-mass-shooting-plans-in-advance/article_bd408f18-dd39-11ec-be53-df8fdd095d6f.html

Retired, but working a special contract?
Title: Re: What exactly does the FBI do? (Known to the FBI)
Post by: G M on May 28, 2022, 06:57:04 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/05/26/salvador-ramos-mightve-revealed-shooting-plan-reporttexas-shooter-may-have-revealed-sick-massacre-plan-in-video-game-rant-report/



Target enemies of the dems is what they do. Stop terror/mass shootings, not so much.

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/authorities-investigating-if-retired-federal-agent-knew-of-buffalo-mass-shooting-plans-in-advance/article_bd408f18-dd39-11ec-be53-df8fdd095d6f.html

Retired, but working a special contract?

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/05/27/with-spree-shooters-an-overwhelming-majority-of-gunmen-are-previously-known-to-f-b-i/#more-270199
Title: NRO: Student Loan forgiveness is illegal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2022, 09:33:24 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/student-loan-forgiveness-is-illegal-and-politically-suicidal/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-05-27&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on May 28, 2022, 11:28:00 AM
I can't see NR
due to never subscribed

I scribed to epoch times and that was a mistake

now my emails are flooded with campaign ads and donation requests to the tune of 20 to30 + pre day
I could be wrong but it seemed to coincide with my logging into epoch times

not sure
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2022, 11:52:17 AM
I am very pleased with my ET subscription.  Did not notice any spam increase from signing up.

Spam donation solicitations could easily have originated from some other action on your part , , ,
Title: Andrew McCarthy: Due Process was missing in Chauvin trial
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 30, 2022, 02:21:56 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/two-years-later-the-george-floyd-cases-are-a-dark-chapter-in-the-history-of-due-process/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202022-05-28&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on May 30, 2022, 06:05:15 AM
"I am very pleased with my ET subscription.  Did not notice any spam increase from signing up.

Spam donation solicitations could easily have originated from some other action on your part , , ,"

Thanks for your feedback with your experience with ET.
I guess it was from some where else
I keep trying to unsubscribe and someone keeps sending
I found if you switch them to spam at least all this garbage goes into the spam folder.
Title: Be sure to vote harder!
Post by: G M on June 04, 2022, 07:18:09 AM
Jack Posobiec:

Sussman walks free
Navarro put in chains
Are you paying attention yet?
This is banana republic stuff. Pure political persecution of the opposition
Title: You aren't going to be able to shoot your way out of this!
Post by: DougMacG on June 04, 2022, 10:25:37 AM
quote author=G M
Be sure to vote harder!
« Reply #1241 on: Today at 07:18:09 AM

Jack Posobiec:

Sussman walks free
Navarro put in chains
Are you paying attention yet?
This is banana republic stuff. Pure political persecution of the opposition
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


All true!

Mocking conservative voting is a SURE way to lose.

You aren't going to be able to shoot your way out of this.

Better start thinking about electioneering, meaning:
Secure the voting process, every chance we get,
Choose candidates more carefully,
Do the hard work and win by WAY more than the volume of fraud,
Hold elected officials accountable,
Deliver on what is promised,
Repeat.

Our responsibilities in this emergency situation described are FAR greater than just showing up every 2 or 4 years and pulling the lever. ("Vote harder"??)

Plan B, described as guns, ammo, training, location and beans, is never fully defined and has some problems with it.  1. If you shoot first you are going to prison.  2. If you wait for them to come to you, you are (also) sure to lose.  (Sure to lose seems to keep coming up.)

Please name the wars won by surrender and retreat.

If you (we all) retreat to the reddest county of the reddest state (oops, how did they get red, by voting?) you (we) will soon be landlocked - like Ukraine after they lose Odessa.  Then where is your port?  Where is your pipeline?  Where is your standard of living?  Where is your freedom - to travel for example?  Are you going to make your own solar panels and wind turbines?  They wear out, you know.  Going to make your own food without interference from the expanded, enlarged and corrupted federal government you left to the tyrannists?  Good luck with that. 

Before you retreat, read Wickard v. Filburn where they banned you from growing your own wheat to feed your own animals.  Yes they made a FEDERAL case of it and the tyrannists won, and they enforced it (and they kept winning).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn. 

How about that, we have more constitutional conservatives on the US Supreme Court in 2022 than they did in 1930s and 1940s. How can that be?  Because SOMEBODY did the hard work of winning elections, across a majority of the fruited plain, for an extended period.  Yes there was vote fraud over that time, cf. Al Franken, and losses cf. Obama, and there were conservatives in label only who shirked, cf. John McCain et al.  Does that mean give up? What war or battle on this scale did not have setbacks, big ones?

If history repeats itself, what year are we in?  With inflation, gas prices and you can't buy a house as indicators, the economy is a bit like the late 1970s.  However the conservative movement is in FAR better shape now than it was then, when Democrats controlled ALL levers of government and Republicans had no chance of taking back the House, Senate or Supreme Court from their super-majorities, and we nominated an actor to go up against an incumbent President.  Democrats controlled 99% of newspapers and 100% of network news then, a bit like now, except now no one watches network news or gets a newspaper.  Now there are ways around that.  All we had then was one man looking into the camera and telling it like it is, ("I paid for this microphone") and we overcame some of it - for a period.

My point is, this is a long war.  It is STUPID (counter-productive, understatement) to give up now, even if Democrats are getting away with crimes and Republicans are being persecuted.  ESPECIALLY if Democrats are getting away with crimes and Republicans are being persecuted.

It is time to rise up, offer a better vision, get it out there and reach EVERYONE.  Win (repeatedly) by landslides and deliver on freedom, prosperity and promises.

What is the alternative, in detail, not a bumper sticker?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on June 04, 2022, 10:42:38 AM
great post sir!
 8-)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2022, 12:55:53 PM
WWWOOOFFF!!!

I would quibble with this though:

"You aren't going to be able to shoot your way out of this."

Agreed that kinetic civil war is not the way to go, but OTOH there does need to be a line that we draw that says, "Cross this line at your peril.  Cross this line and you WILL have civil war."

What that line should be is hard to define.  Perhaps "If you come for our guns, it will be the next Battle of Lexington & Concord" or something like that, , ,

Of course, the danger/risk is that those that say this will be J6'd.

Terrible conundrum.

Title: Re: You aren't going to be able to shoot your way out of this!
Post by: G M on June 04, 2022, 11:37:28 PM
quote author=G M
Be sure to vote harder!
« Reply #1241 on: Today at 07:18:09 AM

Jack Posobiec:

Sussman walks free
Navarro put in chains
Are you paying attention yet?
This is banana republic stuff. Pure political persecution of the opposition
-------------------------------------------------------------------------


All true!

Mocking conservative voting is a SURE way to lose.

Normalcy bias

The normalcy bias, or normality bias, refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.



You aren't going to be able to shoot your way out of this.

*You have no choice. Open war is coming.*

Better start thinking about electioneering, meaning:
Secure the voting process, every chance we get,
Choose candidates more carefully,
Do the hard work and win by WAY more than the volume of fraud,
Hold elected officials accountable,

*Accountable how? How did you hold your elected officials accountable for letting BurnLootMurder burn, loot and murder your city?*

Deliver on what is promised,
Repeat.

Our responsibilities in this emergency situation described are FAR greater than just showing up every 2 or 4 years and pulling the lever. ("Vote harder"??)

Plan B, described as guns, ammo, training, location and beans, is never fully defined and has some problems with it.  1. If you shoot first you are going to prison.  2. If you wait for them to come to you, you are (also) sure to lose.  (Sure to lose seems to keep coming up.)

*Who is going to put resisters in prison? The fake, gay military that couldn't win against illiterate 7th century goat-fcukers armed with rusty AK-47s? Maybe the SWAT teams afraid to get into a gunfight with an 18 crossdresser murdering children?*


Please name the wars won by surrender and retreat.

*Surrender is pretending that the coup that ended the American Republic didn't happen and that voting isn't a rigged game.*

If you (we all) retreat to the reddest county of the reddest state (oops, how did they get red, by voting?) you (we) will soon be landlocked - like Ukraine after they lose Odessa.  Then where is your port? 

*Ever hear of Texas, Louisiana and Florida?*

Where is your pipeline?  *The red states are where the oil is, primarily.*

Where is your standard of living? 

*The standard of living, which is rapidly plummeting is the only thing keeping the lid on the coming Bosnia x Rwanda getting ready to kick off shortly.*

Where is your freedom - to travel for example?  Are you going to make your own solar panels and wind turbines?  They wear out, you know.  Going to make your own food without interference from the expanded, enlarged and corrupted federal government you left to the tyrannists?  Good luck with that.

*The left OWNS the FEDGov, heart and soul.*

Before you retreat, read Wickard v. Filburn where they banned you from growing your own wheat to feed your own animals.  Yes they made a FEDERAL case of it and the tyrannists won, and they enforced it (and they kept winning).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn. 

*The laws that matter are the ones that can be enforced. When the left runs out of those willing to suffer kinetic realities that will be omnipresent 24/7/365 on duty and off. Those at the various levels of government willing to try to seize guns will find that the risk well outdoes the reward. N. Ireland is roughly the size of Connecticut and the IRA probably only had 150 trigger pullers ever, and yet despite the best efforts of the UK's Intel, law enforcement and military, the IRA fought them to a standstill. The IRA has NEVER disarmed.*

How about that, we have more constitutional conservatives on the US Supreme Court in 2022 than they did in 1930s and 1940s. How can that be?  Because SOMEBODY did the hard work of winning elections, across a majority of the fruited plain, for an extended period.  Yes there was vote fraud over that time, cf. Al Franken, and losses cf. Obama, and there were conservatives in label only who shirked, cf. John McCain et al.  Does that mean give up? What war or battle on this scale did not have setbacks, big ones?

If history repeats itself, what year are we in?  With inflation, gas prices and you can't buy a house as indicators, the economy is a bit like the late 1970s.  However the conservative movement is in FAR better shape now than it was then, when Democrats controlled ALL levers of government and Republicans had no chance of taking back the House, Senate or Supreme Court from their super-majorities, and we nominated an actor to go up against an incumbent President.  Democrats controlled 99% of newspapers and 100% of network news then, a bit like now, except now no one watches network news or gets a newspaper.  Now there are ways around that.  All we had then was one man looking into the camera and telling it like it is, ("I paid for this microphone") and we overcame some of it - for a period.

*Did the FedGov leviathan get bigger or smaller, even when Reagan was still in office?*

My point is, this is a long war.  It is STUPID (counter-productive, understatement) to give up now, even if Democrats are getting away with crimes and Republicans are being persecuted.  ESPECIALLY if Democrats are getting away with crimes and Republicans are being persecuted.

*It is stupid to pretend that a real war isn't coming and that suddenly the deep state players, who have committed MANY felonies are just going to stop and left themselves be arrested and imprisoned. They are prepared to kill whomever they need to to preserve their power. That is anyone and everyone.*

It is time to rise up, offer a better vision, get it out there and reach EVERYONE.  Win (repeatedly) by landslides and deliver on freedom, prosperity and promises.

*You can't and won't outvote vote fraud.*

What is the alternative, in detail, not a bumper sticker?

Accountability. Local elements can easily be deal with locally.

Stolen elections have consequences. Teach the left that what they do results in tangibly bad things happening right where they live. Lex Talionis.

They ALL have names and addresses.

Read up on the Spanish Civil War. You don't want to be in a place where you don't have the advantage when things really kick off. Every day you are not at war is another day to sharpen your hatchet.

Title: Do you understand yet?
Post by: G M on June 05, 2022, 05:39:22 AM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/06/04/neil-oliver-when-you-accept-that-modern-western-government-considers-citizens-their-enemy-then-all-the-outcomes-make-sense/
Title: WE.MUST.VOTE.HARDER!
Post by: DougMacG on June 05, 2022, 12:46:24 PM
Thank you for the detailed answer G M.  I respect your view and especially your right to state it freely, but for as long as this site mocks conservatives for voting and trying to secure and win elections, I will not be participating.

The red state, blue state divide is not a clear split.  Blue states are typically 60-40 blue and red states are often 60-40 red, swing states are maybe 50-50 or 51-49.  That leaves maybe 100 million people on the wrong side of the divide, one way or the other.  As Crafty posed, how do you know who is on your side?  If you organize, you get 'listed'.

"  *You can't and won't outvote vote fraud.*  "

Begs the question, why can't we, especially if we've discovered how they cheated and control the process in many of those states.

But of course that prophecy comes true if enough conservatives are dissuaded from voting.  I don't want any part of it.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2022, 12:44:13 PM
Doug:

I'd like to ask you to reconsider.

"(A)s long as this site mocks conservatives for voting and trying to secure and win elections, I will not be participating."

Ummm , , , forgive me, but this is not accurate.

THIS SITE does not "mocks conservatives for voting and trying to secure and win elections", GM does.

PS:  You have PM.
Title: Dershowitz: Navarro arrest very bad precedent
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 06, 2022, 01:14:46 PM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-peter-navarro-jan-6/2022/06/04/id/1072966/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on June 07, 2022, 09:47:27 PM
Doug:

I'd like to ask you to reconsider.

"(A)s long as this site mocks conservatives for voting and trying to secure and win elections, I will not be participating."

Ummm , , , forgive me, but this is not accurate.

THIS SITE does not "mocks conservatives for voting and trying to secure and win elections", GM does.

PS:  You have PM.

Well, I would phrase it as I mock anyone who thinks the utterly corrupted system in power now is going to let elections interfere with their plans.

Trying?

FAIL.

They blatantly stole 2020 and suffered NO consequences.

NONE.


Title: I wonder if Soros can be sued?
Post by: ccp on June 08, 2022, 05:30:27 AM
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/07/san-francisco-voters-recall-radical-d-a-chesa-boudin-warning-to-left-wing-prosecutors-nationwide/
Title: Re: I wonder if Soros can be sued?
Post by: G M on June 08, 2022, 09:50:56 AM
Of course not.



https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/07/san-francisco-voters-recall-radical-d-a-chesa-boudin-warning-to-left-wing-prosecutors-nationwide/
Title: The FBI's purge
Post by: G M on June 08, 2022, 09:53:41 AM
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/jim-jordan-shares-allegations-of-fbi-purge-over-jan-6

Totalitarian states are always aggressive about ensuring the organs of state power are ideologically pure and will not question orders.
Title: Re: WE.MUST.VOTE.HARDER!
Post by: G M on June 08, 2022, 10:55:19 PM
(https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/2008111216580669734_2.jpeg?resize=270%2C180)

As local Somalis prepare to enter Doug's residence, Doug steels himself to vote even harder at the next election...

 :wink:


Thank you for the detailed answer G M.  I respect your view and especially your right to state it freely, but for as long as this site mocks conservatives for voting and trying to secure and win elections, I will not be participating.

The red state, blue state divide is not a clear split.  Blue states are typically 60-40 blue and red states are often 60-40 red, swing states are maybe 50-50 or 51-49.  That leaves maybe 100 million people on the wrong side of the divide, one way or the other.  As Crafty posed, how do you know who is on your side?  If you organize, you get 'listed'.

"  *You can't and won't outvote vote fraud.*  "

Begs the question, why can't we, especially if we've discovered how they cheated and control the process in many of those states.

But of course that prophecy comes true if enough conservatives are dissuaded from voting.  I don't want any part of it.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 09, 2022, 05:14:51 AM
Wit noted, but one suspects that Doug is already armed , , ,
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on June 09, 2022, 07:44:55 AM
Wit noted, but one suspects that Doug is already armed , , ,

I hope so.

Time is short.
Title: NRO: 18-24 months for firebombing police
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 09, 2022, 04:45:20 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/the-biden-justice-departments-shameful-pandering-to-bomb-throwing-rioters/

By THE EDITORS
June 7, 2022 6:30 AM
The foundational duty of government is to maintain public safety and order, without which neither liberty nor prosperity is possible. The dramatic story of the summer of 2020 was the outbreak of riots and protests following the murder of George Floyd. More than a dozen people were killed and a billion or more dollars in damages were caused, including the destruction of many businesses. This cried out for a vigorous response.

Instead, apparently viewing the cause as a righteous one, Democratic prosecutors at the federal, state, and local levels have been scandalously soft on the many crimes committed in the course of those riots and protests. Large numbers of offenders were let off scot-free by progressive prosecutors; even those whose crimes caused death have been given sentences no longer than ten years. In so doing, the progressive district attorneys and the Justice Department have imperiled public safety in our cities and undermined public confidence in the even-handed administration of law. It is unsurprising that urban crime and violence have spiked in many cities after the law failed to restore order or punish criminality.

The Biden administration has just added to this shameful spectacle by retroactively reducing the plea-bargained sentence in one of the most high-profile of those crimes, in which two white-shoe lawyers in Brooklyn threw a Molotov cocktail into a police car.

Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman were well-compensated attorneys in their early thirties when they joined the protesting mob in May 2020. Rahman was caught on tape throwing the firebomb into an unoccupied police car, and Mattis was arrested with more such improvised explosives in his car and was videotaped trying to hand them out to others. These are gravely serious crimes, more so than those committed by all but a tiny handful (at most) of the people charged in connection with January 6. An unapologetic Rahman told reporters later, “The only way they hear us is through violence.”

Mattis and Rahman pleaded guilty last year to one count of possessing and making an explosive device, a charge carrying up to ten years in prison. Both of them will quite properly be disbarred. Federal prosecutors sought to charge them with still more serious offenses for distribution but, in a shocking reversal, have now agreed to recommend a prison sentence of 18 to 24 months for charges carrying a maximum of five years. Even for a Justice Department that has bent over backwards to be lenient towards left-wing protesters while throwing the book at right-wing protesters, a retreat from a previous plea agreement is a dramatic display of favoritism for left-wing political violence.

Merrick Garland is right to make examples of those who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, and right to pursue genuinely violent right-wing extremism. Riots and violence originating on the political right should be met with a firm hand. But he and big-city progressive prosecutors have badly undermined the public legitimacy of those prosecutions by refusing to take the same approach to their own side. Justice that plays political favorites is not justice at all.
Title: It's like there are different tiers of justice...
Post by: G M on June 13, 2022, 08:04:59 AM
https://libertyunyielding.com/2022/06/12/washington-supreme-court-overturns-conviction-because-of-criminals-race/

Because there are.
Title: Dershowitz on Dems disservice to America (cans)
Post by: ccp on June 13, 2022, 08:15:23 PM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-jan-6-hearings-bias/2022/06/13/id/1074253/
Title: AG Garland is a disgrace
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 16, 2022, 01:22:01 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pro-life-leaders-send-letter-to-attorney-general-garland-demanding-response-to-pro-abortion-terrorism/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=28079757
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on June 16, 2022, 01:39:05 PM
it is now 45 days since the leak on May 2

still no leaker publicly identified

still no ruling..........

they can figure out how to crack blockchain

but they cannot ID a leaker from a handful of likely people ?

or they just mum ?
Title: FBI-- praetorian guard of Biden & son
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2022, 07:08:53 AM
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10929171/Tucker-Carlson-blasts-Joe-Biden-setting-FBI-woman-sold-Ashley-Bidens-diary.html
Title: Re: The rule of law; Abortion ruling
Post by: DougMacG on June 27, 2022, 09:13:00 AM
Some note should be made here that this decision matters, even and especially with the Left. "Consequential", "earth shaking", what are all the quotes?

Isn't that a contradiction IN PART of the idea that all rule of law except woke Leftist rule of law has been lost, that elections and even who is on the Supreme Court doesn't matter anymore.

This 'end of the world' ruling, 50 years in coming, is (quite) a bit more than deck chair rearrangement IMHO, (even if our ship will eventually sink).
Title: Re: FBI-- praetorian guard of Biden & son
Post by: G M on June 27, 2022, 10:43:24 PM
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10929171/Tucker-Carlson-blasts-Joe-Biden-setting-FBI-woman-sold-Ashley-Bidens-diary.html

Joe was just as good of a father as he is as president!
Title: Jane's Revenge an FBI operation?
Post by: G M on June 27, 2022, 10:47:14 PM
https://www.revolver.news/2022/06/is-pro-abortion-terror-group-janes-revenge-entirely-a-creation-of-the-fbi/

Read up on the unclassified documents bout COINTELPRO.
Title: Re: The rule of law; Abortion ruling
Post by: G M on June 27, 2022, 11:08:50 PM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/109/810/815/original/b75d59f118cd6af0.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/109/810/815/original/b75d59f118cd6af0.jpg)

Some note should be made here that this decision matters, even and especially with the Left. "Consequential", "earth shaking", what are all the quotes?

Isn't that a contradiction IN PART of the idea that all rule of law except woke Leftist rule of law has been lost, that elections and even who is on the Supreme Court doesn't matter anymore.

This 'end of the world' ruling, 50 years in coming, is (quite) a bit more than deck chair rearrangement IMHO, (even if our ship will eventually sink).
Title: Re: FBI-- praetorian guard of Biden & son
Post by: DougMacG on June 28, 2022, 12:40:18 AM
After being a creepy dad, and skinny dipping as VP with female secret service forced to watch, now he hasn't acknowledged his latest grandchild, proven by DNA, making him an illegitimate grandfather - in addition to (likely) illegitimate President.

The fish stinks from the head.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 28, 2022, 06:08:25 AM
Regarding the Revolver piece GM, I am confused.  Why would FBI be doing Jane's Revenge?
Title: so hutchinson's testimony is hearsay
Post by: ccp on June 28, 2022, 04:05:31 PM
she wasn't even there:


https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/28/not-possible-donald-trump-mocks-allegation-he-tried-to-grab-steering-wheel-of-the-presidential-limo-on-january-6/

wouldn't be admissible in court but suddenly this PROVES he was involved in seditious activity

OTOH it would not surprise me for a second if true.........

Title: Secret Service agents deny claims
Post by: ccp on June 29, 2022, 05:31:22 AM
https://www.mediaite.com/news/secret-service-is-reportedly-prepared-to-testify-trump-didnt-try-to-commandeer-limo-on-jan-6-despite-hutchinson-account/

they will not be invited to the committee hearing circus
they will not be invited on CNN to sit front and center to deny claims

and barely a mention, if at all , on the LEFT wing DNC propaganda machine
Title: is this Liz Cheney giving Hutchinson a hug?
Post by: ccp on June 29, 2022, 08:08:07 AM
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/06/29/pollak-l-a-times-8-bombshells-from-hutchinson-testimony-are-all-duds/

we can't see from this angle but she is whispering in her ear

"your financial future is now guaranteed"

 :wink:
Title: Brownshirts
Post by: G M on June 29, 2022, 09:38:39 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/28/america-is-not-immune-from-brown-shirts/

America Is Not Immune from Brown Shirts
Corrupt institutions could do nothing if there were no members of law enforcement, from the local police to FBI agents, willing to act as the brute enforcers of state dictates.
By Rod Thomson

June 28, 2022
In this moment of hope emerging from the almost unbelievable set of constitutionally informed Supreme Court rulings on freedom of religion, gun rights, and abortion, it’s easy to imagine the tide has turned. America is back!

Alas, even rulings as monumental as those of the past week are no antidote to the generations of cultural poison that continues to be mainlined into American society. The best we can do is to call upon the words of Winston Churchill after England had survived the Nazi air blitz: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

At best. Because the poisoning is extensive and follows the veins such poisons find most suitable. And so, we are forced to belabor the obvious for a moment in which too many mostly college-poisoned Americans have a slippery grasp on reality.

Human nature is the same across races, ethnicities, and nationalities. There was nothing uniquely evil about the German human in 1939 or the French human during Napoleon’s reign or the Russian human under Stalin or the Chinese human under Mao or the Mongolian human riding with Ghengis Khan.

What was different in these situations were the culture-supported systems, or lack of them, put in place that allowed all of the worst of human nature to flourish. America, acknowledging the essential depravity of human nature, had once put in place systems designed to check the worst impulses of our nature. But with those American institutions breaking down under relentless leftist, anti-American assaults over more than two generations, we are seeing what was always true: American human nature is like all others.

And so in the past two years we have seen something many of us probably thought “can’t happen here”: The rise of the Brown Shirt within American law enforcement communities. This is particularly painful to acknowledge for those of us with beloved family members who are in law enforcement and are the opposite of Brown Shirts. But it nonetheless remains a truism that is denied at our own peril.

As a recent example, we saw Trump White House advisor Peter Navarro arrested for not responding to a subpoena from the dubious House January 6 select committee. He was scooped up at the D.C. airport soon after arriving from his D.C. home, and cuffed by a full team of FBI agents. Navarro is 72 years old, 145 pounds soaking wet, and lives within three minutes of FBI headquarters. He has cooperated with federal investigators as far as executive privilege allowed him to do. But with Donald Trump claiming executive privilege, Navarro was ethically bound to not respond.

FBI agents could have walked to his home, or asked him to turn himself in, which he says he would have done and his history suggests is the case. But they chose to make this a very public arrest, a strikingly unveiled threat to others who refuse to comply with state narratives.

Coincidentally—by which I mean not coincidentally at all—Navarro had filed a civil lawsuit against the government days earlier for violating his civil rights. Their response was swift and humiliating.

At the airport, Navarro, a smart lawyer, said he wanted to call his lawyer. He demanded to know the charges. But the lead agent took his phone and disallowed it and Navarro was taken into solitary and, he says, strip-searched. That’s multiple constitutional violations, which just don’t seem to matter to most American institutions, including the FBI.

“They went with this shock-and-awe terrorist strategy,” Navarro told Tucker Carlson on Fox News. “They let me go to the airport and then take me with five agents, like an al-Qaeda terrorist, lock me into a car and the next thing I know I’m in leg irons, handcuffs, strip-searched.”

Abuses of Power
This has been going on for a while. And it’s not always simply partisan. Since COVID, it has been more and more clear that most of the response was on behalf of the power of the state and favor pharmaceutical firms, and little more.

During the worthless lockdowns, we witnessed a mother arrested in Idaho for taking her child to the park, a lone individual surfing and another walking on the beach in California were also arrested, among endless other examples. We saw businesses raided for defying state orders to shut down seeing that their big chain competitors across the street were allowed to stay open. We saw people dragged out of public places for not wearing ineffectual face masks or not showing vaccination papers. Papers!

On other fronts, we’ve seen parents targeted for speaking out against schools allowing young men to use the women’s bathrooms and shower facilities. Parents have been investigated and threatened for speaking up at public meetings. And parents who have spoken up have had those opinions included in their children’s educational reports. We saw a father at a Virginia school board meeting tackled and arrested for pointing out, rightly, that the district was hiding a trans rapist who had assaulted his daughter in the girl’s bathroom.

In these and in countless other situations, pundits critical of the actions tend to blame the policy-setting entities, from school boards to the Justice Department, all of which, in fact, are behaving like oppressors. But here is the blunt, painful truth: Those institutions could do nothing if there were no members of law enforcement, from the local police to FBI agents, willing to act as the brute enforcers of state dictates.

They may be a minority, but they are more than enough. Some are on board with policy, some will say they are just doing their jobs—“following orders” if we carry out our analogy to Germany in the 1930s. Some I have talked to, including high-ranking law enforcement, say they would never follow such orders and in discussions with their colleagues agree there are lines they would not cross.

That requires a great deal of fortitude. Some humans have it. Many do not. History bears this out.

Crumbling Foundations
But until the mid-20th century, America had systems in place that provided checks on human nature running rampant. The balance of powers instituted between branches of the federal government and between the federal government and the states actually drew upon the inevitability of human nature turning toward rapaciousness to create a natural friction that kept all of the government entities in check. Human nature at each level and in the various branches would work in ways that kept checks on all the others. And ultimately an informed and moral people were to be relied upon to keep all of them in check.

But none of that is in place like it was.

It is painfully clear with the proliferation of things like drag queen story hours and shocking degradations of parents actually taking their young children to drag clubs with dollar bills; or allowing their very young children to transition; or public schools promoting and hiding such activities from parents. It is becoming systemic and it’s stomach-turning. It is also the most recent evidence of the collapse of a once religious and moral people.

John Adams was absolutely prophetic when he said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Too many of the American people are no longer religious or moral in any grounded, traditional way. They are too narcissistically preoccupied with TikTok and their phones, unable to think in any critical fashion, and as parents tend to accede all education to public schools that increasingly only teach our children what to think. College students are taught to shout down anyone who disagrees, a shocking transmogrification of the purpose of university. The checks and balances are failing and the power of the state is increasing.

This religious and moral failing naturally trickles down through our institutions. Congress has ceded large swathes of power to the executive branch because for generations, the majority of the members of Congress chose the expediency of re-election over everything else. The current executive branch administration brazenly ignores court rulings—even by the Supreme Court—and does what it wants. It is not the first.

The First Amendment provided for a highly protected freedom of the press. The founders knew well the importance of the Fourth Estate in holding the most powerful people—specifically, those in government—accountable to the people. Unfortunately, the media that once provided basic information, even if it was with a bias, that all sides could access, ceded this unifying territory to becoming little more than the communications arm of one party.

Americans now are operating under two sets of information and “facts” that increasingly make it impossible to even have a conversation. And this makes it so much easier to demonize those from the other universe of information.

The First Amendment also provided for freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Both of these were trampled and greatly weakened as pastors were arrested and churches closed down by armed law enforcement during COVID while the local Home Depot and Walmart remained open. But both were also ceded away by people who no longer are religious or even understand the rudiments of free speech. If Americans were the religious people they once were, this could never have happened.

Considering this crumbling of these basic American institutions, along with the degradation of Americans themselves, it should come as no surprise that even law enforcement is being eroded. The more we turn away from foundational truths, the more this will be the case.

Don’t think we could ever see actual Brown Shirts on American streets? Then you will be the most surprised, because we’re already seeing it.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 29, 2022, 10:03:38 AM
 :cry:
Title: Re: Secret Service agents deny claims/Deep State Andy very excited despite truth
Post by: G M on June 29, 2022, 01:48:33 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/399801.php

https://www.mediaite.com/news/secret-service-is-reportedly-prepared-to-testify-trump-didnt-try-to-commandeer-limo-on-jan-6-despite-hutchinson-account/

they will not be invited to the committee hearing circus
they will not be invited on CNN to sit front and center to deny claims

and barely a mention, if at all , on the LEFT wing DNC propaganda machine
Title: rachal madcow brings on WP reporter
Post by: ccp on June 29, 2022, 02:03:53 PM
to call secret service agent who deny Hutchinson's story as ass kissers

and to play up  of the image of 25 yo low level aid Hutchinson as though she is the most credible because she is the LAST person who would say anything bad about the orange haired man:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/secret-service-agents-denying-cassidy-hutchinsons-claim-were-trump-yes-men-wapo-reporter-tells-maddow

so this PULITZER PRIZE winning WP reporter tells us hearsay to verify the hearsay of the low level aide -

and BTW she was not a low level aide - she was essentially working as the WH press secretary we are told.

Title: sec. serv. trump too u'hem , heavy set to get to steering wheel
Post by: ccp on June 30, 2022, 03:31:46 PM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-girth-prevent-him-actually-200030703.html
Jan 6 committee

this is NOT evidence and should be ignored while 25 yo low level aid is mother Theresa

and everything she says is "compelling" and "credible "

end of story...... as far as they are concerned

Cheney has made herself into  a total farce

the spurned woman from the Shakespeare phrase
Title: EPA Ruling
Post by: DougMacG on July 02, 2022, 05:58:48 AM
Make sure EPA ruling is mentioned in our deep state thread.  A BFD.

1.  Make them follow the rule of law.  Laws start as bills in Congress, get voted on by the people's representatives, etc.

2.  Defund the parts of the government that are BS or undermine our country..  Shrink, downsize, send powers back to the states.

3.  Fill essential positions with people who have the best interests of the US in mind.

No one said it would be easy.
Title: Beyond our control...
Post by: G M on July 02, 2022, 09:41:27 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/what-if-people-actually-controlled-government

For now.
Title: John Fund : watch the shysters do not find way around EPA SCOTUS ruling
Post by: ccp on July 02, 2022, 10:08:17 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/supreme-court-strikes-a-blow-on-bureaucrats/
Title: ET: SCOTUS security chief demands MD gov protect Justices
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 03, 2022, 06:02:33 AM
Supreme Court Security Chief Demands Maryland Governor, County, Do More to Protect Justices
By Matthew Vadum July 2, 2022 Updated: July 2, 2022biggersmaller Print

0:00
5:41



1

Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley sent letters to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and Montgomery County, Md., Executive Marc Elrich (D) demanding that they enforce existing laws and do a better job protecting justices whose lives have been threatened.

Greta Van Susteren of Newsmax revealed the existence of the letters in two posts on Twitter time-stamped the evening of July 1.

The letters came after authorities foiled a June 8 attempt to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh at his Maryland home in the suburbs of the nation’s capital.

According to an FBI affidavit (pdf), suspect Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, Calif., said he wanted to kill Kavanaugh to prevent him from voting to overturn abortion rights and gun control laws. Roske, who was found with a pistol, ammunition, pepper spray, and other items, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Maryland on June 15 and formally charged with attempting to murder a Supreme Court justice, contrary to federal law. He has entered a plea of not guilty.

Other individuals have threatened the lives of various justices, and protests at justices’ homes in Maryland have intensified in recent weeks.

As Marshal, Curley is responsible for court security, the court’s police force, and the personal safety of the justices, wrote Hogan on July 1 requesting that “the Maryland State Police, in conjunction with local authorities as appropriate, enforce laws that prohibit picketing outside of the homes of Supreme Court Justices who live in Maryland.”

Curley wrote that state law provides a person “may not intentionally assemble with another in a manner that disrupts a person’s right to tranquility in the person’s home.” Violators face 90 days in prison or a $100 fine or both and courts are allowed to issue injunctions against the conduct and award damages, she added.

Montgomery County prohibits picketing “in front of or adjacent to any private residence,” the letter states, adding that violators face fines of $100 to $200 plus 30 days in prison.

Curley noted that in a joint letter with Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), Hogan had said he was “deeply concerned” about demonstrations outside the homes of justices in Maryland that used “threatening language” and that jeopardized “the integrity of our American judicial system and the safety of our citizens.”

“Since then, protest activity at Justices’ homes, as well as threatening activity, has only increased,” Curley wrote. “For weeks on end, large groups of protesters chanting slogans, using bullhorns, and banging drums have picketed Justices’ homes in Maryland,” she said, adding this “is exactly the kind of conduct” that state and county laws forbid.

Curley’s letter to Elrich reminded the county executive of his enforcement obligations and of a comment he made after a recent protest in front of a justice’s home in the county. “If everybody’s going to protest everybody who does something at their houses, we’re going to have a very hard time maintaining civil society,” she quoted Elrich saying.

Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Fairfax County, Va., Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano (D) have been widely criticized for refusing to enforce federal and state laws against pro-abortion activists who have been threatening and attempting to intimidate Supreme Court justices and their families who reside in Virginia, according to a report by Hans A. von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation. This failure to act is egging on the “summer of rage” against the court that left-wing activists have promised, the scholar argues.

Federal law, von Spakovsky writes, makes it a criminal offense to parade or picket “near a building or residence occupied or used by [a federal] judge, juror, witness, or court officer” with the “intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty.”

Von Spakovsky urges Youngkin and Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) “to step in and use their statutory power to arrest, prosecute, and seek the maximum penalty for every day the protesters are violating the law.”

Congress took action last month.

In response to the threats, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced the proposed Supreme Court Police Parity Act on May 5, three days after Politico published a leaked court opinion showing the justices were poised to overturn the abortion precedent Roe v. Wade, something they ended up doing in a June 24 ruling. The leak was followed by a nationwide outpouring of anger and threats by pro-abortion activists. Curley is investigating the leak but few details of the probe have been made public.

The bill moved quickly through Congress and was signed into law by President Joe Biden on June 16.

The measure grants the Supreme Court “security-related authorities equivalent to the legislative and executive branches.” It also gives the court marshal authority to provide protection for members of the justices’ immediate families and for “any officer of the Supreme Court if the Marshal determines such protection is necessary.”

The Epoch Times reached out to Hogan and Elrich but they did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Title: Hutchison refers to 1/6 Committee as BS
Post by: ccp on July 04, 2022, 07:50:56 AM
when asking for right wing help :

https://www.conservativereview.com/exclusive-text-messages-show-cassidy-hutchinson-referring-to-january-6-committee-as-bs-2657603133.html

this leads me to believe she is expecting something in return
(besides "free" legal representation) , all with strings attached........from the LEFT

Title: Has Deep State Andy ever mentioned Ray Epps?
Post by: G M on July 07, 2022, 07:18:49 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/07/hiding-doj-denies-foia-request-ray-epps-removed-fbi-wanted-list/
Title: What is the worm trying to hide?
Post by: G M on July 08, 2022, 08:21:49 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/07/panicked-adam-schiff-moves-disrupt-future-investigations-us-military-involvement-jan-6-protests-riot/
Title: Re: Has Deep State Andy ever mentioned Ray Epps?
Post by: G M on July 11, 2022, 07:56:52 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/07/hiding-doj-denies-foia-request-ray-epps-removed-fbi-wanted-list/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/07/lied-proof-highly-sensitive-doj-jan-6-documents-leaked-gateway-pundit-fbi-confidential-human-source-infiltrated-proud-boys-ran-fbi-operation-j-6-reported/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 11, 2022, 08:02:18 AM
I wish GWP was less cluttered with extraneous adverts.
Title: The Secret Service has some explaining to do
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 15, 2022, 09:20:49 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-secret-service-has-some-explaining-to-do/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MJ_220715&utm_term=Jolt-Smart
Title: Re: What is the worm trying to hide? The US military's involvement in the coup!
Post by: G M on July 17, 2022, 09:46:33 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/15/what-is-adam-schiff-hiding/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/07/panicked-adam-schiff-moves-disrupt-future-investigations-us-military-involvement-jan-6-protests-riot/
Title: AMcC: Zeldin
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 23, 2022, 09:12:17 PM
Two Tiers of Justice: The Violent Attack against Lee Zeldin

A group of people attending Congressman Lee Zeldin's stump speech gather around after an alleged attack on Zeldin in Fairport, N.Y., July 21, 2022. (Ian Winner/Handout via Reuters)

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
July 23, 2022 12:25 PM

I have a column in the New York Post about the violent assault on Lee Zeldin by a man wielding a deadly weapon — a brass-knuckles-type contraption with spiked prongs (and bear in mind that the assailant, whom we must describe as “alleged,” is a military veteran trained in close combat). New York state penal law and procedure have become such a joke that the alleged assailant was not only charged with attempted assault in the second degree (did that look like a mere attempt to you?) but was released on his own recognizance.

By good fortune alone, Zeldin was not seriously hurt. But under Democrat-backed “reforms,” this means the “attempted” assault, though classified as a felony (Class D), is one for which release may not be conditioned on the posting of bail. New York, moreover, is the only state in the nation which does not permit detention based on a judicial finding that the suspect poses a danger to the community (as opposed to a flight risk).

Zeldin is the Republican candidate for governor of New York. Not ironically, he addressed the insanity of New York’s bail laws in the speech during which he was attacked — at a VFW event in Perinton, N.Y. (in Monroe County near Rochester).

Zeldin also happens to be a member of the United States House of Representatives. That makes him a federal officer for purposes of the laws against assaults on same. (The cognizable officials, which include officers of any branch of the U.S. government, are listed in Section 1114, the statute covering murder and attempted murder. This list is referenced in Section 111, which covers assaults on federal officers.)

If there is going to be a meaningful prosecution of Zeldin’s attacker, it will have to be done in federal court. There, the accused would face a real bail proceeding, in which he could be detained as a danger to the community (under Section 3142(e)). Even if not detained, he would be released only on stringent conditions (e.g., house arrest, bracelet monitoring) along with the posting of bail.



Democrats’ ‘Contraception’ Bill Overrides Religious-Freedom Law and Protects Abortion
I write here to add just one thing: If Zeldin were a Democrat, his assailant would already have been arrested by the FBI, and he’d be in custody after his initial bail hearing in federal court, at the urging of federal prosecutors from the office of Trini E. Ross, the Biden-appointed United States attorney for the Western District of New York (which has jurisdiction over Monroe County, where the assault occurred).

Moreover, if Zeldin were a Democrat, one of the biggest stories in the country, in tandem with the brazen, near lethal assault of a New York Democrat, would be the fact that the assailant was a military veteran, and thus likely tied to some white-supremacist militia at war with “our democracy.” There would be renewed calls by Democrats, echoed by their media chorus, for passage of their Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act.




Andrew C. McCarthy
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy
Title: DOJ disobeyed President Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 23, 2022, 10:24:45 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/doj-sabotaged-trump-release-russiagate-docs?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=801
Title: Re: AMcC: Zeldin
Post by: DougMacG on July 24, 2022, 02:04:36 PM
Sounds to me like
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
is on our side.
Title: Re: AMcC: Zeldin
Post by: G M on July 24, 2022, 02:27:58 PM
Sounds to me like
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
is on our side.

Lots of people pretending to be on our side that aren’t.
Title: Peter Navarro
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2022, 11:47:23 PM
I'm thinking to donate to the defense fund:

https://peternavarro.com/urgent-message-from-peter-navarro/
Title: Re: Peter Navarro
Post by: DougMacG on July 25, 2022, 01:49:48 AM
I'm thinking to donate to the defense fund:

https://peternavarro.com/urgent-message-from-peter-navarro/

Yes they deserve all our support, and I hate giving up anonymity to join the list to be targeted next by the tyrannists.

We should also give to Liz Cheney's primary opponent and the opponent of every member of the committee.  And to all great swing district candidates and knock these people as far from power as we can.

https://www.hagemanforwyoming.com/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on July 25, 2022, 06:19:05 AM
"We should also give to Liz Cheney's primary opponent and the opponent of every member of the committee."

Did you see Bret Baier's interview of same yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcKrCMcvyFk

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 25, 2022, 08:24:45 AM
She does not address the absence of cross examination, witnesses in secret without them allowed lawyers or copies of the testimony, the failure to mention that Trump offered 20,000 National Guard, the denial of Jim Jacobs and the other one, etc etc
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on July 25, 2022, 08:46:17 AM
"She does not address the absence of cross examination, witnesses in secret without them allowed lawyers or copies of the testimony, the failure to mention that Trump offered 20,000 National Guard, the denial of Jim Jacobs and the other one, etc etc"

I thought Bret did good job of confronting her on these facts
and even pointed out how she did not answer them
all she would say " we need to save Democracy over and over again"
despite ignoring the problems the people who voted her into office are concerned about which is not her 24/7 divine mission (like a woman spurned - obsession for revenge)

I liked when Bret asked her if this is about '24.

She smiled and did not give a straight answer one way or another
I would never vote for her under almost any circumstances
every again .



Title: Our totally trustworthy intelligence professionals!
Post by: G M on July 26, 2022, 10:08:12 AM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400180.php
Title: It's the FBI's birthday!
Post by: G M on July 26, 2022, 02:15:06 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400194.php
Title: I can't wait until Deep State Andy addresses this!
Post by: G M on July 26, 2022, 07:24:48 PM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/07/26/senator-chuck-grassley-outlines-systemic-institutional-corruption-within-dept-of-justice-and-fbi/
Title: The FBI keeps interfering in presidential elections
Post by: G M on July 27, 2022, 12:14:09 PM
https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/27/the-fbi-keeps-interfering-in-presidential-elections-time-to-disband-it/
Title: Can’t wait until Deep State Andy explains this!
Post by: G M on July 29, 2022, 10:46:11 AM
https://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=400232
Title: AMcC: Deep State Andy goes after the FBI and the DOJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 30, 2022, 05:46:18 PM


Democrats and the FBI Collude Again on a Russia Smear against Republicans
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
July 30, 2022 6:30 AM

This time, they’ve been able to turn Democratic collusion with foreign powers into an illusion of disinformation.

Not since Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers has a couple gone cheek-to-cheek quite like Democrats and the FBI.

This spring, we watched special counsel John Durham’s first Russiagate trial blow up on him, not because he lacked evidence of a 2016 fraudulent scheme to portray Donald Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin, but because he portrayed one of the two main schemers, the FBI, as if it were a victim. In Durham’s indictment, the Clinton campaign lies to the bureau’s babes in the woods, gulling them into opening a baseless foreign-counterintelligence probe of whether her Republican rival is a Putin puppet. In Durham’s proof at trial, however, top FBI officials turn out to be fully aware that they are colluding with Clinton campaign operatives in exploiting political opposition research to try to nail Trump — and then labor to cover their tracks.

It’s an unfortunate blind spot. Durham has one conviction so far: a guilty plea from FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, whose manipulation of a document caused the FISA court to be deceived into granting a surveillance warrant to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser — again, substantially based on the Clinton campaign’s bogus opposition research. Except the case wasn’t charged as a fraud on the court. It was charged as a false statement to another FBI official. Yes, it seems even when the FBI itself lies, the victim is . . . the FBI.

And now we learn how adaptable the Democrat–FBI Russia two-step is: You can run it in reverse! Not only can the scheme distort actual disinformation into an illusion of Republican collusion with foreign powers. It also can turn actual Democratic collusion with foreign powers into an illusion of disinformation. Now, that’s some choreography, right there.

We’ve written a good bit about how Democrats and the Biden campaign, aided and abetted by their collaborators in media, social media, and the distressingly partisan network of current and former government national-security officials (pillars of the so-called Deep State, which I am going to have to stop describing as “so-called”), tried to con the country into believing Hunter Biden’s patently authentic “Laptop from Hell” was Russian disinformation. Well, now we see the fuller picture of how, far from pulling this tall tale out of the sky when the New York Post exposed the Hunter laptop in October 2020, these operatives simply incorporated it into a Biden campaign narrative that Democrats and pliant FBI officials had concocted two months earlier.

FBI Knew That Fear the Bidens Were Compromised Was Not Based on Disinformation

Republicans controlled the Senate in the 116th Congress in 2019, when Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) of the Finance Committee and Chairman Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs began probing the Biden family business of cashing in on Joe’s political influence. The focus was fishy foreign financial transactions. By then, the Justice Department and the FBI had been onto Hunter’s shenanigans for a year — again, long before the laptop’s existence emerged.

The government’s national-security apparatus had every reason to know the Bidens were compromised. As I’ve detailed, one of the family’s most lucrative deals had it partnering with a Shanghai-based conglomerate called CEFC, which turned out to be a Chinese intelligence operation. This is the deal where Joe Biden — “the big guy” — was to get a 10 percent cut . . . which may explain why he was so relieved that a New York Times exposé seemed only minimally damaging that he called Hunter (the son with whom he never talked business, no siree) to opine that Hunter was “in the clear.”

Among CEFC’s key executives was Patrick Ho, once described by Hunter as “the f***ing spy chief of China.” Ho was prosecuted by the Justice Department on foreign-corruption charges. Months before his arrest, CEFC’s top executive (and Xi Jinping protégé) Ye Jianming paid Hunter $1 million to snoop around and try to find out what the government had on Ho. That turned out to be a lot. In February 2018, federal prosecutors advised the defense that Hunter’s client, Ho, had been the subject of national-security surveillance under FISA. Within a week of this notice, the Chinese regime arrested Ye. He has not been seen in public since, and the regime quietly let the multibillion-dollar conglomerate go bust.

The Bidens were being lavishly paid by CEFC: It is documented that $6 million went into the family coffers. Hunter once related that Ye had offered him $10 million annually just for “introductions.” Given that the FBI appears to have been monitoring Ho and CEFC as clandestine agents of the communist Chinese regime, what chance is there that the Biden connection was an important aspect of the FBI’s CEFC probe? They’ll never tell us, of course, because it’s all classified, but I’m betting it’s a pretty good chance since a major goal of any counterintelligence investigation is to detect whether the U.S. government has vulnerabilities on which a foreign power is capitalizing — often by paying lots of money to influential Americans. If the FBI didn’t know about the Bidens and the Chinese regime, then we should be asking why we’re plowing billions of dollars into the foreign-counterintelligence budget.

The Grassley–Johnson investigation homed in on the foreign funding streams pouring into Biden accounts. This obviously was not disinformation planted by foreign intelligence services. Much of it was signaled by suspicious-activity reports filed by financial institutions. (Banks file such reports when they suspect transactions are traceable to potentially illegal activity, or when the transactions appear to be structured in a manner designed to defeat federal reporting requirements.)

In addition, we now know that in early 2019, Hunter told one of his “escorts” that accounts of his had been frozen because he was making payments for “escort services” that were tied to Russian accounts. So . . . a bevy of Eastern European prostitutes knew that it really was Hunter Biden behind money sluicing between intriguing foreign accounts and accounts that, whaddya know, really were controlled by Hunter Biden. Is it so hard to imagine that the FBI might have figured that out, too? Just maybe?

Not Quite Efrem Zimbalist Jr.’s FBI

In today’s FBI, progressive political bias is so notorious that what used to be shocking to humiliated bureau defenders (such as moi) has become a rueful punch line. Thankfully, hardworking case agents still habitually follow the evidence wherever it leads. That, however, doesn’t mean their political-hack bosses won’t undermine them.

As 2020 wore on, leading Democrats grew increasingly alarmed that what looked like a cakewalk for Joe Biden could turn into a close election. He had no more blatant vulnerability than streams of foreign money that could support Biden’s well-earned reputation for being willfully blind, at best, to his family’s propensity to monetize his government power. Grassley and Johnson were turning up potentially damaging information. Something had to be done.

And what do Democrats do these days when they need election help? They call the FBI.

In Durham’s prosecution, we saw that when 2016 Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann wanted to plant disinformation about Trump–Russia collusion to trigger an FBI investigation, he targeted the bureau’s then–general counsel Jim Baker — an old friend from their Justice Department days. Sussmann knew he could text Baker on a Sunday night and be confident of getting a Monday meeting in the bureau’s executive suite. Sussmann even had a badge giving him access to FBI headquarters. No surprise then that he got both his meeting and the FBI investigation of Trump that the Clinton campaign was hoping for.

In 2020, the situation was reversed. This time, the evidence was very real and damaging to Democrats, so what party heavyweights needed was to thwart any significant FBI investigation, preferably by branding the evidence as disinformation.

Wonder of wonders, the Democrats found willing FBI officials. Two of them are called out in Grassley’s letter.

The first is Timothy Thibault, a longtime bureau muckety-muck who is the top FBI agent in the District of Columbia investigative division (his title is assistant special agent in charge of the Washington Field Office — ASAC of WFO in bureau-speak). The WFO handles some of the government’s most sensitive investigations — sensitive because they have political ramifications. (I’m sure it will give you comfort to know that among Thibault’s predecessors heading up the WFO was Andrew McCabe.) We met Thibault a few weeks back, courtesy of another Grassley letter referring him for investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Besides apparently brandishing his FBI credentials to draw attention to his very active social-media presence (a violation of various rules), Thibault engages in partisan public commentary, taking aim at Republicans, the Trump administration, the Catholic Church, the American South (“Can we give Kentucky to the Russian Federation” — is this guy hilarious or what?).

Then there is supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten. We didn’t know him by name, but some of his crackerjack intelligence analysis is outlined in the IG’s report on the FBI’s abuse of FISA surveillance authority in the Trump–Russia probe. After the FBI had already used the blatantly bogus and uncorroborated Steele dossier in sworn applications to obtain FISA warrants, it finally interviewed the sources relied on by former British spy Christopher Steele for the conclusion that Trump was in cahoots with the Kremlin. Auten was the “supervisory intel analyst” identified in the report, trusted by the FBI to handle the interview of Igor Danchenko, Steele’s “primary sub-source” — and himself suspected by the bureau to be a Russian spy (see the IG Report, pp. 186-190). Danchenko told Auten and other agents that Steele had extensively distorted the information Danchenko passed along to him, much of which was rank rumor and innuendo. Yet, I’m sure you’ll be stunned to learn that after these interviews, the FBI continued to rely on Steele’s information in its FISA applications. Unbelievably, the FISA court was informed that Danchenko was credible, but not that what he was credible about was Steele’s utter lack of credibility.

What a pair.

The Democrat–FBI Disinformation about Disinformation Campaign

Grassley’s recent letter relates that, as he and Johnson collected damaging Biden information, four senior congressional Democrats — then-Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well as Senator Mark Warner and Congressman Adam Schiff, top Dems on the intelligence committees — dashed off a letter to the FBI on July 13, 2020. In it, they fretted that Congress could be the subject of a foreign-disinformation campaign and sought a “defensive briefing.”

Three days later, this request was elaborated on by Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Gary Peters. They were the ranking members of the committees then headed by Grassley and Johnson, respectively, and thus privy to the Biden information then being amassed. The two Democrats requested a briefing from the FBI about potential foreign disinformation tied specifically to the Grassley–Johnson investigation.
Grassley maintains that there was no need for such a briefing because the information he and Johnson were gathering was substantially verifiable and, ergo, not disinformation. I would further observe, as I’ve detailed on other occasions, that even when the source of information is known or truly suspected to be a foreign intelligence service (which the Biden information substantially was not), this does not perforce mean the information is false. Sometimes, for example, Russia floats information that is true — and quite intentionally so because it is embarrassing to American officials. So even if one believes in good faith that Russia or China, say, are putting out Biden data, that would not by itself make that data disinformation. Yet, that’s what Democrats and their confederates would have you believe — if the information is derogatory, it must be both sourced to a foreign intelligence service and untrue.

According to Grassley, the FBI was happy to help the Democrats in that enterprise. After the bureau received the letters from the top Democrats, Auten worked up an intelligence “assessment” that concluded derogatory Biden evidence was disinformation. Grassley says unidentified FBI whistleblowers have recounted that agents working the Biden investigation were interviewed in connection with Auten’s assessment and pushed back against their headquarters’ claims of disinformation risk, arguing that their reporting either had been verified or could be verified using ordinary investigative techniques (e.g., search warrants). Nevertheless, FBI headquarters purported to conclude that this derogatory Biden data was disinformation. To cover their tracks, Grassley says that in September 2020, FBI headquarters officials “placed their findings with respect to whether reporting was disinformation in a restricted access sub-file reviewable only by particular agents.”
Meantime, in August 2020, the FBI invited members of Congress to be briefed on possible foreign interference in the election campaign.
Grassley says the briefing he and Johnson received, which was “unsolicited and unnecessary,” related to the Biden investigation that the Auten assessment sought to discredit, over the dissent of case investigators. Parts of the Biden investigation, Grassley explains, were leaked to the media in order to paint the evidence gathered “in a false light.” On August 13, 2020, for example, the Associated Press published a report suggesting a government “intelligence assessment” raised the question of whether Senator Johnson’s effort to investigate Biden family dealings with Ukraine, among other foreign governments, was “mimicking” Russian efforts to spread disinformation and “amplifying its propaganda.”

Grassley goes on to note that “in October 2020, an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed at the direction of ASAC Thibault.” Moreover, not content with merely closing this part of the case “without providing a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines,” Thibault also “attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” according to the senator.

Grassley does not further describe this “avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting.” We do know, however, that October 2020 — the dwindling weeks right before Election Day — is when the New York Post broke the Hunter Biden laptop story. And how’s this for a coincidence: At the same time that Thibault was shutting down part of the Biden investigation, an array of 51 former U.S. national-security officials released their “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails.” It’s a remarkably deceptive piece of, well, disinformation, strongly suggesting that the Hunter laptop contents were Russian disinformation — but, when read closely, the officials admit that they are merely “suspicious” and actually have no basis in solid fact to conclude that the contents were disinformation. Naturally, the 2020 Biden campaign happily peddled this government-approved Russian disinformation storyline — just as the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign had happily peddled the bureau-promoted narrative that Trump had established a communications back channel with the Kremlin.

How to Get Their Attention

With Democrats running both congressional chambers and the Justice Department, an investigation of the FBI’s collusion with Democrats to influence another American presidential election is not in the cards at the moment. Republicans could and should vow to investigate this latest budding bureau scandal thoroughly once they take control of one or both houses of Congress. But let’s be frank. There have already been numerous investigations of FBI politicization, misconduct, and abuse of power over the last several years. Congress investigates, the Justice Department investigates, the FISA court investigates . . . and nothing happens.

What ought to happen has become increasingly clear. The FBI’s foreign-counterintelligence mission should be reassigned to another agency that is strictly an intelligence service with no police responsibilities. The bureau should be restricted to law enforcement. That is what it knows how to do well.

Just as important, law enforcement has to be transparent. In the criminal-justice system, discovery rules and court oversight ensure that the bureau’s work will be checked, which incentivizes police to do it by the book, without political bias. Intelligence activities are classified. The shroud over them creates too much temptation toward mischief — including politically motivated abuse of power. The FBI used to be the premier federal police force, which had a domestic-security sideline. With the onslaught of jihadist terrorism that began in the 1990s, and especially after 9/11, the sideline — the intelligence mission — became such a priority that it has corrupted the bureau’s ethos. The combination of intense secrecy and awesome law-enforcement power is too combustible when entrusted to an agency that has lost the public’s trust and that has shown, time after time, that it is resistant to oversight.

If you want to get the FBI’s attention, restrict its mission, cut its budget, and hold higher-ups at the bureau and its mother ship, the Justice Department, accountable for malfeasance. There is no reason to believe, at this point, that anything else will work.
Title: Re: AMcC: Deep State Andy goes after the FBI and the DOJ
Post by: DougMacG on July 30, 2022, 09:57:28 PM
It could be time to stop calling him that.

Looks like he's on our side.
Title: Re: AMcC: Deep State Andy goes after the FBI and the DOJ
Post by: G M on July 30, 2022, 10:03:37 PM
It could be time to stop calling him that.

Looks like he's on our side.

Don't be so easily manipulated. Bill Barr says all the right things and then helps the coup and cover-up.

DSA begrudgingly admits some of the massive corruption, then serves weak tea.

Many people in the FBI need to go to prison.

The FBI needs to be dissolved, the earth salted where it once stood as a lesson.
Title: War on the rule of law; Deep State, 20 years since Ruby Ridge
Post by: DougMacG on August 01, 2022, 06:23:24 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/lessons_from_ruby_ridge.html
Title: WT: FBI soldiers revolt against HQ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2022, 03:04:39 AM
FBI soldiers revolt against pro-Biden headquarters

Whistleblowers reveal bias against conservatives, discrimination

By Rowan Scarborough

The FBI’s alliance with the Democratic Party has reached new heights with the assertion by two Republican senators that the bureau set them up for fake-news press stories about their groundbreaking Hunter Biden disclosures.

FBI whistleblowers have been contacting Republican lawmakers for months, a career-risking campaign that shows the grassroots outside the 7th Floor are in revolt. Their target is the FBI’s elitist left-wing headquarters overseen by Director Christopher Wray since August 2017.

The bureau’s hierarchy has developed in recent years a particular distaste for Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. This animus dates back well before July’s stunning whistleblower disclosures of corruption: Headquarters sabotaged a probe of Hunter Biden (Grassley statement), and it directed field offices to make up statistics for domestic violent extremism threats (Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio statement). Over a dozen FBI employees have contacted Mr. Jordan’s ranking Judiciary Committee office since November.

Both the Hunter blocking and DVE padding are in complete lockstep with the FBI’s political master, President Biden. Hunter is the son; domestic threats fit Mr. Biden’s constant assertions about dangerous Trump supporters, although what they have been attacking and killing day in, day out is unclear.

Hunter is not the only Biden offspring to get FBI help. Ashley Biden, the president’s daughter, left her intimate diary at a “halfway house” in Palm Beach, Florida, the Daily Mail reported. The document circulated in conservative circles until it reached undercover journalist James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas. The FBI promptly raided his home, in force. Whether the bureau wants him criminally charged and what the crime would be is still unclear. But a missing personal diary is now a potential federal crime for a guy who uncovers — first hand, on hidden camera — liberal bias in the news media.

And still in Republican memory is the FBI 7th floor’s classification of “suicide by cop” for Sen. Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson. He loaded up for a massacre of practicing GOP ball players on a baseball diamond in 2017. Only the immediate actions of two Capitol Police officers stopped him. After Republican outrage, Mr. Wray changed the attack to domestic terrorism.

Of course, the FBI-Democratic Party uber-alliance is the Christopher Steele dossier. Democrats funded the dossier, and their operatives spread the smut all over town, including deep inside the bureau.

Under Director James Comey and Deputy Andrew McCabe, the bureau fell in love with the 2016 collection of falsehoods about Mr. Trump and his aides. So deep was the love that Mr. Comey insisted the intelligence community, which dubbed the dossier “internet rumor,” include its claims in the January 2017 official government paper on Russian election interference. As a compromise, they added it to the appendix.

In 2019, the Department of Justice inspector general wrote a scathing report on the whole FBI dossier affair.

Mr. Jordan has unearthed two other FBI nuggets from whistleblowers in addition to the fake DVE reporting.

In a May 11 letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Mr. Jordan said the FBI has granted another Biden priority by targeting school kids’ parents as domestic terror threats.

Mr. Jordan told Mr. Garland that by October, based on the AG’s own directive, FBI counterintelligence and criminal divisions created a new threat tag: “EDUOFFICIALS.”

“We have learned from brave whistleblowers that the FBI has opened investigations with the EDUOFFICIALS threat tag in almost every region of the country and relating to all types of educational settings,” the congressman wrote. “The information we have received shows how, as a direct result of your directive, federal law enforcement is using counterterrorism resources to investigate protected First Amendment activity.”

In May and June letters to Mr. Wray, Mr. Jordan disclosed the other nugget: The FBI has retaliated against employees who express conservative views.

He told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham of a “Decorated Iraq war veteran being run out of the FBI. His allegiance to the country is being questioned because he had the gall to say something that offended the FBI leadership about the January 6th investigation.”

This narrative gets us to the setup — a remarkable allegation from Mr. Grassley and Mr. Johnson that the FBI created a purposeless August 2020 private briefing as a way to sabotage their Hunter Biden work.

Did the FBI hold a grudge against the two? The senators were instrumental in winning the declassification of footnotes in the 2019 IG report. The disclosure: The FBI had been warned that the dossier on which it relied contained deliberate Kremlin disinformation.

That August, as then-President Donald Trump and Mr. Biden squared off, the two senators were a month away from issuing an explosive report on Hunter Biden’s finances — how he collected millions of dollars from shady Chinese tycoons, and Moscow and Ukraine oligarchs. The New York Post was two months away from breaking the story of Hunter’s abandoned laptop stocked with financial records, porn, emails and texts. His messages told of how he shares proceeds with the elder Biden.

Before the Grassley-Johnson report came out, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer smeared their inquiry by alleging it relied on Russian disinformation. He and other Democrats had been briefed by the same FBI unit that discredited evidence against Hunter Biden, who today remains under investigation by the U.S. attorney for Delaware. Then, the FBI’s 7th floor showed up to provide the closed August 2020 briefing. Thinking back, the two senators now contend it was a setup to feed the news media inaccurate stories about what was said. In a July 25 letter to Mr. Garland, Mr. Grassley singled out Brian Auten, a supervisory intelligence analyst at headquarters, who that very month began dismissing Hunter Biden evidence of wrongdoing as disinformation. The FBI whistleblowers told Mr. Grassley’s staff that all the evidence of criminality was either verified or could be backed up by search warrants. By then, the FBI had taken ownership of, and presumably exploited, the Hunter laptop for eight months.

“I received an unsolicited and unnecessary briefing from the FBI that purportedly related to our Biden investigation and a briefing for which the contents were later leaked in order to paint the investigation in a false light,” Mr. Grassley told Mr. Garland. “The concurrent opening of Auten’s assessment, the efforts by the FBI HQ team and the efforts by the FBI to provide an unnecessary briefing to me and Senator Johnson that provided our Democratic colleagues’ fodder to falsely accuse us of advancing foreign disinformation draws serious concern.”

“We had that briefing and it was a setup,” Mr. Johnson told Fox News’ “Unfiltered with Dan Bongino.”

Mr. Biden’s pick of Mr. Garland for attorney general was a savvy move. Mr. Garland knows who kept him off the Supreme Court — Republican senators blocked his nomination in 2016.

If Mr. Wray has an appetite for reforming FBI headquarters based on the 2019 IG report, and more recent scandals, his moves have yet to materialize in public
Title: American political prisoners
Post by: G M on August 04, 2022, 09:37:25 PM
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/never_forget_the_governments_j6_political_prisoners.html
Title: Above the law
Post by: G M on August 05, 2022, 07:30:51 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/04/the-evasive-mr-wray/
Title: Re: Above the law
Post by: G M on August 08, 2022, 12:22:27 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/04/the-evasive-mr-wray/

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400377.php
Title: It’s done
Post by: G M on August 08, 2022, 06:23:03 PM
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-president-trump-announces-fbi-has-raided-mar-a-lago
Title: Re: It’s done
Post by: DougMacG on August 09, 2022, 01:11:16 AM
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-president-trump-announces-fbi-has-raided-mar-a-lago

Ron DeSantis:

The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.
Title: Andrew McCarthy on yesterdays raid
Post by: ccp on August 09, 2022, 07:52:43 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/08/09/trump-raid-not-about-classified-documents-its-about-jan-6/

thinks this is not about some boxes of records - that was the ruse - to invade and swipe boxes from Mar Lago.

It is all about 1/6/20.

The claim if Trump KNEW the election was NOT stolen then perhaps that could be used as criminal indictments. 

Which is of course ridiculous because Trump believed it was stolen as do I .

So the whole thing smells of shysterism with a complicit media - as always .

( I lived literally across the intracoastal waterway from Mar A Lago in the early 90s in poor man's Palm Bch - West Palm Bch - I couldn't afford the membership fees - which then I think as 50 K - It went up to 250 K per annum later and may be even more now. I  could see the estate  outside my window.  I never dreamed he would be President in a million yrs!)

Title: Search warrant signed by former Epstein attorney
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 08:19:57 AM
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872441/united-states-v-sealed-search-warrant/


Bruce E. Reinhart

https://lawsintexas.com/jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book-of-princes-law-professors-and-now-this-prosecutor-turned-judge-is-just-horrifying/
Title: The feral government goes full 3rd world
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 08:27:11 AM
https://sonar21.com/the-united-states-government-behaving-like-a-third-world-despot/

Never go full 3rd world.
Title: Re: The feral government goes full 3rd world
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 08:42:14 AM
https://sonar21.com/the-united-states-government-behaving-like-a-third-world-despot/

Never go full 3rd world.
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/112/997/242/original/9fcd0e0a083392bd.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/112/997/242/original/9fcd0e0a083392bd.jpg)
Title: Just a reminder...
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 09:27:36 AM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/112/992/794/original/f6ff0caf8446eb98.png

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/112/992/794/original/f6ff0caf8446eb98.png)
Title: Re: Search warrant signed by former Epstein attorney
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 10:06:05 AM
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872441/united-states-v-sealed-search-warrant/


Bruce E. Reinhart

https://lawsintexas.com/jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book-of-princes-law-professors-and-now-this-prosecutor-turned-judge-is-just-horrifying/

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/breaking-judge-who-signed-mar-a-lago-raid-was-obama-appointee-who-defended-jeffery-epstein-associates/
Title: Re: It’s done
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 10:14:53 AM
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/end-republic-robert-spencer/

End of the Republic
With the FBI raid on Trump’s home, America has fallen into the abyss.

Tue Aug 9, 2022
Robert Spencer








When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home on Monday, a key aspect of what made the United States of America great and free has been lost, and likely cannot be recovered. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson detested one another for years before their eventual reconciliation, but neither one used the agencies of the U.S. government to hound, persecute or discredit the other. Other bitter political opponents throughout the history of the republic have never before used the government’s own mechanisms of justice to do injustice to their foes. Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and their henchmen have brought America to a new phase of its history, and it is not likely to be one that is marked by respect for the rule of law or defense of the rights of individual citizens. Instead, we are entering an ugly age of authoritarianism, in which the brute force of the state is used to bend the people to the will of the tyrant.

Trump announced on Monday, “These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”

The 45th president is not given to understatement, but the FBI raid on his home is much more than just unnecessary and inappropriate. It is criminal. The FBI that was heavily involved in trying to frame and destroy Trump in the Russian Collusion hoax is now trying once again to destroy him, apparently by claiming that he improperly took classified material from the White House. They never cared when Hillary Clinton misused classified material on a grand scale; what is the difference? They’re also likely trying to find something to link him more firmly to the January 6 “insurrection” that never was. The Left’s January 6 narrative has been full of holes from the beginning: Trump told the demonstrators to proceed peacefully, the people who entered the Capitol had no weapons, and no one had sketched out any kind of plan to do what the Left continues to claim that Trump was trying to do all along, overthrow the government and rule as a dictator.

But Joe Biden’s handlers are desperately afraid that Trump will return to the White House on January 20, 2025 and that things will go harder for them next time than they did during his first term. They’re afraid that a vengeful Trump will do a genuine and thorough housecleaning of the desperately corrupt and compromised Washington bureaucracy, and that many of them will, quite justly, end up out of power, and some of them will, even more justly, end up in prison. So they’ve determined to pre-emptively do the same to Trump. If they can’t actually find anything to prosecute him for (and Lord knows they’ve tried, this is the most investigated and poked and prodded and scrutinized man in American history, and still those who hate him have nothing), then at very least they hope to taint Trump so completely in the eyes of the distracted and indifferent public that they will have a fighting chance in 2024.

This is banana republic stuff. This is the kind of thing that moved Woodrow Wilson to intervene militarily in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua, explaining: “We are friends of constitutional government in America; we are more than its friends, we are its champions. I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” Wilson was an authoritarian scoundrel and one of the worst presidents we have ever endured, but much as he hated Theodore Roosevelt and feared that he would be reelected to the presidency in 1920 (instead, Roosevelt died in 1919), Wilson never had rogue government agents raid Roosevelt’s home looking for something they could use to pin some crime on him.

Merrick Garland recently signaled that something like this was in the offing, when he emphasized that no one was above the law and anyone could be prosecuted. No one is above that law, that is, except Hillary Clinton, and Hunter Biden, and all the FBI officials who have been implicated in the Russian Collusion hoax, and all the other Leftists who have escaped and will continue to escape prosecution because they hold what the elites consider to be acceptable political opinions.

The two-tier justice system that aggressively prosecutes conservatives while turning a blind eye to Leftists who have committed similar or worse crimes is now out in the open. Trump did nothing, but the FBI will find some crime for which the Justice Department will prosecute him. Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden did a great deal, but none of it matters to corrupt officials who share their worldview.

The lesson is clear: in America today, in the corrupt kleptocracy of Joe Biden, you have to have the right opinions. Then all doors will open for you and you can even break laws with impunity, and have no fear of prosecution. But if you dare to dissent from the opinions of the elites, prepare to be hounded by the new super-IRS and the weaponized FBI, and you’ll face raids, and prison, and who knows what else is coming.

Many conservatives are saying that this ensures Trump’s victory in 2024. But what makes them think that this corrupt regime will allow the man whom they fear and hate above all others return to the White House? It’s clear now. They will stop at nothing.

This is no longer a republic, except of the banana variety. It may be a republic again someday, but for now, the great American experiment is over. Born July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia, died August 8, 2022, in Mar-A-Lago, at the hands of Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and Christopher Wray.

https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-president-trump-announces-fbi-has-raided-mar-a-lago

Ron DeSantis:

The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.
Title: Re: Search warrant signed by former Epstein attorney
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 10:19:48 AM
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872441/united-states-v-sealed-search-warrant/


Bruce E. Reinhart

https://lawsintexas.com/jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book-of-princes-law-professors-and-now-this-prosecutor-turned-judge-is-just-horrifying/

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/breaking-judge-who-signed-mar-a-lago-raid-was-obama-appointee-who-defended-jeffery-epstein-associates/

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/08/09/follow-the-pedophile-money/

Title: War on the rule of law; Deep State.
Post by: DougMacG on August 09, 2022, 10:49:09 AM
This, plus 87,000 new "IRS" agents, it ought to be enough to get people favoring freedom energized.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/86-852-new-irs-employees
----------------------------------
If you are a Dem and didn't think they were targeting Republicans, as they do, you wouldn't favor this.
----------------------------------
I suggested going to a more secure format to discuss how to fight back in the war the deep state has waged against us.  I wrote that it's hard to fight this war with the constraint that we can't shoot first.  Events of the day make me think of alternatives to that caveat.

The simplest fight back is to defund them, and also purge and/or prosecute the bad apples when justified.  That requires winning elections and taking charge.  And we are back again to the election fraud debate.

A friend said he voted in today's MN primary, offered the election judge his ID but she said we don't need to see that, and he offered back a contrary view on that.  If one or both of the next two election cycles has even a hint of Dem cheating in it... I would be open to considering ideas that should not be stated in an open format.
Title: Re: War on the rule of law; Deep State.
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 11:37:26 AM
https://freebeacon.com/policy/dems-poised-to-make-irs-larger-than-pentagon-state-department-fbi-and-border-patrol-combined/
___________________________________________________________________________

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2022/08/08/irs-has-guns-inflation-reduction-act-will-unleash-tough-irs-on-taxes/?sh=3512e1a45d20

The Inflation Reduction Act Unleashes A Tougher IRS
Robert W. WoodSenior Contributor
I focus on taxes and litigation.
Follow
Aug 8, 2022,09:25am EDT
6

The Schumer-Manchin tax bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed the Senate on Sunday, raises taxes and will give the IRS billions to go into what the Wall Street Journal called “beast mode.”

In all, the meant-to-be-inflation buster bill will dole out about $80 billion to the IRS for increase enforcement, operational improvements, customer service, and systems modernization. Think big, really big. That $80 billion is more than six times the current annual IRS budget of $12.6 billion.

How can the IRS spend all of that? You guessed it, the bill says a whopping $45.6 billion will be for enforcement, and make no mistake, enforcement is the main directive from Democrats to the IRS. Get bigger, tougher and faster at collecting, and make them pay. Meanwhile, the IRS could be ramping up its police power too. The IRS is a key part of the government, but not one you usually associate with law enforcement and guns.

Only the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS can carry guns, but the IRS has been buying more guns and ammunition in recent years, snapping up nearly $700,000 in ammo in early 2022. The bullet buy prompted Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Jeff Duncan (R-SC) to introduce the “Disarm the IRS Act,” to prohibit the IRS from buying ammunition.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) tweeted, "87,000 IRS agents will be hired with $80 billion taxpayer dollars when the Senate Reconciliation bill passes this weekend. And they're buying more guns & ammo too. Lower to middle income Americans & small businesses will be the primary targets of Democrat's new IRS force."

The IRS has a hard job to do, but worry about the IRS inventory of weapons is not new. An official report published by the Government Accountability Office said that at the end of 2017, the IRS had 4,487 guns and 5,062,006 rounds of ammunition in its weapons inventory.


Many federal agencies were reviewed and assessed in the GAO study, Purchases and Inventory Controls of Firearms, Ammunition, and Tactical Equipment (GAO-19-175) (Dec 13, 2018). Some of the guns the IRS has are fully automatic machine guns. Compared to seeing gun-toting IRS Agents at your door, a correspondence audit doesn’t sound too bad. An audit report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration covering 2009 to 2011 said that IRS Agents accidentally discharged their guns 11 times during that time. The report says that IRS agents fired their guns accidentally more times than they did intentionally. Some of the misfires caused property damage or personal injury. A few defendants in criminal tax cases have tried to suppress evidence based on the IRS carrying guns.

In United States v. Adams, the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Charles Adams’ conviction for conspiracy to defraud the United States by obstructing payroll tax collections and tax evasion. Mr. Adams was convicted despite his argument that the IRS agents carrying guns was not allowed by law. Mr. Adams was essentially treated as a tax protester, which is clearly a pejorative term. Even so, he isn’t the first taxpayer to be unhappy about the IRS having weapons. In fact, an IRS business card can cause more heart palpitations than the CIA, FBI, or Department of Justice. You don’t need to see a firearm to get weak in the knees.

There is a separate part of the IRS that is criminal, not civil. Like the FBI, the IRS Criminal Investigation Division uses the Special Agent terminology. If you are visited by an IRS Criminal Investigation Division Special Agent, you should consult with an attorney. You are not legally required to talk to them. In fact, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees your right against self-incrimination. That means you can’t be compelled to be a witness against yourself in a criminal case. You may believe that by answering a few simple questions you will not hurt yourself or your position—especially if you are just a witness. Yet speaking up might actually help the IRS build a criminal case against you. The IRS may (quite honestly) tell you that you are not the target of the investigation, but merely a witness. Even so, you are entitled to retain counsel. Besides, the IRS view of you may change.

In the early stages of IRS criminal investigations, a person may be told he or she is a witness. You may therefore think there is no harm in being forthcoming, and that your cooperation will actually make it more likely that the IRS will appreciate you and leave you alone. However, as the investigation continues, a witness can become a target. Even if you are convinced you are merely a witness and will remain so, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that you have the right to assert your constitutional privilege against self-incrimination. See Bellis v. United States.

If you are approached and questioned by a Special Agent, ask for his or her business card. Firmly but politely state that you do not want to answer any questions and that you will have your attorney contact the Special Agent. You can fully cooperate through your attorney. This may sound paranoid, but given the fluid nature of who is a witness and who is a target, even statements you think sound innocent may not be. Suppose you are asked whether you do business with Joe or know Sally. If you answer falsely, you may face felony charges. See 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1001. Plus, making a false statement can be considered evidence of an attempt to conceal other criminal conduct.



This, plus 87,000 new "IRS" agents, it ought to be enough to get people favoring freedom energized.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/86-852-new-irs-employees
----------------------------------
If you are a Dem and didn't think they were targeting Republicans, as they do, you wouldn't favor this.
----------------------------------
I suggested going to a more secure format to discuss how to fight back in the war the deep state has waged against us.  I wrote that it's hard to fight this war with the constraint that we can't shoot first.  Events of the day make me think of alternatives to that caveat.

The simplest fight back is to defund them, and also purge and/or prosecute the bad apples when justified.  That requires winning elections and taking charge.  And we are back again to the election fraud debate.

A friend said he voted in today's MN primary, offered the election judge his ID but she said we don't need to see that, and he offered back a contrary view on that.  If one or both of the next two election cycles has even a hint of Dem cheating in it... I would be open to considering ideas that should not be stated in an open format.
Title: Re: Search warrant signed by former Epstein attorney
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 01:05:45 PM
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872441/united-states-v-sealed-search-warrant/


Bruce E. Reinhart

https://lawsintexas.com/jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book-of-princes-law-professors-and-now-this-prosecutor-turned-judge-is-just-horrifying/

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/breaking-judge-who-signed-mar-a-lago-raid-was-obama-appointee-who-defended-jeffery-epstein-associates/

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/08/09/follow-the-pedophile-money/

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400402.php

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 09, 2022, 01:38:53 PM
Whoa , , ,
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 01:46:45 PM
Whoa , , ,

Funny how many current events keep circling back to Epstein, isn't it?

Almost like the idea that a cabal of pedos running things from the shadows is more than an Alex Jones fever dream.
Title: Re: Search warrant signed by former Epstein attorney
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 02:34:40 PM
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872441/united-states-v-sealed-search-warrant/


Bruce E. Reinhart

https://lawsintexas.com/jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book-of-princes-law-professors-and-now-this-prosecutor-turned-judge-is-just-horrifying/

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/breaking-judge-who-signed-mar-a-lago-raid-was-obama-appointee-who-defended-jeffery-epstein-associates/

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/08/09/follow-the-pedophile-money/

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400402.php

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/076/629/original/b4013317f41e8896.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/076/629/original/b4013317f41e8896.jpg)
Title: Re: Search warrant signed by former Epstein attorney
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 03:53:45 PM
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872441/united-states-v-sealed-search-warrant/


Bruce E. Reinhart

https://lawsintexas.com/jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book-of-princes-law-professors-and-now-this-prosecutor-turned-judge-is-just-horrifying/

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/breaking-judge-who-signed-mar-a-lago-raid-was-obama-appointee-who-defended-jeffery-epstein-associates/

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/08/09/follow-the-pedophile-money/

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400402.php

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/076/629/original/b4013317f41e8896.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/076/629/original/b4013317f41e8896.jpg)

https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/1150174192454852608

Title: AMcC on the MAL raid
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 09, 2022, 04:48:38 PM
As usual, highly intelligent.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/the-fbis-mar-a-lago-raid-its-about-the-capitol-riot-not-the-mishandling-of-classified-information/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-08-09&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: AMcC on the MAL raid
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 04:58:04 PM
As usual, he dishonestly leaves out important details that make his buddies at the DOJ look bad, such as J6 was a fed operation.

"The Justice Department’s legitimacy, which hinges on the public’s acceptance of it as a non-partisan law-enforcer, would be at risk. If Garland is going to charge the former president, he has to be sure. He has to be able to convince the country that the public interest strongly favors prosecution."

Are
You
Fucking
Kidding
Me?




As usual, highly intelligent.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/the-fbis-mar-a-lago-raid-its-about-the-capitol-riot-not-the-mishandling-of-classified-information/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-08-09&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Garland's FBI going after everyone...
Post by: G M on August 09, 2022, 05:21:19 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/breaking-joe-bidens-fbi-apprehends-gop-rep-traveling-family-seizes-phone-raiding-president-trumps-home-last-night/

Except the clients of G. Maxwell for some reason...


Coming soon-Andy McCarthy defends the mass arrests of registered republicans...
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 09, 2022, 07:06:15 PM
"As usual, he dishonestly leaves out important details that make his buddies at the DOJ look bad, such as J6 was a fed operation."

That would be because it is not the subject at hand.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 09, 2022, 07:07:34 PM
Clearly something deep is afoot.

At the moment there is more heat than light.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on August 10, 2022, 04:58:33 AM
"Clearly something deep is afoot."

The increase in IRS agents is equal to half the force of the entire US Marine Corps, with billions (tens of billions? ) more for guns and ammo for these 'pencil pushers'.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marine_Corps

The war against us is on.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on August 10, 2022, 07:07:32 AM
As usual, he dishonestly leaves out important details that make his buddies at the DOJ look bad, such as J6 was a fed operation.

"The Justice Department’s legitimacy, which hinges on the public’s acceptance of it as a non-partisan law-enforcer, would be at risk. If Garland is going to charge the former president, he has to be sure. He has to be able to convince the country that the public interest strongly favors prosecution."

Are
You
Fucking
Kidding
Me?"


maybe Andrew is trying to avoid an armed IRS investigation into his taxes

is the IRS arming to the teeth because they know when they go after conservatives many / most are armed?



Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on August 10, 2022, 07:16:31 AM
"Clearly something deep is afoot."

The increase in IRS agents is equal to half the force of the entire US Marine Corps, with billions (tens of billions? ) more for guns and ammo for these 'pencil pushers'.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marine_Corps

The war against us is on.

As a comparison MN has about 600 state troopers, NJ has about 2500.

The FBI has about 13,000 Special Agents.
Title: Kerik warns
Post by: G M on August 10, 2022, 07:40:04 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/bernie-kerik-fbi-raid-will-not-stop-donald-trump-next-step-will-assassination-video/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on August 10, 2022, 07:43:14 AM
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/08/09/report-fbi-agents-searched-through-melania-trumps-wardrobe-during-mar-a-lago-raid/

just wondering if FBI was looking to retrieve a bug that was planted previously..

perhaps they thought she had crack in an inside pocket
or stuffed
archive material in her under panties.........

[as one who has experienced some of this shit.]
Title: Re: Search warrant signed by former Epstein attorney
Post by: G M on August 10, 2022, 07:53:42 AM
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872441/united-states-v-sealed-search-warrant/


Bruce E. Reinhart

https://lawsintexas.com/jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book-of-princes-law-professors-and-now-this-prosecutor-turned-judge-is-just-horrifying/

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/breaking-judge-who-signed-mar-a-lago-raid-was-obama-appointee-who-defended-jeffery-epstein-associates/

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/08/09/follow-the-pedophile-money/

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400402.php

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/076/629/original/b4013317f41e8896.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/076/629/original/b4013317f41e8896.jpg)

https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/1150174192454852608

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1557195640463040514

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on August 10, 2022, 08:20:24 AM
worked as prosecutor against Epstein
quits post and NEXT day is working for Epstein to protect his girl accomplices from prosecution
  ( and keep them quiet)

that is what I read and heard

the appearance of unethical immoral behavior for a protector of the RULE OF LAW
does not get any worse than this!

 :x

Does the word scumbucket come to your mind as well?

Even "shyster" is not strong enough to  describe him.



Title: Trump "Classified" docs already declassified
Post by: G M on August 10, 2022, 08:20:58 AM
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/08/09/classified-docs-fbi-sought-in-trump-raid-were-already-declassified-n1619585

Deep State Andy prepares to justify in 3, 2, 1...
Title: Obama's enemies list chronology updated
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 10, 2022, 10:55:53 AM
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/18211-obamas-irs-enemies-list-updated-chronology-2013-05-16?mailing_id=6878&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.6878&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
Title: This why the Feebs raided Trump
Post by: G M on August 10, 2022, 12:42:26 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/huge-development-report-shows-fbi-personal-stake-mar-lago-raid-agents-spygate-documents-trump-holding-likely-indicted-fbi/


Serving and protecting themselves.
Title: Israel Nat'l News: American Kristallnact
Post by: G M on August 10, 2022, 06:48:10 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/around-world-people-labeling-fbis-raid-president-trumps-mar-lago-kristallnacht-day-america-changed/
Title: Re: Search warrant signed by former Epstein attorney-Social Media anti-Trump
Post by: G M on August 10, 2022, 08:06:18 PM
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872441/united-states-v-sealed-search-warrant/


Bruce E. Reinhart

https://lawsintexas.com/jeffrey-epsteins-little-black-book-of-princes-law-professors-and-now-this-prosecutor-turned-judge-is-just-horrifying/

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/breaking-judge-who-signed-mar-a-lago-raid-was-obama-appointee-who-defended-jeffery-epstein-associates/

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/08/09/follow-the-pedophile-money/

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400402.php

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/076/629/original/b4013317f41e8896.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/076/629/original/b4013317f41e8896.jpg)

https://twitter.com/dcpoll/status/1150174192454852608

https://summit.news/2022/08/10/judge-who-signed-off-on-fbi-raid-made-anti-trump-posts/
Title: VDH on the FBI
Post by: G M on August 11, 2022, 07:31:40 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/10/fbi-r-i-p/
Title: Mark Steyn on our pseudo-republic
Post by: G M on August 11, 2022, 08:15:50 AM
https://www.steynonline.com/12704/criminalizing-opposition-in-a-pseudo-republic
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on August 11, 2022, 08:27:05 AM
Too bad for the nation that the FBI did not go to an untainted judge for a warrant that the public can trust. 

Unless I missed something, all we know is context.  They didn't go after anyone else for documents.  cf. Hillary. Obama. W.J. Clinton.  We don't know what's in the search warrant or what they found.  Trump not releasing it indicates he's not being fully candid, or else he is planning his defense, and remaining silent is a skill he might work on.

A President can declassify documents by his actions; there isn't only one approved way of doing it.

We can surmise there will be an indictment and prosecution, otherwise FBI would have to admit they were wrong and apologize. No bleeping way that's going to happen.

Joe Biden didn't know and approve?  Fair enough, but did his bosses know?

The law for document mishandling that says the violator cannot hold office again is unconstitutional.  The constitution lays out the restrictions of who can serve as President.  Congress doesn't have that power or authority.

Trump could run for President from jail.  Trump could go to trial pro se, representing himself (with teams of lawyers advising him in and out of the courtroom.  (I wonder if he's considered a flight risk?)  Trump can demand a speedy trial.  Trump would demand cameras in the court room.  Public deserves to know.  He could run his defense and his campaign at the same time.  Trump could lose with a DC jury and win the election and pardon himself.  He doesn't have 4 or 8 years to wait, and it seems that he wants to be President.

Looks like we have a circus on the docket.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on August 11, 2022, 10:47:39 AM
“Trump not releasing it indicates he's not being fully candid”

How do we know he has it?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on August 11, 2022, 10:49:57 AM
“We can surmise there will be an indictment and prosecution, otherwise FBI would have to admit they were wrong and apologize.“

Oh really?

Remember me of all the past FBI apologizing for various unethical and/or criminal acts?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on August 11, 2022, 11:13:03 AM
Hope you know I was joking about the forthcoming police state apology.  Not joking about the indictment coming.  For what, I have no idea.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on August 11, 2022, 08:29:43 PM
Hope you know I was joking about the forthcoming police state apology.  Not joking about the indictment coming.  For what, I have no idea.

Sorry Doug, I didn't realize you had reached my level of cynicism and bitterness.

(https://i.imgflip.com/6poyj6.jpg)

Even though it's said that any prosecutor could "Indict a ham sandwich" they haven't been able to meet that standard with Trump up to this point, despite serious effort and more than a little criminality.
Title: Computer repairman threatened by FBI S/A
Post by: G M on August 12, 2022, 07:48:43 AM
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11103599/Computer-repairman-claims-FBI-agents-threatened-say-Hunter-Bidens-laptop.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 13, 2022, 04:21:15 AM
https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2022/08/12/caught-posting-anti-trump-hate-julie-kellys-play-by-play-thread-covering-whitmer-kidnapping-trial-makes-the-fbi-look-even-shadier/
Title: Garland's fishing expedition
Post by: G M on August 13, 2022, 07:41:58 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hoax-trump-denies-nuclear-weapons-report-likens-steele-dossier

Just another crooked act in a long line of crooked acts.
Title: Re: Garland's fishing expedition
Post by: G M on August 13, 2022, 07:47:56 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hoax-trump-denies-nuclear-weapons-report-likens-steele-dossier

Just another crooked act in a long line of crooked acts.

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=700,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/113/086/704/original/f4e3e5398b9ea8ef.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=700,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/113/086/704/original/f4e3e5398b9ea8ef.jpg)
Title: Some interesting points from AMcC
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 13, 2022, 03:54:36 PM
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 13, 2022 6:30 AM
Already, we can see that the investigation is far broader than just the mishandling of classified information.
The Mar-a-Lago search warrant has been unsealed. Turns out it is what I told you it was going to be: an open-ended license to grab any item that might be relevant to the Justice Department’s Capitol-riot investigation.

To be sure, the government is very interested in reclaiming every bit of classified information — or, at least, information that it claims is classified — in Donald Trump’s possession at his Mar-a-Lago estate. The warrant, however, is not limited to evidence of classified-information crimes, not even close.

According to the warrant’s Attachment B, which describes the “property to be seized,” the Justice Department sought (and received) judicial authority to seize evidence of three crimes related to the mishandling of government records: the Espionage Act (Section 793); the concealment, removal, or mutilation of government records (Section 2071); and the obstruction of investigations by altering or destroying evidence (Section 1519).

Already, we can see that the investigation is far broader than just the mishandling of classified information. While the Espionage Act offense relates to defense secrets, the other two offenses are not limited to classified information: Section 2071 relates to the removal or concealment of any government record, not just classified intelligence; and Section 1519 applies to any item at all — it need not be a government record, for the point is to protect government investigations, not government property.

From there, Attachment B seems to prioritize classified-information crimes, but less so than appears at first blush. Subsection (a) authorizes agents to seize documents marked classified, but the license is much broader — the warrant allows seizure of not only containers in which classified documents are found (along with their other contents, even if they are not classified), but also of other containers found proximate to those first containers, again, regardless of whether the contents are classified. So, for example, if agents found one low-level classified document in a container that was stored next to ten other containers of nonclassified documents, the warrant permitted seizure of all of the nonclassified containers and their nonclassified contents.

Then there’s subsection (b), which permits the seizure of communications, in any form, regarding classified information. Note: The communications do not have to be classified to be seized; they can be nonclassified and about anything as long as they have some connection to classified information.

Where things get really, shall we say, elastic is subsection (c). It permits the seizure of “any government and/or Presidential Records created” throughout the four years of Trump’s presidency.

Plainly, this has nothing to do with classified information. It is mainly designed to use the criminal law — the search warrant, an intrusive tactic for retrieving evidence of crimes — to enforce the Presidential Records Act, which is not a criminal statute.

Can DOJ get away with this? Perhaps. Section 2071 is very broad, targeting anyone who “removes” or “destroys” “any” government record. If you are wondering how this did not apply to Hillary Clinton’s removal of tens of thousands of government-related emails and willful destruction of tens of thousands of others, you are not alone. In any event, Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure permits the seizure not only of evidence of a crime but also of “items illegally possessed.” It seems clear from the context that this phrase is meant to apply to items derived from criminal activity. Literally, though, it is clearly broader than that.

Since Congress did not choose to attach criminal penalties to violations of the Presidential Records Act, what we see here amounts to the Justice Department fashioning a new crime for Donald Trump. This is not my idea of the even-handed enforcement of the law — no partisan discrimination — that Attorney General Merrick Garland insisted he pursues in his remarks on Thursday. But there will be plenty of time to discuss that.

My point for present purposes is that subsection (c) authorized the FBI agents to seize every scrap of paper from the Trump administration. There is no limitation to classified information. There is no limitation to the Presidential Records Act. There is no limitation to the unmentioned Capitol riot. Indeed, there is no requirement that any scrap of paper be connected in any way to any crime whatsoever. No restriction at all. If it was arguably a government record of any kind generated during the Trump presidency, the judge said the bureau could take it.

The FBI and Justice Department will be doing what I told you they’d be doing: Poring over everything and anything from Trump’s presidency to try to make a January 6 case. What was executed at Monday’s historically unprecedented search of a former American president’s home was not a traditional search warrant to find evidence of specific crimes. It was certainly not a search warrant solely to retrieve vital national-defense secrets. This search warrant was a license for a fishing expedition. In an ocean.

The Justice Department is hoping the Trump trove will yield proof that he did not believe his stop-the-steal rhetoric and was willfully trying to steal by fraud and political pressure an election he knew he lost. I believe that is what the Justice Department thinks it needs to charge the former president with corruptly obstructing Congress’s count of state-certified electoral votes, and with conspiring to defraud the government.

Whether they will find the needles in the haystack remains to be seen. But they made sure to get control of the haystack.
Title: Recommended by MY
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 13, 2022, 06:27:41 PM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/special-report-behind-the-trump-raid_4659233.html?utm_source=goodeveningnoe&utm_campaign=gv-2022-08-13&utm_medium=email&est=XFuva359yjqx4edoRnGmhJQColM%2B7%2FBFDmAK6J0r%2FTHrLk7jH4GB5kokmDhKvlp8x0y2i9xj&utm_content=TrumpSpecial
Title: Re: Some interesting points from AMcC
Post by: G M on August 14, 2022, 07:33:26 AM
"Can DOJ get away with this? Perhaps. Section 2071 is very broad, targeting anyone who “removes” or “destroys” “any” government record. If you are wondering how this did not apply to Hillary Clinton’s removal of tens of thousands of government-related emails and willful destruction of tens of thousands of others, you are not alone. In any event, Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure permits the seizure not only of evidence of a crime but also of “items illegally possessed.” It seems clear from the context that this phrase is meant to apply to items derived from criminal activity. Literally, though, it is clearly broader than that."

Wow! Way to criticize your DOJ buddies without getting uninvited to lunch and golf!


By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 13, 2022 6:30 AM
Already, we can see that the investigation is far broader than just the mishandling of classified information.
The Mar-a-Lago search warrant has been unsealed. Turns out it is what I told you it was going to be: an open-ended license to grab any item that might be relevant to the Justice Department’s Capitol-riot investigation.

To be sure, the government is very interested in reclaiming every bit of classified information — or, at least, information that it claims is classified — in Donald Trump’s possession at his Mar-a-Lago estate. The warrant, however, is not limited to evidence of classified-information crimes, not even close.

According to the warrant’s Attachment B, which describes the “property to be seized,” the Justice Department sought (and received) judicial authority to seize evidence of three crimes related to the mishandling of government records: the Espionage Act (Section 793); the concealment, removal, or mutilation of government records (Section 2071); and the obstruction of investigations by altering or destroying evidence (Section 1519).

Already, we can see that the investigation is far broader than just the mishandling of classified information. While the Espionage Act offense relates to defense secrets, the other two offenses are not limited to classified information: Section 2071 relates to the removal or concealment of any government record, not just classified intelligence; and Section 1519 applies to any item at all — it need not be a government record, for the point is to protect government investigations, not government property.

From there, Attachment B seems to prioritize classified-information crimes, but less so than appears at first blush. Subsection (a) authorizes agents to seize documents marked classified, but the license is much broader — the warrant allows seizure of not only containers in which classified documents are found (along with their other contents, even if they are not classified), but also of other containers found proximate to those first containers, again, regardless of whether the contents are classified. So, for example, if agents found one low-level classified document in a container that was stored next to ten other containers of nonclassified documents, the warrant permitted seizure of all of the nonclassified containers and their nonclassified contents.

Then there’s subsection (b), which permits the seizure of communications, in any form, regarding classified information. Note: The communications do not have to be classified to be seized; they can be nonclassified and about anything as long as they have some connection to classified information.

Where things get really, shall we say, elastic is subsection (c). It permits the seizure of “any government and/or Presidential Records created” throughout the four years of Trump’s presidency.

Plainly, this has nothing to do with classified information. It is mainly designed to use the criminal law — the search warrant, an intrusive tactic for retrieving evidence of crimes — to enforce the Presidential Records Act, which is not a criminal statute.

Can DOJ get away with this? Perhaps. Section 2071 is very broad, targeting anyone who “removes” or “destroys” “any” government record. If you are wondering how this did not apply to Hillary Clinton’s removal of tens of thousands of government-related emails and willful destruction of tens of thousands of others, you are not alone. In any event, Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure permits the seizure not only of evidence of a crime but also of “items illegally possessed.” It seems clear from the context that this phrase is meant to apply to items derived from criminal activity. Literally, though, it is clearly broader than that.

Since Congress did not choose to attach criminal penalties to violations of the Presidential Records Act, what we see here amounts to the Justice Department fashioning a new crime for Donald Trump. This is not my idea of the even-handed enforcement of the law — no partisan discrimination — that Attorney General Merrick Garland insisted he pursues in his remarks on Thursday. But there will be plenty of time to discuss that.

My point for present purposes is that subsection (c) authorized the FBI agents to seize every scrap of paper from the Trump administration. There is no limitation to classified information. There is no limitation to the Presidential Records Act. There is no limitation to the unmentioned Capitol riot. Indeed, there is no requirement that any scrap of paper be connected in any way to any crime whatsoever. No restriction at all. If it was arguably a government record of any kind generated during the Trump presidency, the judge said the bureau could take it.

The FBI and Justice Department will be doing what I told you they’d be doing: Poring over everything and anything from Trump’s presidency to try to make a January 6 case. What was executed at Monday’s historically unprecedented search of a former American president’s home was not a traditional search warrant to find evidence of specific crimes. It was certainly not a search warrant solely to retrieve vital national-defense secrets. This search warrant was a license for a fishing expedition. In an ocean.

The Justice Department is hoping the Trump trove will yield proof that he did not believe his stop-the-steal rhetoric and was willfully trying to steal by fraud and political pressure an election he knew he lost. I believe that is what the Justice Department thinks it needs to charge the former president with corruptly obstructing Congress’s count of state-certified electoral votes, and with conspiring to defraud the government.

Whether they will find the needles in the haystack remains to be seen. But they made sure to get control of the haystack.
Title: Trump records negotiator
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 14, 2022, 04:29:21 PM
Trump Records Negotiator: Former President in ‘Bureaucratic Battle’ Over Classified Documents
By Jack Phillips August 14, 2022 Updated: August 14, 2022biggersmaller Print

0:00
3:53



1

Former White House official Kash Patel on Sunday revealed former President Donald Trump has been involved in a battle with the federal government to declassify documents before last week’s FBI raid.

Patel, who was a top official in the Department of Defense, said Trump declassified numerous documents.

“President Trump made me his representative a month ago, and we’ve been in a bureaucratic battle,” he told Fox News on Sunday morning. “We found whole sets of documents we got out to the American public … about 60 percent.”

Patel, who hosts “Kash’s Corner” for Epoch TV, added that Trump “made it his mission to declassify and be transparent.”

“In October 2020, he issued a sweeping declassification order for every single Russiagate document and every single [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton document,” Patel said, adding that “whole sets of documents” were declassified under his watch.

“And this is a key fact … President Trump, as a sitting president, is a unilateral authority for declassification,” he continued. “He can literally stand over a set of documents and say ‘these are now declassified,’ and that is done with definitive action immediately.”

Patel further noted that due to the Department of Justice’s latest actions and the FBI’s ongoing investigation, Americans “will never be allowed to see the Russiagate docs or any other docs that President Trump lawfully declassified, and they will hide it from the public.”

Other Details
Late last week, a U.S. magistrate judge ordered the release of the FBI warrant and property record used to raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. The documents showed the FBI seized alleged classified documents and said the former president may be under investigation for possibly violating the 1917 Espionage Act and obstruction of justice, although neither the Justice Department nor FBI have released the affidavit in the case.

In late 2020, Trump issued a declassification memo that referred to materials connected to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which has been the subject of intense controversy and scrutiny. Republicans and Trump have long asserted the investigation used fabricated information and anonymous leaks to the press to denigrate the former president.

“I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy,” then-President Trump wrote on Dec. 30, 2020, or just three weeks before Joe Biden was sworn in as president.

After the warrant and property receipt were unsealed, Trump posted to his Truth Social page that the materials the FBI allegedly took were “all declassified.”

“They didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request,” he wrote on the website on Aug. 12.

On Sunday, the former president wrote that among other items that were taken by agents, attorney-client material and executive privileged material were removed from Mar-a-Lago.

“By copy of this TRUTH, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!” Trump wrote.
Title: Standards!
Post by: G M on August 15, 2022, 12:14:44 AM
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/444/612/original/3ebe1f0b72c6d92f.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/113/444/612/original/3ebe1f0b72c6d92f.jpeg)
Title: Re: Trump records negotiator
Post by: DougMacG on August 15, 2022, 12:39:17 AM
From the article :
"And this is a key fact … President Trump, as a sitting president, is a unilateral authority for declassification,” he continued. “He can literally stand over a set of documents and say ‘these are now declassified,’ and that is done with definitive action immediately.”

Right. And if that document was still labeled "classified",  it would be  a wrongly labeled document, not a classified document. That is my understanding.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2022, 03:39:07 AM
Mine too.
Title: from breitbart today : phony conspiracy theory or fire behind the smoke?
Post by: ccp on August 15, 2022, 06:17:33 AM
Recall, investigative reporter Paul Sperry was suspended from Twitter earlier this week after he revealed the FBI may have had a personal stake and searched for classified documents related to Spygate.

“DEVELOPING: Investigators reportedly met back in June w Trump & his lawyers in Mar-a-Lago storage rm to survey docs & things seemed copasetic but then FBI raids weeks later. Speculation on Hill FBI had PERSONAL stake & searching for classified docs related to its #Spygate scandal.”


– investigative journalist Paul Sperry said in a tweet Tuesday before getting suspended from Twitter.

Prior to being suspended from using the social media outlet, Sperry also tweeted a list of “conflicted” DOJ officials who were “briefed on the Mar-a-Lago raid” and noted that “CNN is admonishing reporters not to call the FBI raid of Trump’s home a “raid” but instead to term it as a “judge-approved search.”

The list of “conflicted” DOJ officials included:

Nicholas MCQuaid, who worked with Hunter Biden’s and Michael Sussman’s criminal attorneys, Lisa Monaco, who was an Obama Aide and is implicated in Russiagate, and Maggie Goodlander, who is the wife of top Biden aide Jake Sullivan, implicated in Russiagate.


And now Sperry dropped another bomb on Saturday.

According to Sperry, the federal agents involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid are under investigation by Special Counsel John Durham for being involved in investigating Trump prior to the raid on his home.


“Developing: Sources say the FBI agents and officials who were involved in the raid on former President Trump’s home work in the same Counterintelligence Division of the FBI that investigated Trump in the Russiagate hoax and are actively under criminal investigation by Special Counsel John Durham for potentially abusing their power investigating Trump in the Russian fraud and therefore have a potential conflict of interest and should have been RECUSED from participating in this supposed “espionage” investigation at Mar-a-Lago”

-Sperry said in a social media post on Saturday, just before being suspended from Twitter..

It appears the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago to seize documents that likely implicated the FBI – and now they’re claiming the records were related to nuclear weapons to justify the raid, Gateway Pundit noted."


Title: Patriot Post
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2022, 12:19:43 PM

, , ,

Recall all the classified "Top Secret" information Hillary Clinton transmitted on her personal email accounts and maintained on servers hidden in her residential closet, which she had her staff "wipe" ahead of the 2016 election to hide her communications from any future public scrutiny. I covered those actions in detail in "Clinton's Secret Communication Subterfuge."

Recall also that in July 2016, ahead of the presidential election, then-FBI Director Comey reopened the FBI investigation into Clinton's coms, then took the unusual step of exonerating Clinton from any prosecutable offense under 18 U.S. Code § 793 in a public statement. He did so despite the fact he knew then that Clinton's unsecured coms and servers had been compromised by foreign intelligence hackers — likely Russian.

According to Comey, Clinton set up and used "several different [private] servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain."

But here is the key to Comey's justification for exonerating Clinton: He also said that "any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton's position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation."

Let's be clear: Maintaining hard copies of some documents in a secured area of a former president's house, which is protected by the Secret Service among other law enforcement security personnel, is a minuscule national security risk compared to transmitting and storing highly classified information electronically in an unsecured residence.

Of course, any objective observer knew that Comey's higher loyalty was to Clinton's campaign. Further, Comey then provided the layup for the fake "Russian collusion" investigation of Trump, which took three years to totally debunk by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation — but the intended damage to Trump's agenda was done.

As for the Biden/Demo ulterior motive for the raid?

As I have stated previously, whoever the Demo presidential nominee will be in 2024 (and I assert again it will not be Biden), Democrats absolutely want Trump to run again. Despite their "Br'er Rabbit" strategy of insisting they don't want Trump to run, they are in fact baiting him to do so, certain they can win on the hate and division they can foment against a Trump candidacy — as they did in 2020.

Footnote: In a textbook case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who has now lost all of his marbles, suggested Trump should be executed like the Rosenbergs for giving nuke secrets to Russia.
Title: NYP: Obama's records
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2022, 02:35:06 PM
https://nypost.com/2022/08/14/theres-no-sainthood-for-obama-national-archives-in-trump-fbi-raid-uproar/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=com.facebook.Messenger.ShareExtension&fbclid=IwAR11waIcjRKauDvP_otU5tAliPsEtSjRmrq8Y52B0IKioGFiRuVvVKVdJvs
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2022, 06:10:48 PM
As usual, sharp analysis by AMcC. 

That said, there are some major gaps in it:

1) The description fails to mention that the very purpose of Hillary's server was to evade the National Records Act, the Congressional subpoena she blew off when she destroyed 30,000 emails, that the standard set for the criminal statute she violated was NOT INTENT, but rather RECKLESSNESS.  It would not have been amiss that President had opined during the then ongoing investigation that Hillary "lacked bad intent" and that the decision was announced by FBI Comey (well outside of his job description of the Fed. Bur. of INVESTIGATION) but that he had stepped in because AG Loretta Lynch had stepped in by getting caught the week before trying to have a secret meeting with Hillary's husband, who as President had appointed her-- a clear violation of Judicial Cannon etc.

2) He fails to mention all the private property of Trump that was seized.

3) Though he has made the point well previously, the bootstrap operation here was to get in the door for a general fishing expedition.  What happened to his previous point that the warrant was a general warrant and as such unconstitutional?

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 15, 2022 1:58 PM

Some of the documents seized in the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago may be covered by privilege — but all of them are the property of the government by law.

As with myriad other controversies ignited by Donald Trump’s norm-breaking and the irate norm-breaking with which it inspires his opponents to respond (while each side indignantly slams the other for, you know, breaking norms), the Mar-a-Lago don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-raid has reached peak farce.

First, it emerged over the weekend, as if it were stunning news, that some of the documents seized in the FBI’s search of Trump’s estate may have been covered by the attorney-client and executive privileges. Then, the former president issued a statement on his Truth Social platform claiming that the FBI “knowingly should not have taken” this “privileged material,” and “respectfully request[ing] that these documents be returned to the location from which they were taken.”

Okay, we need to back up the truck here.

“The location from which [these privileged documents] were taken” was, at least originally, the White House: Then-president Trump brought them with him to Mar-a-Lago when he left office. What the FBI did last week was retrieve them.

I know this was at least four Trump news cycles ago, so it feels like ancient history, but the original fact from which all else flows is that, classified or not, the documents at issue are government records. Even if they are subject to legitimate privilege claims, the documents are still the property of the United States.

So of course the FBI took privileged documents from Mar-a-Lago. To repeat what I laid out over the weekend, the warrant that the bureau executed, approved by a federal district court in Florida, authorized the agents to take every shred of paper generated during the four years of the Trump presidency that it could find. Since presidential administrations produce mounds of work product covered by the executive and/or attorney-client privileges over a four-year term, the search was always likely to result in the seizure of at least some privileged material.

Let’s keep our eye on the ball. When evaluating the Justice Department’s behavior in this situation, the question we should ask is: Did government officials go too far in the methods by which they reclaimed presidential records? Was the impasse between the DOJ’s lawyers and Trump’s lawyers really so serious, so dire, that the Justice Department and FBI needed to get involved? Was it really necessary to turn a conflict between the National Archives and a former president into a criminal-law controversy and, for the first time in history, search the residence of a former American president?

In other words, the issue is not whether Trump committed a wrong, but whether the government’s actions were a proportional response to that wrong; Trump was unquestionably in violation of the law.

Let’s say you believe, as I do, that (a) for as long as he remained president, Trump had the legal authority to declassify any government document he chose to declassify, no matter how irresponsible doing so might have been; and (b) the Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute and is not meant to be enforced through search warrants and indictments. Even assuming those beliefs to be true, the Presidential Records Act is still the law of the land. It is a presumptively valid congressional statute that has been on the books, without being invalidated by a court, for nearly half a century.

Under the PRA, the records generated by the Trump presidency are the property of the United States government. Trump had no lawful right to keep them down at Mar-a-Lago. This is not just about the classified information Trump kept there; it’s about all of the presidential records he kept there, no matter how trivial. There are separate issues pertinent to the classified documents, because there are laws and regulations unique to them, owing to the fact that the nation can be harmed if they fall into the wrong hands — which makes it especially irresponsible of Trump to keep them in his home. But even if none of the materials he’d stored at Mar-a-Lago had been classified, Trump would still have committed a violation of the law by removing presidential records from a government facility and retaining them as if they were his personal property.

For all of his fury, I do not believe Trump himself has ever claimed to be in compliance with the PRA. He’s tried to deflect by claiming that other presidents did what he’s done, but those claims are wrong — and they wouldn’t constitute a defense of his actions even if they were accurate.

Contrary to Trump’s assertions, President Obama did not interfere when the National Archives took custody of millions of pages of his presidential records. And when President Clinton sleazily swiped nearly $200,000 of property (including furniture, china, and flatware) upon leaving the White House, the government did not stand idly by; Clinton ended up reimbursing the government for most of it — and documents were not at issue.

Trump has further claimed that he told government officials they could have anything they wanted, they just needed to ask. That, however, is neither the whole story nor the way things are supposed to work. The National Archives had been trying to get the records back for over a year. After resisting, Trump finally gave them about 15 boxes’ worth of material, but, as is now clear, he retained a great deal more. There is no requirement that the government itemize which of its records it wants back; Trump should not have taken them in the first place, and should have returned all of them on request, end of story. This is not supposed to be a negotiation.

With no defense, Trump has framed himself as the victim of government hyper-aggression. It’s a shrewd framing because there’s truth in it. But it only gets him so far, because again, he unquestionably violated the law. The National Archives wanted the records back. Trump didn’t want to give them back and calculated that the government wouldn’t do much about it. That was a bad bet for a guy who was (a) in improper possession of classified documents whose security government officials were worried about; and (b) under investigation in connection with the Capitol riot, a probe that the DOJ is pressing with zeal.

We can question whether Trump’s conduct was so illegal that it was proper for the government to escalate to a search of his residence when other efforts at persuasion apparently did not work. Based on what we now know, I think the answer to that question is no. But that’s not because what Trump did was legitimate; it wasn’t. Rather, it’s because the government has not resorted to such an extraordinary step in recent history.

For example, I believed that, quite apart from her gross negligence in handling classified information (which the FBI acknowledged), the most compelling case for prosecuting Hillary Clinton over the email scandal was the fact that she systematically converted to her own use and then destroyed thousands of government records. I argued that she should be prosecuted under the federal embezzlement statute, which makes conversion and destruction of government records a crime. Nevertheless, once they decided her recklessness with classified intelligence did not merit prosecution, the Hillary-smitten Obama-Biden Justice Department barely acknowledged her felonious conversion and purging of other government records.

Having taken that position, I don’t think there’s much chance DOJ will prosecute Trump on the potential allegations laid out in the search warrant. (I’ll talk more about that in a separate post.) But understand: Even if you believe that there should be no charges, and that the Biden administration should not have used criminal-law tactics to retrieve presidential records from Mar-a-Lago, there is no doubt that the records are the government’s property. If you are defending Trump after you chanted “lock her up” in response to Clinton’s malfeasance six years ago, that is only a worthy argument because she got a pass. They were both in the wrong.

The privilege issues Trump now cites have no bearing on the rightful ownership of the documents in question. Remember last year, when the House January 6 committee made a formal request for Trump’s presidential records and Trump responded by trying to assert executive privilege? Trump did not have possession of those documents. The committee’s formal request went to the archivist of the United States, because these records — the vast majority of Trump presidential records — were properly stored at the National Archives. The courts still entertained the former president’s privilege claims (and ruled against him). But the claims themselves had nothing to do with the ownership or possession of the records.

Privilege conveys confidentiality, not ownership. If Trump has valid attorney-client or executive privilege claims on documents the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago, that might affect whether the Justice Department may get access to those documents and use them in its investigations of the former president — such as its January 6 probe. But such access has no bearing on who owns the documents. The privileges may belong to Trump; the materials themselves do not.
Title: VDH gets closer to the Truth
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 15, 2022, 06:21:45 PM
4th:
==================


While AMCC seems to be right on the Government's ownership rights in the documents, this, it seems to me, gets closer to the Truth:
======================

FBI, R.I.P.?
Victor Davis Hanson
August 12, 2022 Updated: August 15, 2022

Commentary

The FBI is dissolving before our eyes into a rogue security service akin to those in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

Take the FBI’s deliberately asymmetrical application of the law. Last week, the bureau surprise-raided the home of former President Donald Trump—an historical first.

A massive phalanx of FBI agents swooped into the Trump residence while he wasn’t home to confiscate his personal property, safe, and records. All of this was over an archival dispute of presidential papers common to many former presidents. Agents swarmed the entire house, including the wardrobe closet of the former first lady.

Note we are less than 90 days out from a midterm election. This was not just a raid, but a political act.

The Democratic Party is anticipated to suffer historical losses. Trump was on the verge of announcing his 2024 presidential candidacy. In many polls, he remains the Republican frontrunner for the nomination—and well ahead of incumbent President Joe Biden in a putative 2024 rematch.

In 2016, then-FBI Director James Comey announced that candidate Hillary Clinton was guilty of destroying subpoenaed emails—a likely felony pertaining to her tenure as secretary of state. Yet he all but pledged that she would not be prosecuted given her status as a presidential candidate.

As far as targeting presidential candidates, Trump was impeached in 2020 ostensibly for delaying military aid to Ukraine by asking Ukrainian officials to investigate more fully the clearly corrupt Biden family—given Joe Biden at the time was a likely possible presidential opponent in 2020.

The FBI has devolved into a personal retrieval service for the incorrigible Biden family. It suppressed, for political purposes, information surrounding Hunter Biden’s missing laptop on the eve of the 2020 election.

Previously, the FBI never pursued Hunter’s fraudulently registered firearm, his mysterious foreign income, his felonious crack cocaine use, or his regular employment of foreign prostitutes.

Yet in a predawn raid just before the 2020 election, the FBI targeted the home of journalist James O’Keefe on grounds that someone had passed to him the lost and lurid diary of Ashley Biden, Biden’s wayward daughter.

At various times, in Stasi-style, the FBI has publicly shackled Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro, swarmed the office of Trump’s legal counsel Rudy Giuliani, and sent a SWAT team to surround the house of Trump ally Roger Stone. Meanwhile, terrorists and cartels walk with impunity across an open border.

FBI Director Christopher Wray last week cut short his evasive testimony before Congress. He claimed he had to leave for a critical appointment—only to use his FBI Gulfstream luxury jet to fly to his favorite vacation spot in the Adirondacks.

Wray took over from disgraced interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe. The latter admitted to lying repeatedly to federal investigators and signed off on a fraudulent FBI FISA application. He faced zero legal consequences.

McCabe, remember, was also the point man in the softball Hillary Clinton email investigation—while his wife was a political candidate and recipient of thousands of dollars from a political action committee with close ties to the Clinton family.

McCabe took over from disgraced FBI Director James Comey. On 245 occasions, Comey claimed under oath before the House Intelligence Committee that he had no memory or knowledge of key questions concerning his tenure. With impunity, he leaked confidential FBI memos to the media.

Comey took over from Director Robert Mueller. Implausibly, Mueller swore under oath that he had no knowledge of either the Steele dossier or of Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned Christopher Steele to compile the dossier. But those were the very twin catalysts that had prompted his entire special investigation into the Russian collusion hoax.

FBI legal counsel Kevin Clinesmith was convicted of a felony for altering an FBI warrant request to spy on an innocent Carter Page.

The FBI, by Comey’s own public boasts, bragged how it caught national security adviser designate Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in its Crossfire Hurricane Russian collusion hoax.

As special counsel, Mueller then fired two of his top investigators—Lisa Page and Peter Strzok—for improper personal and professional behavior. He then staggered their releases to mask their collaborative wrongdoing.

Mueller’s team deleted critical cellphone evidence under subpoena that might well have revealed systemic FBI-related bias.

The FBI interferes with and warps national elections. It hires complete frauds as informants who are far worse than its targets. It humiliates or exempts government and elected officials based on their politics. It violates the civil liberties of individual American citizens.

The FBI’s highest officials now routinely mislead Congress. They have erased or altered court and subpoenaed evidence. They illegally leak confidential material to the media. And they have lied under oath to federal investigators.

The agency has become dangerous to Americans and an existential threat to their democracy and rule of law. The FBI should be dispersing its investigatory responsibilities to other government investigative agencies that have not yet lost the public’s trust.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 16, 2022, 02:49:32 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/15/pressure-mounts-biden-administration-slap-cuffs-tr/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=1nANBKqu0AhzdEBkLrZXV6O7dlBoqU8T%2FDg%2BNfkEUP2HCbiu0Jc5NRME%2BgNAAvEI&bt_ts=1660643134507
Title: Dershowitz
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 16, 2022, 03:08:39 AM
second

Double Standard by Civil Libertarians against Trump Endangers the Rule of Law
by Alan M. Dershowitz
August 16, 2022 at 5:00 am

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has repeatedly challenged the constitutionality and applicability of the Espionage Act to anti-government activities by left-wing radicals, is strangely silent when the same overbroad law is deployed against a political figure whose politics they deplore.

Then there is the manner by which Trump loyalists have been treated when they were indicted. Several have been arrested, handcuffed and shackled, despite not having been charged with crimes of violence and despite the absence of evidence that they were planning to flee... [M]ost other comparable defendants are simply notified of the charges and ordered to appear in court. Yet despite this apparent double standard, the left has been silent.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland commendably stated that the Justice Department is dedicated to the "evenhanded application of the law." But recent applications of the law suggest otherwise. "Due process for me but not for thee" seems to have replaced the equal protection of the law as the guiding principle.

Perhaps the most glaring manifestation of the double standard currently at work is the different approach taken to the alleged mishandling of classified material by Trump,

(MARC: It is strongly asserted by Trump that as President he declassified the material in question)

on the one hand, and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, on the other hand. No wide-ranging search warrants were sought for Clinton's home, where private servers were apparently kept and subpoenaed material even possibly destroyed.

(MARC:  Possibly?!?  No, there is no fg doubt whatsoever that she destroyed 30,000+ emails!!!  All generated as part of a purposeful scheme to evade the government records laws as well as the security of top secret diplomatic correspondence.!!!)

Equal justice for Democrats and Republicans must not only be done; it must be seen to be done. There must be one law, and one application of law, for all comparable acts and persons. There must also be one standard of civil liberties — and complaints about their violation — by principled civil libertarians.

This unacceptable double standard is so widespread that it endangers the rule of law and the historic role of neutral, non-partisan civil liberties that protect it from partisan weaponization.

Civil liberties require a single standard without regard to party, ideology or person. This great tradition has not been evident when it comes to the treatment of Donald Trump. A double standard has been manifested in a number of ways. (Image source: iStock)

Civil liberties require a single standard without regard to party, ideology or person. The right of Nazis to their despicable free speech must be protected with the same vigor as the right of Salman Rushdie. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in particular, and good civil libertarians in general, used to live by that creed. That is what makes them different from special pleaders who limit their advocacy to those who agree or identify with them. This great tradition — that led John Adams to defend the hated British soldiers who were accused of the Boston massacre and led the old ACLU to defend the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois — has not been evident when it comes to the treatment of Donald Trump. A double standard has been manifested in a number of ways.

The most serious alleged crime cited in the Trump search warrant is under the Espionage Act of 1917. In the past, many leftist civil libertarians have railed against the breadth and scope of this law, calling it repressive and unconstitutionally vague. Among the people who were prosecuted, indicted or investigated under the Espionage Act are progressive icons such as socialists Eugene V. Debs and Charles Schenk, antiwar activists Daniel Ellsberg and Dr. Benjamin Spock, whistleblowers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, as well as many others who made unpopular speeches, engaged in protests or took other actions deemed unpatriotic by the government.

But now that the shoe is on the other foot — now that the same law is being deployed against a possible presidential candidate they deplore — many of these same leftists are demanding that this accordion-like law be expanded to fit Trump's alleged mishandling of classified material. The ACLU, which has repeatedly challenged the constitutionality and applicability of the Espionage Act to anti-government activities by left-wing radicals, is strangely silent when the same overbroad law is deployed against a political figure whose politics they deplore.

The same double standard seems to be at work regarding the FBI's search of Mar-a-Lago. Many civil libertarians have complained about the overuse of search warrants in situations where a "less intrusive" and narrower subpoena would suffice. Even U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland acknowledged that the policy of the Justice Department is to use measures less intrusive than a full-blown search whenever possible. Yet he did not explain why a day-long search of Trump's home was necessary, especially since a subpoena had been issued and could have been judicially enforced if the government was dissatisfied with the progress of negotiations. Again, silence from the ACLU and other left-wing civil libertarians.

Then there is the manner by which Trump loyalists have been treated when they were indicted. Several have been arrested, handcuffed and shackled, despite not having been charged with crimes of violence and despite the absence of evidence that they were planning to flee. In my long experience, most other comparable defendants are simply notified of the charges and ordered to appear in court. Yet despite this apparent double standard, the left has been silent.

Garland commendably stated that the Justice Department is dedicated to the "evenhanded application of the law." But recent applications of the law suggest otherwise. "Due process for me but not for thee" seems to have replaced the equal protection of the law as the guiding principle.

Perhaps the most glaring manifestation of the double standard currently at work is the different approach taken to the alleged mishandling of classified material by Trump, on the one hand, and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, on the other hand. No wide-ranging search warrants were sought for Clinton's home, where private servers were apparently kept and subpoenaed material even possibly destroyed.
Then FBI director James Comey announced that no criminal prosecution has ever been taken for comparable mishandling of classified material. The same was true of former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger's deliberate hiding of such material in his socks. Berger was administratively fined but not criminally prosecuted for willfully violating the law concerning secret documents. Yet the Espionage Act was not invoked against him.

Equal justice for Democrats and Republicans must not only be done; it must be seen to be done. There must be one law, and one application of law, for all comparable acts and persons. There must also be one standard of civil liberties — and complaints about their violation — by principled civil libertarians. The salutary goal seems to be missing from recent attempts to "get" Trump and his loyalists regardless of the principle of equal justice for friend and foe alike.

To the contrary, those of us who — despite our opposition to Trump politically — insist that the same standards of civil liberties must be applied to him as to those we support politically, have lost friends, been defamed by the media and been cancelled. This unacceptable double standard is so widespread that it endangers the rule of law and the historic role of neutral, non-partisan civil liberties that protect it from partisan weaponization.

Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of The Price of Principles: Why Integrity Is Worth Its Consequences. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute, and is also the host of "The Dershow," podcast.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on August 16, 2022, 09:36:58 AM
DSA floats the "the documents are government property". Did I miss where it's different from all the prior presidents documents?

As usual, sharp analysis by AMcC. 

That said, there are some major gaps in it:

1) The description fails to mention that the very purpose of Hillary's server was to evade the National Records Act, the Congressional subpoena she blew off when she destroyed 30,000 emails, that the standard set for the criminal statute she violated was NOT INTENT, but rather RECKLESSNESS.  It would not have been amiss that President had opined during the then ongoing investigation that Hillary "lacked bad intent" and that the decision was announced by FBI Comey (well outside of his job description of the Fed. Bur. of INVESTIGATION) but that he had stepped in because AG Loretta Lynch had stepped in by getting caught the week before trying to have a secret meeting with Hillary's husband, who as President had appointed her-- a clear violation of Judicial Cannon etc.

2) He fails to mention all the private property of Trump that was seized.

3) Though he has made the point well previously, the bootstrap operation here was to get in the door for a general fishing expedition.  What happened to his previous point that the warrant was a general warrant and as such unconstitutional?

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
August 15, 2022 1:58 PM

Some of the documents seized in the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago may be covered by privilege — but all of them are the property of the government by law.

As with myriad other controversies ignited by Donald Trump’s norm-breaking and the irate norm-breaking with which it inspires his opponents to respond (while each side indignantly slams the other for, you know, breaking norms), the Mar-a-Lago don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-raid has reached peak farce.

First, it emerged over the weekend, as if it were stunning news, that some of the documents seized in the FBI’s search of Trump’s estate may have been covered by the attorney-client and executive privileges. Then, the former president issued a statement on his Truth Social platform claiming that the FBI “knowingly should not have taken” this “privileged material,” and “respectfully request[ing] that these documents be returned to the location from which they were taken.”

Okay, we need to back up the truck here.

“The location from which [these privileged documents] were taken” was, at least originally, the White House: Then-president Trump brought them with him to Mar-a-Lago when he left office. What the FBI did last week was retrieve them.

I know this was at least four Trump news cycles ago, so it feels like ancient history, but the original fact from which all else flows is that, classified or not, the documents at issue are government records. Even if they are subject to legitimate privilege claims, the documents are still the property of the United States.

So of course the FBI took privileged documents from Mar-a-Lago. To repeat what I laid out over the weekend, the warrant that the bureau executed, approved by a federal district court in Florida, authorized the agents to take every shred of paper generated during the four years of the Trump presidency that it could find. Since presidential administrations produce mounds of work product covered by the executive and/or attorney-client privileges over a four-year term, the search was always likely to result in the seizure of at least some privileged material.

Let’s keep our eye on the ball. When evaluating the Justice Department’s behavior in this situation, the question we should ask is: Did government officials go too far in the methods by which they reclaimed presidential records? Was the impasse between the DOJ’s lawyers and Trump’s lawyers really so serious, so dire, that the Justice Department and FBI needed to get involved? Was it really necessary to turn a conflict between the National Archives and a former president into a criminal-law controversy and, for the first time in history, search the residence of a former American president?

In other words, the issue is not whether Trump committed a wrong, but whether the government’s actions were a proportional response to that wrong; Trump was unquestionably in violation of the law.

Let’s say you believe, as I do, that (a) for as long as he remained president, Trump had the legal authority to declassify any government document he chose to declassify, no matter how irresponsible doing so might have been; and (b) the Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute and is not meant to be enforced through search warrants and indictments. Even assuming those beliefs to be true, the Presidential Records Act is still the law of the land. It is a presumptively valid congressional statute that has been on the books, without being invalidated by a court, for nearly half a century.

Under the PRA, the records generated by the Trump presidency are the property of the United States government. Trump had no lawful right to keep them down at Mar-a-Lago. This is not just about the classified information Trump kept there; it’s about all of the presidential records he kept there, no matter how trivial. There are separate issues pertinent to the classified documents, because there are laws and regulations unique to them, owing to the fact that the nation can be harmed if they fall into the wrong hands — which makes it especially irresponsible of Trump to keep them in his home. But even if none of the materials he’d stored at Mar-a-Lago had been classified, Trump would still have committed a violation of the law by removing presidential records from a government facility and retaining them as if they were his personal property.

For all of his fury, I do not believe Trump himself has ever claimed to be in compliance with the PRA. He’s tried to deflect by claiming that other presidents did what he’s done, but those claims are wrong — and they wouldn’t constitute a defense of his actions even if they were accurate.

Contrary to Trump’s assertions, President Obama did not interfere when the National Archives took custody of millions of pages of his presidential records. And when President Clinton sleazily swiped nearly $200,000 of property (including furniture, china, and flatware) upon leaving the White House, the government did not stand idly by; Clinton ended up reimbursing the government for most of it — and documents were not at issue.

Trump has further claimed that he told government officials they could have anything they wanted, they just needed to ask. That, however, is neither the whole story nor the way things are supposed to work. The National Archives had been trying to get the records back for over a year. After resisting, Trump finally gave them about 15 boxes’ worth of material, but, as is now clear, he retained a great deal more. There is no requirement that the government itemize which of its records it wants back; Trump should not have taken them in the first place, and should have returned all of them on request, end of story. This is not supposed to be a negotiation.

With no defense, Trump has framed himself as the victim of government hyper-aggression. It’s a shrewd framing because there’s truth in it. But it only gets him so far, because again, he unquestionably violated the law. The National Archives wanted the records back. Trump didn’t want to give them back and calculated that the government wouldn’t do much about it. That was a bad bet for a guy who was (a) in improper possession of classified documents whose security government officials were worried about; and (b) under investigation in connection with the Capitol riot, a probe that the DOJ is pressing with zeal.

We can question whether Trump’s conduct was so illegal that it was proper for the government to escalate to a search of his residence when other efforts at persuasion apparently did not work. Based on what we now know, I think the answer to that question is no. But that’s not because what Trump did was legitimate; it wasn’t. Rather, it’s because the government has not resorted to such an extraordinary step in recent history.

For example, I believed that, quite apart from her gross negligence in handling classified information (which the FBI acknowledged), the most compelling case for prosecuting Hillary Clinton over the email scandal was the fact that she systematically converted to her own use and then destroyed thousands of government records. I argued that she should be prosecuted under the federal embezzlement statute, which makes conversion and destruction of government records a crime. Nevertheless, once they decided her recklessness with classified intelligence did not merit prosecution, the Hillary-smitten Obama-Biden Justice Department barely acknowledged her felonious conversion and purging of other government records.

Having taken that position, I don’t think there’s much chance DOJ will prosecute Trump on the potential allegations laid out in the search warrant. (I’ll talk more about that in a separate post.) But understand: Even if you believe that there should be no charges, and that the Biden administration should not have used criminal-law tactics to retrieve presidential records from Mar-a-Lago, there is no doubt that the records are the government’s property. If you are defending Trump after you chanted “lock her up” in response to Clinton’s malfeasance six years ago, that is only a worthy argument because she got a pass. They were both in the wrong.

The privilege issues Trump now cites have no bearing on the rightful ownership of the documents in question. Remember last year, when the House January 6 committee made a formal request for Trump’s presidential records and Trump responded by trying to assert executive privilege? Trump did not have possession of those documents. The committee’s formal request went to the archivist of the United States, because these records — the vast majority of Trump presidential records — were properly stored at the National Archives. The courts still entertained the former president’s privilege claims (and ruled against him). But the claims themselves had nothing to do with the ownership or possession of the records.

Privilege conveys confidentiality, not ownership. If Trump has valid attorney-client or executive privilege claims on documents the FBI seized at Mar-a-Lago, that might affect whether the Justice Department may get access to those documents and use them in its investigations of the former president — such as its January 6 probe. But such access has no bearing on who owns the documents. The privileges may belong to Trump; the materials themselves do not.
Title: A different sort of warrant
Post by: G M on August 16, 2022, 11:56:54 AM
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-different-sort-of-warrant/
Title: NRO
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 16, 2022, 12:14:48 PM
Somehow this piece overlooks that the very purpose of Hillary's private servers was to evade scrutiny, apparently with the venal purpose of covering up her grifting.

Somehow this piece overlooks that the decision whether to prosecute or not pertained to AG Lynch, not FBI Comey, and that Comey applied the wrong legal standard when he applied INTENT instead of the statute's standard of RECKLESSNESS and that THIS was the main pivot point for throwing the investigation.  There were many others of course-- which are well known here on this forum.

Somehow this piece forgets Sandy "Fingers" Berger, Brennan, Clapper, McCabe, Strock, Paige, the various perjuries and lies around the Steele dossier etc et al

=============
Whom Is the Law For?

The grassroots of both the Democrats and the Republicans believe that the opposition party’s leaders get away with murder and that their own leaders get the book thrown at them just for jaywalking.

For the past six years or so, many Democrats scoffed, “But her emails!” — implicitly arguing that whatever Hillary Clinton did regarding her emails, including classified information, back when she was Secretary of State, was unimportant in the context of the 2016 presidential election. And make no mistake, the FBI determined that emails on Clinton’s private server contained classified information. In his infamous July 5, 2016, statement, then-FBI director James Comey revealed that, “110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification.”

To most Trump supporters, the classified information in Hillary’s emails was just one of the most vivid examples of her arrogance and sense that the rules and laws didn’t apply to her. To Hillary’s fanbase, it was a routine paperwork snafu with no real-world consequences that was hyped up by her political enemies.

Fast forward a few years, and now almost everyone in the political-outrage-industrial complex has switched places. Now Donald Trump is accused of taking documents with classified or other sensitive information with him when he left the White House and storing them at Mar-a-Lago, defying a federal law which requires their return to the appropriate archives.

Back in 2016, Comey concluded that Hillary Clinton’s use of an insecure private system was mostly a big misunderstanding, not a deliberate effort to hide her communications from institutional archives or future FOIA requests:

We did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information. . . . There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.

Six years ago, despite the considerable evidence that the then-Democratic nominee for president had violated the law, Comey concluded it was not worth it for the FBI to recommend criminal charges to the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” Comey said. “Prosecutors necessarily weigh a number of factors before bringing charges. There are obvious considerations, like the strength of the evidence, especially regarding intent. In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts . . . although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.”

When I heard about the FBI executing a search warrant in a hunt for unreturned documents with sensitive information, I thought of Comey’s assessment that criminal charges against Clinton just weren’t needed. I also thought about an observation from famous RussiaGate investigator and prosecutor John Durham:

You are only authorized to bring a prosecution if you believe, based upon the evidence that you have, that you are likely to be able to prove a case not to the probable-cause standard, which is all that is required to arrest somebody, but if you believe you can prosecute the case and prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt, and beyond that, that you would be able to sustain that conviction on appeal. And if you can’t say, in all honesty, that you would be able to do that, then prosecution is not warranted.

Someone within federal law enforcement thinks that what was found at Mar-a-Lago represents evidence of a crime that could well lead to an indictment and a conviction — and that the conviction will be sustained upon appeal. (Our Andy McCarthy theorized that the search actually had more to do with investigations relating to January 6: “The ostensible justification for the search of Trump’s compound is his potentially unlawful retention of government records and mishandling of classified information. The real reason is the Capitol riot.”)

Under the law, Donald Trump is just another citizen, no more or less special than anyone else. If the documents are legally required to be kept in secure government facilities, then they are legally required to be kept in secure government facilities, full stop. Whether they’re classified or declassified doesn’t matter. Even if Trump now says he declassified them, courts have previously ruled there has to be a legal record of the declassification — a verbal “standing order” doesn’t cut it. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in July 2020 that, “Declassification cannot occur unless designated officials follow specified procedures. Executive order 13,526 established the detailed process through which secret information can be appropriately declassified. . . . Declassification, even by the president, must follow established procedures.”

But these are far from normal circumstances. Donald Trump is a furious former president who believes that a “deep state” conspired to rig an election and unjustly remove him from office. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have recognized that Trump would perceive the search as the federal government declaring a war against him personally and would respond with apoplectic fury. Whoever authorized this search warrant had better be darn sure that it was worth the likely consequences. A lot of Americans won’t easily grasp — or will choose not to grasp — why a former president keeping old papers, even ones containing sensitive information, in his heavily secured estate should be subjected to criminal charges.

After all, Comey and the FBI didn’t see any need for criminal charges against Hillary in similar circumstances. In fact, Comey’s contention that, “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case” indicates that pressing charges for this sort of thing is wildly unreasonable, or even absurd. In Comey’s account, it wasn’t even a close call.

And the contrast with Hillary Clinton is not the only case where Trump supporters can point to federal law enforcement effectively ignoring what appears to be a slam-dunk case of criminal behavior by a high-profile Democratic figure. Hunter Biden more or less confessed to lying on his paperwork to purchase a firearm in 2018, declaring that he was not “an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance.” While promoting his memoir in spring 2021, the younger Biden said that at the time he’d purchased the gun, he was an addict who smoked crack “literally every 15 minutes.”

Federal prosecutors are apparently still debating whether to press charges against the president’s son; at least one former federal prosecutor argues that the glacial pace of the federal investigation and lengthy deliberation is abnormal. “t’s not adding up. It’s certainly not what I would have done. And it’s not what the majority of my colleagues who served as U.S. attorneys and assistant U.S. attorneys would have done in this case,” former U.S. attorney Brett Tolman told Fox News. “Anybody who wanted to seek justice in this case would have charged Hunter Biden very quickly. . . . I mean, this is so simple and so basic that the only conclusion I can make is political games are being played and have from the very beginning.”

The problem with arguing, “They didn’t enforce the law against Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden, but they did against Trump,” is that it amounts to an argument that the American justice system is only fair if leaders and elites of both parties get to ignore laws they find inconvenient. But we shouldn’t want any of our leaders ignoring any laws. If a law is worth having on the books, it is worth enforcing; if it is not worth enforcing, it is not worth having on the books.

If an official breaks the law, then prosecute them — even if they’re the all-but-certain Democratic nominee a few weeks away from the convention, or a former president that is a stone-cold lock to run for another term. But don’t contend that lawbreaking is okay if it is done by political leaders you prefer, or that your party is entitled to at least one free crime because the other party has gotten away with some. We need one clear and consistent standard, applied to leaders of both parties.
Title: striking out at police is good until
Post by: ccp on August 17, 2022, 06:51:52 AM
it is law enforcement that goes after Conservatives :

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-angry-words-spur-warnings-205303076.html

no white privilege or supremacy
though all the FBI agents are white men

but since they are all apparently Democrats - it is all good

if most Trump supporters were black or "brown"
can anyone imagine the uproar?



Title: Why the Deep State is terrified of Trump's documents
Post by: G M on August 17, 2022, 10:42:19 AM
https://sonar21.com/understanding-why-the-deep-state-is-terrified-of-trumps-documents/
Title: Live Freeh or die
Post by: G M on August 18, 2022, 06:45:13 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/17/live-freeh-or-die/
Title: esptein lawyer / majistrate
Post by: ccp on August 18, 2022, 01:42:47 PM
called judge

to decide which information government allows him
to release on Trump:

https://nypost.com/2022/08/18/hearing-on-unsealing-trump-fbi-raid-affidavit-underway/

did they know this guy is a pedo defense lawyer ? the day after prosecuting him
could this get any more farcical?

maybe he is on the epstein black book list and thus under tight "control"

Title: Deep State Andy won't want to mention this
Post by: G M on August 18, 2022, 08:29:44 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400552.php
Title: It's worse than you think
Post by: G M on August 19, 2022, 07:16:09 AM
https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/19/think-the-fbi-deserves-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-this-laundry-list-of-corruption-should-make-you-think-again/
Title: Re: It's worse than you think
Post by: G M on August 19, 2022, 07:55:23 AM
https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/19/think-the-fbi-deserves-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-this-laundry-list-of-corruption-should-make-you-think-again/

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/fbi-agent-pleads-guilty-destroying-evidence-frame-pro-trump-political-prisoner/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 19, 2022, 02:19:39 PM
How can that man still be in prison?!?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on August 20, 2022, 07:11:34 AM
From the Pence thread.

Pence: 'Saying defund the FBI is like saying defund the police',  meaning irresponsible.

ccp:
yes
that is why I state we should clean house of those at FBI who are targeting us

not defund them
re direct them back to their original missions
--------
G M:
New smaller agencies with different missions is the answer.

The FBI needs to be made an example of.... Destroy careers as a lesson to other gov employees.
--------
(Doug)
Right on both. (IMHO) The bumper sticker, defund the FBI, doesn't show we take the law enforcement seriously, and most steps short of that mean we don't take their own criminal overreach seriously.

My approach (in every department) is "zero based budgeting".  Time permitting,  every employee,  every department, every function, every mission, every dollar gets scrutinized. Your funding doesn't continue because it was once funded by a previous Congress and previous administration. We look at results. It gets funded only if it is necessary and a proper role for federal government that no other government or agency could do better.

Trump 1.0 had trouble right from the transition.  They did not have thousands,  millions of qualified people ready willing able to step in and take the place of all those who need firing.  Still,  they needed firing and those jobs go unfilled and job listings go out nationwide until we find new public servants, not party/deep state activists, to fill them.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2022, 07:17:28 AM
"My approach (in every department) is "zero based budgeting""

YES-- as versus Baseline Budgeting!!!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on August 20, 2022, 07:56:53 AM
"My approach (in every department) is "zero based budgeting""

YES-- as versus Baseline Budgeting!!!

I would recommend looking at what Bratton did to reform the NYPD.
Title: AMcC: What Pence gets wrong on the FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2022, 08:05:44 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/what-mike-pence-gets-wrong-about-the-fbi/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202022-08-20&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
Title: Re: AMcC: What Pence gets wrong on the FBI
Post by: G M on August 20, 2022, 08:24:03 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/what-mike-pence-gets-wrong-about-the-fbi/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%20New%202022-08-20&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

DSA got this right: "he (Pence) has no business running for president"
Title: 2015: Classified or not: Complexities in Hillary's server and emails
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2022, 08:25:47 AM
August 20, 2015  ·
Shared with Your friends
Classified or Not? Explaining the Clinton Email Controversy
    By
    Byron Tau
 
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s campaign acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that her email archive contains material that is now classified—but downplayed its admission by saying the material had been retroactively classified out of an abundance of caution by U.S. intelligence agencies. Further, she said she has done nothing illegal.

“She was at worst a passive recipient of unwitting information that subsequently became deemed as classified,” said Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, on Wednesday.

Here is a rundown of the key issues in the fight over whether classified information was improperly sent or received by her private email address, which has become the focus of the controversy surrounding her email setup.

First, remind me how the email controversy got started.

When Hillary Clinton was secretary of state from 2009 to early 2013, she used a private setup for her email. In late 2014, Mrs. Clinton turned over her work-related emails at the request of the State Department. In March 2015, Mrs. Clinton gave her first comments on why she used a private system, saying the setup was for convenience. (See a timeline of events leading up to these remarks.) She also said she wanted all her work emails to be made public. These emails are being reviewed and released in batches by the State Department this year. Aside from public interest in the contents of the emails, there were also concerns about the level of security protecting her emails, since they resided outside government control.

So, what then kicked off the classification review?

The State Department told a federal court in May that it would be reviewing Mrs. Clinton’s emails for any sensitive information in consultation with other government agencies before releasing them. Such precautions are a routine part of the Freedom of Information Act process. However, a few months later two inspectors general — independent, internal government watchdogs — raised concerns about the thoroughness of that process as part of an independent audit. Specifically, the two IGs warned that classified information had already been released publicly by the State Department and recommended that other intelligence agencies be more involved in the screening. The intelligence community inspector general found four emails in Mrs. Clinton’s email trove that appeared to be classified when they were sent. Since then, reviewers from five intelligence agencies have identified 305 emails out of about 6,000 that have been designed for further scrutiny to ensure they contain no classified material.

Explain the classification system. That’s like “Confidential” or “Secret”?

Yes. The classification system is laid out by executive order and aims to protect national security information. Generally, classified information is designated either “Confidential,” “Secret” or “Top Secret.” All three require various levels of security clearances and secure computer systems or access procedures designed protect the information. As head of the State Department, Mrs. Clinton had some power to determine what information her department considered classified. But she was also obligated to protect the classified information shared with her by other agencies.

How does that relate to the FBI probe?

Once the two inspectors general discovered that classified information was on a server not in the government’s possession, they made a referral to the FBI about the situation. The IGs “did not make a criminal referral,” they said in a July statement. “It was a security referral made for counter intelligence purposes. The [Intelligence Community Inspector General] is statutorily required to refer potential compromises of national security information” to appropriate officials. Department of Justice officials have said Mrs. Clinton herself is not a target of the investigation.

What are some of the emails under scrutiny?

As mentioned earlier in this Q&A, the inspector general for the intelligence community said earlier this year he found four emails containing material that was classified at the time they were written. The State Department and the Clinton campaign now disagree with that assessment.  Two of the four emails were identified by Fox News on Wednesday as two emails flagged by the inspector general as part of its referral to the FBI. Both were already released publicly as part of an investigation into the death of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi, Libya. The two emails in question were written by lower-ranking State Department officials and forwarded to Mrs. Clinton by top aides Jake Sullivan and Huma Abedin, who both now work for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. (Here is the 2011 email forwarded by Ms. Abedin to Mrs. Clinton, and here is the 2012 email from Mr.Sullivan to Mrs. Clinton.)

How can I see more of her her emails?

You can see the full archive in the WSJ.com email archive tool. They are first posted at the State Department’s FOIA site.
What happened to the email server after Mrs. Clinton  left office?

The server was at one point run out of Mrs. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, N.Y., according to reports. However, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer said in a letter this month that a private IT firm called Platte River Networks was hired to manage it sometime in 2013 — the same year Mrs. Clinton left her State Department post. That firm has now turned over her server to the FBI. The details about what was on the server when Platte River Networks took control of it are not clear.

What are these thumb drives belonging to David Kendall?

The Intelligence Community inspector general announced last month that it had uncovered that Mrs. Clinton’s personal attorney David Kendall was in possession of a thumb drive containing an archive of her work email. Mr. Kendall acknowledged in a letter that he possessed two other copies of that thumb drive. State Department officials noted that Mrs. Clinton’s attorneys had a security clearance and said they had provided adequate security precautions to allow Mr. Kendall’s firm to store those thumb drives, despite the fact that they were now deemed to have contained classified information. Mr. Kendall turned all of his thumb drives over to the FBI.

Was the server ever wiped?

Mrs. Clinton said in March that she “chose not to keep my private personal emails — emails about planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations, the other things you typically find in inboxes.” Mr. Kendall, her lawyer, further affirmed that no emails were left on the server in a March letter to Congress. After a review to identify potential work-related emails, Mrs. Clinton asked that her server be set to only keep 60 days worth of email. Mr. Kendall said in the same letter that no emails from Mrs. Clinton’s time in office remained on the server as of March.
So did she, or did she not, send or receive classified info on her private email?

The State Department and the inspectors general are at odds over this fact. The State Department has said repeatedly that that while some information has been retroactively classified, Mrs. Clinton’s emails did not contain anything classified at the time as far as they were aware.
Other intelligence agencies disagree, saying that her email contains information that was classified at the time and should have been submitted over a secure email system. Because the fight is essentially a bureaucratic turf war over complicated issues of classification, it’s difficult to say at this point without a more complete report.

On Wednesday, campaign spokesman Fallon said: “When it comes to classified information, the standards are not at all black and white.”
What has Mrs. Clinton’s said about it?

In March, Mrs. Clinton said definitively: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material. So I’m certainly well-aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”

After the inspectors general report, Mrs. Clinton started to emphasize that the information was not identified as classified — something that the inspectors general also attest to. “I did not send classified material and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified — which is the way you know whether something is,” Mrs. Clinton said Tuesday.

On Wednesday, her campaign finally acknowledged the presence of now-classified material but said that such material was only retroactively classified as part of the routine turf war between agencies.

“That’s why we are so confident that this review will remain a security-related review. We think that furthermore this matter is mostly just shining a spotlight on a culture of classification that exists within certain corners of the government, especially the intelligence community,” he said.
Title: POTP: Kash Patel and declassification
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2022, 09:39:49 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/19/trump-kash-patel-declassification-mar-a-lago-search/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F37b3cfd%2F630105d01930ae1d2058fe55%2F61cdf026ae7e8a4ac205b2b3%2F18%2F70%2F630105d01930ae1d2058fe55&wp_cu=10fdb05edea8f32c1b02f6dfec609335%7CD462DD329F9C56B3E0530100007F597F
Title: How low will the FBI go?
Post by: G M on August 20, 2022, 11:48:27 PM
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/sharyl_attkisson_reveals_how_low_the_fbi_will_go.html

From the Pence thread.

Pence: 'Saying defund the FBI is like saying defund the police',  meaning irresponsible.

ccp:
yes
that is why I state we should clean house of those at FBI who are targeting us

not defund them
re direct them back to their original missions
--------
G M:
New smaller agencies with different missions is the answer.

The FBI needs to be made an example of.... Destroy careers as a lesson to other gov employees.
--------
(Doug)
Right on both. (IMHO) The bumper sticker, defund the FBI, doesn't show we take the law enforcement seriously, and most steps short of that mean we don't take their own criminal overreach seriously.

My approach (in every department) is "zero based budgeting".  Time permitting,  every employee,  every department, every function, every mission, every dollar gets scrutinized. Your funding doesn't continue because it was once funded by a previous Congress and previous administration. We look at results. It gets funded only if it is necessary and a proper role for federal government that no other government or agency could do better.

Trump 1.0 had trouble right from the transition.  They did not have thousands,  millions of qualified people ready willing able to step in and take the place of all those who need firing.  Still,  they needed firing and those jobs go unfilled and job listings go out nationwide until we find new public servants, not party/deep state activists, to fill them.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on August 21, 2022, 06:53:56 AM
"https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/sharyl_attkisson_reveals_how_low_the_fbi_will_go.html"

I experience this all the time.
Katherine and I were staying in a motel while looking for. a house in NJ (2002 or 2003)
and we had people move in to the rooms across the hall and next to us all of a sudden

Their excuse according to the hotel manager was they were their for a Rutgers Univ. golf tournament.

They were hacking in to our computer.
One night in the middle of night our printer suddenly turned on by itself.

I bought I think 2 laptops after the first one was hacked into . Eventually the get the codes by following me to the best buy etc., bribery (in the past they used to go through our garbage till we got privy to that)
and within a few days they all get hacked into.

About at least another dozen events occurred letting me know that at least 6 to 8 people involved had also stayed in rooms in the hotel. At least once I saw a girl who followed me to the Home Depot got on line behind me and while I was paying ran out of the line and left.
I could go on but I know this is boring .

Katherine had many songs she had written and they were basically stalking us till they could get them.

one of the hotel janitors tried to open our door
another time I looked out the peep hole and saw a person listening to our front door.
when I opened the door his eyes bugged out and he walked away

the hotel manager who I was complaining to
said this "never happens around here - usually it is very quiet"

funny , after we checked the hotel I realized I might have left something in the room.
so I went back to the room.  The manager and the janitor were taking. off the covers to the electric socket on the wall next to where the crooks were in the next room

I didn't say anything .  They would just deny it.
Try telling this to the "police" and watch them do nothing .

so the Attkinson story is totally believable to me.
I know this stuff happens all the time.

Title: Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Hom
Post by: G M on August 21, 2022, 08:23:26 AM
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt207g8cb

I suggest you look this book up.


"https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/sharyl_attkisson_reveals_how_low_the_fbi_will_go.html"

I experience this all the time.
Katherine and I were staying in a motel while looking for. a house in NJ (2002 or 2003)
and we had people move in to the rooms across the hall and next to us all of a sudden

Their excuse according to the hotel manager was they were their for a Rutgers Univ. golf tournament.

They were hacking in to our computer.
One night in the middle of night our printer suddenly turned on by itself.

I bought I think 2 laptops after the first one was hacked into . Eventually the get the codes by following me to the best buy etc., bribery (in the past they used to go through our garbage till we got privy to that)
and within a few days they all get hacked into.

About at least another dozen events occurred letting me know that at least 6 to 8 people involved had also stayed in rooms in the hotel. At least once I saw a girl who followed me to the Home Depot got on line behind me and while I was paying ran out of the line and left.
I could go on but I know this is boring .

Katherine had many songs she had written and they were basically stalking us till they could get them.

one of the hotel janitors tried to open our door
another time I looked out the peep hole and saw a person listening to our front door.
when I opened the door his eyes bugged out and he walked away

the hotel manager who I was complaining to
said this "never happens around here - usually it is very quiet"

funny , after we checked the hotel I realized I might have left something in the room.
so I went back to the room.  The manager and the janitor were taking. off the covers to the electric socket on the wall next to where the crooks were in the next room

I didn't say anything .  They would just deny it.
Try telling this to the "police" and watch them do nothing .

so the Attkinson story is totally believable to me.
I know this stuff happens all the time.
Title: I will read this GM thanks!
Post by: ccp on August 21, 2022, 08:47:29 AM
I read a few about this stuff

to learn what the hell is going on

war spied turned into corporate spies
past war

white collar criminals - the real professional types - who plan every thing down to each detail
never take chances and are very patient.

they almost NEVER get caught because they know how not to leave evidence
and they know how to bribe and insert *their people* into the right places

like Tony Soprano said in one episode " I got this guy at the DMV "

they spend their lives doing this stuff
and know the ropes that have been learned over God knows how long.

things I never even dreamed of - because I never thought like a crook growing up

and then if they have unlimited funds and connections - forget it.
If they are the government doing this forget it even more...........

Their will be Congressional Committee investigations and they may be revealing but when is the last time anyone can remember any of these leading to real consequences ?



Title: How far down does the rot in the FBI go?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 21, 2022, 09:26:42 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/firing-fbi-leadership-isnt-enough_4672990.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-08-21&utm_medium=email&est=0FY5ULoE6rojAjg81yH9mZC4yQPUkjPOE2fJAIpiuXLYsVvp1c6mMLyWV4bU%2B877Xrp2
Title: Re: How far down does the rot in the FBI go?
Post by: G M on August 21, 2022, 12:45:56 PM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/firing-fbi-leadership-isnt-enough_4672990.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-08-21&utm_medium=email&est=0FY5ULoE6rojAjg81yH9mZC4yQPUkjPOE2fJAIpiuXLYsVvp1c6mMLyWV4bU%2B877Xrp2

All the way.
Title: VDH : break up FBI
Post by: ccp on August 21, 2022, 02:10:43 PM
VDH agrees with GM

https://www.audacy.com/podcasts/american-thought-leaders-29539/victor-davis-hanson-fbi-should-be-broken-up-agents-moved-to-other-departments-1520399756
Title: Re: How far down does the rot in the FBI go?
Post by: DougMacG on August 21, 2022, 06:58:49 PM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/firing-fbi-leadership-isnt-enough_4672990.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-08-21&utm_medium=email&est=0FY5ULoE6rojAjg81yH9mZC4yQPUkjPOE2fJAIpiuXLYsVvp1c6mMLyWV4bU%2B877Xrp2

All the way.

I know of one young man working on terrorism for the FBI out of the San Francisco office who makes me think there are a lot of rank and file agents who want to do professional, life saving work in law enforcement.

Too bad people at the  top make the whole thing stink.

IRS targeting scandal was just as treasonous. IMHO.  How about ATF and fast and furious?
 Let's not get overly focused on one agency. The problem runs wider, not just deeper.
Title: No oversight-above the law
Post by: G M on August 22, 2022, 11:10:37 AM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/08/21/sunday-talks-david-laufman-says-congress-has-no-right-to-oversight-over-doj-national-security-division-all-political-weaponization-by-main-justice-nsd-is-above-the-law/

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 22, 2022, 11:57:53 AM
Whoa , , ,
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on August 22, 2022, 03:37:49 PM
"hen Barack Obama and Eric Holder stepped in a few years later, they created the DOJ National Security Division (DOJ-NSD). This division specializes in weaponizing surveillance against their political enemies.  The DOJ-NSD had no inspector general oversight and operates within Main Justice, but above the law. "

"by the book Brock"

"no controlling legal authority "

hehehehe
Title: A question Deep State Andy won't ask
Post by: G M on August 23, 2022, 08:36:12 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/22/where-is-steven-dantuono/

The father of the J6 Fedsurrection.
Title: WT: Agents call out 'mob-like mentality' at FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 12:09:47 PM
Agents call out ‘mob-like mentality’ at FBI

Widespread complaints of leaders go to the top

BY KERRY PICKET THE WASHINGTON TIMES

FBI whistleblowers accused bureau management in different field offices of corruption, cover-ups and retaliation against rank-and-file agents who attempted to expose it, The Washington Times has learned. Current and former FBI leaders at the bureau’s offices in Miami, Salt Lake City, Buffalo, New York, and Newark, New Jersey, are facing whistleblower complaints that the supervisors:

• Forced or coerced agents to sign false affidavits.

•Fabricated terrorism cases to pump up performance statistics.


• Sexually harassed and stalked a female agent.

• Engaged in sexual acts with a subordinate in a government vehicle and crashed the vehicle.

One of the whistleblowers, an FBI agent who said superiors, including FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, ignored her accusations of sexual harassment, said the bureau suffers from a “mob-like mentality.”

“The FBI is completely out of control and its culture and structure needs to change. Not only is the political bias completely out of control and disgustingly obvious, the FBI knows they will not be held accountable for their illegal behavior and misconduct,” she said in a letter to Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

The Times reviewed some of the complaints and learned details about other complaints from the whistleblowers or their attorney.

The complaints were turned over to Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee and likely will be

Exclusive

part of a broader examination of Justice Department conduct, according to the whistleblowers’ attorney.

The misconduct charges add to the mounting mistrust of the Justice Department and FBI after the Aug. 8 raid of former President Donald Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida. It was the first-ever FBI raid of a former president’s home.

Another whistleblower, a former employee who worked for the FBI office in Buffalo, told The Times that FBI honchos in Washington focus on the volume of cases to evaluate the special agent in charge, or SAC, who runs a field office. That leads some office supervisors to inflate the numbers.

“It’s basically a report card for him, so at the end of his two-year term as a SAC, he gets moved to a better position down in Washington. And everything focuses around his metrics,” the employee said.

“You have to have so many terrorism cases per year in your office, or else you fail,” he said. “So they would come to us and say things like ‘Open up a case. I don’t care if it’s got merit or not. Just open it up. We only have nine, and we need 10 for me to pass.’” This problem is not exclusive to the Buffalo office but is found in FBI field offices all over the country, said Kurt Siuzdak, a former FBI agent and former whistleblower who now serves as a legal counsel for FBI employees who call out corruption at the bureau.

“Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, there’s a number of field offices, and the SAC picks somebody for everybody to follow because it helps them with their metrics,” Mr. Siuzdak said. “So they pick somebody to scrutinize, often without merit from wherever, and that’s the bad guy you need to follow and put your assets on.”

Mr. Siuzdak said field offices have names for these holiday operations, such as “Turkey Day Terrorist” or “Thanksgiving Day Terrorist.”

Mr. Siuzdak has multiple clients in the FBI who say agents in Salt Lake City were coerced to sign a false affidavit, sworn written statements used as evidence in court.

According to the agents’ complaint, Mr. Siuzdak said, the affidavit did not accurately describe the facts and gave the wrong impression of the evidence.

“If your affidavit kind of mischaracterizes something … agents shouldn’t be pressured to sign,” Mr. Siuzdak said. “They should be pressured to sign correct and truthful affidavits.”

Another former agent revealed that a special agent in charge at the Miami field office is accused of engaging in an adulterous affair with an intelligence analyst who was married to another man from a different government agency.

According to the agent’s complaint, the SAC and the intelligence analyst “took an amorous drive” to celebrate his promotion and crashed while engaged in a sex act.

The complaint said the special agent in charge was still promoted. After an internal investigation, his punishment, by his request, was to be demoted back to SAC at the Miami field office.

The complaints add to a torrent of FBI whistleblowers whose accusations include trumped-up domestic terrorism cases and inaccurate labeling of verifi ed evidence against Hunter Biden as disinformation
Title: Re: WT: Agents call out 'mob-like mentality' at FBI
Post by: G M on August 23, 2022, 12:16:05 PM
Reminder: An affidavit is a sworn legal document. It is a FELONY to lie in an affidavit.

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/police-officer-truthfulness-and-brady-decision

Agents call out ‘mob-like mentality’ at FBI

Widespread complaints of leaders go to the top

BY KERRY PICKET THE WASHINGTON TIMES

FBI whistleblowers accused bureau management in different field offices of corruption, cover-ups and retaliation against rank-and-file agents who attempted to expose it, The Washington Times has learned. Current and former FBI leaders at the bureau’s offices in Miami, Salt Lake City, Buffalo, New York, and Newark, New Jersey, are facing whistleblower complaints that the supervisors:

• Forced or coerced agents to sign false affidavits.

•Fabricated terrorism cases to pump up performance statistics.


• Sexually harassed and stalked a female agent.

• Engaged in sexual acts with a subordinate in a government vehicle and crashed the vehicle.

One of the whistleblowers, an FBI agent who said superiors, including FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, ignored her accusations of sexual harassment, said the bureau suffers from a “mob-like mentality.”

“The FBI is completely out of control and its culture and structure needs to change. Not only is the political bias completely out of control and disgustingly obvious, the FBI knows they will not be held accountable for their illegal behavior and misconduct,” she said in a letter to Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

The Times reviewed some of the complaints and learned details about other complaints from the whistleblowers or their attorney.

The complaints were turned over to Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee and likely will be

Exclusive

part of a broader examination of Justice Department conduct, according to the whistleblowers’ attorney.

The misconduct charges add to the mounting mistrust of the Justice Department and FBI after the Aug. 8 raid of former President Donald Trump’s residence in Palm Beach, Florida. It was the first-ever FBI raid of a former president’s home.

Another whistleblower, a former employee who worked for the FBI office in Buffalo, told The Times that FBI honchos in Washington focus on the volume of cases to evaluate the special agent in charge, or SAC, who runs a field office. That leads some office supervisors to inflate the numbers.

“It’s basically a report card for him, so at the end of his two-year term as a SAC, he gets moved to a better position down in Washington. And everything focuses around his metrics,” the employee said.

“You have to have so many terrorism cases per year in your office, or else you fail,” he said. “So they would come to us and say things like ‘Open up a case. I don’t care if it’s got merit or not. Just open it up. We only have nine, and we need 10 for me to pass.’” This problem is not exclusive to the Buffalo office but is found in FBI field offices all over the country, said Kurt Siuzdak, a former FBI agent and former whistleblower who now serves as a legal counsel for FBI employees who call out corruption at the bureau.

“Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, there’s a number of field offices, and the SAC picks somebody for everybody to follow because it helps them with their metrics,” Mr. Siuzdak said. “So they pick somebody to scrutinize, often without merit from wherever, and that’s the bad guy you need to follow and put your assets on.”

Mr. Siuzdak said field offices have names for these holiday operations, such as “Turkey Day Terrorist” or “Thanksgiving Day Terrorist.”

Mr. Siuzdak has multiple clients in the FBI who say agents in Salt Lake City were coerced to sign a false affidavit, sworn written statements used as evidence in court.

According to the agents’ complaint, Mr. Siuzdak said, the affidavit did not accurately describe the facts and gave the wrong impression of the evidence.

“If your affidavit kind of mischaracterizes something … agents shouldn’t be pressured to sign,” Mr. Siuzdak said. “They should be pressured to sign correct and truthful affidavits.”

Another former agent revealed that a special agent in charge at the Miami field office is accused of engaging in an adulterous affair with an intelligence analyst who was married to another man from a different government agency.

According to the agent’s complaint, the SAC and the intelligence analyst “took an amorous drive” to celebrate his promotion and crashed while engaged in a sex act.

The complaint said the special agent in charge was still promoted. After an internal investigation, his punishment, by his request, was to be demoted back to SAC at the Miami field office.

The complaints add to a torrent of FBI whistleblowers whose accusations include trumped-up domestic terrorism cases and inaccurate labeling of verifi ed evidence against Hunter Biden as disinformation
Title: WT: Durham prosecutor withdraws
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 12:21:21 PM
Key Durham prosecutor withdraws from Danchenko case

Sides fight on using classified info for fall trial

BY JEFF MORDOCK THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A top prosecutor for special counsel John Durham has withdrawn from the criminal case against Igor Danchenko, who was a source for the anti-Trump Steele dossier, less than two months before the trial is set to begin.

Assistant special counsel Andrew DeFilippis withdrew from the case, according to a filing late Sunday by Mr. Durham. The filing did not offer any more details.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

Mr. DeFilippis has a November trial in New York in which he is prosecuting two Americans charged with providing material support to the Islamic State. That trial is scheduled to start roughly three weeks after the Danchenko case, so it’s possible the departure was designed to keep from spreading himself too thin.

The high-profile departure comes at an odd time in the case, with Mr. Danchenko’s trial scheduled to start Oct. 16 and both sides mired in a fight over whether his lawyers can use classified information.

Mr. DeFilippis oversaw the failed prosecution of former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who was charged with lying to the FBI. In May, a jury in Washington concluded that Mr. Sussmann was not guilty after about six hours of deliberation.

Mr. DeFilippis was also a key prosecutor in Mr. Durham’s case against Kevin Clinesmith, a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to falsifying evidence to justify investigators’ continued surveillance of Carter Page, an adviser to former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

It is not publicly known if Mr. Durham has any more cases pending or if Mr. DeFilippis would continue to be involved in those cases.

Mr. Danchenko last fall was charged with repeatedly lying to the FBI about how he compiled information for British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier of now-debunked accusations tying Mr. Trump to Russia. He has pleaded not guilty.

Mr. Danchenko is accused of intentionally misleading the FBI when he denied in a 2017 interview that his primary source for a section of the dossier was Charles H. Dolan Jr., a former aide to Hillary Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, lost the election to Mr. Trump.

Both sides have spent the summer fighting over the use and production of classified documents.

Earlier this month, Mr. Danchenko filed a motion signaling that he intends to use classifi ed information in his defense. That motion was filed under seal and did not offer details on how the materials could help defense attorneys make their case.

Mr. Durham filed his own objection, also under seal, saying he opposed the “use, relevance and admissibility” of classified information.
Title: POTP allows an opinion for Affidavit Disclosure
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 01:08:22 PM
Opinion  Let voters read virtually all of the Mar-a-Lago search affidavit
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By Henry Olsen
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August 22, 2022 at 5:06 p.m. EDT

Documents related to the search warrant for former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., are photographed on Aug. 18. (Jon Elswick/AP Photo)

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Federal Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart will decide soon how much to reveal of the FBI’s affidavit that provided the basis for the search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. He should make virtually all of it public.

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Such pre-indictment disclosure would be highly unusual in a normal investigation. Law enforcement needs to operate in a veil of secrecy to accumulate evidence. If targets learn what authorities know, they could more easily destroy evidence or intimidate potential witnesses, thereby hindering or effectively stopping the investigation. This clear public interest rightly overrides other concerns in a typical case.

But this is anything but a typical case. America has become divided into virulently pro- and anti-Trump factions over the past seven years. This ever-deepening partisan animosity is the most potent threat to our democracy, exceeding even the dangerous efforts by Trump and his allies to undermine our election process. Anything that exacerbates those tensions pushes us one step closer to a permanent political divide, where all dissent is viewed by the other side as disloyal.


The FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago was a legal proceeding, but it was also a political act. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to authorize the raid infuriated tens of millions of people — and excited an equal number who have long wanted their bête noire thrown in jail. Regardless of whether the FBI search uncovered potentially valuable evidence for a criminal investigation, these equal and opposite reactions are its primary social impact.

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This fact means that it’s not appropriate for the judge to follow normal procedures in assessing how much of the affidavit to reveal. The more that is kept secret, the less public justification — and in politics, public knowledge is crucial for legitimacy — there is for the search. That lack of information helps fuel the attacks on the FBI, both verbal and physical, that further undermine our entire federal law enforcement system. Those consequences cannot be in the public interest.

Reinhart should also consider the impact on the nation if an investigation conducted largely in secret results in an indictment of Trump or someone close to him. Many Trump supporters already believe, with much justification, that there’s a “deep state” conspiracy to bring their hero down. Secrecy would feed political unrest that has societal effects that are more important to the nation’s well-being than the investigation itself.


The fact that “those with direct knowledge of the matter” often leak publicly unverifiable information to reporters further poisons the political well. These leaks are impossible to resist, but they also further foster public unrest, and not only among Trump’s supporters. Disclosure of the affidavit would provide concrete and specific information, beyond what “people familiar with the investigation” say to the news media, that the public could assess to determine for themselves if the search was justified.

These considerations mean that Reinhart should resist any temptation to release a heavily redacted affidavit. That result would be worse than if he released nothing at all. Conspiracy theorists would be quick to contend that the release was a sham intended to conceal the truth.

Removing the normal veil of secrecy that surrounds investigations would also send a powerful signal to leakers. Law enforcement officials, as well as attorneys on the defense side, with direct knowledge of an investigation could no longer presume their actions would be protected from disclosure. That should reduce the incentive to color information in an opaque effort to influence public opinion.


Upholding the rule of law means more than simply affirming that legal processes are followed. It also means ensuring that the laws are applied fairly. That consideration weighs heavily in favor of public disclosure.

The analogy many on the right are drawing between the investigation into former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of an unauthorized private server to receive and send official emails is apt. In both cases it appears Trump and Clinton acted recklessly and selfishly in their treatment of sensitive information, but in neither case is it conclusive that actual harm resulted to U.S. security. The investigation of Trump may yet uncover proof of such harm, but if Trump were to be indicted after a secret investigation without such proof while Clinton was let off, Trump backers would conclude that the fix was in. That would not be in the public’s interest.

Like it or not, Trump’s political fate is what’s at issue in this investigation. That fate will ultimately be decided in the court of public opinion, not a court of law. Judge Reinhart should recognize that fact now and act to inform the court whose judgment will ultimately settle the real case at issue.
Title: Out: BADORANGEMAN had nuclear secrets In: BADORANGEMAN hurt the feelz of a lefty
Post by: G M on August 23, 2022, 02:02:05 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400609.php

Deep State Andy says "Don't criticize my deep state buddies or they'll just make it worse for you"!
Title: Rivkin & Casey: Trump Warrant had no legal basis
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2022, 03:28:40 PM
Rivkin & Casey are serious heavyweight attorneys.
=================================

The Trump Warrant Had No Legal Basis
A former president’s rights under the Presidential Records Act trump the statutes the FBI cited to justify the Mar-a-Lago raid.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
Aug. 22, 2022 12:51 pm ET


Outside Mar-a-Lago the day after the raid.

PHOTO: JOE CAVARETTA/ZUMA PRESS

Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation justified in searching Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago? The judge who issued the warrant for Mar-a-Lago has signaled that he is likely to release a redacted version of the affidavit supporting it. But the warrant itself suggests the answer is likely no—the FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid.

The warrant authorized the FBI to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§793, 2071, or 1519” (emphasis added). These three criminal statutes all address the possession and handling of materials that contain national-security information, public records or material relevant to an investigation or other matters properly before a federal agency or the courts.

The materials to be seized included “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021”—i.e., during Mr. Trump’s term of office. Virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category. Federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them. His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.

Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump’s documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that “where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.” The former president’s rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.

The PRA dramatically changed the rules regarding ownership and treatment of presidential documents. Presidents from George Washington through Jimmy Carter treated their White House papers as their personal property, and neither Congress nor the courts disputed that. In Nixon v. U.S. (1992), the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that Richard Nixon had a right to compensation for his presidential papers, which the government had retained under the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974 (which applied only to him). “Custom and usage evidences the kind of mutually explicit understandings that are encompassed within the constitutional notion of ‘property’ protected by the Fifth Amendment,” the judges declared.

The PRA became effective in 1981, at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It established a unique statutory scheme, balancing the needs of the government, former presidents and history. The law declares presidential records to be public property and provides that “the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records.”

The PRA lays out detailed requirements for how the archivist is to administer the records, handle privilege claims, make the records public, and impose restrictions on access. Notably, it doesn’t address the process by which a former president’s records are physically to be turned over to the archivist, or set any deadline, leaving this matter to be negotiated between the archivist and the former president.

The PRA explicitly guarantees a former president continuing access to his papers. Those papers must ultimately be made public, but in the meantime—unlike with all other government documents, which are available 24/7 to currently serving executive-branch officials—the PRA establishes restrictions on access to a former president’s records, including a five-year restriction on access applicable to everyone (including the sitting president, absent a showing of need), which can be extended until the records have been properly reviewed and processed. Before leaving office, a president can restrict access to certain materials for up to 12 years.

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The only exceptions are for National Archives personnel working on the materials, judicial process, the incumbent president and Congress (in cases of established need) and the former president himself. PRA section 2205(3) specifically commands that “the Presidential records of a former President shall be available to such former President or the former President’s designated representative,” regardless of any of these restrictions.

Nothing in the PRA suggests that the former president’s physical custody of his records can be considered unlawful under the statutes on which the Mar-a-Lago warrant is based. Yet the statute’s text makes clear that Congress considered how certain criminal-law provisions would interact with the PRA: It provides that the archivist is not to make materials available to the former president’s designated representative “if that individual has been convicted of a crime relating to the review, retention, removal, or destruction of records of the Archives.”

Nothing is said about the former president himself, but applying these general criminal statutes to him based on his mere possession of records would vitiate the entire carefully balanced PRA statutory scheme. Thus if the Justice Department’s sole complaint is that Mr. Trump had in his possession presidential records he took with him from the White House, he should be in the clear, even if some of those records are classified.

ADVERTISEMENT - SCROLL TO CONTINUE

In making a former president’s records available to him, the PRA doesn’t distinguish between materials that are and aren’t classified. That was a deliberate choice by Congress, as the existence of highly classified materials at the White House was a given long before 1978, and the statute specifically contemplates that classified materials will be present—making this a basis on which a president can impose a 12-year moratorium on public access.

The government obviously has an important interest in how classified materials are kept, whether or not they are presidential records. In this case, it appears that the FBI was initially satisfied with the installation of an additional lock on the relevant Mar-a-Lago storage room. If that was insufficient, and Mr. Trump refused to cooperate, the bureau could and should have sought a less intrusive judicial remedy than a search warrant—a restraining order allowing the materials to be moved to a location with the proper storage facilities, but also ensuring Mr. Trump continuing access. Surely that’s what the government would have done if any other former president were involved.

Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Title: Imagine if the Deep State protected you and your family like this!
Post by: G M on August 25, 2022, 10:11:39 AM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400651.php
Title: Eye wash or real?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2022, 01:06:53 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/aug/29/top-agent-exits-fbi-amid-charge-political-bias-und/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=6HK1QIVXLwVAX3hDDNujudWs%2F6vd0MjVDa2gN4tFcMaGLM0CG0fCFJnfVrVpwfig&bt_ts=1661802068021
Title: Sacrificial lamb or scapegoat?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2022, 09:00:15 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/08/29/fbi-agent-resigns-amid-hunter-biden-probe-scrutiny/?fbclid=IwAR1aHFqowvQ4lY5bqkXebXQFPEpwD5G93rFM3IsjxyFKhruIuS30S9fHVQg

=======================================

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6311516750112?fbclid=IwAR3DAQtSJwW8Yr3Thut0mYvUz-HWV_lON9ykbPxV9CqURytuHrP6tWy1fB4#sp=show-clips

Title: Re: Sacrificial lamb or scapegoat?
Post by: G M on August 30, 2022, 09:07:02 AM
Oh, the FBI has seen the light! No more corruption! The bad guy responsible will be forced to retire and sign a contract as an MSNBC commentator for 350,000 a year.

Justice has been served!



https://nypost.com/2022/08/29/fbi-agent-resigns-amid-hunter-biden-probe-scrutiny/?fbclid=IwAR1aHFqowvQ4lY5bqkXebXQFPEpwD5G93rFM3IsjxyFKhruIuS30S9fHVQg

=======================================

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6311516750112?fbclid=IwAR3DAQtSJwW8Yr3Thut0mYvUz-HWV_lON9ykbPxV9CqURytuHrP6tWy1fB4#sp=show-clips
Title: Re: Sacrificial lamb or scapegoat? Ace's take
Post by: G M on August 30, 2022, 09:40:36 AM

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400736.php


Oh, the FBI has seen the light! No more corruption! The bad guy responsible will be forced to retire and sign a contract as an MSNBC commentator for 350,000 a year.

Justice has been served!



https://nypost.com/2022/08/29/fbi-agent-resigns-amid-hunter-biden-probe-scrutiny/?fbclid=IwAR1aHFqowvQ4lY5bqkXebXQFPEpwD5G93rFM3IsjxyFKhruIuS30S9fHVQg

=======================================

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6311516750112?fbclid=IwAR3DAQtSJwW8Yr3Thut0mYvUz-HWV_lON9ykbPxV9CqURytuHrP6tWy1fB4#sp=show-clips
Title: More on Sacrificial Lamb or Scapegoat
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 30, 2022, 06:30:08 PM
https://www.foxnews.com/media/fbi-unraveling-damage-control-hunter-probe-agent-reportedly-resigns-prosecutor-says?fbclid=IwAR3Eg9LDRAks0I6IkmPWEFtbs8K8fqcgZlGCfYhxSqf7BIkFJL-JffN0tbs
Title: MSM -> "very disturabing!!!!"
Post by: ccp on August 31, 2022, 07:07:26 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/08/31/trump-fbi-raid-doj-says-docs-were-likely-concealed-and-removed-at-mar-a-lago/

 :roll: :wink:
Title: FBI agents call on Wray to resign
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2022, 09:17:48 AM
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/08/31/fbi-agents-call-on-wray-to-resign-over-allegations-of-political-bias-at-the-top-n1625567?fbclid=IwAR0s-xjIdLJsCs9ORyDFoGnV-mFjRG3APvJe-u7_Aso6cZXoDYY1svZ2m0w
Title: Re: FBI agents call on Wray to resign
Post by: G M on August 31, 2022, 09:25:43 AM
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2022/08/31/fbi-agents-call-on-wray-to-resign-over-allegations-of-political-bias-at-the-top-n1625567?fbclid=IwAR0s-xjIdLJsCs9ORyDFoGnV-mFjRG3APvJe-u7_Aso6cZXoDYY1svZ2m0w

The dems do not plan on ever giving up power.

Wray knows this.

Title: PP: Garland
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2022, 10:42:21 AM
AG Garland seeks to intimidate FBI whistleblowers: On Tuesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a new policy to Justice Department personnel forbidding them from communicating with "Senators, Representatives, congressional committees, or congressional staff without advance coordination, consultation, and approval" by the Office of Legislative Affairs. Garland claimed his motive for issuing the new policy directives was to prevent the DOJ's actions from having "the appearance of political influence." While that does sound good on paper, the proof is in the pudding. The range of targets for the Garland-led DOJ too often smacks of blatant political bias, a fact borne out by a growing number of FBI whistleblowers making claims of political bias among leadership in the agency. Garland's directive appears to be designed to tamp down on more potential whistleblowers contacting members of Congress, even as he seeks to claim otherwise. Garland has repeatedly demonstrated that honesty is not his forte.
Title: Re: PP: Garland
Post by: G M on August 31, 2022, 10:48:02 AM
Utterly corrupt. This isn't a misunderstanding or a difference of opinions. This is blatant, in your face corruption.


AG Garland seeks to intimidate FBI whistleblowers: On Tuesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a new policy to Justice Department personnel forbidding them from communicating with "Senators, Representatives, congressional committees, or congressional staff without advance coordination, consultation, and approval" by the Office of Legislative Affairs. Garland claimed his motive for issuing the new policy directives was to prevent the DOJ's actions from having "the appearance of political influence." While that does sound good on paper, the proof is in the pudding. The range of targets for the Garland-led DOJ too often smacks of blatant political bias, a fact borne out by a growing number of FBI whistleblowers making claims of political bias among leadership in the agency. Garland's directive appears to be designed to tamp down on more potential whistleblowers contacting members of Congress, even as he seeks to claim otherwise. Garland has repeatedly demonstrated that honesty is not his forte.
Title: PP: The Problem is deeper than the FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2022, 12:41:16 PM

It's Not an 'FBI Problem'
"Protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States."

Mark Alexander
"Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the 'latent spark'... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?" —John Adams (1775)

The Department of Justice — and more specifically its domestic law enforcement, intelligence, and security service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation — has been taking some well-earned criticism over the last six years for fabricating a politically motivated investigation, starting with a deceitful FISA warrant, to target Donald Trump.

But the politicization of the FBI, tasking the bureau with investigations that fit high-profile political objectives, is not a recent phenomenon. In fact, it dates back to its inception.

Today's FBI is a massive bureaucracy, with a $10.7 billion budget, most of which is used to pay its 37,000 employees, including more than 13,000 special agents who form the tip of the FBI's enforcement spear.

Founded in 1908 as the Bureau of Investigation, its initial mission was to enforce the Mann Act prohibition on interstate trafficking of prostitutes. The BOI mission significantly expanded by 1933, when it was linked to the Bureau of Prohibition and its focus was expanded to prosecuting notorious bootleggers and gangsters. That same year it would be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The fusion of politics and law enforcement originates with the FBI's longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover. He commanded the organization for nearly half a century — from its BOI days in 1924 until his retirement in 1972. The bureau took on its national security functions at the onset of World War II and its powers — which is to say, Hoover's powers — greatly expanded through the end of his tenure.

Hoover is perhaps most remembered for keeping tabs and taps on John F. Kennedy and his administrative nemesis, JFK's brother Robert, who was also our nation's attorney general. In the mid-1960s, Hoover turned his focus to Martin Luther King and the communist connections of some civil rights leaders. But many of those investigations exceeded FBI authority and were clearly used to discredit King and others.

From 1945 until Hoover's retirement, presidents and politicians dared not cross him because it was assumed that he maintained dossiers on their dalliances and other dastardly deeds. Today, the FBI's 56 field offices report to the bureau's DC headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue — in the J. Edgar Hoover building.

For two decades after Hoover's era, the FBI became more specialized and more professional, developing designated units involved in high-profile criminal and terrorist investigations.

But the organization's shine was badly tarnished by its excessive (to put it kindly) actions during the 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the 1993 siege at Waco, Texas, the latter being two months after the bureau failed to detect and thwart the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center's North Tower. The bureau's mishandling of the 1996 Summer Olympics bombing, including the leaking of information leading to the public vilification of the wrong person, Richard Jewell, was another deep wound to its reputation.

The actual Centennial Park Olympic bomber was a sociopath named Eric Rudolph, identified in 1998 as the suspect in several bombings including those of two abortion clinics. For that reason, over the next two years, Rudolph became the subject of one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history involving massive federal manpower and resources. He was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list and had a $1 million bounty on his head.

Then-President Bill Clinton had the FBI focused on a high-profile criminal and political target at the same time al-Qa'ida terrorists were settling into U.S. suburbs and preparing to carry out their devastating 9/11 Islamist attack on our nation. Clinton had already declined numerous opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden before the attack.

In its findings, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission Report blamed both the FBI and CIA for failing to follow leads regarding the terrorist plotters, noting our country had "not been well served" by either agency. In fact, Stanford University Fellow Amy Zegart documented 23 investigative leads the FBI failed to follow, any one of which may have led to the disruption of the 9/11 attack. For the record, Eric Rudolph surrendered to local police in Murphy, North Carolina, 18 months after 9/11.

In the years after 9/11, the FBI's leadership resisted the changes recommended by the 9/11 Commission and missed other investigative leads including those regarding mass assailants at schools.

There have been other notable failures.

In 2016, as former FBI Director James Comey and his corrupt FBI cadre were laying the groundwork to set up the Trump "investigation," the bureau failed to follow up on a tip-off regarding Islamist Omar Saddiqui Mateen before he murdered 49 people in Orlando.

All that being said, there are three key points that beg a pardon.

First, in all the years since the FBI's formation, despite some significant failures, special agents have made countless thousands of arrests thwarting terrorist plans and taking the most dangerous criminals off the streets — often due to truly brilliant investigative work and at great risk to the agents making those arrests.

Second, regarding failures to detect terrorist events, particularly the 1993 and 2001 WTC attacks, hindsight is 20/20. OK, actually hindsight is rarely 20/20, but in serious retrospect, it is much easier to look back and see what was missed than it is to detect something in real time. And too often there is a significant bias when reports emerge on past failures — a bias holding that clues and leads at the time should have made intervention more achievable than in fact it was.

And third, the FBI agents I have known and worked with over the past 35 years have been professional men and women of impeccable character, devoted to their oath "to support and defend" our Constitution. Every agent I know today fits that profile and is singularly devoted to the FBI motto: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.

The FBI's stated mission is to "protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States," and that is precisely what most FBI agents endeavor to do every day.

Unfortunately, as a result of corruption on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building, morale among agents is at an all-time low.

Thus, I exercise caution when criticizing "the FBI" to make the distinction between the vast majority of special agents who make up the FBI and the corrupt elements within the FBI.

The problem is not the FBI.

The problem is a profoundly arrogant and lawless cadre of deep state bureaucrats within the bureau, and a slice of dependable minions below them, who have lost their moral compass and their willingness to abide by their oaths. Instead, they obediently and cleverly do the bidding of their Democrat Party masters, knowing full well how to keep their fingerprints off the crime scene.


At no time since 9/11 has the FBI's reputation been so deeply soiled than it has been over the last six years.

As I have thoroughly detailed, the corruption of the FBI and CIA under former directors James Comey and John Brennan, respectively, in collaboration with Hillary Clinton and using her layup for the "Russia collusion" conspiracy as "probable cause" to take down the presidency of Donald Trump — a political charade that was ultimately found baseless — was unprecedented in U.S. history.

And we now know as a matter of fact that the FBI ran interference for Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election by suppressing information from Hunter Biden connecting his father to a ChiCom pay-to-play scheme.

And it appears now that the understudy of the demonstrably corrupt Barack Obama is resurrecting another DOJ/FBI deep state cabal to convict Trump for Hillary Clinton's crimes.

The latest iteration is modeled after the last one created by Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and former FBI Counterintelligence Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok.

It is no coincidence that the FBI unit leading the Mar-a-Lago investigation also ran the Trump-Russia investigation.

Will they succeed with Trump with the objective of demoralizing his supporters ahead of the midterm elections?

Maybe, but there are some cracks in the cabal's armor.

A growing chorus of FBI whistleblowers is starting to shed light on political corruption at the highest levels of the bureau. It is likely no coincidence that FBI ASAC Timothy Thibault, a senior agent at the center of what can only be described as politically motivated investigations and non-investigations (such as the Russia collusion hoax and the Hunter Biden non-hoax), has decide to "retire," much as some co-conspirators in Comey's cadre also "retired."

More will follow, especially if a Republican-led House majority opens investigations next January.

In the meantime, we should all take care to distinguish between "the FBI" as the corpus of thousands of good agents and the cadre of corrupt deep state bureaucrats within and atop the FBI.

To that end, the latest Rasmussen survey reports that a majority of likely voters agree that "there is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI that are using the FBI as Joe Biden's personal Gestapo."

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776
Title: Miranda Devine: FBI spied on Rudy Giuliani and me
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2022, 04:16:06 PM


https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/miranda-devine-fbi-spying-rudy-giulianis-cloud-knew-obtained-laptop-knew-post-going-write-video/?fbclid=IwAR0wi5vcnV-63vb1XtEHgy0qIDwILClChM5LLOL2gw3wHtUwXi4bs3g9mrQ
Title: Re: Miranda Devine: FBI spied on Rudy Giuliani and me
Post by: G M on August 31, 2022, 04:17:07 PM
Just a few bad apples at the top!

 :roll:



https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/miranda-devine-fbi-spying-rudy-giulianis-cloud-knew-obtained-laptop-knew-post-going-write-video/?fbclid=IwAR0wi5vcnV-63vb1XtEHgy0qIDwILClChM5LLOL2gw3wHtUwXi4bs3g9mrQ
Title: FBI agent takes after the President , , ,
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 31, 2022, 06:39:56 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/utah-based-fbi-employee-charged-with-sexually-abusing-five-underaged-girls-reports/
Title: Yon on the FBI
Post by: G M on August 31, 2022, 11:09:30 PM
https://michaelyon.substack.com/p/fbi-internal-war-starting-traitors
Title: WT: Sen. Grassley letter to AG Garland
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 05, 2022, 08:35:19 AM
Grassley warns Garland in letter to back off from FBI whistleblowers

BY KERRY PICKET THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Sen. Chuck Grassley turned up the heat on Attorney General Merrick Garland for prohibiting Justice Department employees from communicating with members of Congress amid a flood of FBI whistleblower complaints to lawmakers.

Mr. Grassley said that the attorney general’s edict, sent to DOJ workers in an Aug. 30 memo, threatened to “chill and undermine the importance of whistleblower protections.”

“Under your leadership, the Department and FBI have failed to be responsive to congressional oversight requests. Accordingly, it is often only because of whistleblowers that Congress and the American people are apprised of the type of wrongdoing that your memo seeks to protect against,” Mr. Grassley wrote last week in a letter to Mr. Garland.

“As you are aware, the Department and FBI have a reputation for retaliating against whistleblowers that provide information to Congress,” he wrote. “Accordingly, I’d like to remind the Department that, as a basic matter of law, all employees of the U.S. Government have a right to petition Congress or furnish information to Congress.”

The Times reached out to the Justice Department for a response but did not hear back.

The sharp words added to mounting tension between Republican lawmakers and Mr. Garland, whose Justice Department has been accused of anti-conservative bias and launching politically motivated investigations including the unprecedented FBI search on former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida.

FBI whistleblowers recently revealed that bureau officials sabotaged an investigation of Hunter Biden’s business dealings and tax affairs by labeling verified evidence as “disinformation.” Those efforts coincided with Hunter Biden’s father, President Biden, campaigning for the White House in 2020.

What’s more, the Washington Times has reported that scores of FBI whistleblowers have come forward about widespread misconduct and mismanagement at the bureau’s field offices across the country.

Mr. Grassley, an Iowa Republican and the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, is known for championing whistleblower protection laws, specifically the FBI Whistleblower Enhancement Protection Act.

Mr. Garland’s memo ordered DOJ employees to cease communicating with members of Congress and their staff. It said that all communication with Congress must be conducted through the department’s office of legislative affairs.

The policy is “to protect our criminal and civil law enforcement decisions, and our legal judgment from partisans or other inappropriate influences, whether real or perceived or indirect,” Mr. Garland said in the memo.

He added that the new policies “are not intended to conflict with or limit whistleblower protections” and that “Congress may carry out its legislative oversight functions.”

Mr. Grassley, in his letter to Mr. Garland, said, “Even with your whistleblower caveats, and due to the timing of your memo, I remain concerned about the chilling effect it may have on whistleblowers who wish to approach Congress with information relating to fraud, waste, abuse, and gross mismanagement.”
Title: The FBI has become the KGB
Post by: G M on September 06, 2022, 12:41:43 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/05/the-fbi-exposed/
Title: The FBI 99.9 % corrupt
Post by: G M on September 08, 2022, 08:20:50 PM
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/is_this_the_public_image_the_fbi_wants.html
Title: Rule of law? Deep State includes SEC
Post by: DougMacG on September 09, 2022, 07:07:31 AM
https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/sec-chairmans-role-steele-dossier-payments-adds-questions-about

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/truth-social-head-calls-sec-out-bs-demands-quick-approval-merger
Title: From Matt Bracken
Post by: G M on September 10, 2022, 07:45:49 AM
From Matt Bracken:

I happen to agree 100% with MM.
And Republican normies still think we can turn this all around with a "red wave" in November...
Even if it happens, that we "beat the cheat," what will actually change? The slim majority GOP in Congress will hold "hearings."

And FBI and DOJ honchos will laugh in their faces, give them the middle finger, and then the next day have their cell phones seized on the street by FBI Gestapo goons, and the homes of their aides raided just to teach them, finally, who is the real, permanent boss.

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/115/507/973/original/b9256dc7992093d6.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/115/507/973/original/b9256dc7992093d6.jpg)
Title: Judicial Watch, IRS Scandal continued
Post by: DougMacG on September 13, 2022, 12:52:28 PM
https://www.judicialwatch.org/irs-scandal-update-2/

Let's discuss.
Title: Re: Judicial Watch, IRS Scandal continued
Post by: G M on September 13, 2022, 12:59:42 PM
https://www.judicialwatch.org/irs-scandal-update-2/

Let's discuss.

We are ruled by unaccountable criminals.
Title: I can't wait until DSA discusses this!
Post by: G M on September 13, 2022, 01:32:08 PM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/09/12/the-state-of-our-justice-dept-asst-u-s-attorney-exposes-his-penis-forcibly-sexually-assaults-woman-lies-to-investigators-and-doj-criminal-prosecution-was-declined/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on September 13, 2022, 02:47:03 PM
**The Obama IRS scandal serves as a warning – that keeping a watch on our government is essential – as those in power are always willing to abuse government power for political ends.**

 problem :

who is watching the watchers ?

The MSM
who is in cahoots with one party .

thanks to Fitton et al (and the FOIA) or we would be even more in the dark about the deep state

not clear to me is how much the FOIA is working vs insider cover ups , etc at countering it.




Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 13, 2022, 03:26:15 PM
Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch are awesome and receive my financial support.
Title: Watch the Tucker segment embedded in the post
Post by: G M on September 13, 2022, 04:14:46 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400930.php

MARC:  It can also be found at https://video.foxnews.com/v/6312235351112
Title: Then they came for the My Pillow Guy and I said nothing...
Post by: G M on September 13, 2022, 09:27:45 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/breaking-news-stasi-fbi-seizes-mike-lindells-phone-mike-attempts-turn-agent-christ-video/

Because I hate those fcuking commercials!

Seriously, this is how far we have fallen...
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 02:10:47 AM
My read on this wave of warrants, phone seizures, raids, etc based on J6 claims is that it is to intimidate those who would think to contest skullduggery in this coming election.   
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on September 14, 2022, 03:43:04 AM
My read on this wave of warrants, phone seizures, raids, etc based on J6 claims is that it is to intimidate those who would think to contest skullduggery in this coming election.

How do we fight back against that?  And maybe the answer to that shouldn't go through the internet.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2022, 03:47:43 AM
In which case they have succeeded in their intimidation.

Title: The one gun crime the ATF doesn't want prosecuted
Post by: G M on September 14, 2022, 10:27:51 AM
https://www.ammoland.com/2022/09/court-atf-can-continue-covering-hunter-bidens-gun-crime/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on September 14, 2022, 10:35:33 AM
"Because I hate those fcuking commercials!"

well the commercials are enough reason to throw him in jail.  :?

he is now the "MY COFFEE " guy

next it will the my condom guy.....

I mean :

" the most delicious sweetest coffee you ever had -> GUARANTEED"

come on

what a jerk



Title: Re: Then they came for the My Pillow Guy and I said nothing...
Post by: G M on September 14, 2022, 10:48:53 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/breaking-news-stasi-fbi-seizes-mike-lindells-phone-mike-attempts-turn-agent-christ-video/

Because I hate those fcuking commercials!

Seriously, this is how far we have fallen...

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/rogue-fbi-uses-identity-theft-conspiracy-commit-identity-theft-justify-mike-lindell-search-warrant/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on September 14, 2022, 02:33:47 PM
well of course I agree
that being a jerk
and forcing conservatives to sit through endless insufferable commercials

"this is the lower price ever"

"while supply lasts"

with the same stuff at the same prices for yrs......

*does not excuse the FBI

abuse of power.......*


yet, if he was sent to solitary without a microphone ....

I would not weep .


Title: WSJ: How Mueller shredded the FBI's credibility
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2022, 08:40:55 AM
How Robert Mueller Shredded the FBI’s Credibility
His post-9/11 attempts to change the culture led to politicized investigations like Crossfire Hurricane.
By Thomas J. Baker
Sept. 14, 2022 2:44 pm ET

Four days after 9/11, Robert Mueller was summoned to the presidential retreat at Camp David. It was little more than a week since he’d become director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

That Saturday morning, Mr. Mueller gave President George W. Bush the FBI’s initial report on the attacks. The Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation, or Penttbom, would become the largest ever conducted by the FBI. It had already identified the 19 hijackers as well as their roles, nationalities, travel documents and histories. The focus had turned to establishing links between the hijackers and al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush, wearing a leather bomber jacket, sat at the head of a big square conference table in the rustic oak cabin. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was at the president’s right. Mr. Mueller, as he later acknowledged, was confident in the report. The FBI had done what it does best—investigate.

Expecting praise or thanks, Mr. Mueller was taken aback when the president interrupted him. “Bob, I expect the FBI to determine who was responsible for the attacks and to help bring them to justice,” he said. “What I want to know from you—today—is what the FBI is doing to prevent the next attack.” That same morning Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet presented a proposed plan of action. At the conclusion of Mr. Tenet’s presentation, Mr. Bush exclaimed, “That’s great.” He turned toward Mr. Mueller and said, “That’s what I want to hear.” Mr. Mueller told me later that he felt humiliated.

After his experience at Camp David, for reasons that might have seemed justified at the time, Mr. Mueller resolutely set about to change the “culture” of the FBI. That’s the word he used. He was going to make the bureau into an intelligence agency, or in his repeated terminology, an “intelligence driven” organization. Unintended consequences followed. The organization I had served for 33 years would undergo a cultural change in subsequent years, culminating in the ugly disaster of Crossfire Hurricane, the fruitless but disruptive investigation of the Trump campaign and Russia.

As a federal prosecutor, Mr. Mueller had worked with FBI special agents in Boston and San Francisco, but he didn’t know the FBI’s culture or how it functioned. He also displayed disdain for the special agents in charge of each of the FBI’s 50-plus field offices.

Mr. Mueller didn’t understand the FBI’s office-of-origin system, which has been in use for nearly a century. On a typical case, an office of origin would run things, sending out leads to other field offices who’d track them down and report back. In the case of the 9/11 attacks, the logical office of origin would have been the New York or Washington field office. Both had experienced international squads. New York had the investigative capacity, it was near Ground Zero, and up to then had been the office of origin for the entire al Qaeda case.


But Mr. Mueller wanted centralization. He wanted all information to run through FBI headquarters, which would make all the decisions. Mr. Mueller’s predecessor, Louis Freeh, who started his career as a field agent, strongly believed in empowering the field offices. Not Mr. Mueller, who accelerated centralization; he also believed special agents in charge presided over their territories like dukes. His words.

Penttbom would thus become the first case in FBI history run from headquarters. It set a bad precedent, which would yield poisonous fruit in the Hillary Clinton email investigation and then in the Russian collusion fiasco, when a small clique at headquarters called all the shots.

Mr. Mueller made other moves to change the FBI’s culture, which had negative consequences. Replacing agent executives, he brought in outside professionals to take over key headquarters positions—perhaps enhancing short-term technical proficiency in those positions but losing long-term commitment and an invaluable knowledge of the institution and its culture. The outsiders didn’t have the institutional knowledge of career agents.

During the directorships of Mr. Mueller and his successor, James Comey, nonagents ran the FBI’s public-affairs and congressional-affairs offices and served as its general counsel. These are precisely the positions in which the ugliness of Crossfire Hurricane and its aftermath eventually manifested itself. As the trial of Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann demonstrated, FBI General Counsel James Baker, a nonagent, accepted misdirection from Mr. Sussmann, causing the bureau to chase the fabricated Alfa Bank connection. A special agent would have known better how to interview Mr. Sussmann.

The change in FBI culture initiated by Mr. Mueller after his September 2001 experience with Mr. Bush led directly to today’s problematic FBI. Director Christopher Wray, or his successor, must turn the FBI back into a “swear to tell the truth” law enforcement agency.

Mr. Baker is a retired FBI special agent and legal attaché and author of “The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy,” forthcoming in December.
Title: Biden accused of pressuring FBI to fabricate
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 16, 2022, 10:31:00 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/sep/15/biden-accused-pressuring-fbi-fabricate-extremist-a/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=ql%2FwNraodjFDKKWtFqY%2FGc270qCfr2tc3TGmmz1HkNjuIB71NAkZVRPyJIEGsAEw&bt_ts=1663261333279
Title: Danchencko CHS status used to hide the conspiracy
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 20, 2022, 02:15:38 AM
FBI Put Key Dossier Source on Payroll in Apparent Effort to Conceal Dossier Fabrications
Hans Mahncke
Hans Mahncke
 September 14, 2022 Updated: September 19, 2022biggersmaller Print

0:00
11:58



1

Commentary

Special counsel John Durham filed a pre-trial motion in limine on Sept. 13 in his false statements case against Igor Danchenko, the primary sub-source of Christopher Steele’s dossier on former President Donald Trump. Danchenko, who is charged with five counts of lying to the FBI about his sources for the dossier, had earlier filed a motion to dismiss the charges against him.

Epoch Times PhotoMotions in limine are routine motions that are used to determine what evidence may and may not be used at trial. Danchenko’s trial is scheduled to begin next month.

However, Durham’s motion is anything but routine and contains a series of stunning revelations about Danchenko.

Perhaps the most stunning disclosure is that Danchenko was given confidential human source (CHS) status by the FBI in March 2017. Notably, this was after Danchenko had disowned the Steele dossier in a January 2017 FBI interview, having admitted that it was based on gossip and rumors. Given the admission, there was no legitimate reason to extend the protections of CHS status to Danchenko, who no longer had any bona fide value to the FBI’s investigation into alleged Trump–Russia collusion.

In fact, the FBI’s investigation ought to have ended as soon as Danchenko disclosed the true provenance of Steele’s reporting.

The FBI’s goal in giving Danchenko the highly coveted CHS status appears to have been to take Danchenko off the grid. As a CHS, Danchenko enjoyed special protections and privileges. Crucially, the FBI was able to use his status to conceal Danchenko and his disclosures from congressional inquiries, such as the investigation by then-Rep. Devin Nunes led by Kash Patel. Other inquiries, such as Freedom of Information Act requests, could similarly be stonewalled by reference to the “sources and methods” justification for concealing the identity, and even the existence, of a CHS.

The FBI had huge incentives to hide Danchenko. Although Danchenko told the FBI several lies in what Durham now describes was an attempt to reconcile what Danchenko had told Steele, the overarching message from Danchenko was that the dossier was untrue. This effectively ended any legitimate inquiry into Trump–Russia collusion. Danchenko’s disavowal also meant that the FBI’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against Trump campaign adviser Carter Page—which were issued based on the Steele dossier—were effectively invalidated.

The FBI had a legal duty to inform the FISA court about Danchenko but failed to do so. In fact, they successfully applied for two further FISA warrants against Page on the basis of the Steele dossier which they knew to be false.

The timing of Danchenko’s elevation to CHS status coincided with two major developments. First, on March 20, 2017, then-FBI Director James Comey told Congress that the Trump campaign was under investigation for alleged ties to Russia. At the time, Comey knew that Danchenko had shredded the investigation’s predicate, yet he chose to forge on regardless. Second, also in March 2017, Nunes found out from a whistleblower in the intelligence community that the Trump transition team had been spied on. Nunes complained that Congress hadn’t been given that information.

As head of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes immediately ratcheted up his own investigation into the Trump–Russia matter. That investigation would lead to the Nunes memo in February 2018. However, the Nunes memo made no mention of Danchenko or of the fact that he had disavowed the dossier. After the FBI put Danchenko on their CHS payroll, he was completely off the grid and any information about him was withheld from Congress under the “sources and methods” justification.

The FBI’s apparent scheme to bury Danchenko seems to have worked as planned. Neither Nunes nor anyone else knew about Danchenko or his disavowal of the Steele dossier until December 2019, when Justice Department (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued his report on the FBI’s FISA abuses. Horowitz didn’t disclose Danchenko’s name and provided very little information other than that Steele had a primary sub-source whose story differed from the one told by Steele himself.

It wasn’t until July 2020 that a group of online sleuths, including myself, were able to extrapolate Danchenko’s name from various data points in Horowitz’s report, as well as from heavily redacted interview notes published by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

With the identification of Danchenko, any remaining credibility of the Steele dossier collapsed. Contrary to the FBI’s claims, Danchenko wasn’t a Russian-based source with access to Kremlin insiders. Instead, he was a Beltway insider who had spent a number of years working at the Democratic-leaning Brookings Institution, where anti-Trump impeachment witness Fiona Hill was his mentor.

Yet, the FBI continued to pay Danchenko, as well as maintain his CHS status, until October 2020. By then, Durham had already been investigating the origins of the Trump–Russia probe for 19 months. It also isn’t known when Durham found out about Danchenko’s CHS status. It’s likely that Danchenko’s CHS status was revoked after then-Attorney General William Barr disclosed in September 2020 that Danchenko had been suspected of working for Russian intelligence.

That fact was known to the FBI since 2009, but Barr’s public disclosure may have forced the bureau’s hand.

It appears that the sole purpose of making Danchenko a CHS was to conceal FBI malfeasance from Congress, from the FISA court, and from the public; that opens up new avenues for Durham to criminally pursue FBI officials. These officials include former FBI Director James Comey, former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, former head of counterespionage Peter Strzok, and Danchenko case agent Brian Auten.

It was thought that the statute of limitations for bringing charges against FBI officials had lapsed earlier this year, when five years had passed from the time the officials took their respective actions. However, it now appears as if the time limit has been extended because the FBI continued employing Danchenko under false pretenses until October 2020. That gives Durham plenty of time to pursue FBI officials, if he’s so inclined.

Aside from the CHS revelations, Durham’s new motion also sheds light on the above-mentioned incident in which Barr disclosed that, while Danchenko was employed by the Brookings Institution, he allegedly had approached two fellow employees and told them that if they “had access to classified information,” and wanted “to make a little extra money,” he knew “some people to whom they could speak.”

Epoch Times Photo
Russian analyst Igor Danchenko is pursued by journalists as he departs the Albert V. Bryan U.S. Courthouse after being arraigned on Nov. 10, 2021, in Alexandria, Virginia. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
After the incident was reported to law enforcement in 2009, the FBI opened a “full investigation” into Danchenko after learning that he “(1) had been identified as an associate of two FBI counterintelligence subjects and (2) had previous contact with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers.”

Until Sept. 13, the status of that investigation remained unknown. Durham now has revealed that the FBI closed the investigation into Danchenko in 2010 because it “incorrectly believed” that he had left the country.

It isn’t known whether Durham believes the FBI’s threadbare explanation. It’s noteworthy that Durham hasn’t charged Danchenko with lying about his contacts with Russian intelligence officers. During his January 2017 FBI interview, Danchenko claimed not to know or have met with any such officers.

It’s also notable that Durham hasn’t charged Danchenko with lying about the infamous “pee tape” story. The dossier claims that the story originated in June 2016 from a senior Western employee at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow. However, Durham has now revealed that his office tracked down the only Western hotel employee at the time, a German national.

According to Durham, that German national will testify at Danchenko’s trial that he never met Danchenko and had never heard of the pee tape story until the media started reporting about the dossier in 2017.

Similar to the situation involving the Russian intelligence officers, it isn’t known why Durham hasn’t charged Danchenko specifically with lying about his supposed interactions with the German hotel manager. Given the massive interest that the pee tape story generated, it would have seemed to be a natural path to pursue, in particular since the hotel manager is able and willing to testify in court.

Epoch Times Photo
(L–R) Former FBI agent Peter Strzok; former FBI Director James Comey; and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. (Getty Images/Illustration by Epoch Times)
The manager’s account is backed up by Charles Dolan, a political adviser with connections to Bill and Hillary Clinton. According to Durham, Dolan will testify at Danchenko’s trial that he and Danchenko had traveled to Moscow in June 2016 but that, unlike Dolan, Danchenko didn’t stay at the Ritz-Carlton and didn’t meet the German hotel manager. It appears that Danchenko made up the pee tape story from whole cloth, falsely attributing it to the German manager whom he never met.

While Danchenko is charged with lying about his interactions with Dolan, Durham is asking the court to also allow the hotel manager to testify as a means of demonstrating Danchenko’s “efforts to ​​fabricate and misattribute information reflected in the Steele Reports.”

In another stunning revelation, Durham has now disclosed that in February 2016, only a few months before his dossier work, Danchenko briefed the managing partner of a business intelligence firm on how to fabricate sources. According to Durham, Danchenko’s advice to the partner was that if there were no sources, one should “use oneself as a source” while obscuring this fact by citing others “to save the situation.”

Although Danchenko’s interactions with the business intelligence partner aren’t directly tied to the dossier or to Danchenko’s alleged lies to the FBI, Durham is asking the court to allow that information to be presented to the jury as a means of showing Danchenko’s modus operandi in fabricating sources.

While Durham’s latest revelations are extremely damning for Danchenko, they are far more damning for the FBI who appears to have perfidiously used the CHS mechanism to take Danchenko off the grid and bury the fact that he had disavowed the dossier. By doing so, FBI leadership deceived Congress, the courts, the DOJ’s inspector general, and the public. Worst of all, they did it in order to be able to continue with their efforts to take down then-President Trump.

While Danchenko’s chances of conviction have risen considerably with these latest revelations, Durham’s filing shows that the real prize is FBI leadership. Whether Danchenko is convicted is largely meaningless if FBI leadership isn’t held to account.
Title: A FBI S/A with a sense of honor
Post by: G M on September 21, 2022, 07:41:53 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/whistleblower-identified-fbi-special-agent-steve-friend-goes-public-exposed-disgusting-fbi-lies-unprecedented-attacks-conservative-americans-jail-chris-wray-video/

He will be crushed by the FBI.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on September 22, 2022, 05:11:28 AM
"He will be crushed by the FBI."

for sure

the Repubs better protect him like
dems do for their whistle suckers

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on September 22, 2022, 07:22:24 AM
"He will be crushed by the FBI."

for sure

the Repubs better protect him like
dems do for their whistle suckers

They won't.
Title: Re: A FBI S/A with a sense of honor
Post by: G M on September 22, 2022, 07:33:16 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/whistleblower-identified-fbi-special-agent-steve-friend-goes-public-exposed-disgusting-fbi-lies-unprecedented-attacks-conservative-americans-jail-chris-wray-video/

He will be crushed by the FBI.

https://nypost.com/2022/09/21/fbi-hero-paying-the-price-for-exposing-unjust-persecution-of-conservative-americans/
Title: Devine: fbi hero
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 23, 2022, 03:39:19 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/09/21/fbi-hero-paying-the-price-for-exposing-unjust-persecution-of-conservative-americans/
Title: Re: Devine: fbi hero
Post by: G M on September 23, 2022, 07:47:59 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/09/21/fbi-hero-paying-the-price-for-exposing-unjust-persecution-of-conservative-americans/

Look up.
Title: Remember when the J6 Fedsurrection was just a conspiracy theory?
Post by: G M on September 23, 2022, 08:16:36 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/exclusive-10-facts-dozens-federal-operatives-infiltrated-trump-crowds-january-6th/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on September 23, 2022, 08:59:00 AM
couple of hundred proud boys
or few thousand at most

I wonder how many are actually Fay Wray plants......

BIGGEST THREAT TO DEMOCRACY , OUR REPUBLIC, FASCISTS , NAZIS !!! 
ARMAGEDDON !

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on September 23, 2022, 09:40:35 AM
couple of hundred proud boys
or few thousand at most

I wonder how many are actually Fay Wray plants......

BIGGEST THREAT TO DEMOCRACY , OUR REPUBLIC, FASCISTS , NAZIS !!! 
ARMAGEDDON !

Well, the Proud Boys shoot a lot of people in Chicago every weekend, right?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on September 23, 2022, 10:00:31 AM
"Well, the Proud Boys shoot a lot of people in Chicago every weekend, right?"

 Just did search

could not find any reports of murder from Proud Boys
but tons of

they are violent and dangerous because they have on few occasions punched a few people
if they were killing people we would never hear the end of it..

the murderers are black and latino gangs

we all know this

yet media FBI DC deep state soros et al - all silent !!


Title: Two Minutes of Hate
Post by: G M on September 23, 2022, 10:36:34 AM
"Well, the Proud Boys shoot a lot of people in Chicago every weekend, right?"

 Just did search

could not find any reports of murder from Proud Boys
but tons of

they are violent and dangerous because they have on few occasions punched a few people
if they were killing people we would never hear the end of it..

the murderers are black and latino gangs

we all know this

yet media FBI DC deep state soros et al - all silent !!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XvGmOZ5T6_Y
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 23, 2022, 07:53:18 PM
Konrad Lorenz called it "Collective Militant Enthusiasm".
Title: The FBI continues to dig...Houck family in PA
Post by: G M on September 25, 2022, 09:01:13 AM
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1573757904972398594
Title: Remember when the J6 Fedsurrection was just a conspiracy theory?
Post by: G M on September 25, 2022, 10:47:14 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/exclusive-doj-drops-bomb-admits-federal-government-ran-informants-inside-oath-keepers-jan-6-spring-defendants-less-one-week-trials/

Andy McDeepstate will be all over this!
Title: Re: Remember when the J6 Fedsurrection was just a conspiracy theory?
Post by: G M on September 26, 2022, 06:26:43 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/exclusive-doj-drops-bomb-admits-federal-government-ran-informants-inside-oath-keepers-jan-6-spring-defendants-less-one-week-trials/

Andy McDeepstate will be all over this!

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/deep-state-caught-luke-robinson-aka-gingergun-protester-filmed-gun-jan-6-fbi-later-removed-wanted-list-new-photo-shows-wearing-earpiec/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2022, 07:26:31 AM
Whoa.

Super frustrating that this comes to us via a site of such , , , unserious appearance.  Hard to look credible sharing this forward , , ,
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on September 26, 2022, 07:29:10 AM
Whoa.

Super frustrating that this comes to us via a site of such , , , unserious appearance.  Hard to look credible sharing this forward , , ,

Just wait for the NRO/Deep State Andy article covering it.

Should be coming out any day now...
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on September 26, 2022, 07:37:10 AM
Whoa.

Super frustrating that this comes to us via a site of such , , , unserious appearance.  Hard to look credible sharing this forward , , ,

Just wait for the NRO/Deep State Andy article covering it.

Should be coming out any day now...

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/116/560/549/original/8886c1711dc07662.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/116/560/549/original/8886c1711dc07662.jpeg)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2022, 09:47:05 AM
Well duh, but not responsive to my point/question-- How to spread the info in these articles without losing credibility in the eyes of those whom we wish to inform?



Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on September 26, 2022, 10:23:20 AM
Well duh, but not responsive to my point/question-- How to spread the info in these articles without losing credibility in the eyes of those whom we wish to inform?

Credible, like the MSM?

 :roll: :roll: :roll:
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 26, 2022, 11:57:41 AM
Non-responsive.

I'm not talking about persuading the MSM, I'm talking about persuading those whose impressions are fed in part, be it small or large, by the MSM.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on September 26, 2022, 10:29:12 PM
Non-responsive.

I'm not talking about persuading the MSM, I'm talking about persuading those whose impressions are fed in part, be it small or large, by the MSM.

If they trust the MSM, they are too stupid/brainwashed to waste time on.

As a wise man once told me, "You can't reason a person out of a position they didn't reason their way into".
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 27, 2022, 08:29:11 AM
     

IMHO we need BOTH to continue outreach with proof that the "Emperor has no clothes" AND to be fully ready to defend our Constitutional Republic against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.
Title: Intolerable
Post by: G M on September 27, 2022, 10:41:25 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/116/657/198/original/80acff854d65ce00.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/116/657/198/original/80acff854d65ce00.jpg)
Title: Where are all the FBI whistleblowers?
Post by: G M on September 27, 2022, 10:50:39 AM
https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/case-study/german-police-battalion-101

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/116/722/573/original/9000aa4162b04e47.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/116/722/573/original/9000aa4162b04e47.jpg)
Title: Fay Wray diverting FBI resources to keep expanding "1/6 " investigations
Post by: ccp on September 27, 2022, 10:36:05 PM
and fire the whistleblower who came out publicly  to decry this :

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/gop-fbi-whistleblower/2022/09/27/id/1089323/

its going on two yrs
got to keep it going past November ( or 2024/ due to Trump ).   :x

Title: Meanwhile, back at the DNC-Stasi
Post by: G M on September 28, 2022, 08:28:34 AM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/401131.php

Read it all.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on September 29, 2022, 04:51:25 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/22-gop-lawmakers-demand-answers-from-garland-on-fbi-raid-of-pro-life-activists-home/
Title: other presidents who took out records
Post by: ccp on October 01, 2022, 07:58:14 AM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/fbi-donaldtrump-hillaryclinton/2022/09/28/id/1089504/

though nothing mentioned if "classified"

Title: Re: other presidents who took out records
Post by: G M on October 01, 2022, 08:03:07 AM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/fbi-donaldtrump-hillaryclinton/2022/09/28/id/1089504/

though nothing mentioned if "classified"

Who has the ultimate authority over classification?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 01, 2022, 08:10:04 AM
I am not sure I really buy the argument
that Trump could simply state he thought it and thus classified docs are unclassified .

zero evidence he de classified or attempted to de classify anything
except his words which we all know means zero

sounds like an fallacious argument made after the fact if you ask me.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on October 01, 2022, 08:13:57 AM
I am not sure I really buy the argument
that Trump could simply state he thought it and thus classified docs are unclassified .

zero evidence he de classified or attempted to de classify anything
except his words which we all know means zero

sounds like an fallacious argument made after the fact if you ask me.

https://kogo.iheart.com/featured/the-clay-travis-and-buck-sexton-show/content/2022-08-15-clay-travis-and-buck-sexton-kash-patel-explains-how-trump-docs-were-declassified-and-handled/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 01, 2022, 08:26:57 AM
I am not sure where in the dialogue between Kash and Buck
it discussed "classified " documents

and whether other Presidents also had them

or what evidence Trump de classified them .....

did I miss something

don't get me wrong
clearly two tiered justice system

    but I am just saying because Trump has ultimate authority to declassify does not mean he formally did

as far as I know

whether this was grounds to raid Mar a Lago
I would say in total context a FLAT NO

clearly a political hit.

many questions unanswered

what was in docs
why did trump take them
did he know what was in them
why did he simply not return classified ones
should he have?
did GHB or GWB or Clinton or Obama also hold classified docs?





Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on October 01, 2022, 10:12:52 AM
I am not sure where in the dialogue between Kash and Buck
it discussed "classified " documents

and whether other Presidents also had them

or what evidence Trump de classified them .....

did I miss something

don't get me wrong
clearly two tiered justice system

    but I am just saying because Trump has ultimate authority to declassify does not mean he formally did

as far as I know

whether this was grounds to raid Mar a Lago
I would say in total context a FLAT NO

clearly a political hit.

many questions unanswered

what was in docs
why did trump take them
did he know what was in them
why did he simply not return classified ones
should he have?
did GHB or GWB or Clinton or Obama also hold classified docs?

“Now, in October of 2020, the president wrote a statement that’s now publicly available that said, I declassify every Russiagate document and every Hillary Clinton email investigation document. That’s it. That’s what it takes. And then out as he was leaving the presidency in December or January, he issued further sweeping declassification orders at the White House over a whole sets of documents.“
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 01, 2022, 01:32:22 PM
Kash states :

“Now, in October of 2020, the president wrote a statement that’s now publicly available that said, I declassify every Russiagate document and every Hillary Clinton email investigation document. That’s it. That’s what it takes. And then out as he was leaving the presidency in December or January, he issued further sweeping declassification orders at the White House over a whole sets of documents.“

Does he have the document or a copy?

Did anyone else hear Trump say this as he was walking out the front door?

or did he whisper this into Kash's ear?

Playing devil's advocate:

I like Kash but Trump has no real credibility with me.
That said neither does deep state.

Title: Fidelity! Bravery! Integrity! and Seth Rich
Post by: G M on October 02, 2022, 08:25:55 AM
https://technofog.substack.com/p/court-orders-production-of-seth-rich
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on October 02, 2022, 08:27:50 AM
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/

Kash states :

“Now, in October of 2020, the president wrote a statement that’s now publicly available that said, I declassify every Russiagate document and every Hillary Clinton email investigation document. That’s it. That’s what it takes. And then out as he was leaving the presidency in December or January, he issued further sweeping declassification orders at the White House over a whole sets of documents.“

Does he have the document or a copy?

Did anyone else hear Trump say this as he was walking out the front door?

or did he whisper this into Kash's ear?

Playing devil's advocate:

I like Kash but Trump has no real credibility with me.
That said neither does deep state.
Title: The other FBI laptop scandal
Post by: G M on October 03, 2022, 08:28:27 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_seth_rich_case_the_fbis_other_laptop_scandal.html
Title: The FBI and the Seth Rich laptop
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 03, 2022, 02:09:42 PM


https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_seth_rich_case_the_fbis_other_laptop_scandal.html
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 03, 2022, 02:57:52 PM
the deceit and dishonesty and misleading stuff coming from the Deep State is what logically leads to alternate theories

skepticism is a natural outcome that leads to

all THOSE  labelled "conspiracy theories"

as written off by the DNC MSM DC lawyer complex
Title: Byron York on :STRZOK v. GARLAND
Post by: ccp on October 03, 2022, 03:42:58 PM
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/trump-fired-peter-strzok-now-biden-is-defending-that-decision
Title: War on the rule of law; Deep State, Peter Strzok
Post by: DougMacG on October 03, 2022, 08:36:36 PM
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/10/peter-strzok-and-the-russia-collusion-hoax-revisited.php
Title: Deep State, Census errors - all in one direction
Post by: DougMacG on October 04, 2022, 07:42:59 AM
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/08/18/census-errors-will-distort-elections-funding-for-next-decade/
Title: WT: If Reps win House
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 06, 2022, 06:57:01 AM
Republican lawmakers ready to rein in FBI, DOJ

Judiciary committee has several plans ready

BY KERRY PICKET THE WASHINGTON TIMES

House Republicans, appalled by FBI misconduct and politicized investigations that have been detailed by a flood of whistleblowers, are weighing a range of probes and legislative fixes for the Department of Justice.

The lawmakers have begun revealing those plans that will spring into action if, as expected, the GOP wins a House majority in the Nov. 8 elections.

Judiciary Committee Republicans are kicking around various ideas for structuring investigations and drafting legislation to put a check on the FBI and the Justice Department. These plans include:

• Moving Justice Department supervision of the FBI out of Washington.


• Probing the FBI and DOJ with special committees such as ones modeled after Congress’ probes of U.S. intelligence agencies in the 1970s.


• Adding muscle to Congress’ referrals to the DOJ for criminal investigations.


• Requiring FBI, ATF and other federal law enforcement agents to wear body cams during raids.

The Justice Department and FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina told The Washington Times in an interview on “SiriusXM Patriot” that he is working on legislation that would decentralize the DOJ’s oversight power from Washington.

“The Department of Justice’s supervising of the FBI ought to be done out in the country by United States Attorney’s Offices, rather than having all key decisions focus where politics can Shanghai them here in Washington,” the congressman said.

Mr. Bishop said the more than two dozen FBI whistleblowers recently come forward to Congress because they think the agency’s mission was been distorted, often by politics.

“That sort of dynamic can happen when all power is essentially sucked up into one central decision-making vortex,” he said.

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee who will likely become chairman in a GOP-run House, said the committee will pursue robust investigations of the FBI and DOJ, but other types of investigatory committees could be in the works.

When recently pressed by Fox News host Mark Levin on whether Republicans would follow House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s model of handpicking all members of the Jan. 6 committee, Mr. Jordan said he was looking for the “most effective” options. “Whether that is a select committee, whether that is a special subcommittee of Judiciary, whether that’s a Church-type committee,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out what is exactly the best way.”

The Church committee, named after Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, conducted a series of investigations in 1975 into the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA, FBI and IRS.

Judiciary Committee Republicans have taken a particular interest in FBI whistleblower reports related to the FBI’s targeting of parents who protested at local school boards and conservative political activists, including those involved in the Jan. 6 demonstration that turned into a riot.

“How much is the FBI and the Department of Justice targeting citizens with respect to Jan. 6?” said Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican on the Judiciary Committee. He said the committee will find out more bout those who “exercised their First Amendment rights, and then suddenly, they’re being brought up on some sort of parading or trespassing charges and didn’t engage in any physical harm to anybody.”

Another Judiciary Committee Republican, Rep. Darrell Issa of California, told The Times that he is drafting legislation that will give Congress more muscle in making criminal referrals to the DOJ.

Mr. Issa has ample experience on that front. He led the Oversight and Reform Committee in 2012 when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was held in contempt for not cooperating with the panel’s investigation of the Obama administration’s Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation, which went awry and put more than a thousand firearms in the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

He also led Congress’ frustrated effort to hold IRS official Lois Lerner accountable for the IRS targeting of conservative groups.

“We referred Lois Lerner criminally. We referred Eric Holder criminally, and it was thwarted. You can’t have attorneys general … simply look at us and say, ‘Even though the law says you can do it, we’re not going to honor it,’” said Mr. Issa, who vowed to beef up that congressional power.

“We’re going to have to strengthen it,” he said.

Another measure several Republicans on the committee want is requiring federal law enforcement agents to wear body cameras during raids and digitally record all interviews.

“I prosecuted with the FBI for 15 years as a federal prosecutor, and it always came up because even when they were interviewing in custody, they wouldn’t have a camera in the room,” said Rep. Ken Buck, Colorado Republican. “Every time there was a crossexamination of an FBI agent, [the defense attorney] would ask, ‘Well, why didn’t you record this? Why did you just take notes and then destroy the notes?’ And so I think it is time.”


“That sort of dynamic can happen when all the power is essentially sucked up into one central decisionmaking vortex,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (left) on “SiriusXM Patriot.” The North Carolina lawmaker is kicking around ideas with fellow Republicans on how to put a check on the FBI and the Department of Justice. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Title: Re: WT: If Reps win House
Post by: G M on October 06, 2022, 06:58:51 AM
Right after they defund Obamacare!

 :roll:


Republican lawmakers ready to rein in FBI, DOJ

Judiciary committee has several plans ready

BY KERRY PICKET THE WASHINGTON TIMES

House Republicans, appalled by FBI misconduct and politicized investigations that have been detailed by a flood of whistleblowers, are weighing a range of probes and legislative fixes for the Department of Justice.

The lawmakers have begun revealing those plans that will spring into action if, as expected, the GOP wins a House majority in the Nov. 8 elections.

Judiciary Committee Republicans are kicking around various ideas for structuring investigations and drafting legislation to put a check on the FBI and the Justice Department. These plans include:

• Moving Justice Department supervision of the FBI out of Washington.


• Probing the FBI and DOJ with special committees such as ones modeled after Congress’ probes of U.S. intelligence agencies in the 1970s.


• Adding muscle to Congress’ referrals to the DOJ for criminal investigations.


• Requiring FBI, ATF and other federal law enforcement agents to wear body cams during raids.

The Justice Department and FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina told The Washington Times in an interview on “SiriusXM Patriot” that he is working on legislation that would decentralize the DOJ’s oversight power from Washington.

“The Department of Justice’s supervising of the FBI ought to be done out in the country by United States Attorney’s Offices, rather than having all key decisions focus where politics can Shanghai them here in Washington,” the congressman said.

Mr. Bishop said the more than two dozen FBI whistleblowers recently come forward to Congress because they think the agency’s mission was been distorted, often by politics.

“That sort of dynamic can happen when all power is essentially sucked up into one central decision-making vortex,” he said.

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee who will likely become chairman in a GOP-run House, said the committee will pursue robust investigations of the FBI and DOJ, but other types of investigatory committees could be in the works.

When recently pressed by Fox News host Mark Levin on whether Republicans would follow House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s model of handpicking all members of the Jan. 6 committee, Mr. Jordan said he was looking for the “most effective” options. “Whether that is a select committee, whether that is a special subcommittee of Judiciary, whether that’s a Church-type committee,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out what is exactly the best way.”

The Church committee, named after Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, conducted a series of investigations in 1975 into the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA, FBI and IRS.

Judiciary Committee Republicans have taken a particular interest in FBI whistleblower reports related to the FBI’s targeting of parents who protested at local school boards and conservative political activists, including those involved in the Jan. 6 demonstration that turned into a riot.

“How much is the FBI and the Department of Justice targeting citizens with respect to Jan. 6?” said Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican on the Judiciary Committee. He said the committee will find out more bout those who “exercised their First Amendment rights, and then suddenly, they’re being brought up on some sort of parading or trespassing charges and didn’t engage in any physical harm to anybody.”

Another Judiciary Committee Republican, Rep. Darrell Issa of California, told The Times that he is drafting legislation that will give Congress more muscle in making criminal referrals to the DOJ.

Mr. Issa has ample experience on that front. He led the Oversight and Reform Committee in 2012 when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was held in contempt for not cooperating with the panel’s investigation of the Obama administration’s Fast and Furious gun-tracking operation, which went awry and put more than a thousand firearms in the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

He also led Congress’ frustrated effort to hold IRS official Lois Lerner accountable for the IRS targeting of conservative groups.

“We referred Lois Lerner criminally. We referred Eric Holder criminally, and it was thwarted. You can’t have attorneys general … simply look at us and say, ‘Even though the law says you can do it, we’re not going to honor it,’” said Mr. Issa, who vowed to beef up that congressional power.

“We’re going to have to strengthen it,” he said.

Another measure several Republicans on the committee want is requiring federal law enforcement agents to wear body cameras during raids and digitally record all interviews.

“I prosecuted with the FBI for 15 years as a federal prosecutor, and it always came up because even when they were interviewing in custody, they wouldn’t have a camera in the room,” said Rep. Ken Buck, Colorado Republican. “Every time there was a crossexamination of an FBI agent, [the defense attorney] would ask, ‘Well, why didn’t you record this? Why did you just take notes and then destroy the notes?’ And so I think it is time.”


“That sort of dynamic can happen when all the power is essentially sucked up into one central decisionmaking vortex,” said Rep. Dan Bishop (left) on “SiriusXM Patriot.” The North Carolina lawmaker is kicking around ideas with fellow Republicans on how to put a check on the FBI and the Department of Justice. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Title: Re: WT: If Reps win House
Post by: DougMacG on October 06, 2022, 07:17:08 AM
Right after they defund Obamacare!

 :roll:

John McCain has left the building. 

Did you send money to Blake Masters today?
https://secure.winred.com/blake-masters/donate?amount=1000

Murkowski is still there.
https://secure.winred.com/kelly-for-alaska/website-donate?recurring=true

Want action?  Elect better people.  An R by the name is not enough.
Title: FBI hatchet man Steven Dantuono
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 07, 2022, 10:42:25 AM
Masters was one of my big recipients.   Donated to Kelly too.
==========================================

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/06/steven-dantuono-the-fbis-hatchet-man/?fbclid=IwAR0dl-drAkcaiCNRaDHiuTU6TgVSd37qJyfC_6fJMfGFI_7_cqoK2fMYzH8
Title: Andrew McCarthy agrees with me
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 07, 2022, 12:47:32 PM
Andrew McCarthy agrees with me!



https://nypost.com/.../hunter-bidens-end-game-its-about.../

Hunter Biden’s end game: It’s about far more than him
By Andrew C. McCarthy
October 6, 2022 8:33pm  Updated

The report discussed Biden's tax fraud.

Federal agents investigating Hunter Biden believe they have for months had enough evidence to charge the first son with tax crimes.

How does the Hunter Biden probe end? That question is stirring now that anonymous people connected to the case are leaking to the Washington Post — leaks of investigative information and prosecutorial deliberations that are about as surprising as the fact that the Washington Post somehow manages to make its report as much about Donald Trump as about the story’s putative subject, the incumbent president’s ne’er-do-well son.

It’s not a new question because it’s not a new story. Indeed, the reporting is only “new” in the sense that people supposedly in the know are talking about things that have been known for years — certainly known to readers of the New York Post.

Indeed, the mildly hilarious aspect of the report is that the Washington Post wants you to know that, in March 2022, it reported that a couple of “computer security experts” reviewed the thousands of emails “purportedly” from Hunter’s infamous laptop and “found they were authentic communications.”

Unmentioned, natch, is that in October 2020, when the New York Post reported on the laptop’s patently authentic communications in final weeks of the presidential election campaign, the Washington Post joined the FBI, the intelligence community, and the rest of the media-Democrat complex in suppressing the laptop data on the risible, evidence-free claim that it was “Russian disinformation.”

So how does the Hunter Biden investigation end? I’m going to tell you what I’ve told people for years. First, the fact that you’re thinking of it as the “Hunter Biden investigation” means it already has ended in the salient sense. In point of fact, Hunter is the least consequential Biden implicated, and what he gingerly called his “tax matter” when he was induced — only after the 2020 election, of course — to concede that he was under criminal investigation is the least consequential aspect of it.

Second, and wholly consistent with that, it’s going to end in politically choreographed theater in which the Biden administration tries to convince you that justice was done. And if they’ve already got you thinking of this drama as the “Hunter Biden investigation,” why shouldn’t they figure they can pull it off.

Stop perverting justice and charge Hunter Biden already

I’ll repeat the prediction I’ve been making for a couple of years: With great fanfare, Hunter Biden will be allowed to plead guilty to a tax charge, with minimal if any time in custody — even if a false-statement charge is thrown in for good measure.

Understand: In the scheme of things, this would be nothing. Hunter only acknowledged being under criminal investigation for tax offenses because everyone who was paying attention already knew that. There have been liens on his properties for years, and his ex-wife has been very public about his financial straits.

As for the false-statement charge, that would be in connection with a notorious firearms offense. Hunter, who was bounced from naval service in 2013 over drug abuse, obtained a gun after representing on the required federal form that he was not a user of illegal narcotics. Not only did he have a well-known problem; by his own account (in his book), he was abusing cocaine at the time. Here’s the only notable thing about that at this point: The false-statement offense appears to be a slam-dunk case.

Why is that notable? Because it happened four years ago. If you lied on a federal firearms form, managed to acquire a gun by doing so, then failed to safeguard the gun, then were so careless you lost the gun, do you think you’d still be walking around four years later without being charged?

How about four weeks? I doubt it.

Bobulinski has recounted that he had face-to-face meetings with Joe Biden.

Hunter was bounced from naval service in 2013 over drug abuse.
AP

So here is the theater I envision: The Justice Department will announce a guilty plea deal to trivial charges. Hunter will emote his deeply sincere contrition. President Biden will beat his chest and say, “See, I didn’t interfere in any way whatsoever” (I doubt he’ll add “just like I never discussed my son’s foreign business deals”). And the Justice Department will convene the victory-lap press conference at which it congratulates itself for its courage and independence in prosecuting the president’s son, without fear or favor.

And then they’ll hope the whole thing goes away. Case closed. The guilty plea settles all outstanding issues. Swept under the prosecutorial rug is any mention of the corruption and self-dealing in which the president himself is implicated.

I won’t go into chapter and verse — though I could, and Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.) already have in lengthy reports about the goo-gobs of foreign money that have gone into the Biden family coffers. I’ll keep it to one transaction.

The Biden family — not merely Hunter, the Biden family — received approximately $6 million in a transaction with CEFC, an apparent arm of the Chinese Communist government. There is documentary corroboration from the laptop that Joe Biden was supposed to get a significant slice (10% for the “big guy”).

Grassley has called for an investigation into Biden.

Sen. Chuck Grassley has lengthy reports about the foreign money that have gone into the Biden family coffers.
AP

Putting aside that the records are clearly authentic, there is a corroborating witness: Tony Bobulinski, a former naval intelligence officer and entrepreneur brought in by the Biden family and its inner circle to build the business structure. Bobulinski has recounted that he had face-to-face meetings with Joe Biden about the deal, and that Joe was deeply involved in Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Of the $6 million haul, $1 million went to Hunter to act as a lawyer for Patrick Ho, who appears to have been under foreign counterintelligence surveillance, in addition to criminal investigation for foreign corrupt practices (he was ultimately convicted). Once Ho was exposed, the regime of Xi Jinping arrested the Bidens’ main CEFC partner, Ye Jianming. He has never been seen in public again.

What did the Chinese government believe they were getting by lavishing millions on the Bidens? Were any of the Bidens intercepted in the FBI’s national-security monitoring of CEFC? If Joe Biden weren’t president and had to apply for a security clearance like other executive branch officials, could he qualify? Do you suppose the Justice Department’s very aggressive I’m sure, no fear or favor investigation is going to answer those and other pertinent questions?

But let’s not worry our pretty little heads about such things. After all, it’s just Hunter’s “tax matter,” right?

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 07, 2022, 02:04:25 PM
almost certainly this is the deal the shysters have worked out

 :x :x :x

"no one f**ks with a Biden"

just wait .....
Title: ET: FBI team involved in censoring Hunter laptop identified
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 08, 2022, 06:38:25 AM
FBI Team Involved in Censorship of Hunter Biden Laptop Story Identified
By Zachary Stieber October 7, 2022 Updated: October 7, 2022biggersmaller Print



The FBI team that was in communication with Facebook before the social media company censored the original Hunter Biden laptop story has been identified, according to a new court filing.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, identified the team as the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), according to an updated complaint entered late on Oct. 6.

Meta named the team after receiving a subpoena in a case alleging the federal government pressured Big Tech firms to censor users.

“Pursuant to the third-party subpoena, Meta has identified the FBI’s FITF, as supervised by Laura Dehmlow, and Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” the updated complaint states.

Mark Zuckberg, Meta’s CEO, said in August that Facebook reduced the reach of posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop in response to advice from the FBI.

“The background here is the FBI I think basically came to some folks on our team [and] were like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that, so just be vigilant,'” Zuckerberg said on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He made similar comments before the Senate in 2020.

“One of the threats that the FBI has alerted our company and the public to was the possibility of a hack and leak operation in the days or weeks leading up to this election,” Zuckerberg said then. Those alerts “suggested we be on high alert and sensitivity if a trove of documents appeared that we should view that with suspicion that it might be part of a foreign manipulation attempt,” he added.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment on the updated lawsuit, which now names the FBI as a defendant. The bureau said previously that it is routinely in touch with U.S. companies but “cannot ask, or direct, companies to take action on information received.”

2 Officials
The FITF was established by FBI Director Christopher Wray in 2017 “to identify and counteract malign foreign influence operations targeting the United States,” according to the bureau’s website. Such operations include covert actions by outside governments aimed at influencing the American political scene or discourse, the bureau has said.

Laura Dehmlow is a supervisor of FITF. She has been named as a defendant in the case along with Elvis Chan, a special agent who manages the cyber branch at the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office.

According to new documents produced by the government as part of discovery in the case, Dehmlow briefed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Cybersecurity Advisory Committee on March 1, 2022. Minutes of the meeting show Dehmlow telling members that the FITF actually started in 2016 and has since grown to 80 workers.

Asked about goals for approaching mal-, mis-, and disinformation, Dehmlow said that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable; we need to early educate the populace; and that today, critical thinking seems to be a problem currently,” according to the minutes.

Chan, meanwhile, bragged on a recent podcast that the San Francisco office “was very involved in helping to protect the US elections in 2020” by working with private companies and election officials. He also indicated he works closely with CISA Director Jen Easterly, who has been revealed to have taken part in pressuring Big Tech companies to crack down on alleged misinformation.

“We talked with all of these entities I mentioned regularly, at least on a monthly basis. And right before the election, probably on a weekly basis. If they were seeing anything unusual, if we were seeing anything unusual, sharing intelligence with technology companies, with social media companies, so that they could protect their own platforms. That’s where the FBI and the US government can actually help companies,” Chan said.

Plaintiffs in the case said that helping social media companies protect their platforms “includes censorship and suppression of speech at the FBI’s behest.”

Chan also organized meetings with LinkedIn from 2020 through the present, with agendas provided indicating the meetings included going over censoring election-related posts on social media. Chan organized similar meetings with other Big Tech firms, plaintiffs said.
Title: 1 million dollars!
Post by: G M on October 11, 2022, 08:06:27 PM
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/durham-probe-fbi-offered-christopher-steele-1-million-corroborate-trump-allegations-dossier

Fidelity!

Bravery!

Integrity!
Title: State AGs going after Biden Admin for using Goolag to endrun First Amendment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 12, 2022, 09:16:32 AM
https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2022/05/05/missouri-louisiana-ags-file-suit-against-president-biden-top-admin-officials-for-allegedly-colluding-with-social-media-giants-to-censor-and-suppress-free-speech?fbclid=IwAR1aa6Ti2N39i7U2WiMiKGNz7SHYeFEpFSRBcQngFQZf8ehM1di469MU8Go
Title: Andrew Weissmann vs. the Rule of Law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 12, 2022, 11:53:14 AM
second

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/exclusive-andrew-weissmann-part-iii-three-decades-innocent-man-rots-prison-weissmans-actions-corrupt-prosecution-doj-history/?fbclid=IwAR1EOCt7vhpZrTSR9lgx1iRHtimqKI7wIHCAH1Sb1sj50CZ9_qQ0VrsjwR8
Title: McCarthy : FBI framed Trump and covered up for Hunter
Post by: ccp on October 13, 2022, 05:40:15 AM
a McCarthy article even GM would like:
https://nypost.com/2022/10/12/utter-proof-the-fbi-framed-trump-and-shielded-hunter/
Title: Re: McCarthy : FBI framed Trump and covered up for Hunter
Post by: G M on October 13, 2022, 06:15:58 AM
a McCarthy article even GM would like:
https://nypost.com/2022/10/12/utter-proof-the-fbi-framed-trump-and-shielded-hunter/

Still, pretty weak tea.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2022, 08:19:54 AM
And a pretty weak rejoinder  :-D
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on October 13, 2022, 09:20:16 AM
And a pretty weak rejoinder  :-D

DSA is “shocked” at the FBI’s blatant criminality?

Really?

I might have missed the part where DSA retracted his endorsement of Garland. Can you post a link to it?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 13, 2022, 09:29:45 AM
Ad hominem, but here the question presented is the specifics of this article.
Title: Some riots are more equal than others
Post by: G M on October 14, 2022, 10:21:35 AM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/401373.php

Can’t wait for DSA to address this.
Title: Hide the witness
Post by: G M on October 15, 2022, 08:03:37 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/fbi-ordered-igor-danchenko-erase-evidence-phone-role-attempted-coup-president-trump/

Criminal acts.
Title: Re: Hide the witness
Post by: DougMacG on October 15, 2022, 10:10:30 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/fbi-ordered-igor-danchenko-erase-evidence-phone-role-attempted-coup-president-trump/

Criminal acts.

Yes, wouldn't you think?  When do they all go to jail?

As Danchenko argues (and documents) he provided the truth to the FBI, we find out it was the FBI that lied.

When is it SO bad that even [honest] liberals are outraged?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 15, 2022, 12:04:55 PM
When is it SO bad that even [honest] liberals are outraged?

do they exist?

I have not seen one democrat pol or liberal news outlet show any concern let alone outrage

maybe dershowitz might comment here but he is not influential

where are Cheney and Kintzenger concerning this?
ignore of course






Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on October 15, 2022, 12:22:16 PM
When is it SO bad that even [honest] liberals are outraged?

do they exist?
...

The dishonest media certainly isn't part of that, but I mean our friends, family and neighbors, that are good people, vote liberal but have similar integrity to our own.  When do they get outraged?

I know they're sheltered from the news of these developments, but when do they get outraged, even about being sheltered from real news?

They don't even know about the IRS Targeting, perhaps the worst scandal until now, far worse than Watergate.  Their news said that their Senate Committee report said both sides were subjected to further questioning.  Only if you read through to page 206 in the minority report section do you find out 100% of progressive groups were approved and 100% of conservative groups were denied the right to organize as a political group coming into Barack Obama's crooked reelection.

I would hate it if 'my' media hid the truth from me and let me go out in the world spewing false data and wrong conclusions easily shot down by real facts.

Some how the 'honest' left isn't noticing their media is consistently wrong and shielding of the truth.

"Joe wasn't involved in his son's business."

"Trump was a Russian agent."

"Democrats care more about other people."

"Republicans are the party of the rich."

"There was no election fraud."
Title: Who rules this country? The Deep State
Post by: G M on October 16, 2022, 07:13:44 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/10/15/ex-fbi-agent-timothy-thibault-wont-cooperate-with-house-gop/
Title: Re: Who rules this country? The Deep State
Post by: G M on October 16, 2022, 07:15:04 AM
https://nypost.com/2022/10/15/ex-fbi-agent-timothy-thibault-wont-cooperate-with-house-gop/

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/118/089/839/original/0c793147caf1e84f.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/118/089/839/original/0c793147caf1e84f.jpg)
Title: Oath keeper Trial
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 16, 2022, 03:34:15 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/oath-keepers-show-trial-government-hiding-informants-ones-calling-violence-walkie-talkie-app-complete-kangaroo-court/?fbclid=IwAR1fUDOMpqTXVHepTI3SG3MphUEwOA9n16Rap0hrbrGn8hm-Vuh58ykalq4
Title: FBI gets trolled. Heh heh
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 18, 2022, 08:22:47 AM
https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2022/10/17/fbi-tweet-encourages-citizens-to-report-election-shenanigans-and-then-it-gets-awkward/?bcid=2c48ca7f406101c71ee3ecf3507c08b6f88e8e93354ba2ce3ad02c1e3018ee70&utm_campaign=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_source=twtydaily
Title: Re: FBI gets trolled. Heh heh
Post by: G M on October 18, 2022, 08:46:47 AM
https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2022/10/17/fbi-tweet-encourages-citizens-to-report-election-shenanigans-and-then-it-gets-awkward/?bcid=2c48ca7f406101c71ee3ecf3507c08b6f88e8e93354ba2ce3ad02c1e3018ee70&utm_campaign=nl&utm_medium=email&utm_source=twtydaily

We mean stuff we can arrest republicans for, not the stuff we do!
Title: Danchenko walks and DOJ/FBI massively corrupt
Post by: G M on October 18, 2022, 04:18:39 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/401442.php
Title: WT on the Danchenko verdict
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 19, 2022, 01:40:18 AM


Russian source for anti-Trump dossier acquitted of lying to FBI

Durham comes up empty in court after three-year inquiry

BY JEFF MORDOCK THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Special counsel John Durham’s likely final trial ended in another defeat Tuesday as a federal jury acquitted Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst who was the primary source of the anti-Trump Steele dossier, on charges of making false statements to the FBI.

The jury deliberated for about nine hours over two days before acquitting Mr. Danchenko, who showed no reaction to the verdict.

It was the second acquittal for Mr. Durham in as many trials, leaving him with the guilty plea of a low-level FBI lawyer who was sentenced to probation as his only win.

Stuart Sears, a defense attorney for Mr. Danchenko, thanked the jurors for their work during the weeklong trial.

“We’ve known all along that Mr. Danchenko was innocent. We’re happy now that the American public knows that as well,” he told reporters in a brief statement after the verdict.

Mr. Durham said in a statement that his team was “disappointed” in the outcome.

“We respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case,” he said.

Joel Greene, a juror from Vienna, Virginia, told The Washington Times that the verdict was an easy call.

“We looked really closely, going

through and examined it all, and the conclusion that we reached was a conclusion that all of us were able to reach,” he said. “It was pretty unanimous. Everyone had questions on different things that needed to be clarified, but no fight over ‘yes,’ ’no’ or whatever.”

Mr. Danchenko was charged with four counts of making false statements related to his claims to the FBI that he received an anonymous phone call in July 2016 from someone he believed to be Sergei Millian, a former head of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. Danchenko told investigators that information from the phone call ended up in the dossier, a compendium of unproven anti-Trump accusations compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele and paid for by Democrats ahead of the 2016 election. The dossier was used in part by the FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant for Carter Page, a Trump campaign figure, in an investigation of suspected links between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

During the five-day criminal trial, Mr. Durham’s prosecutors argued that Mr. Danchenko never received the call and that he fabricated the story under pressure by FBI agents to corroborate accusations he provided to Mr. Steele, which ended up in the dossier.

“Why would Sergei Millian, a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, call and offer damaging information about Donald Trump to a person he’s never met before, he’s never spoken with before? It doesn’t make any sense,” prosecutor Michael Keilty said in his closing statement to jurors on Monday.

The defense said the call could have been made via a secure app and that Mr. Danchenko volunteered to help the FBI corroborate information in the Steele dossier.

“He was trying to help the FBI, and now they are prosecuting him for it,” Mr. Sears said.

The acquittal is a stinging defeat for Mr. Durham, who had a lot on the line in the Danchenko trial. Attorney General William Barr appointed him in 2019 to look for misconduct by the FBI and other intelligence agencies during their Russian collusion investigation.

Mr. Trump predicted that the Durham investigation would result in major arrests and would reveal that the FBI engaged in “really bad things” during its probe of Russia ties. After more than three years of looking for FBI wrongdoing, Mr. Durham has secured only one guilty plea and struck out on two criminal trials. He hasn’t charged anyone with conspiracy, proved that political bias swayed FBI decision-making while investigating Mr. Trump, or put highlevel officials on trial.

The Danchenko trial had one major stumble for Mr. Durham and his team. At the conclusion of the prosecution’s case on Friday, U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga granted a defense motion to throw out one of the initial five charges against Mr. Danchenko.

Prosecutors charged Mr. Danchenko with lying to the FBI when he said he never “talked” with Democratic operative Charles H. Dolan Jr. about information that wound up in the Steele dossier. Although the two men exchanged emails, there was no evidence that they spoke. Judge Trenga, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, said Mr. Danchenko’s answer was “literally true” and the charge was too weak to send to the jury.

Mr. Durham appeared to be feeling the heat Monday as he defended his investigation to jurors during a rebuttal to the defense attorney’s closing argument.

Mr. Sears, the defense attorney, lauded Mr. Danchenko’s work as a paid informant for the FBI from 2017 to 2020, but the bureau was forced to cut ties with him in late 2020 after Mr. Barr’s Justice Department indirectly outed him as the dossier source.

“He deserved more than to be exposed because a bunch of politicians put politics over national security,” said Mr. Sears, repeatedly reminding jurors that Mr. Barr initiated the Durham probe.

Mr. Durham argued that his investigation was a natural sequel to special counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusion that there was no evidence of collusion between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.

“Mr. Sears wants to put this on Bill Barr. He wants to put this on politicians,” Mr. Durham said in defense of his investigation. “You can call that political [that investigators] spent considerable time away from their family, did that for a political reason. If it’s your mindset, I guess that’s your mindset.”

Mr. Durham also showed frustration last week while sparring with one of his own witnesses, FBI analyst Brian Auten. Mr. Durham appeared angry while questioning Mr. Auten, who was not giving answers to match the prosecution’s narrative.

The Danchenko prosecution is the third case brought by Mr. Durham’s team.

The first case against former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith resulted in a guilty plea. He admitted to falsifying details in an email partly used to justify the Page surveillance application. Mr. Clinesmith walked away with probation.

Mr. Durham’s first trial, on a single charge of lying to the FBI against former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussman, ended in an acquittal. After a two-week trial, jurors took less than six hours to conclude the lawyer wasn’t guilty.

The Danchenko case is expected to be Mr. Durham’s final trial before he wraps up his investigation. He is expected to issue a report of his conclusions to the Justice Department. It is up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide whether to publicly release the report.
Title: Re: WT on the Danchenko verdict
Post by: DougMacG on October 19, 2022, 07:48:02 AM
"Russian source for anti-Trump dossier acquitted of lying to [the Lying] FBI

Durham comes up empty in court after three-year inquiry"
------------------------------------------------------------


I'm not sure he came up empty.  More accurately it seems he blew the whole thing open for the public to see.

I don't think making Russian fiction writers go to jail was the objective.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 19, 2022, 09:39:38 AM
The struggle for the spin now begins.
Title: AMcC on Durham
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2022, 10:43:53 AM
Waiting for Durham

Special Counsel John Durham arrives for his trial at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C., May 26, 2022.(Ron Sachs/Consolidated News Pictures/Getty Images)
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By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
October 22, 2022 6:30 AM

The special counsel’s looming report is the only chance the American people will ever get to hold the Clinton campaign and the FBI accountable for Russiagate.

Special counsel John Durham performed a valuable public service by bringing to cold, stark light the FBI’s Russiagate abuses and the imperative that the bureau — its reputation in tatters — be subjected to intense congressional scrutiny and reform. Nevertheless, the prosecutions by which he has thus far made his record could be its ultimate undoing.

In a four-year investigation, Durham has established collaboration — mostly of the nod-and-wink variety — between Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the government’s law-enforcement-and-intelligence apparatus, in an effort to baselessly frame Donald Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin. What grates is that, far from being held accountable, the significant participants are still celebrated.

FBI director Chris Wray would dispute this. When cornered into addressing the matter, Wray insists that none of the major players — including former director Jim Comey, whom he himself succeeded — is any longer in a position to make mischief.

Even on its face, this is untrue. In Durham’s prosecution of Igor Danchenko, which just ended in acquittal, we learned that even though Wray referred supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten for internal discipline over his role in the misconduct connected to the 2016 presidential election, and even though a significant suspension was recommended (which Auten is appealing), Auten was nevertheless tapped by another rogue FBI higher-up, Timothy Thibault, to concoct an intelligence assessment in connection with the 2020 presidential election. Based on that assessment, Auten and Thibault helped Democrats dismiss as “Russian disinformation” credible, derogatory information about Biden-family monetization of the now-president’s political influence — despite the dearth of evidence that it was disinformation at all, much less disinformation sourced to Russia.

That aside, Wray has undercut the cause of accountability every step of the way. When Republicans held the House and tried to investigate Russiagate in 2017–18, Wray led the FBI as it joined the Justice Department (under Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein) in stonewalling, on the now eye-roll-inducing grounds that public disclosure of highly classified FISA surveillance-warrant applications and other related intelligence would compromise intelligence-gathering methods and sources. Later, when the embarrassing disclosures finally trickled out, we learned that the FBI had not only botched Russiagate but had systematically violated its own FISA protocols for years, Wray assured everyone that everything was fine. The reason he feels the need to remind us that the Russiagate culprits are no longer in their jobs is that most were shunted aside discreetly, lest public attention be called to the debacle.


Still, there is something even more galling, not just to Trump fans but to many other Americans, including former FBI agents and law-enforcement officials, who are chagrined by what’s become of the bureau: The culprits who were fired, suspended (e.g., Auten), demoted, or otherwise encouraged to “spend more time with their families” (e.g., Thibault) seem always to fail upward, landing book deals, cable-TV gigs, or other lucrative new jobs, and so on.

In its way, it’s reminiscent of the progressive hold on the culture illustrated in the fallout from the Sixties. For example, far from being held accountable, Weatherman terrorists went on to celebrity — prestigious academic perches, influential posts in affluent progressive funding networks, and Democratic Party eminence. It didn’t matter how atrocious their actions were; what mattered was that they were audacious, bien pensant lefties who picked the right enemies. Today, the right enemy is Donald Trump, so . . . Russiagate schmussiagate. All is not just forgiven, it is exalted. The bureau’s politicization, malfeasance, and incompetence undermined Durham’s prosecutions of Russiagate rogues, just as they undermined prosecutions of the Weathermen. (“Guilty as sin, free as a bird — what a country, America,” as Bill Ayers put it.) The only difference between then and now is that the FBI, having been on the “wrong” side in the Weatherman fight, joined the “right” side against Trump.

To be sure, Durham’s apparent failures — not just the acquittals but the lack of prosecutions of Russiagate’s prime movers — are simply the nature of the beast. As I explained in my 2019 book about the Trump–Russia investigation, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, government abuses of power do not readily lend themselves to redress by criminal prosecution. They cannot — at least, not if we want to have national security and the rule of law.

You don’t need me to tell you that. Just have a look at surging crime in every American city that has consigned itself to the tender mercies of the progressive prosecutors and defund-the-police activists typical of one-party Democratic governance. If we convey to cops the message that they could be vilified, disciplined, and even prosecuted for the judgment calls they make in enforcing the law, then we get passive policing and rampant crime.

Widen the lens and we find no difference when it comes to national security. If fear of abuse induces us to clamp down on the government’s counterintelligence powers, our spy agencies will be hamstrung in probing the ambitions of malign regimes and foreign terrorists — in gathering the intelligence that is vital to protecting the homeland and American interests around the world.

We have learned this the hard way. In the 1990s, amid federal law enforcement’s response to the jihadist onslaught that began with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, concern grew over the possibility that, in the absence of hard evidence that a crime had been committed, the FBI and Justice Department might pretextually exploit counterintelligence authorities, such as spying under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), to monitor criminal suspects. So the Clinton Justice Department erected the infamous “wall” — a set of guidelines that effectively prevented the FBI’s counterintelligence agents from sharing information with the bureau’s criminal investigators as well as federal prosecutors.

In other words, to clamp down on the FBI’s propensity to abuse national-security power (see, e.g., COINTELPRO), we risked national-security catastrophe. The intentional blinders had the predictable, tragic result: The government failed to detect the machinations of terrorists as they plotted what became the 9/11 atrocities, in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed.

The “wall” addressed a hypothetical abuse. Today, that abuse is no longer hypothetical. In 2016, the FBI did not have credible evidence that the Republicans’ then-candidate for the presidency, Donald Trump, was in a corrupt conspiracy with Russia, much less that he had anything to do with the hacking of Democratic National Committee emails. (Indeed, even assuming that the Kremlin orchestrated the hacking, the Justice Department would not be able to prove its culpability in a criminal trial.) So the FBI did what I, as a prosecutor on terrorism cases back in the Nineties, used to argue it would never do in a million years: It conducted a sham FISA investigation, deceiving the court, in order to sit on Trump in hopes of coming up with some crime over which he could be convicted, or at least driven from office.

Where did the FBI get the “evidence” to support the sham? Mainly from the Clinton campaign. Bureau officials knew the Trump dirt was partisan opposition-research, knew it was bogus and unverifiable, and knew it would be explosive if anyone ever found out how aware of all this the FBI had been. So they used FISA to pursue their aims, guaranteeing that everything would be classified and Congress could be stonewalled — at least until the bureau caught Trump red-handed, as its leadership was oh so sure it would, at which point no one would care how it had gotten the goods on him. Meantime, the FBI let DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann pretend he was just a concerned former government official and patriot — rather than a well-paid Clinton-campaign emissary — when he came peddling skewed anti-Trump data. And FBI officials pretended that their old pal Chris Steele was not a hack being paid by other partisan hacks to smear Trump on behalf of Clinton, but merely a former British intelligence officer and respected colleague in the defense of the West whose every utterance about Russia had to be taken with utmost seriousness (notwithstanding that Putin cronies were a significant source of his income).




A gaping black hole in the public understanding of Russiagate, even after four years of Durham’s probe into the investigation’s origins, involves the leads the bureau got from overseas sources — from the CIA, then under the direction of the hyper-partisan John Brennan, and the foreign intelligence services with which Brennan was consulting. As Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017 testimony:

I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion—cooperation occurred. [Emphasis added.]

What exactly was this “intelligence and information” that “served as the basis for the FBI investigation” into supposed Trump–Russia “collusion”? We don’t know. We’re relying on Durham to tell us in his final report.

The report has always been John Durham’s primary job. There was never a realistic chance that he could make a comprehensive Russiagate record in a major prosecution. Hillary Clinton and her campaign aides had First Amendment leeway to use hyperbolic rhetoric against a partisan adversary — Clinton and Trump may be unseemly figures, but we don’t want law-enforcement agencies policing our politics. Of necessity, the FBI has a very low threshold of suspicion for opening a national-security investigation, and its discretion regarding the exploitation of legal authorities (such as FISA) in conducting such investigations is expansive. If anything, the CIA has even more discretion and the imperative of secrecy makes its operations practically uncheckable — and certainly not checkable by court prosecutions. When candidates and public officials must be given broad discretion, there is unavoidably lots of opportunity for abuse that cannot be addressed by the criminal law.

The only chance we have ever had to find out what really happened to spawn Russiagate was for Durham, with compulsory access to all the relevant players and intelligence, to write a comprehensive report. He took a calculated risk by bringing comparatively trivial cases against minor players, before what were sure to be hostile jury pools. He has gotten the predictable results: acquittals across the board. And now, as night follows day, Democrats and other Trump antagonists are mobilizing to preempt Durham’s coming report — urging Attorney General Merrick Garland to “pause” its public release, on the argument that the acquittals illustrate that Durham, heretofore of stellar bipartisan reputation, is an unreliable Trump lackey.

You want to say Durham has himself to blame for this predicament because he brought indictments that shouldn’t have been brought? I won’t argue the point, except to say that (a) the people he charged (including FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pled guilty to falsifying key information in connection with the bureau’s preparation of a sworn FISA application) do appear to have provided false information; and (b) it was in the public interest to expose the evidence of government misconduct that emerged in these proceedings.

Regardless, though, we still need Durham’s report. It is the only real chance we’ll ever have to hold the Clinton campaign and its government collaborators accountable for Russiagate.
Title: A. McCarthy on Durham probe
Post by: ccp on October 22, 2022, 12:25:34 PM
"Regardless, though, we still need Durham’s report. It is the only real chance we’ll ever have to hold the Clinton campaign and its government collaborators accountable for Russiagate."

sobering yet seemingly to me, an accurate assessment.

anyone  on the right team
in DC
will have no chance of being held accountable for transgressions...

worse then my experience with Copyright.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2022, 12:48:22 PM
"(S)obering yet seemingly to me, an accurate assessment."

Concur.
Title: Re: A. McCarthy on Durham probe
Post by: G M on October 22, 2022, 02:36:15 PM
"Regardless, though, we still need Durham’s report. It is the only real chance we’ll ever have to hold the Clinton campaign and its government collaborators accountable for Russiagate."

sobering yet seemingly to me, an accurate assessment.

anyone  on the right team
in DC
will have no chance of being held accountable for transgressions...

worse then my experience with Copyright.

We all know that there are multiple tiers of justice in the FUSA. We all are on the bottom tier.
Title: The Senior Executive Service of the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2022, 03:08:25 PM



WELL INFORMED PERSON IN A PUBLIC SPACE
Trump had the opportunity to dismantle/realign the SES (Senior Executive Service) model at one time. But for whatever reason, it never occurred. SES become pawns of the regime or else they’re forced out of service (3R). SES is where the long-term agency influences exist.


MARC
Sounds important but that went over my head. May I ask you to flesh that out a bit?

WIPIAPS
sure thing, Senior Executive Service is a position classification for civil service employees. Most government employees are on a general scale (GS) classification …which tops out at a GS15 level (similar to a one star General). They are in positions at the highest executive levels of all government agencies (Executive Directors, Chiefs, Directors, Commissioners, etc) responsible for “direction” and agency oversight.

SES is a “club”, which requires a selection process to enter. The selection process controlled/vetted by other sitting SES’s. Not only do they max out with the highest $ for all government employees, they also receive massive bonus at the end of the year, are not subject to maximum age requirements, and receive a significantly better retirement plan. There are only about 8000 SES across all the Agencies. They are (by every definition) the Deep State.

Once an SES, the executive is at the direction of the Administration. If the SESs push back against the Administration, they receive a 3R letter ( Resign, Relocate, Retire)….see Former Border Patrol Chief Scott’s candid remarks about the matter when he pushed back against the current Biden Administration regarding Border Security (or rather, the lack thereof). It’s the reason he “retired”.

Part of the reason Trump received so much push back during his term was due to the fact that Obama had packed the SES Agency offices during his terms. These “selected” SESs are mostly loyal to a leftist agenda. Although there are a few exceptions, one of the most notable being Mark Morgan (SES Border Patrol Chief under Obama) who became the CBP Commissioner under Trump, much to the consternation of many left leaning SESs within that organization. There are a few others (in my experience), but they are cautious (and politically savvy) about how they follow direction.

In about 2017, there was a rumor circulating that Trump was going to dismantle the program and dismiss all sitting SES. That unfortunately did not happen.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 22, 2022, 07:43:52 PM
continuing the convo:

MARC:
Thank you for that.
Just to be clear, you are saying that a President could undo the SES by unilateral act?
What would come in its aftermath?

WIP:
Unsure Marc. I do know that the Administration has the flexibility to force resignations of SES executives who don’t fall in line.
And I can only speak of my experience through the U.S Border Patrol for the 26 years I wore the badge. Between 1924 and 2013 all Border Patrol Senior Executive leadership came from within the ranks (meaning they went through our Academy, wore our badge, performed the job, and built a reputation within the organization). Mark Morgan was the first U.S. Border Patrol Chief to come to the agency from outside (he was previously an FBI Agent). Morgan was an exceptional leader and proved so under both the Obama and Trump administrations. He received a lot of pushback within our Agency because he was considered an outsider. And although he was exceptionally good for the Border Patrol and did an exceptional job of enhancing border security (e.g. the expansion of a functional International Border Fence, a.k.a. the Trump wall), he set a dangerous new precedence for people outside our ranks to hold Senior leadership positions. That is evidenced now by the current Commissioner, Magnus who has done more to devastate the agency’s morale and Border Security efforts in one year than has ever occurred in the last 98 years of the organization.
Title: pre election "announcement" by another shyster
Post by: ccp on October 24, 2022, 10:44:27 AM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/garland-hold-news-conference-significant-164441880.html

psst: russia

Title: Did the Deep State (FBI/DOJ) disappear James Gordon Meek?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 24, 2022, 11:00:24 AM
https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2022/10/21/the-fbi-raid-and-disappearance-of-journalist-james-gordon-meek-should-chill-you-to-the-bone-n646672
Title: after 30 yrs DOJ nabs two CCP spies
Post by: ccp on October 25, 2022, 07:17:29 AM
wow China. ---

NOT RUSSIA like I guessed in previous post :

https://republicbrief.com/breaking-us-attorney-general-and-fbi-director-hold-press-conference-on-significant-national-security-cases/

presumably Hunter's prints are no where near this  :wink:
Title: FBI asks for 66 years to release Seth Rich info
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 30, 2022, 01:58:52 PM
FBI Asks Court for 66 Years to Release Information From Seth Rich’s Computer
By Zachary Stieber October 28, 2022


The FBI is asking a U.S. court to reverse its order that it produce information from Seth Rich’s laptop computer.

If the court does not, the bureau wants 66 years to produce the information.

Rich was a Democratic National Committee staffer when he was killed on a street in Washington in mid-2016. No person has ever been arrested in connection to the murder.

U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant, an Obama appointee, ruled in September that the bureau must hand over information from the computer to Brian Huddleston, a Texas man who filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the info.

The FBI’s assertion that the privacy interest Rich’s family members hold outweighed the public interest was rejected by Mazzant, who noted the bureau cited no relevant case law supporting the argument.

But the ruling was erroneous, U.S. lawyers said in a new filing.

The bureau shouldn’t have to produce the information because of FOIA exemptions for information that are compiled for law enforcement purposes and “could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source,” the lawyers said in a motion for reconsideration. Another exemption, which enables agencies to withhold information that would disclose law enforcement techniques also applies, they said.

“Given the Court’s findings that except for the information related to Seth Rich’s laptop withheld pursuant to Exemptions 6 and 7(C) based on privacy interests, the FBI properly withheld or redacted all other information responsive to Huddleston’s requests, the production order seems inconsistent with the rest of the order,” the motion stated.

The FBI, after claiming it never possessed Rich’s laptop or any information from it, acknowledged in 2020 that it had thousands of files from the computer.

The bureau “is currently working on getting the files from Seth Rich’s personal laptop into a format to be reviewed,” the government said at the time.

Information and material extracted from the computer were provided by a source to an FBI agent during a meeting on March 15, 2018, FBI records officer Michael Seidel said in a declaration. He said the files included photographs and documents, among other material.

In the new filing, government lawyers said the FBI never extracted the data, which it revealed as originating with a law enforcement agency. They said the information is on a compact disc containing images of the laptop.

“The FBI did not open an investigation into the murder of Seth Rich, nor did it provide investigative or technical assistance to any investigation into the murder of Seth Rich. As a result, the FBI has never extracted the data from the compact disc and never processed the information contained on the disc,” they said.

To produce the information, the FBI would have to convert information on the disc into pages and then review the pages to redact information per FOIA, according to the government.

If Mazzant upholds his order, the FBI wants a lengthy period of time to perform the work—66 years, or 500 pages a month.

“If the court overrules the FBI’s motion, the FBI wants to produce records at a rate of 500 pages per month. At that rate, it will take almost 67 years just to produce the documents, never mind the images and other files,” Ty Clevenger, a lawyer representing Huddleston, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“After dealing with the FBI for five years, I now assume that the FBI is lying to me unless and until it proves otherwise. The FBI is desperately trying to hide records about Seth Rich, and that begs the question of why.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has suggested Rich leaked Democratic National Committee (DNC) files to WikiLeaks, but special counsel Robert Mueller said the real source was Russian hackers. Still, Mueller’s finding conflicts with statements from CrowdStrike, the firm hired to investigate how the DNC files were released.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 04, 2022, 11:58:15 AM
House Republicans Release Extensive Report Detailing FBI Politicization
By ARI BLAFF
November 4, 2022 8:31 AM

House Republicans on the Judiciary Committee released a 1,000-page report on Friday outlining how the FBI and Justice Department have abandoned their commitment to political neutrality in recent years.

The report, which relies heavily on whistleblower accounts, is set to serve as a roadmap for the oversight investigation into the politicization of federal law enforcement that Republicans will undertake should they reclaim a House majority in next week’s midterm elections. The probe will be led by Representative Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), who is expected to become chairman of the Judiciary Committee if Republicans take the House.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the stewardship of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, is broken,” the GOP report states. “The problem lies not with the majority of front-line agents who serve our country, but with the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy.”

The lengthy document details alleged FBI misconduct under President Biden and in the years leading up to his presidency. Prior to Biden, the bureau abused the FISA process to ensnare first the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration in an investigation into alleged Russian collusion that was based primarily on what agents knew to be partisan opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign.

Once Biden took office, the report alleges, the Department of Justice under Attorney General Merrick Garland began wielding the FBI to harass political enemies, including the wave of parents who protested school closures and radical curricula changes during school-board meetings over the 2020-2021 school year. The FBI also allegedly purged the agency of “conservative employees,” per the report.

The bureaus’s handling of alleged wrongdoing by Hunter Biden and the broader Biden family “is especially striking,” the draftees allege, given “how the FBI leadership has aggressively used law-enforcement authorities against conservatives.” Despite the well-founded allegations that Hunter spent his father’s vice presidency engaging in foreign pay-for-play schemes, the bureau has effectively “stonewalled” the committee’s attempts to investigate the alleged wrongdoing, the report states.

Indeed, Facebook’s censorship of the coverage surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop was influenced by the FBI, the report alleges. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told popular podcaster Joe Rogan in August that the tech platform decided to suppress the New York Post report detailing the nefarious contents of Hunter’s laptop after the FBI warned executives to be aware of potential Russian influence campaigns.

“Basically the background here is the FBI, I think basically came to us—some folks on our team—and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,’” Zuckerberg said during the conversation.

Zuckerberg’s revelation reinforced for many Republican committee members that the FBI has been collaborating with Big Tech companies to “censor conservative viewpoints.” Zuckerberg’s statements were seen as direct proof that the agency had shaped some of the social-media platform’s “content-moderation decisions in the weeks preceding the 2020 presidential elections.”

The report also argues that the FBI has turned a blind eye to escalating violence targeting pregnancy centers in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in May 2022. Despite the Department of Homeland Security warning of attacks against “Supreme Court justices, public officials, healthcare providers, and clergy,” the report argues the FBI failed to protect them, citing dozens of examples of specific incidents in the report’s appendix.
Title: AMcC: The FBI did it (again!)
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2022, 11:04:23 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/the-twitter-files-miss-the-real-scandal-fbi-interference-in-the-2020-election/?bypass_key=UkptemZDR3FpQzNOZG02a3IxVDY5UT09OjpiMGxhZVRKWGNVWlFOVEprUzJkU2FXcHVSeXR3VVQwOQ%3D%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-12-06&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
December 6, 2022 1:46 PM

Reading between the lines of all available evidence, you can find an organized effort by the bureau to put its thumb on the scale for Joe Biden’s campaign.

I can appreciate clever. It’s when people — especially government officials — insult my intelligence that I get angry. And we should all be angry over the United States government’s interference in the 2020 presidential election, hot on the heels of its self-abasement during and in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election.

The FBI, as the pointy end of the executive-branch spear, would have us believe that it in no way intentionally interfered in the 2020 election. Yet the evidence that it did so, and that its doing so was part of a yearslong pattern, is by leaps and bounds stronger than the evidence that the Trump campaign corruptly conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election — the baseless allegation, energetically promoted by the bureau, that inflamed the country for two years.

I’ve laid out much of the 2020 evidence here at NR and in the New York Post — the latter piece coming after Elon Musk, Twitter’s new top honcho, made some of the platform’s internal correspondence relating to the 2020 campaign available to journalist Matt Taibbi, who reported on it publicly in a series of tweets. Taibbi’s reporting is important, but I was surprised by the weakness of his observation that, beyond a “general” warning about “possible foreign hacks,” there appeared to be no evidence of FBI complicity in the pre-election social-media suppression of the Post’s reporting on damning information from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

To summarize, three months before the Post reported on the laptop, there was already not only a Hunter Biden criminal investigation but a Senate Republican investigation of the scandal the media-Democrat complex continues to bury: the cashing in on Joe Biden’s political influence by his family members, with his knowing and willful involvement, to the tune of millions of dollars that poured into Biden family coffers from agents of corrupt and authoritarian regimes, including some, such as China and Russia, that are hostile to the United States.


Obviously worried about the potential effect of these revelations on their party’s presidential nominee, congressional Democrats turned to some of their many sympathizers in the FBI brass. These included Timothy Thibault, who ran the Bureau’s Washington field office until he was forced into early retirement over anti-Republican, anti-conservative posts on his social-media account, and Brian Auten, an intelligence analyst who played an important role in the deeply misleading FISA-warrant applications the FBI filed in federal court, leading the judges to believe the 2016 Trump campaign had colluded with the Kremlin. Through these officials, the FBI helped Democrats peddle a political narrative that the evidence of foreign money lining the Bidens’ pockets was “Russian disinformation” — notwithstanding that much of this evidence was simply money-trail records generated by financial institutions, easily verifiable.

That is, before there ever was a Hunter Biden laptop story, the FBI hadn’t just helped Democrats craft a political storyline to dismiss evidence of Biden family corruption; bureau whistleblowers also reported to Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) that Thibault took internal steps both to bury the Biden investigation and obscure his rationale for doing so. Thibault, as previously noted, has since been pushed into early retirement. Auten, who reportedly cobbled together the intelligence “assessment” used to undermine the evidence of Biden family corruption, remains the subject of an internal disciplinary probe due to his actions in connection with Russiagate.


Moreover, even though the public did not know about the Hunter Biden laptop in the summer of 2020, when the FBI was already helping Democrats debunk the evidence of Biden family corruption, the FBI knew all about it, and about the likelihood that its existence would leak.

John Paul Mac Isaac, the Delaware computer repairman to whom an apparently strung-out Hunter brought the laptop, tried to give it to the bureau in October 2019. At that time, the FBI expressed no interest in taking it. But, given that there was a Justice Department probe under way, investigators subsequently decided they’d better grab it. So, as Isaac has recounted, two agents (whom he identifies by the last names of Wilson and DeMeo) showed up at his shop in December 2019 with a grand-jury subpoena for the laptop’s hard drive, which he surrendered. The bureau thus knew that the laptop contained explosive information, that Isaac had undoubtedly retained a copy of that information, and that it was likely he had or would share the information, especially given how reluctant the FBI had been to take possession of it.

It was within that context that Twitter and Facebook chose to suppress the Post’s reporting on the laptop.

As the Post’s Miranda Devine has reported, the FBI conducted weekly briefings for the social-media platforms in the run-up to the 2020 election. Why was the FBI, a government law-enforcement agency, briefing social-media companies? The bureau is generally not in the habit of sharing investigative information with private parties. But here, it was sticking to its overblown storyline that the Kremlin carried out cyber-espionage operations — hacking — in order to interfere in the 2016 election for the benefit of Donald Trump. I say “overblown” because the publication of hacked Democratic National Committee emails had no discernible impact on the 2016 election (there were no embarrassing Hillary Clinton–DNC emails), and the allegation that the Russian government was responsible, while plausible, is not supported by strong evidence (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Still, because the “Russia hacked the election” narrative was the FBI’s pretext for investigating the Trump campaign as if it were colluding with the Kremlin, the FBI continues to scaremonger about Russian election-interference. In truth, Russia has always interfered in our elections (as our government routinely interferes in Russia’s internal politics). Historically, this fact never seemed to bother Democrats until some of that interference was directed against them, but they needn’t be too concerned, since the Russians have not been nearly as effective as the FBI when it comes to election interference.

But I digress. When FBI agents met weekly with Twitter and Facebook in the run-up to the 2020 election, they weren’t doing it for their health. They were doing it to convey to both companies that, just as Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, it was undoubtedly trying to do so again in 2020. (In fact, the Post reports that the briefings were led by one of the FBI’s top cybersecurity agents, Elvis Chan, for whom Russia’s 2016 machinations have become the source of a postgraduate thesis and semi-celebrity.) The very unsubtle message, since it was coming from the government’s top law-enforcement agency, was that the companies should carefully police their platforms, lest they be accused of disseminating foreign disinformation and undermining election integrity. In fact, agent Laura Dehmlow, who runs the bureau’s “Foreign Influence Task Force,” reportedly hectored Twitter in March 2020 over the imperative that media platforms be “held accountable” for allowing “disinformation” to be spread. The FBI was not in a position to order the companies to suppress information. It was, however, well-positioned to make them fear that the failure to suppress information it might perceive as dodgy could result in serious legal consequences.

With this as background, Yoel Roth, who was a top Twitter executive in autumn 2020 and has since left the company, has provided a sworn declaration to the Federal Election Commission, in which he asserts that the FBI provided Twitter with alerts about what the bureau anticipated would be “hack and leak” operations. And not just that: Roth says that the FBI expressly alerted Twitter that there could be a dump of derogatory information about Hunter Biden in particular.

The FBI concedes that it briefed the social-media companies to be on alert for “hack and leak” operations and “foreign message indicators.” It claims, however, that it did not get so specific as to invoke Hunter Biden’s name as a potential target. That is what agent Chan recently testified in a lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general, which alleges government collusion with the social-media companies to suppress political speech. Chan acknowledged that Hunter Biden’s name came up in a briefing that occurred after the Post broke the laptop story, but he maintains that it was broached by a Facebook executive in a question to agent Dehmlow, who declined to comment on the Biden probe.

The dueling accounts of whether Hunter’s name was invoked are a sideshow. Patently, in the October 2020 run-up to the presidential election, (a) the FBI was well aware that there could be imminent media coverage about the laptop that the bureau possessed and had known about for a year; (b) the FBI had collaborated with Democrats to develop a narrative dismissing the evidence of Biden family corruption as Russian disinformation; and (c) the FBI was conducting briefings with social-media companies to convey, heavy-handedly, that they should exercise their discretion in favor of suppressing from their platforms anything that might be perceived as a repeat of 2016 — i.e., any information that could be construed, however tenuously, as the product of Russian hacking, or as disinformation intended to hurt Democrats and help Trump.


Furthermore, we know Twitter is not the only outfit that says this. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook (now Meta), recounted on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Facebook limited dissemination of the Biden laptop reporting because the FBI told the company to be on the lookout for a redux of Russia’s 2016 election interference. The FBI indicated that it had reason to believe there could be “some kind of dump that’s similar to that,” Zuckerberg recalled.

Was Hunter’s name mentioned? That question is irrelevant, because it didn’t need to be. You didn’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.

At Twitter, there were internal gusts, too. By 2020, it had hired former FBI general counsel James Baker as one of its top lawyers. He was smack in the middle of the deliberations over suppressing the Biden laptop reporting.

How surprised should we be by that? Baker was the FBI general counsel in 2016–17. He was a top adviser to then-director Jim Comey during the time when Comey assured then-president Trump that Trump himself was not a suspect in the Russiagate probe, even though, throughout that time, the bureau was telling the FISA court under oath — in applications reviewed by Baker and approved by Comey — that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Kremlin. Baker was in the prep session for then-director Comey’s January 6, 2017, briefing of Trump on the Steele dossier — the briefing in which Comey told Trump that the bureau had gotten this questionable reporting about Trump’s being compromised by the Russians, yet conveniently neglected to mention that the bureau had been relying on Steele’s reporting, under oath, in the FISA court. Baker was among Comey’s top advisers when Comey told Trump it would be improper for him to publicly announce that Trump was not a suspect, and then when Comey gave House testimony in which he announced to the world that the FBI was conducting a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia — an investigation, the director gratuitously added, that could result in criminal charges. (At the time, the FBI did not have a shred of evidence that the Trump campaign had conspired with Russia. In fact, weeks earlier, Igor Danchenko, the principal source for the Steele-dossier information, had told Auten and other investigators that the dossier was rife with fabrications and exaggerations — a fact the FBI withheld from the FISA court, as it continued relying on the Steele dossier in FISA-surveillance applications.) And Baker was the FBI lawyer who agreed to take a meeting with his old friend, Clinton campaign and DNC lawyer Michael Sussmann, so that Sussmann could provide the bureau with data supposedly showing that Trump had a communications back-channel to Vladimir Putin. That is, Baker accepted partisan opposition research from a campaign operative, yet agreed to treat the data as evidence to be prioritized for investigation on the laughable pretense that Sussmann was not coming to the FBI in his partisan capacity, but as a patriotic private citizen and former government lawyer who was deeply concerned about national security. The FBI’s headquarters then concealed from its own field investigators that Sussmann was the source of the data, and the documentation pursuant to which the investigation proceeded falsely stated that the data had come from the Justice Department, of all places.

These guys are old pros when it comes to, shall we say, massaging information to get what they want. The FBI can always say, “Hey, we never told the FISA court that Trump might personally be a Russian agent, only that the campaign Trump was running might be a Russian agent.” The FBI can always say, “We truthfully told the FISA court that we’d found Danchenko credible when we interviewed him . . . we just didn’t mention that what we found him credible about was his assertion that the dossier we were relying on was bogus.” In the same spirit, the FBI may well be able to say, “We never said the name ‘Hunter Biden’ when we briefed the social-media companies.” But the point is that the message the FBI willfully conveyed to Twitter was: If you suddenly see a story unfavorable to the Bidens that comes from a computer, assume that the underlying information has been hacked, and the Russians are probably at it again, just like in 2016. And in this instance, the bureau could be confident that Twitter was being advised by Baker, a man steeped in FBI practice and dizzying bureau-speak. Baker, in his inimitably Bakery way, would surely advise Twitter to exercise caution because it couldn’t be sure the laptop information wasn’t hacked, and Twitter would get the message that suppression was warranted.

And, well, whaddya know? Turns out Baker advised “caution” because, after all, Twitter couldn’t be sure the laptop information wasn’t hacked, and Twitter decided that suppression was warranted.

As if we needed more, then came the 51 former national-security officials who, in a jaw-dropping election-eve proclamation, went all in on the Democrat/FBI storyline that the laptop reporting was Russian disinformation. Naturally, the Gang of 51 was led by the two top former Obama officials, Jim Clapper (director of national intelligence) and John Brennan (CIA director), who had worked most closely with the FBI in peddling the 2016 Russian interference and Trump–Russia collusion narratives.

The proclamation is itself classic disinformation: It is careful not to come out and say the Biden story is Russian disinformation . . . only that our crack national-security pros keenly discern all the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” If you pressed them on it, Clapper, Brennan, et al., would claim they weren’t trying to deceive anyone by exploiting for partisan gain their privileged access to the nation’s intelligence secrets, no siree. They’d point you to the fine print: the proclamation’s fleeting admissions that, actually, the Gang of 51 has no idea whether the laptop data are “genuine,” and similarly lacks any hard “evidence of Russian involvement.”

But they sure got their point across, didn’t they? The social-media execs relied on this disingenuous, hyperpolitical, factually baseless proclamation to fortify themselves in the conclusion that the Biden reporting should be suppressed as hacked Russian disinformation. And Joe Biden himself pronounced, in a presidential debate watched by tens of millions of Americans, that the laptop story must be disinformation because, after all, dozens of former national-security officials — bipartisan, professional, patriotic, credible — had said so.

Here is the most galling part: They think we’re morons. They think they’re so very clever, manipulating words and putting their thumbs on the scale with the power we entrust to them. They think they’ve covered their tracks with so much deniability that we, the benighted rabble, could not hope to keep up with them.

I guess we’ll see if they’re right.

Andrew C. McCarthy
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, an NR contributing editor, and author of BALL OF COLLUSION: THE PLOT TO RIG AN ELECTION AND DESTROY A PRESIDENCY. @andrewcmccarthy

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on December 07, 2022, 11:17:13 AM
"Here is the most galling part: They think we’re morons. They think they’re so very clever, manipulating words and putting their thumbs on the scale with the power we entrust to them. They think they’ve covered their tracks with so much deniability that we, the benighted rabble, could not hope to keep up with them.

I guess we’ll see if they’re right."

the phrase no one is above the law should be amended to

no Republican is above the law.

ask Larry Lib et al
teacher of how to manipulate the Constitution for political gain of his beloved Democrat Party
no shame
just a know it all


Title: NRO: AMcC: How Russiagate was used to justify FBI election interference
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2022, 01:51:20 PM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/how-russiagate-was-used-to-justify-fbi-election-interference/?bypass_key=dVk4SkFJOFpKbjUwdmZmNHFvZUc4UT09OjpNWFJMU1ZWTFpVUTRlbkk1WlV0Mk5FZHhSRFZYZHowOQ%3D%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202022-12-10&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart

How Russiagate Was Used to Justify FBI Election Interference

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
December 10, 2022 6:30 AM

The false collusion narrative of 2016 became the pretext for the bureau to put its thumb on the scale for Joe Biden in 2020.

Who was the archvillain of Russiagate? It’s an important question, considering the cocksure certainty of the national-security establishment that Russia is a mortal threat to our democratic process, and the fact that that certainty has been used as justification for thrusting the FBI into our electoral politics as a monitor of what is supposed to be our free press and robust political speech.

Ask any Democrat or the FBI — you might even be able to ask both at the same time, since they seem to collaborate quite a bit — and Donald Trump will be the answer. In fact, Adam Schiff, for the moment the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, is still howling at the moon about collusion. And as for the FBI? Well, it never had a Trump–Russia-collusion case, but that didn’t stop it from swearing to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that it had one — not once but four times.

The other commonly cited villain is Vladimir Putin, another one-stop shop for explaining Democratic electoral woes. Hillary Clinton still won’t let 2016 go. For top Democrats and a certain regrettably common type of FBI official, elections have only two possible outcomes: Either Democrats win them or Russia steals them for Republicans.

Let’s dig a bit deeper, though, because Trump and Putin are too obvious. The surest Public Enemy No. 1 in the Russiagate saga is Julian Assange. Trump’s alleged role in the hack that launched a thousand fever dreams was, pardon the pun, trumped up. Putin’s role — given the opaque chain of command from the Kremlin to Moscow’s intelligence services to the battalions of nameless, faceless Russian hackers — is necessarily elusive. But if the “Russia hacked the 2016 election” narrative is true, then the one person we know was guilty beyond doubt is Assange. He’s the WikiLeaks guy. He’s the stolen-secrets clearinghouse for fancy bears, cozy bears, and whatever other bears there may be. We’re to understand that he encourages politically calculated anti-American hacking, he becomes a repository of the purloined data, and he gets it published in major media.

Don’t take my word for it. Just read Robert Mueller’s indictment of Roger Stone, which includes page after page of heavy breathing about Assange — his hacker connections, the hack of the DNC server, the publication of thousands of internal emails that turned party leaders crimson, Stone’s quest to connect with him and find out what he and his wily Russki partners would do next to eviscerate the Clinton campaign and steal the election for Trump.

Funny thing though: While Team Mueller, the Justice Department, and their FBI investigators had an awful lot to say about Assange, they never actually charged him with conspiring to hack the DNC’s servers. They never formally accused him of engaging in a cyber-espionage conspiracy with Russia to interfere in a presidential election.

In fact, as I’ve previously detailed, even when the Justice Department finally indicted Assange, it did not accuse him of helping Russia hack the DNC, much less of conspiring with other foreign operatives and foreign powers to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Baker and FBI Election Interference

It’s not as if the DOJ didn’t accuse him of any cyber-espionage conspiracies. Have a look at the current Assange indictment. A superseding instrument filed in 2020, after the comparatively sparse original 2018 indictment, it goes on for nearly 50 pages. First, it lays out a historical narrative about Assange’s elaborate global hacking operations, about the way he particularly targets the United States, our government, and our major institutions. Then, it pleads no fewer than 18 counts, as prosecutors start in 2007 and proceed to describe years of hacking operations.

But here’s the curious thing: For the most part, the indictment says Assange’s crimes ended in 2015 — the year before the 2016 election and the publication of the hacked DNC emails. In two counts at the end, the Justice Department tries to extend the Espionage Act offenses into 2019. I suspect that was done because, if Assange is eventually prosecuted on this indictment, his best defense may be the statute of limitations. For most federal crimes, it is five years; that could be a problem for prosecutors who waited until 2018 to allege misconduct that, in the main, happened eight years earlier. But in any event, the charges the government has strained to stretch into 2019 involve theft of government defense secrets. Assange is not charged with conspiracy to hack the DNC and divulge its emails and internal memoranda.

Strange, no?

Think about it: The Biden administration is now fighting to get Assange extradited from Britain to face the charges. What could more surely have clinched success in that extradition proceeding than charging Assange with having done what the Justice Department, the FBI, U.S. spy agencies, and congressional Democrats have assured us ad infinitum he did to “attack our democracy”? Remember, the Brits were extremely invested in the claim that the 2016 election was stolen by Russia in conjunction with Assange, for the benefit and with the collusion of Donald Trump’s campaign. Christopher Steele, the principal author of the shoddy dossier that framed Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin, was a former spy who had run the Moscow desk for Britain’s intelligence services. Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat who, according the FBI, triggered the Trump–Russia investigation with a vague inference he drew from a conversation over drinks with an obscure young Trump-campaign adviser, had deep ties to British intelligence. The British government coordinated with the FBI to enable the bureau to run down Trump–Russia collusion leads in the U.K.

If you wanted to impress British and European courts with how vital it is to the U.S. government to prosecute Assange, what would be more powerful than charging him with what, in England, Australia, and America, was apparently regarded as the crime of the century?

On the other hand, there could be a very good reason why Assange hasn’t been charged: The government cannot prove that Russia and Assange conspired to hack the DNC and thus interfere in the 2016 election.

Let that roll around in your brain for a moment. More than six years have passed since the 2016 election. Immediately after the election, President Barack Obama allowed that Russia did what Russia always does: It ineffectually meddled to try to affect the outcome. Before that, during the campaign itself, the Obama administration was well aware of Russia’s mostly moronic troll activity, and of Russian hacking operations that had no actual bearing on the election, yet took no meaningful action in response (unless you deem Obama’s giving Putin a stern look while telling him to knock it off to be meaningful action).


Mind you, I am not saying that Russia did not and does not meddle in our politics, just as our intelligence agencies have spent decades meddling in Russia’s politics. I am saying that Russia is a basket-case country with nukes. Its economy is third-rate. Its population is drunk and disappearing. If the Ukraine debacle proves anything, it is that Russia’s intelligence capabilities — which even at their strongest, during the Soviet era, were never strong enough to sway an American election — are significantly degraded.

Moscow couldn’t even divine the state of play in Ukraine, a next-door neighbor its agents had deeply infiltrated. Yes, Putin is a ruthless little man. The notion, however, that he and his ruling mafia family are ten-feet tall and blindingly efficient, expertly conducting the American electoral process like an orchestra from their Kremlin perch, is hilarious — or it would be, were it not the progressive political establishment’s pretext for not only continuing to insert the FBI into our politics, but actually increasing the bureau’s intrusions, its election-meddling, as we get further and further from the 2016 election that Russia did not actually affect.

The reality is that Hillary Clinton lost an election she should have won in 2016. Why? Because she was a uniquely unpopular and politically tin-eared candidate. Democrats could not bring themselves to admit that their standard-bearer lost fair and square, so they came up with an election-denial narrative. Their story was that “Russia hacked the election” in cahoots with Donald Trump. Unlike Trump’s crude stolen-election claptrap, the Democrats’ farce was well crafted, designed not only to rationalize Clinton’s defeat but to keep Trump under a cloud (and, eventually, to put him in the sights of a special counsel) for the first two years of his presidency.

Of course, the Democrats’ story was always going to have the media behind it. But, as we’ve seen in the ensuing years, it was also backed by a hyper-politicized federal law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus. Who do you think slapped together the Obama-commissioned intelligence report on Russian election interference — the kind of report that the government would ordinarily take over a year to compile — in just a few weeks so that the Democratic administration could manage its public rollout before Trump took office? None other than the same preening national-security professionals who willfully promoted the Trump–Russia-collusion fraud knowing it was a baseless Clinton-campaign smear. None other than the “nonpartisan” former federal officials — in particular, Obama’s two top intelligence chiefs, James Clapper and John Brennan — who would later sign onto the disgraceful mirror-image claim that the New York Post’s 2020 reporting on Biden-family corruption bore “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Let’s assume that the Russian government really did orchestrate the hacking of DNC’s servers in 2016 and then conspired with Assange to disseminate the emails they contained. The DNC emails still had no impact on the 2016 election. They were a tad embarrassing for a number of senior Democrats, but there were no Hillary Clinton emails. The only email issue that bedeviled the former secretary of state during the campaign was her mind-bogglingly irresponsible decision to conduct her State Department business over a private email server. And neither Putin nor Assange nor the Trump campaign can be blamed for that.

The DNC hack was irrelevant to Clinton’s defeat. So was the laughably sparse and juvenile propaganda allegedly spewed out via Kremlin-backed “troll farms” and bots. Both the leaked emails and the propaganda were mere drops in an ocean of election-related rhetoric. They had no impact on the election.

Nevertheless, if you’re going to maintain, against all reason, that the DNC hack was of consequence to the 2016 election, the question of Russia’s culpability cannot be avoided. Alas, after Democrats insisted for months that there was solid evidence of both Russia’s guilt and Trump’s complicity, it turned out that the Russia evidence was iffy at best.

The FBI and the Obama Justice Department never seized or subpoenaed the DNC’s servers, which is a very odd way of treating the corpus delecti of what they told us was the crime of the century. Instead, government investigators relied on the analysis of a private firm, CrowdStrike. As a DNC contractor, CrowdStrike had the same motive as the Clinton campaign and the Democrats to pin the hack on Russia and, derivatively, Trump. But it turned out that, in 2017, the company’s president, Shawn Henry, admitted to the House Intelligence Committee that CrowdStrike’s analysis turned up no hard evidence that Russian operatives (or anyone else) actually “exfiltrated” data from the DNC’s system. Sure, CrowdStrike had a theory. It had some circumstantial evidence that hackers may have laid the groundwork to exfiltrate the data. Henry conceded, though, that it found no “concrete evidence” that hackers actually followed up and filched the DNC emails.

Hmmm.

Then there’s the Mueller probe. With great fanfare, Team Mueller indicted a few dozen alleged Russian operatives for hacking and online-propaganda offenses. As I explained at the time, these indictments were more like press releases than formal charging documents. That’s because the defendants were in Russia. The Mueller prosecutors, many of them partisan Democrats, knew that Putin would never allow the defendants to be extradited to the United States for prosecution. So they issued their allegations in formal indictments, making the too-clever-by-half calculation that they’d never have to prove their claims in court. It was just theater: the crafting of official government documents designed to put the issue of Russia’s culpability to rest, even though indictments don’t prove anything.

Except that the prosecutors screwed up. Team Mueller gilded the lily by indicting not only Russian people but some Russian companies. That was dumb because, unlike people, companies don’t have to worry about being sentenced to prison. In fact, if they’re just foreign front companies, they don’t even have to worry about being bankrupted by an American prosecution, either. They don’t have to hunker down in the shadow of the Kremlin for fear of the U.S. Justice Department.

The rest is history: Much to the chagrin of Mueller’s collusion hunters, the Russian companies showed up in Washington and demanded their day in court, with all the American due process and discovery of the prosecutors’ files that entails. For a while, the hand-wringing prosecutors absurdly fought the discovery demands on national-security grounds. As every federal prosecutor knows, however, once you indict a case, there is no national-security exception to due process. You don’t get to tell the court, “Well gee, judge, y’know, we never thought we’d have to, like, prove this case, so do we really have to show them the evidence?” In the final humiliation, Mueller had no choice but to dismiss the indictment. Maybe Putin’s operatives are as guilty as the day is long, or maybe not, but either way, prosecutors couldn’t risk the public-relations damage a seemingly sure acquittal would have done to their painstakingly crafted narrative. So they folded.

Finally, that brings us back to Julian Assange. The government indicts him, but they don’t accuse him of conspiring to hack the DNC, or of meddling in the 2016 election in any other way. They’re trying to extradite him from Britain, but they won’t accuse him of the crimes the U.S. and U.K. governments worked together to try to prove.

The Justice Department knows that Assange has always maintained that he did not get the stolen DNC emails from Russian sources. Now, it’s quite possible that he’s lying. It’s also possible that he just doesn’t know — Kremlin-directed hackers generally don’t pass out FSB business cards. But the fact of the matter is: If the Justice Department indicted Assange over the DNC emails, our government would not be able to prove that Russia is guilty, and Assange would get to take the witness stand and crow that Russia had nothing to do with it.

That wouldn’t do wonders for the “Russia hacked the election” narrative, now, would it?

Wading through this endless saga, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. At this point, what matters most is not the wayward history of the 2016 election. What matters most is what imperils our democracy: the government’s reliance on that history to justify abuses of power in the here and now.

Since 2016, the FBI has become much more aggressive in policing the free press and political speech. To justify this aggression, it has relied on the allegation, made by blatantly partisan current and former national-security officials, that Russia endangered American democracy through diabolical cyber machinations aimed at defeating Hillary Clinton. In the 2020 election, the bureau collaborated with congressional Democrats to push the bogus narrative that the Post’s reporting — its allegations that members of Joe Biden’s family leveraged his political influence into millions of dollars in foreign money — was “Russian disinformation.” Not content with that, the FBI also encouraged social-media platforms to suppress the reporting. And on the eve of the election, 51 national-security pooh-bahs followed the bureau’s lead, peddling the fiction that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Kremlin plant.

This was profound, counter-constitutional interference in our elections by our government. Yet, we’re expected to tolerate it because of Clinton-campaign-generated spin about Russian hacking that didn’t affect the outcome of the 2016 election, that the government’s lawyers refuse to raise even when — as in Assange’s extradition proceedings — raising it would seem to be in the government’s interest, that federal prosecutors apparently can’t prove, and that may not have happened at all.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not convinced that our totally nonpartisan, highly professional, utterly scrupulous government is being straight with us.
Title: American Greatness on Jim Baker
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2022, 02:56:51 PM
second

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/07/elon-musk-fires-former-fbi-lawyer-behind-russiagate-hoax-following-unconvincing-explanation-for-hunter-biden-laptop-censorship/?fbclid=IwAR0u8SwN_XH6_O_yfTR_Yk0eqe2EWNb44EW9eI8l2JuCzO3LV85plGebr4k
Title: Re: American Greatness on Jim Baker
Post by: DougMacG on December 10, 2022, 04:38:09 PM
second

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/07/elon-musk-fires-former-fbi-lawyer-behind-russiagate-hoax-following-unconvincing-explanation-for-hunter-biden-laptop-censorship/?fbclid=IwAR0u8SwN_XH6_O_yfTR_Yk0eqe2EWNb44EW9eI8l2JuCzO3LV85plGebr4k

My understanding is Tim Scott's vote demographic looks similar to that of a (popular) white conservative.
Title: ET: FBI and Seth Rich
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 11, 2022, 09:54:32 PM
Information on Deceased DNC Staffer Seth Rich
By Zachary Stieber December 11, 2022 Updated: December 11, 2022 biggersmaller Print

0:00
5:42



1

The FBI not only has possession of a laptop computer owned by slain Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich, but a report detailing forensic imaging of what’s being described as Rich’s work computer, the bureau revealed in a new filing.

The FBI’s records office located the report while searching for the work computer, Michael Seidel, chief of the office, said in a sworn declaration filed with a federal court in Texas on Dec. 9.

He described the document as “a three (3) page forensic report detailing the actions performed by an outside entity to image the work laptop.”

The report was among four documents that had never been disclosed by the FBI in relation to Rich’s case.

Journalist Sy Hersh said in or around 2017 that he was told by a source about an FBI report on Seth Rich. He said, according to the source, that Seth Rich’s computer showed the DNC staffer had relayed DNC documents to WikiLeaks, a pro-transparency group. Hersh talked about the source’s claims during a phone call with Ed Butowsky, an investor who later retracted claims about Rich being a WikiLeaks source, and discussed the call during a deposition.

Rich was gunned down in the early morning hours on July 16, 2016, near his home in Washington. The killing of Rich, the DNC’s voter expansion data director, remains unsolved. Authorities have claimed that the killing was a robbery gone wrong. Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, has suggested that Rich passed DNC files to the group, which released the DNC files in 2016. U.S. authorities have alleged that Russians hacked into the DNC systems, but those allegations were made before the FBI received images from the DNC’s server to determine their validity.

The Metropolitan Police Department has said it is the lead investigating agency into the death. It has declined to say whether the FBI was helping with the probe into Rich’s death.

New Records
The new records were found after the records office contacted an unnamed FBI special agent during its search for Rich’s work computer, according to FBI Records Chief Seidel.

The other records are a letter from a third-party that accompanied the work computer and two FBI chain of custody forms.

None of the records were indexed to Rich inside of the bureau’s central records system and neither the forensic report nor the custody forms mention Rich’s name, according to the FBI. They were also not included in an electronic file created for Rich’s case.

The agent claimed that disclosure of the records would harm an FBI investigation into the allegations that Russians had hacked into U.S. systems.

The FBI now wants the court to agree to keep the new records shielded from Brian Huddleston, a Texas resident who filed a lawsuit against the bureau over its ignoring a Freedom of Information request for records on Rich.

Bureau officials initially claimed in sworn statements that the FBI had searched for records on Rich but did not locate any.

In 2020, for the first time, the FBI admitted it had files from a computer belonging to Rich. Some of those files were then released to Huddleston and made public, including documents that appear to suggest that someone could have paid for his death.

The FBI has said it has images from a second computer owned by Rich, which the bureau described as Rich’s personal laptop. A federal judge in September ordered the bureau to hand the images over to Huddleston, finding that the bureau improperly withheld them.

Epoch Times Photo
Seth Rich is pictured on a poster created by police officials to urge people with information about his murder to come forward. (Metropolitan Police Department)
FBI Argues Computer ‘Not an Actual Record’
The FBI has repeatedly sought, and obtained, delays to the production order and has still not produced the images.

The bureau had not explained whether it ever took possession of Rich’s personal laptop. A Department of Justice lawyer said at one point that the bureau was “working on getting the files from Seth Rich’s personal laptop into a format to be reviewed.” Seidel said in the new declaration that the FBI “does not have, nor has it ever had, physical possession of the actual personal laptop.”

The work laptop was conveyed to the FBI from a non-governmental third party, the FBI has said.

The bureau is fighting against the release of the images of Rich’s personal laptop and the work laptop, which it says is being held in an FBI evidence room.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, Seidel asserted that the computer “is not an actual record” but is “physical object/evidence” that is not subject to the law.

The law states that every U.S. agency shall make available “agency records.” But factors used to determine whether a record meets the definition shows that the computer is not, Seidel said. One factor is the extent to which personnel at the agency have read or relied upon the document, and the FBI has “found no indication” that the FBI relied on the content of the work computer, he added.

U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant, the Obama appointee who is overseeing the case, should order the computer and its associated records, including the newly discovered forensic report, shielded from Huddleston, U.S. lawyers said.

Ty Clevenger, the lawyer representing Huddleston, told The Epoch Times that he didn’t see a distinction between the physical work computer and the images from both computers. He said he would urge the judge to order the release of information from both computers.
Title: DOJ targeted pro-lifers
Post by: DougMacG on December 14, 2022, 07:18:38 AM
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/12/12/doj-official-admits-targeting-pro-lifers-is-response-to-overturn-of-roe
Title: FOX Steve Hilton on the FBI's skullduggery
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 14, 2022, 10:16:31 AM
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6317043843112?fbclid=IwAR2UwxWp5EM8__WRl_oAh79K7rFJ-hPc6N-9Th438MRzPoxmR53JVV1G7yk
Title: FBI whistleblower
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2022, 10:58:05 AM


https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/16/fbi-whistleblower-reveals-bureau-coverup-jan-6-obs/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=dWhObx8nVhktKp31HjJZjf7hbBtpQhkQqjz55xKyZjcmVIPb14r4fiYVNr0y%2BUwY&bt_ts=1671215041472
Title: Why is FBI so political?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2022, 12:22:01 PM
Pasting CCP's post here as well:

https://spectator.org/why-is-fbi-so-political/
Title: the lawfare mastermind was on O'Donnell last night
Post by: ccp on December 20, 2022, 08:22:32 AM
https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/tribe-we-ll-see-a-series-of-indictments-against-trump-by-spring-158198853727

previously
I heard shyster Andrew Weissman on the previous segment just prior to Tribe

continuously tell us how Jack Smith will get to the bottom of everything !

Jack Smith is a stealth Democrat operative in mho

he was chose not because he will be objective but because he will make it appear he is objective ( with just a little help from the corrupt MSM )


Title: Taibbi: The spies in Twitter
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 27, 2022, 07:10:50 AM
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/twitter-files-thread-the-spies-who?fbclid=IwAR3lK9FLe-_qolhZihodVSplTnBk142skqA5KFtnv6spm-FeNhoSwCaGrZ4
Title: CIA and FBI have been corrupt for 70 years
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 30, 2022, 09:24:23 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/what_we_know_now_the_cia_and_fbi_have_been_corrupt_for_seventy_years.html?fbclid=IwAR2d1VbIElgoCRcOXfTbZHKGt630Bwe8YhH1Tmmx-HtkQBuLeeqFT_wcXOQ
Title: NRO: Pregnancy Center has to hire PIs because FBI is slacking
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2023, 08:38:13 AM
Pregnancy Center Hires Private Investigators to Find Pro-Abortion Firebombers
By CAROLINE DOWNEY
January 8, 2023 11:22 AM

A pro-life pregnancy center network is taking matters into its own hands and hiring private investigators to find pro-abortion terrorists who attacked its medical office, claiming that the FBI is “slow-walking” its probe, which has not resulted in any arrests.

CompassCare is partnering with the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm fighting for religious liberty, to hire private investigators to find the perpetrators on its own terms and timeline.

“After talking with our investigators so far, they’ve already provided very valuable insight that we didn’t know. And they do have a track record of identifying terrorists both internationally and domestically,” Compass Care CEO Jim Harden told National Review.

Compass Care’s Buffalo location was firebombed and vandalized in June by pro-abortion extremists claiming to be affiliated with the group Jane’s Revenge following the leak of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. The damage cost the organization over $100,000 in new security. After rebuilding for 52 days, the center re-opened its doors to patients. Pregnancy resource centers often provide an alternative to abortion, including free medical and financial support to pregnant and new mothers.

“Security alone at all three of our sites has cost $150,000 this year. In the next budget it will probably cost us an additional $80,000 every year,” Harden told National Review at the time. Harden even had to temporarily relocate his family due to doxxing threats from pro-abortion activists.

After the arson attack against Compass Care in Buffalo, N.Y., Jane’s Revenge claimed responsibility in an online memorandum. It also threatened to unleash a rampage of violence against pro-life clinics.

Over the summer, the FBI announced it would investigate attacks on pregnancy-resource centers across the country as acts of domestic violent extremism after 124 Republican Members of Congress urged U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland that it do so.

However, Harden has alleged for four months that the FBI has been delaying the investigation into the violence against 77 pro-life clinics nationwide. For example, the agency did not conduct a forensic analysis of CompassCare’s video surveillance footage until July 13th, five weeks after the attack, the center reported.

The FBI advertised a $25,000 reward for information that could lead to the arrests of arsonists, but Compass Care called that “a ruse designed to feign interest in an investigation.” Harden said Compass Care would likely take the FBI reward to offset the expense of hiring the private investigators if they apprehend suspects.


“If the FBI is interested in quelling the nationwide hate crimes against Christian pro-life organizations, they would offer a reward for information leading to the arrests of all 78 attacks, not just for the pro-abortion terrorists who firebombed our facility,” Harden said. “It is a sad day when private citizens are left to do the work of law enforcement.”
Title: Biden institute has classified docs
Post by: ccp on January 09, 2023, 04:10:03 PM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doj-reviewing-potentially-classified-docs-225623683.html

but
only a small number
but not really classified

but but but
nothing to see here
Title: here is the "out" with regards to classified docs at Univ of Penn biden office
Post by: ccp on January 10, 2023, 06:42:08 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/justice-dept-reviewing-classified-documents-found-in-biden-s-post-vp-office/ar-AA168SkY

this is what the Left will run with

difference between Trump's classified docs and Biden's is that Biden "voluntarily" turned over docs. where in Trump did not.

of course Trump was President while Biden was VP at time
Biden cannot say he declassified them  when he became Pres
or claim schmo bama did when President since that argument plays into Trump's hand



Title: Re: here is the "out" with regards to classified docs at Univ of Penn biden office
Post by: DougMacG on January 10, 2023, 06:55:04 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/justice-dept-reviewing-classified-documents-found-in-biden-s-post-vp-office/ar-AA168SkY

this is what the Left will run with

difference between Trump's classified docs and Biden's is that Biden "voluntarily" turned over docs. where in Trump did not.

of course Trump was President while Biden was VP at time
Biden cannot say he declassified them  when he became Pres
or claim schmo bama did when President since that argument plays into Trump's hand

Big story - by their own definition.

Was it on 60 minutes, Biden said of Trump documents, "How can anyone be so irresponsible?

This was known BEFORE the election - and kept quiet.

What happened to the coverup is worse than the crime?

We still don't know what was in these classified documents. 

While we're reviewing archived documents, let's pull out the Tara Reade personnel file.  How did that scandal end without investigation?  But Trump's tax records are all over the internet.

This is beyond hypocrisy.  Reveals massive organized crime conspiracy.
Title: Ok here it is, the shyster Bulls**t why "this is different"
Post by: ccp on January 10, 2023, 08:36:19 AM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/theres-key-difference-between-classified-004201530.html

the media will sound like a chorus singing these same lines for 48 hrs then move back to previous Trump bashing ......

Title: Re: Ok here it is, the shyster Bulls**t why "this is different"
Post by: DougMacG on January 10, 2023, 09:57:46 AM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/theres-key-difference-between-classified-004201530.html

the media will sound like a chorus singing these same lines for 48 hrs then move back to previous Trump bashing ......

Yes. The disciples at home need talking points with the news. This is different because...   No, it's not different, except as you say, it's probably legal with Trump because he was president with power to declassify and it's illegal with Biden.

From the article:
The documents were found shortly before Attorney General Merrick Garland named the former federal prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel in mid-November to oversee two investigations related to former President Donald Trump.

   - Yes, he knew before and we didn't.  Someone kept it from us.  The administration, the media, leftist operatives, and the intelligence agencies (I repeat myself, all one and the same) kept it from us.  Because they can. 

We did not see that kind of caution and restraint when it came to Russian collusion, for example.

It's only news if it fits their narrative.  If it has to come out at all, it comes out when they think it will do the least damage.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on January 10, 2023, 11:11:09 AM
"- Yes, he knew before and we didn't.  Someone kept it from us.  The administration, the media, leftist operatives, and the intelligence agencies (I repeat myself, all one and the same) kept it from us.  Because they can."

and conversely how do we even know about it now?
I suspect it leaked out somehow which forced the mafia's hand to have to admit then work on explaining away.

funny how news that helps Trump always seems to finally leak post elections....

We Americans I think are for the first time really seeing the full corruption that goes on in DC .

Not new. Only we get better peaks behind the drawn curtains as to the back room dealing and stealing going on .

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 10, 2023, 11:17:42 AM
"and conversely how do we even know about it now?"

My understanding is FOIA and litigation.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on January 10, 2023, 11:22:51 AM
FOIA and litigation

do you know who is responsible?

Judicial Watch?

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 10, 2023, 11:29:00 AM
Don't have the time to track that down but JW is a very good guess.  They impress me and I am a donor.
Title: Joe claims ignorance
Post by: ccp on January 11, 2023, 05:24:04 AM
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/01/10/joe-biden-claims-surprised-discovered-boxes-classified-documents-old-private-office/

RULE OF LAW :

It is a fundamental legal principle in the U.S. that ignorance of the law is no defense. If ignorance were accepted as an excuse, any person charged with a criminal offense could claim ignorance to avoid the consequences. Laws apply to every person within the jurisdiction, whether they are known and understood.

ME:

WE MUST UPHOLD THE RULE OF LAW. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW   :wink:
Title: If the Military Industrial Complex does not run Washington, then who does?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 12, 2023, 05:07:38 PM
The Military-Industrial Complex Doesn’t Run Washington
Something else does

N.S. Lyons
3 hr ago
Osprey-Pentagon.jpg

https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/the-military-industrial-complex-doesnt?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email


A little while ago I found myself interested to read a frustrated Glenn Greenwald argue that, given the context of the “enormous” $858 billion U.S. defense budget recently passed by Congress along with an additional $44 billion in military aid for Ukraine, the only thing anyone can now inevitably rely on from Washington D.C. is that “the U.S. budget for military and intelligence agencies will increase every year no matter what.”

I felt this merited some reflection. Greenwald’s explanation for why perpetual growth of the defense budget is an inevitability (which it basically is), and for why American foreign policy is relentlessly hawkish more broadly, is a popular one: that the American arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. The big defense contractors bribe the politicians with large donations and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shoveling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers. This, Greenwald says, is precisely the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex” that President Eisenhower gravely warned our country to guard against in his famous farewell address some 62 years ago.

Eisenhower was, I must point out, attempting to draw attention to an even broader issue, i.e. the rise of an unaccountable technocratic administrative state, which accelerated in the wake of the technological-managerial revolution produced by WWII, and the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” The influence of this transformation of American republican governance, of which a military-industrial complex was but one part, was likely, he predicted, to be “economic, political, even spiritual” in scope, and threaten to change “the very structure of our society.” But I will leave all that aside for the time being, as “military-industrial complex” is the phrase that stuck in public memory, along with the narrower, more common understanding of what Eisenhower was warning about that Greenwald is using in this case.

As described above, this understanding of the military-industrial complex – and a common understanding of how politics in Washington works in general – is essentially conspiratorial. Its primary mechanism is individuals, or groups of individuals, cynically manipulating the procedures of the state to advance their material self-interests. Thus Washington has turned into a “multi-tentacle war machine,” Greenwald says, because “No matter what is going on in the world, they always find – or concoct – reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is.” (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. Applying Lenin’s maxim – “who benefits?” – appears to provide players (the “they”) and the motive. Combine that motive with the means and opportunity produced by systems of collusion, and you seem to have a straightforward explanation for most of the policy that comes out of Washington: it’s all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become common to the disaffected right instead.

Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also actually a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to do, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system, etc. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to reevaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.

True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions – and why it’s still always a good bet to invest in Lockheed Martin.[1]

First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact all of these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.

The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model. I.e. they don’t think “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” – even the people with seats on the boards of defense contractors. The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.

What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story. Let me try to explain.

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There is a useful saying in Washington, which is: “Where you sit is where you stand.” This refers to how individuals’ interests, and even their values, almost inevitably come to be determined by their position within and among bureaucracies. Whatever motivations they may enter with, they soon find themselves defending and advocating for whatever will most benefit the bureaucracy of which they have become a part. It is a relatively common phenomenon for even loyal top-level political appointees, dispatched by a new president to head a particular department or agency specifically so as to bring it into line with the president’s policy goals, to quickly be coopted into acting against that president’s wishes and working to advance their bureaucracy’s self-interests instead. Even those who enter and discover the truth that “the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy,” as Oscar Wilde memorably quipped, find they desire nothing so much as to help it do so. Their own interests and incentives have been subsumed by the bureaucracy’s interests and incentives.

How does this happen? And what is a bureaucracy, really? How is it that, as the critic Brooks Atkinson once wrote, bureaucracies are organizations “designed to perform public business,” but seemingly “as soon as a bureaucracy is established, it develops an autonomous spiritual life and comes to regard the public as its enemy”?
Title: ex-Intel letter signatory: Yup, we lied
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 17, 2023, 07:09:06 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ex-intel-official-who-signed-hunter-biden-laptop-letter-admits-significant-portion-of-emails-had-to-be-real/ar-AA16pWCX?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=9c2f30b340f14d5e9aa161840d54c657
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on January 17, 2023, 07:45:17 AM
" According to The Australian, Wise had no regrets signing onto the letter and said it was "no surprise" that the emails were genuine"

Democrats never have any regrets - ever - that I can think.
(unless it hurts themselves - like when Clinton had regrets - in  appointing Janet Reno who then appointed the special counsel)

Title: Was Mar a lago raid hoax 2.0 or just 2 systems of justice?
Post by: DougMacG on January 23, 2023, 07:50:47 AM
https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/23/discovery-of-more-biden-docs-proves-mar-a-lago-raid-was-just-another-russia-collusion-hoax/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on January 23, 2023, 01:16:21 PM
https://twitchy.com/dougp-3137/2023/01/23/ex-top-fbi-agent-who-investigated-trump-for-ties-to-russia-arrested-over-alleged-ties-to-russia/
Title: War on rule of law; Deep State, IRS TARGETING, never forget, TTT
Post by: DougMacG on January 25, 2023, 06:22:09 AM
From these threads.  Not only was Obama not impeached for this but his VP went on to run and win again - unquestioned - about it.

100% of the conservative groups organizing, for one thing to oppose Obama's reelection, were denied organizing status by the IRS while 100%of the liberal groups were approved.  That FACT is on page 188 of the defining Senate report.  Besides here, it went no further than that.  Nothing like "transparency".
----------------------
IRS Targeting - 700 conservative groups were prevented from raising money and participating (against Obama's reelection and policies) by action / inaction of the federal bureaucracy, while the IRS commissioner was visiting the White House 500 times more often than his predecessor.
-----
Page 188 of the report claiming, "both liberal and conservatives groups received the same bad treatment and were targeted by the IRS" story:
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/REPORT%20-%20IRS%20&%20TIGTA%20Mgmt%20Failures%20Related%20to%20501(c)(4)%20(Sept%205%202014,%209-9-14%20update).pdf

"104 conservative groups were asked 1552 questions.  7 liberal groups were asked a total of 33 questions.

100% of liberal group applications were approved."

[100% of conservative groups were denied approval over that time period.]

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/REPORT%20-%20IRS%20&%20TIGTA%20Mgmt%20Failures%20Related%20to%20501(c)(4)%20(Sept%205%202014,%209-9-14%20update).pdf

100% (all) of the 292 groups applying for tax-exempt status whose names contained "tea party", "patriot", or "9/12" were denied tax-exempt status for two years coming into Obama's reelection.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323873904578571363311816922

https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1718.msg120464#msg120464
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2023, 07:39:09 AM
Quality work there Doug.  Thank you.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on January 25, 2023, 10:28:33 AM
Thank you.  Now let's get the word out.
Title: NYT, Biden docs screw up the Trump case
Post by: DougMacG on January 25, 2023, 10:32:00 AM
How so?  Are they admitting Biden will never be prosecuted, therefore there is no case against trump? Pathetic reasoning. What the hell does biden's case have to do with Trump's case? Isn't it just how facts line up with the law, the law being an immovable object?

https://dnyuz.com/2023/01/24/bidens-handling-of-secret-documents-complicates-the-case-against-trump/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 25, 2023, 11:50:52 AM
Wasn't there a Talking Heads song/video/album called "Stop Making Sense"?
Title: Crimes were committed
Post by: G M on January 28, 2023, 09:08:15 AM
https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/stefanik-crimes-were-committed-by-intelligence-agencies/

But no one will go to jail, as usual.


MUST! VOTE! HARDER!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on January 28, 2023, 09:19:01 AM
"But no one will go to jail, as usual."

true

but they will get jobs with big tech or CNN or MSPCP

 :x
Title: AMcC: Congress must not tolerate the Biden Admin obstruction
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2023, 04:33:20 AM
As usual, quality legal-political analysis from AMcC:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/congress-must-not-tolerate-the-biden-administrations-obstruction/?bypass_key=Qmt4aDBxU3pkeDJNVDRTTUFzcGludz09OjphakJoVEVGQ2RWRTJUM2xMUVhsSk4wUldTa1pxWnowOQ%3D%3D&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Saturday%202023-01-28&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart


Congress Must Not Tolerate the Biden Administration’s Obstruction
President Joe Biden delivers an speech in Springfield, Va., January 26, 2023. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
January 28, 2023 6:30 AM

Lawmakers have not only the power but the duty to investigate executive misconduct, hold public officials accountable, and enact legislative remedies.

Many a liberty is taken by today’s commentators when imagining what the Constitution’s Framers would or would not have thought about how the modern American government works — or, more often, doesn’t work. Generally speaking, unless the commentator’s name is Rick Brookhiser (our eminent historian and author of, among other gems, What Would the Founders Do?), you’d best take such deductions with a grain of salt.

Yet, there is something about which we can be confident: The ingenious men who designed our framework of government, premised on the principle of discrete branches that check each other’s misconduct by exercising separate powers, would have scoffed at the notion that presidential corruption could be policed by prosecutors who work for the president.

The check against abuse of executive power, including any criminal misconduct committed by the president, is Congress.

Republicans, now in control of the House, would do well to remember that fact. When it comes to the Biden scandals, whether it is the millions of dollars the president’s family raked in by leveraging Joe Biden’s political influence or the president’s egregious misconduct in hoarding classified intelligence, administration officials are determined to stonewall the people’s elected representatives. Their rationale is that to comply with congressional demands for evidence, testimony, and other relevant information regarding misconduct by executive officials (the chief executive very much included) would interfere with the work of the special counsel and other prosecutors assigned by Biden’s attorney general and Biden’s Justice Department to investigate Biden.

To state this rationale is to refute it. Yet Avril Haines, the unelected, Biden-appointed director of national intelligence, contemptuously told the Senate Intelligence Committee to pound sand earlier this week when it asked to inspect the classified documents discovered in Biden’s private office and residence, as well as in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and a nearby storage facility. Mind you, we are talking about a “select” panel, whose members all qualify for the highest possible security clearances, and whose leaders — Chairman Mark Warner (D., Va.) and Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) — are members of the “Gang of Eight,” the congressional leaders to whom the executive branch is obliged to report the nation’s most sensitive intelligence operations.

Constitutionally speaking, even if we were not in an age of secrecy classifications and security-clearance levels, the Article II branch would have no legitimate authority to withhold information on government activities and records from the Article I branch that created, funds, and must conduct oversight of the agencies that make up the government’s law enforcement and intelligence apparatus. As it happens, however, the design of modern government ensures that committees of Congress can implicitly be trusted with the nation’s secrets — obviating the need for executive officials to trigger a constitutional crisis over their supposed fears that disclosing intelligence to Congress would result in leaks that imperil methods and sources. (Because, as we all know, executive officials would never, ever abuse their privileged access to the nation’s secrets by selectively leaking.)

That being the case, DNI Haines is not quite audacious enough to tell lawmakers they can’t be trusted. What she is saying, however, is even worse. Her claim is that there is no higher priority in our government than the completion of investigations currently being conducted by special counsels the Biden Justice Department has appointed, and that providing information to Congress would threaten the integrity of those investigations. Ergo, the administration won’t cooperate.

This is factually frivolous and constitutionally impeachable.

I was a federal prosecutor for 20 years and handled a good many cases in which investigative secrecy was imperative because, without it, violent criminal enterprises would likely kill people, destroy evidence, or flee. In those cases, the two highest public interests were to prevent acts of violence from happening and to prosecute hardened criminals so they would no longer prey on society.

Those considerations do not apply in the ongoing probes of the mishandling of classified information by public officials — or, indeed, in most political-corruption cases.

To begin with, when there has been executive misconduct, the highest national interests are, first, protecting our security and, second, holding the implicated officials publicly accountable so we can determine whether they are fit to serve in public office and whether any additional safeguards need to be enacted by Congress.

As for the first interest, when highly classified information has been mishandled — and particularly if it has been stored in an unauthorized place and potentially exposed to unauthorized persons — the highest security priority is for the government to conduct a risk assessment. This is essential in determining whether sources (such as deep-cover informants) may have been exposed (and thus need to be extracted lest they get killed, captured, tortured, etc.); and whether secret methods of acquiring intelligence have been compromised, which could not only imperil sources but could also give hostile countries the opportunity to feed disinformation into our intelligence databases, with the result that important national-security decisions are made based on false premises.

Remember, for example, when a judge in Florida tried to bar the government from using classified documents seized at Mar-a-Lago until privilege issues could be sorted out. The Justice Department was adamant that such an order would obstruct the intelligence agencies in the completion of a vital national-security risk assessment. This was said — and rightly so — to be of greater consequence than whether a criminal prosecution of Donald Trump was warranted.

Furthermore, the Framers did not require a prosecutable criminal offense to trigger impeachment, removal from power, and disqualification from holding future office. That is because when executive officials abuse their authority or show themselves unsuitable for high office, the imperative is to strip them of their power. If the misconduct is not serious enough for impeachment, Congress first and foremost must develop a full record of it and then propose legislative fixes to prevent it from happening again — which can include stripping the executive of funds and statutory authority. The question of whether the offending official should also be subject to criminal prosecution in court is, again, a second- or third-order concern.

Moreover, even if prosecution were our top priority, the need to maintain investigative secrecy would still only arise when public disclosure could imperil informants and other witnesses, and induce suspects to destroy evidence, suborn perjury, and/or flee. Those concerns are inapposite in Biden’s case, since (a) we are talking about disclosure to members of Congress who have security clearances, (b) the evidence is already substantially in the possession of investigators, (c) no one is going to be killed over these probes, and (d) the fact of the investigations is already public, so even if we were worried about evidence- or witness-tampering, disclosure to Congress wouldn’t increase the risk of either.

That is to say: It is sheer nonsense to claim, in the context of these classified-information scandals, that disclosure to Congress could compromise the ability of prosecutors to locate evidence and to prevent witnesses from constructing a false exculpatory story based on publicly disclosed facts.

Now, let’s leave these public-interest and practical considerations aside and get down to constitutional brass tacks.

In our system, the principal check on executive misconduct is Congress. The Framers did not need to trouble themselves with the farcical proposition that executive misconduct could be contained by prosecutors — i.e., middling executive officials who are subordinate to the president and may be fired by him at any time. When the Constitution went into effect in 1789, federal law enforcement barely existed. It was the states that exercised the police powers of investigation, prosecution, and punishment. The Constitution does not provide for an attorney general; the first Congress did, in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Congress did not create the Justice Department until 1870, and the FBI was not established by statute until 1933. The Framers did not give much thought to federal prosecutors, much less “special” federal prosecutors tasked with probing the executive branch itself.

But, as I related in my 2014 book Faithless Execution, the Framers did give a great deal of thought to how best to rein in potential abuses of the awesome powers they were endowing in the office of the president. Their solution was to make Congress the most powerful branch. (Contrary to popular belief, the three departments of government were not conceived to be “co-equal,” though they are peers.) Congress was given the tools necessary to check executive excess — the power of the purse, the power to create or dismantle executive agencies, the power to conduct oversight of executive operations, the power to reject presidential appointees and treaties, and the power to impeach federal officers up to and including the president, among others.

Needless to say, unlike federal prosecutors and directors of intelligence agencies, Congress does not work for the president; to the contrary, it has an institutional obligation to investigate and effectively address presidential misconduct. If presidential administrations attempt to thwart Congress in that constitutional mission, Congress has the power not just to fight but to overcome such obstruction. All it requires is the will to do so.

The Biden administration is using special counsels as a ploy to obstruct Congress. As we’ve previously discussed (see here and here), there was no reason to appoint a special counsel in Trump’s classified-information case. As for Biden, under long-standing Justice Department guidance, he is not subject to indictment by any federal prosecutor, special or otherwise, while he is a sitting president. It would be wrong under any circumstances for Congress to be told it had to suspend its public-interest and national-security inquiries while prosecutors took their time deciding whether to file charges. It is flatly ridiculous for the administration to take such a position when no criminal charges can be filed for, one presumes, at least two years.

It is particularly rich for a Democratic administration to claim, in 2023, that, because doing so could compromise the work of prosecutors, Congress may not be given the information it needs to assess and address executive misconduct. We just spent nearly two years watching the machinations of the House January 6 committee. It proceeded with its highly aggressive investigation even as the Justice Department proceeded with what are now more than 900 criminal cases stemming from the Capitol riot. The committee was not the slightest bit concerned about interfering with prosecutors. It liberally subpoenaed evidence and witnesses that the Justice Department needed, and it withheld what it learned from prosecutors until it was good and ready to share. It took the position that Congress’s investigation was the highest national priority. Far from fighting the committee on that score, the Biden administration waived executive privilege, sided with the committee in court challenges, and used its prosecutorial authority to indict key witnesses (Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro) who defied congressional subpoenas.

Given that recent history alone, to say nothing of the fact that the Constitution and investigative practicalities are overwhelmingly on its side here, Congress should not abide the Biden administration’s claims that committee investigations of executive wrongdoing could undermine the work of prosecutors.

DNI Haines ought to be handed a congressional subpoena and told that she must immediately produce the documents demanded by the Senate Intelligence Committee or she will be held in contempt of Congress forthwith. If she continues to defy congressional demands for evidence and/or testimony, the House should commence impeachment proceedings.

The same should be true with respect to any executive-branch officials — such as the leaders of the National Archives and Records Administration — who defy congressional information demands by claiming that producing documents or testimony could harm law-enforcement investigations, or that it must be left up to the Biden Justice Department–appointed special counsels to decide whether congressionally created executive agencies should provide information demanded by Congress.

In the meantime, Senator Tom Cotton is right that the Senate should refuse to consider any Biden nominees for executive or judicial offices until the Biden administration surrenders documents and fully cooperates in Congress’s investigations. If the administration’s defiance continues even so, Congress must then use its power of the purse. Special counsels could not stonewall Congress if lawmakers declined to fund their appointments and investigations. Furthermore, cutting swaths of the Justice Department’s staggering $38 billion budget — such as the money underwriting the Civil Rights Division’s campaign to impose woke dogma on schools, police departments, etc. — would be addition by subtraction.

Congress has not only the power but the duty to investigate executive misconduct, hold public officials accountable, and enact legislative remedies. That is what we were told throughout the House January 6 committee probe. Members of that committee made many dubious assertions, but they were right about that much. The Senate Intelligence Committee and House Republicans must make the Biden administration understand — using measures that have teeth, not fulminations on cable-news shows — that obstruction will not be tolerated.
Title: How the Deep State removed Trump
Post by: G M on January 30, 2023, 08:05:14 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/01/jerome-corsi-cia-engineered-russian-collusion-coup-detat-remove-donald-trump-presidency/

Good thing we are back to free and fair elections, right Doug?
Title: Then they came for the Catholics…
Post by: G M on February 09, 2023, 09:52:30 AM
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/fbi-doc-suggests-agency-is-surveilling-radical-traditional-catholics-in-virginia/
Title: Re: Then they came for the Catholics…
Post by: G M on February 09, 2023, 02:47:15 PM
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/fbi-doc-suggests-agency-is-surveilling-radical-traditional-catholics-in-virginia/

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/403101.php
Title: FBI backtracks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2023, 03:46:22 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/09/fbi-recruiting-informants-spy-traditional-catholics-latin-mass-southern-poverty-law-center/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=pqV7VitbK.8QhfrQti6zS46UrRisBcsrdfC4wOphqAVmrnSMgPZ35ZIXfjqOEvqjPuTnvT0a
Title: State Dept working to demonetize conservative news sites
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 09, 2023, 05:29:04 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/09/state-department-disinformation-conservative-news-site/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=suh_AX0aJv0bgqTeuW3tApyStBbyTp8tKeq5zfproBJmIEGiWrSIGbsCtr8cWtsCqJu11b.B
Title: Re: State Dept working to demonetize conservative news sites
Post by: DougMacG on February 10, 2023, 07:35:18 AM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/09/state-department-disinformation-conservative-news-site/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=suh_AX0aJv0bgqTeuW3tApyStBbyTp8tKeq5zfproBJmIEGiWrSIGbsCtr8cWtsCqJu11b.B

Could same State Dept please name one neutral, unbiased news source as a control group for comparison?
Title: Weaponized, for your oppression
Post by: G M on February 10, 2023, 08:03:05 AM
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/02/09/she-joined-the-fbi-to-defend-america-she-left-when-it-turned-its-guns-on-americans-n529598
Title: Overly optimistic AI
Post by: G M on February 10, 2023, 09:50:38 AM
https://dcenquirer.com/chatgpt-ai-predicts-2nd-american-civil-war-probability-is-actually-100/
Title: Judicial Watch, the Secret Service and Hunter's illegal handgun
Post by: G M on February 11, 2023, 06:21:01 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/judicial-watch-secret-service-official-maybe-asked-favor-investigation-hunter-bidens-gun-agency-played-cleanup-crew/
Title: The Deep State targets Hungary
Post by: G M on February 13, 2023, 06:20:03 AM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/02/12/heads-up-state-dept-operative-and-usaid-administrator-samantha-power-is-in-hungary-seeding-another-color-revolution-deep-state-ukraine-2-0/
Title: NYT waiting for leaks from Spec. Counsel
Post by: ccp on February 13, 2023, 08:01:12 AM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/jack-smith-special-counsel-trump-124659226.html

investigate investigate investigate thru infinity or till Trump is dead ........

Jack Smith the icon of legal integrity will finally get to the bottom of something
as though we don't already know everything .
Title: Re: The Deep State targets Hungary
Post by: G M on February 14, 2023, 07:56:20 AM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/02/12/heads-up-state-dept-operative-and-usaid-administrator-samantha-power-is-in-hungary-seeding-another-color-revolution-deep-state-ukraine-2-0/

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/samantha-power-color-revolution-in-hungary/
Title: Oppose pornography in schools? You are obviously a terrorist!
Post by: G M on February 16, 2023, 07:04:23 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/chicago-dad-placed-on-watchlist-after-opposing-pornography-in-schools_4983670.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=TheLibertyDaily
Title: WSJ: Clapper's Disinfo
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 17, 2023, 09:10:11 AM
James Clapper’s Disinformation
Politico ‘distorted’ the 2020 letter signed by 51 ex-intel officials? Now he tells us.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Feb. 16, 2023 6:18 pm ET


Whether or not GOP House oversight yields answers about 2020 election meddling, it is at least producing some fantastical squirming and finger pointing. See this week’s incredulous Clapper defense.

That would be James Clapper, the Obama director of national intelligence, one of 51 former intelligence officials who in October 2020 issued a highly consequential letter. The New York Post had revealed contents of a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. The information raised ugly questions about his use of the Biden family name in his foreign business dealings and the extent to which his father knew about them. With weeks to go in a close presidential campaign, the laptop bomb might have derailed Joe Biden’s White House bid.


Instead, the intel cabal neutralized the threat almost overnight. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared a Politico headline on Oct. 19, 2020. The Clapper & Co. letter explained that the supposed Hunter emails had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” making the signers “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” They had no evidence, but the letter served its purpose by providing the news media, Democrats and social-media censors the excuse to suppress the story.

But the laptop was real, and Republicans suddenly have subpoena power. Hence the remarkable sight this week of Mr. Clapper and fellow signatories resurfacing to blame their 2020 tradecraft on the press. The catalyst for this convenient claim is a batch of letters sent last week by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to 12 of the letter’s signers, demanding documents and interviews about their decision to issue a public statement that “falsely implied” the Hunter story was bogus.


This inspired the Washington Post’s “fact checker,” Glenn Kessler, to provide the conspirators a favorable forum to make an early defense. “Politico deliberately distorted what we said,” Mr. Clapper complained, saying the writers were merely raising a “yellow” flag. “Journalists and politicians willfully or unintentionally misconstrue oral or written statements,” lamented Thomas Fingar, who protested the letter had been “carefully written to minimize” that likelihood. Several unnamed signers meanwhile told Mr. Kessler they believed at the time that a significant amount of the material the Post reported was true—since Russians tend to build disinformation campaigns on facts. That would seem a crucial point, yet the signers somehow omitted it from their letter.


As blame-shifting goes, the press is usually a solid dumping spot. Yet in this case, the signers’ claims are laughable. Start with the partisan motivations. Mr. Clapper and John Brennan, President Obama’s director of the Central Intelligence Agency, were the most politicized officials to ever hold their posts, and were hip-deep in the 2016 Russia-collusion hoax. Most of the rest of the signers were Biden supporters or Never Trumpers. The press made hay of the “bipartisan” quality of the letter, but the conservative side featured folks like Mike Hayden, George W. Bush’s CIA director, who prior to signing the letter had cut an ad beseeching the country not to vote for Donald Trump.

Also consider the hand-picked messenger. Former Brennan aide Nick Shapiro didn’t approach any old Politico reporter with the letter: He chose Natasha Bertrand, who served as one of the key outlets for the outlandish Russia-collusion claims that opposition-research firm Fusion GPS and former Obama officials shopped four years earlier. The letter writers knew exactly what they were getting by going to this reporter—and more likely than not the headline reflected their intent. This was no press sandbagging; it was press cooperation.

And then there’s the silence. No signers complained about the Politico letter after its publication. None corrected the record as dozens of outlets repeated the supposed distortion. No one said a word when Joe Biden, in a presidential debate and a CBS interview, used the letter to declare definitively that the laptop story was “disinformation from the Russians,” “a bunch of garbage,” a “Russian plan” and a “smear campaign.”

As to the muteness, Mr. Clapper claimed to be “unaware” of how Mr. Biden described the letter. Did he and his 50 co-signers make a pact to skip the presidential debate, to tune out all subsequent coverage, and never to communicate again? Surely one would have noticed the “distorted” claim and felt compelled to alert the others. And surely a group capable of collaborating on the letter was capable of correcting the record.

They didn’t, because they didn’t want to. The letter served its purpose. It was written by an intel community that knows well how to manipulate a narrative. It was written by a group of officials who abused their titles—and the public’s belief that their backgrounds gave them unique insights—to peddle a claim for which they had no evidence. It was written to benefit Mr. Biden’s election bid.

Any claims to the opposite are what you might call disinformation.
Title: Where is Deep State Andy's keen legal insights on this?
Post by: G M on February 20, 2023, 08:13:05 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/15-facts-on-the-dozens-of-federal-operatives-who-infiltrated-the-trump-crowds-on-january-6th-at-the-us-capitol/

When will he address Ray Epps?

Title: Re: Where is Deep State Andy's keen legal insights on this?
Post by: G M on February 20, 2023, 08:17:50 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/15-facts-on-the-dozens-of-federal-operatives-who-infiltrated-the-trump-crowds-on-january-6th-at-the-us-capitol/

When will he address Ray Epps?

https://thelibertydaily.com/shocking-court-disclosure-shows-undercover-cops-urging-jan-6-protesters-including-ashli-babbitt-to-enter-capitol-building/
Title: Re: Where is Deep State Andy's keen legal insights on this?
Post by: DougMacG on February 20, 2023, 09:35:29 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/15-facts-on-the-dozens-of-federal-operatives-who-infiltrated-the-trump-crowds-on-january-6th-at-the-us-capitol/

When will he address Ray Epps?

https://thelibertydaily.com/shocking-court-disclosure-shows-undercover-cops-urging-jan-6-protesters-including-ashli-babbitt-to-enter-capitol-building/
.

Why are they withholding video - seems like a fair question. At this point in a criminal matter it would seem to be a crime to be withholding evidence.

This wasn't the JFK assassination. Or was it?

Who is Ray Epps? Why isn't that answered yet?

If he committed the same crime, then he gets the same criminal charges as the others. If it's any different than that, we deserve an explanation.

Regarding McCarthy, he just called for impeachment of Mayorkas, or was it Biden, for not enforcing our border laws. 

The war against our own side detracts from the point being made, IMHO.  Attacking a former prosecutor when there is a real one out there apparently not doing his or her job.
Title: Re: Where is Deep State Andy's keen legal insights on this?
Post by: G M on February 20, 2023, 04:53:50 PM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/15-facts-on-the-dozens-of-federal-operatives-who-infiltrated-the-trump-crowds-on-january-6th-at-the-us-capitol/

When will he address Ray Epps?

https://thelibertydaily.com/shocking-court-disclosure-shows-undercover-cops-urging-jan-6-protesters-including-ashli-babbitt-to-enter-capitol-building/
.

Why are they withholding video - seems like a fair question. At this point in a criminal matter it would seem to be a crime to be withholding evidence.

This wasn't the JFK assassination. Or was it?

Who is Ray Epps? Why isn't that answered yet?

If he committed the same crime, then he gets the same criminal charges as the others. If it's any different than that, we deserve an explanation.

Regarding McCarthy, he just called for impeachment of Mayorkas, or was it Biden, for not enforcing our border laws. 

The war against our own side detracts from the point being made, IMHO.  Attacking a former prosecutor when there is a real one out there apparently not doing his or her job.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Controlled%20opposition
Title: As usual, above the law
Post by: G M on February 21, 2023, 10:55:06 AM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/403252.php

Laws are for the little people.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 22, 2023, 07:24:34 AM
Fk.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on February 22, 2023, 07:39:29 AM
this was on newsmax

last evening
 I think it was Rob Schmidt show and he was interviewing Congressman who sent letter to DOJ demanding investigation

Rob asked him if he really thinks the Garland DOJ/[and the majority Federal employees who work there voting Democrat] will take this seriously

and the Congressman responded by stating the evidence is clear cut
or something to that effect

who here would not be SHOCKED if in the end no one is held accountable ?

defending the "rule of law" the DEMS always screach on the airways....

 :x
Title: awaiting Deep State Andy "Controlled Opposition" McCoverup's commen (Ray Epps)
Post by: G M on February 22, 2023, 08:19:13 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/new-video-of-ray-epps-hurling-giant-trump-sign-at-police-on-jan-6-but-was-never-arrested-like-several-trump-supporters-who-touched-that-same-sign-video/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 22, 2023, 09:25:51 AM
Perhaps of greater likelihood and greater utility will be what Tucker does with all the footage that has been given to him.
Title: Emily Kohrs
Post by: ccp on February 23, 2023, 02:04:05 PM
https://news.yahoo.com/trump-grand-juror-stirs-uproar-230624170.html

after she made a mockery of the judicial system
with her blatant bias

on CNN and elsewhere

CNN's Anderson Cooper will have his every nightly discussion of the deep state's
quest to *get* Trump with a couple of attorneys to placade his viewers fears

that they need not worry
the goal to get Trump is still on course

no worries you little lads
we'll get him!

will the little beady eyes man with the horn rims have his yes men attorneys tell us.

 :wink: :-P
Title: Good thing the republicans voted to give them more money!
Post by: G M on February 24, 2023, 09:30:51 AM
https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4575/We-Are-a-Nation-of-Spies-They-Think.aspx
Title: Re: Good thing the republicans voted to give them more money!
Post by: G M on February 24, 2023, 09:57:13 AM
https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4575/We-Are-a-Nation-of-Spies-They-Think.aspx

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-fbi-memos-expose-sexual-misconduct-drunk-driving-property-theft-and-more
Title: Re: Good thing the republicans voted to give them more money!
Post by: G M on March 02, 2023, 09:55:24 AM
https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4575/We-Are-a-Nation-of-Spies-They-Think.aspx

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-fbi-memos-expose-sexual-misconduct-drunk-driving-property-theft-and-more

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/03/02/okay-so-it-looks-as-if-the-justice-department-probably-has-spies-in-catholic-churches-n1675014
Title: Re: Good thing the republicans voted to give them more money!
Post by: G M on March 03, 2023, 07:12:06 AM
https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4575/We-Are-a-Nation-of-Spies-They-Think.aspx

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-fbi-memos-expose-sexual-misconduct-drunk-driving-property-theft-and-more

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/03/02/okay-so-it-looks-as-if-the-justice-department-probably-has-spies-in-catholic-churches-n1675014

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/whistleblower-reveals-how-the-corrupt-fbi-is-using-a-threat-tag-to-target-pro-lifers-as-domestic-threats-fbi-retaliated-by-suspending-him/
Title: Re: Good thing the republicans voted to give them more money!
Post by: G M on March 03, 2023, 07:13:29 AM
https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4575/We-Are-a-Nation-of-Spies-They-Think.aspx

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-fbi-memos-expose-sexual-misconduct-drunk-driving-property-theft-and-more

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/03/02/okay-so-it-looks-as-if-the-justice-department-probably-has-spies-in-catholic-churches-n1675014

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/whistleblower-reveals-how-the-corrupt-fbi-is-using-a-threat-tag-to-target-pro-lifers-as-domestic-threats-fbi-retaliated-by-suspending-him/

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/130/199/020/original/e5b33000c1c96f03.png

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/130/199/020/original/e5b33000c1c96f03.png)
Title: Re: Good thing the republicans voted to give them more money!
Post by: DougMacG on March 03, 2023, 08:22:10 AM
Lying by omission.  Didn't DEMOCRATS also fund these agencies?

Too bad to cheapen otherwise good points.  And to cheapen the value of the forum with the one sided attacks.

Still no response.   Who is YOUR political party?  What is their platform?  Who are their elected officials?  What did they de-fund lately?  What mistakes have they made?

Even Donald Trump, who ran against both parties, knew you only win and govern in the current era by capturing the nomination of one of the two major parties.

IMHO, fine to criticize our own side or either side, but your mission to tear down the right while leaving leaving the Left in power is destructive to everything I believe in.  - Doug
Title: Re: Good thing the republicans voted to give them more money!
Post by: G M on March 04, 2023, 10:32:56 AM
Lying by omission.  Didn't DEMOCRATS also fund these agencies?

Did the dems fund their KGB? They certainly did, and the majority of the republicans go right along with them. We aren't betrayed by our enemies, we are betrayed by those who are supposed to be on our side.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/02/02/kevin_mccarthy_the_police_officer_who_shot_ashli_babbit_did_his_job.html

Too bad to cheapen otherwise good points.  And to cheapen the value of the forum with the one sided attacks.

I thought we were supposed to seek truth here, not be an echo chamber. I am going to criticize our side when they deserve it, and they really deserve it.

Still no response.   Who is YOUR political party?  What is their platform?  Who are their elected officials?  What did they de-fund lately?  What mistakes have they made?

I am registered as a Libertarian, but almost always vote R, although it's increasingly obvious that voting at the national level is an utter waste of time.

Even Donald Trump, who ran against both parties, knew you only win and govern in the current era by capturing the nomination of one of the two major parties.

And once he was in office, he was sabotaged and targeted from every angle by the deep state. His lawful orders were ignored, including by the Pentagon. Do you understand that means that you are ruled by the deep state and that elections (Even if we had honest elections) are FUCKING MEANINGLESS.


https://thehill.com/policy/defense/441240-mattis-ignored-orders-from-trump-white-house-on-north-korea-iran-report/

https://www.iflscience.com/pentagon-ignores-trumps-orders-continues-preparing-climate-change-43721

IMHO, fine to criticize our own side or either side, but your mission to tear down the right while leaving leaving the Left in power is destructive to everything I believe in.  - Doug

The people in power ARE NOT SUBJECT TO ELECTIONS. The country you grew up in is gone. It's an ugly truth, but it's the truth. Meanwhile, the republicans can't be bothered to use the tiny bit of power left to them because they aren't on our side.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on March 04, 2023, 11:59:29 AM
You cherry pick facts to fit your narrative not unlike the other side. Kevin McCarthy is dead wrong on Ashley Babbitt, and there are plenty of other examples of Republicans wrong and Republicans not taking action when they should. But that pushes away 437 posts of Republican accomplishments in just the Trump years and those were mostly in the first two years.

If if your intent is to spread hatred and disparagement of the only party that has a chance to save us, mentioned one too many times here already, I don't want to be any part of it.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on March 04, 2023, 12:02:52 PM
You cherry pick facts to fit your narrative not unlike the other side. Kevin McCarthy is dead wrong on Ashley Babbitt, and there are plenty of other examples of Republicans wrong and Republicans not taking action when they should. But that pushes away 437 posts of Republican accomplishments in just the Trump years and those were mostly in the first two years.

If if your intent is to spread hatred and disparagement of the only party that has a chance to save us, mentioned one too many times here already, I don't want to be any part of it.

I cherry pick facts? Was Trump illegally surveilled by the IC/FBI before and during his presidency? Yes or no?

Did the Pentagon follow Trumps lawful orders, as mandated by the constitution? Yes or no?

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on March 04, 2023, 12:14:51 PM
You quote my whole post and miss my whole point. I guess that is the point.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on March 04, 2023, 01:25:17 PM
You quote my whole post and miss my whole point. I guess that is the point.

The whole point is a coup took place in 2020. I guess that fact is too scary for you to recognize, so you are going to cling to your “Vote Harder” fantasy.

Please point out where a coup was reversed by voting. I’ll wait.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: DougMacG on March 04, 2023, 04:04:02 PM
"where a coup was reversed by voting"

Two examples with almost exact same circumstances:

In 1960, Democrats stole the presidential election.

The Mayor Daley machine rigged Chicago to steal Illinois. Everyone knew that, and most know LBJ's machine stole Texas. JFK won the popular vote by 0.1% with razor sharp margins in those two states.
One or both of those states would have swung the election the other way.

By 1980, Reagan won 44 states including both Texas and Illinois by wide margins. 

In the year 2000 we had the butterfly ballots and all the shenanigans in Palm Beach County, Broward and Dade. After uneven recounts using "imputed intent", the Florida Court awarded the state (and nationa)l election to Al Gore. The US Supreme Court reversed that based on specific language in the Constitution that some Democrat appointed justices were unable to read or recognize.  Coup reversed by previous election wins.  By 2022, Florida had Republican supermajorities at all levels, and Miami-Dade County is now majority Republican.

How did those things happen? Hard work, better messaging and the successful politicking that you mock.

No one said this would be easy.

No one said this was instantly correctable.

You say we are here to seek the truth. I say we are here to seek the truth AND to advance or restore the American Creed.

Fighting our own side is the opposite of what I'm here to do.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on March 04, 2023, 06:15:06 PM
"where a coup was reversed by voting"

Two examples with almost exact same circumstances:

In 1960, Democrats stole the presidential election.

The Mayor Daley machine rigged Chicago to steal Illinois. Everyone knew that, and most know LBJ's machine stole Texas. JFK won the popular vote by 0.1% with razor sharp margins in those two states.
One or both of those states would have swung the election the other way.

By 1980, Reagan won 44 states including both Texas and Illinois by wide margins. 

In the year 2000 we had the butterfly ballots and all the shenanigans in Palm Beach County, Broward and Dade. After uneven recounts using "imputed intent", the Florida Court awarded the state (and nationa)l election to Al Gore. The US Supreme Court reversed that based on specific language in the Constitution that some Democrat appointed justices were unable to read or recognize.  Coup reversed by previous election wins.  By 2022, Florida had Republican supermajorities at all levels, and Miami-Dade County is now majority Republican.

How did those things happen? Hard work, better messaging and the successful politicking that you mock.

No one said this would be easy.

No one said this was instantly correctable.

You say we are here to seek the truth. I say we are here to seek the truth AND to advance or restore the American Creed.

Fighting our own side is the opposite of what I'm here to do.

"Two examples with almost exact same circumstances:"

The circumstances are radically different.

Title: Cheating in a presidential election is one thing...
Post by: G M on March 05, 2023, 12:54:32 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/another-fbi-whistleblower-says-he-was-forced-inflate-domestic-terrorism-numbers

Weaponizing the IC/federal law enforcement against half the country is entirely different, isn't it?
Title: Still waiting for Deep State Andy to address the FEDsurrection
Post by: G M on March 06, 2023, 08:09:44 AM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/03/fbi-undercover-officers-capitol-jan-6-whistleblower/
Title: SCOTUS Says Domestic Spying Is Too Secret To Be Challenged in Court
Post by: G M on March 06, 2023, 03:01:18 PM
https://reason.com/2023/02/27/scotus-says-domestic-spying-is-too-secret-to-be-challenged-in-court/
Title: Re: Still waiting for Deep State Andy to address the FEDsurrection
Post by: G M on March 06, 2023, 10:05:27 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/03/fbi-undercover-officers-capitol-jan-6-whistleblower/

https://nypost.com/2023/03/06/jan-6-footage-shows-cops-bringing-qanon-shaman-to-senate-floor/

DSA still silent about Ray Epps for some reason.

Please post if you find anything.
Title: Re: Cheating in a presidential election is one thing...MUST READ The creation of
Post by: G M on March 06, 2023, 10:22:39 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/another-fbi-whistleblower-says-he-was-forced-inflate-domestic-terrorism-numbers

Weaponizing the IC/federal law enforcement against half the country is entirely different, isn't it?

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/03/04/people-behind-biden-announce-creation-of-formal-national-surveillance-state-yet-no-one-seems-bothered/

MUST READ!
Title: They lied to us all
Post by: G M on March 07, 2023, 07:31:37 AM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/03/fbi-undercover-officers-capitol-jan-6-whistleblower/

https://nypost.com/2023/03/06/jan-6-footage-shows-cops-bringing-qanon-shaman-to-senate-floor/

DSA still silent about Ray Epps for some reason.

Please post if you find anything.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/they-lied-us-all-tucker-exposes-january-6-fraud-and-kangaroo-court-cover
Title: some counter thoughts to Tucker
Post by: ccp on March 07, 2023, 07:55:13 AM
what if?

the reason the law enforcement  waved people in as a strategy to diffuse the situation ?

they were under manned

and trying to insist and fight to keep people out they gave up and waved them in
to reduce risk of more violence etc

appears to be a wrong strategy if true
but it is always easy in hindsight as opposed to the uncertainty of an acute calamity

I am still not clear about the police officer who just happened to coincidently have stroke the very next day at a relatively young age was all just coincidence



Title: Re: some counter thoughts to Tucker
Post by: G M on March 07, 2023, 08:04:45 AM
what if?

the reason the law enforcement  waved people in as a strategy to diffuse the situation ?

they were under manned

and trying to insist and fight to keep people out they gave up and waved them in
to reduce risk of more violence etc

appears to be a wrong strategy if true
but it is always easy in hindsight as opposed to the uncertainty of an acute calamity

I am still not clear about the police officer who just happened to coincidently have stroke the very next day at a relatively young age was all just coincidence

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/11/955548910/ex-capitol-police-chief-rebuffs-claims-national-guard-was-never-called-during-ri

Title: Re: some counter thoughts to Tucker
Post by: G M on March 07, 2023, 08:25:31 AM
what if?

the reason the law enforcement  waved people in as a strategy to diffuse the situation ?

they were under manned

and trying to insist and fight to keep people out they gave up and waved them in
to reduce risk of more violence etc

appears to be a wrong strategy if true
but it is always easy in hindsight as opposed to the uncertainty of an acute calamity

I am still not clear about the police officer who just happened to coincidently have stroke the very next day at a relatively young age was all just coincidence

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/11/955548910/ex-capitol-police-chief-rebuffs-claims-national-guard-was-never-called-during-ri

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/never-seen-video-nancy-pelosis-filmmaker-daughter-alexandra-pelosi-caught-tape-refuting-j6-narrative-admitting-jan-6-protests-not-insurrection-dc-courts-biased/

Title: Re: some counter thoughts to Tucker
Post by: G M on March 07, 2023, 08:29:28 AM
what if?

the reason the law enforcement  waved people in as a strategy to diffuse the situation ?

they were under manned

and trying to insist and fight to keep people out they gave up and waved them in
to reduce risk of more violence etc

appears to be a wrong strategy if true
but it is always easy in hindsight as opposed to the uncertainty of an acute calamity

I am still not clear about the police officer who just happened to coincidently have stroke the very next day at a relatively young age was all just coincidence

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/11/955548910/ex-capitol-police-chief-rebuffs-claims-national-guard-was-never-called-during-ri

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/never-seen-video-nancy-pelosis-filmmaker-daughter-alexandra-pelosi-caught-tape-refuting-j6-narrative-admitting-jan-6-protests-not-insurrection-dc-courts-biased/

https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-secret-commandos-shoot-kill-authority-were-capitol-1661330

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2023, 09:04:06 AM
What about the apparently now disappeared footage of outside barricades being pulled aside and the people being waved in?
Title: I don't see how this video refutes anything
Post by: ccp on March 07, 2023, 09:40:57 AM
https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1580638348573540355?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1580649051799724033%7Ctwgr%5Eb3a185406e41da9630ee5e0c8b35ae65892b1363%7Ctwcon%5Es3_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2023%2F02%2Fnever-seen-video-nancy-pelosis-filmmaker-daughter-alexandra-pelosi-caught-tape-refuting-j6-narrative-admitting-jan-6-protests-not-insurrection-dc-courts-biased%2F
Title: Deep State Andy still hasn't heard of Ray Epps for some reason...MUST READ
Post by: G M on March 07, 2023, 09:18:20 PM
https://www.revolver.news/2021/12/damning-new-details-massive-web-unindicted-operators-january-6/
Title: Re: I don't see how this video refutes anything
Post by: G M on March 07, 2023, 09:36:53 PM
https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1580638348573540355?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1580649051799724033%7Ctwgr%5Eb3a185406e41da9630ee5e0c8b35ae65892b1363%7Ctwcon%5Es3_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegatewaypundit.com%2F2023%2F02%2Fnever-seen-video-nancy-pelosis-filmmaker-daughter-alexandra-pelosi-caught-tape-refuting-j6-narrative-admitting-jan-6-protests-not-insurrection-dc-courts-biased%2F

Yeah, Pelosi's daughter and her film crew just happened to be there. How did Pelosi know to NOT be in her office when this all happened?

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/3826907-man-photographed-in-pelosi-office-convicted-on-multiple-jan-6-charges/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 08, 2023, 07:02:20 AM
Tucker videos have brought up some important points
but to state the 1/6 is a total sham is equally not true and pushing back too far the other way

it was a bad day
and Trump should have come out immediately when he knew they were breaking into the Capital and pushing back on CP

as for Nancy Pelosi
we will never know what really went through her mind
it is equally plausible she refused National Guard or other reinforcements to avoid looking like she was militarily suppressing a protest

but then it turned into more

it is also equally plausible when it became clear that the outnumbered police could not hold back the crowd that they then lightened up to diffuse the situation

wrong thing to do and it does appear there were those in the crowd who were plants
encouraging the invasion into the building

that said the Dems are big lying propagandists but lets not contort everything the other way

MHO




Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on March 08, 2023, 07:37:53 AM
Tucker videos have brought up some important points
but to state the 1/6 is a total sham is equally not true and pushing back too far the other way

it was a bad day
and Trump should have come out immediately when he knew they were breaking into the Capital and pushing back on CP

as for Nancy Pelosi
we will never know what really went through her mind
it is equally plausible she refused National Guard or other reinforcements to avoid looking like she was militarily suppressing a protest

but then it turned into more

it is also equally plausible when it became clear that the outnumbered police could not hold back the crowd that they then lightened up to diffuse the situation

wrong thing to do and it does appear there were those in the crowd who were plants
encouraging the invasion into the building

that said the Dems are big lying propagandists but lets not contort everything the other way

MHO

https://nypost.com/2023/03/05/house-speaker-kevin-mccarthy-gives-tucker-carlson-unfettered-footage-of-jan-6-riot/
Title: "They're all on the same side"
Post by: G M on March 08, 2023, 08:29:53 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/theyre-all-on-the-same-side-tucker-carlson-unloads-on-mitch-mcconnell-and-chuck-schumer-for-demanding-he-be-stopped-from-releasing-j6-tapes-video/

It's like some kind of Uniparty...
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 08, 2023, 08:35:15 AM
we just cannot get rid of McConnell

incumbents have too much power
 they seem to form mini mafia cartels to sustain themselves
payoffs at home
scratching each others back home ( Kentucky) and in DC
weird how Kentucky has both McConnell and Rand Paul - two very different Republicans

 :x
Title: I am so old, I remember when exculpatory evidence had to be turned over
Post by: G M on March 08, 2023, 03:35:35 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/403490.php
Title: Funny how the FBI isn't looking for the guy smashing the glass
Post by: G M on March 09, 2023, 07:09:34 AM
https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1633352352244858880

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 09, 2023, 09:46:40 AM
how does anyone know if this guy charged or not?
Title: no committee member had access to Jan 6tapes
Post by: ccp on March 09, 2023, 11:16:55 AM
 :-o

you mean a bunch of bureaucrats and shsyters organized the Jan 6 committee
?

https://thepostmillennial.com/jan-6-committee-chairman-bennie-thompson-didnt-have-access-to-surveillance-footage-from-capitol-riot?utm_campaign=64487

 :-o
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on March 09, 2023, 02:41:54 PM
how does anyone know if this guy charged or not?

https://www.revolver.news/2021/12/damning-new-details-massive-web-unindicted-operators-january-6/

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 09, 2023, 03:06:42 PM
Epps
clearly Denmark rot

and how many others

de escalation that back fired
or purposeful allowing it to escalate?

at some point stand down orders seems to have been given
viewing all the CP standing around allowing people to march / roam around

with thoughts (we'll arrest them and screw them later and play it up against Trump and MAGA ) ?

I believe it . 

I know how real conspiracies work first hand.   
Title: Waiting for Andy McCarthy's keen legal analysis of this case
Post by: G M on March 12, 2023, 09:41:45 AM
https://www.revolver.news/2023/03/biden-doj-crusade-to-jail-young-man-for-anti-hillary-memes-just-got-much-uglier/

Right after Ray Epps, I bet!
Title: It's like there is a Deep State beyond the control of elected officials
Post by: G M on March 13, 2023, 05:53:14 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/131/297/752/original/2eafaccc86ed08ad.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/131/297/752/original/2eafaccc86ed08ad.jpeg)
Title: War on rule of law; Deep State, IRS TARGETING, never forget, TTT
Post by: DougMacG on March 13, 2023, 05:57:22 AM
Could someone with WSJ access please fill in this article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323873904578571363311816922.html

From these threads.  Not only was Obama not impeached for this but his VP went on to run and win again - unquestioned - about it.

100% of the conservative groups organizing, for one thing to oppose Obama's reelection, were denied organizing status by the IRS while 100%of the liberal groups were approved.  That FACT is on page 188 of the defining Senate report.  Besides here, it went no further than that.  Nothing like "transparency".
----------------------
IRS Targeting - 700 conservative groups were prevented from raising money and participating (against Obama's reelection and policies) by action / inaction of the federal bureaucracy, while the IRS commissioner was visiting the White House 500 times more often than his predecessor.
-----
Page 188 of the report claiming, "both liberal and conservatives groups received the same bad treatment and were targeted by the IRS" story:
https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/REPORT%20-%20IRS%20&%20TIGTA%20Mgmt%20Failures%20Related%20to%20501(c)(4)%20(Sept%205%202014,%209-9-14%20update).pdf

"104 conservative groups were asked 1552 questions.  7 liberal groups were asked a total of 33 questions.

100% of liberal group applications were approved."

[100% of conservative groups were denied approval over that time period.]

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/REPORT%20-%20IRS%20&%20TIGTA%20Mgmt%20Failures%20Related%20to%20501(c)(4)%20(Sept%205%202014,%209-9-14%20update).pdf

100% (all) of the 292 groups applying for tax-exempt status whose names contained "tea party", "patriot", or "9/12" were denied tax-exempt status for two years coming into Obama's reelection.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323873904578571363311816922

https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?topic=1718.msg120464#msg120464
Title: Re: It's like there is a Deep State beyond the control of elected officials
Post by: DougMacG on March 13, 2023, 07:11:34 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/131/297/752/original/2eafaccc86ed08ad.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/131/297/752/original/2eafaccc86ed08ad.jpeg)

Exhibit number zillion, the two parties are not exactly the same.

Who is the Rand Paul of the Democrats?

This virus (apparently) was designed in a lab in a communist country, funded partly by US taxpayers' money, all facts and evidence lied about, hidden or destroyed. Congress and the American people were (potentially) lied to, under oath, all were affected, millions were killed, and not one Democrat gives a f***.  Protecting their own and their power comes first, always.
Title: Re: It's like there is a Deep State beyond the control of elected officials
Post by: G M on March 13, 2023, 07:25:55 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/131/297/752/original/2eafaccc86ed08ad.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/131/297/752/original/2eafaccc86ed08ad.jpeg)

Exhibit number zillion, the two parties are not exactly the same.

Who is the Rand Paul of the Democrats?

This virus (apparently) was designed in a lab in a communist country, funded partly by US taxpayers' money, all facts and evidence lied about, hidden or destroyed. Congress and the American people were (potentially) lied to, under oath, all were affected, millions were killed, and not one Democrat gives a f***.  Protecting their own and their power comes first, always.

Not exactly? Who in the R wing of the Uniparty has backed Rand Paul?

The republicans, after taking the House, voted to give the DOJ a 10% budget increase to punish them for their well documented criminal conduct.

Oh. and gave the FBI a new HQ!
Title: Re: It's like there is a Deep State beyond the control of elected officials
Post by: DougMacG on March 13, 2023, 11:14:10 AM
Back to the uniparty bullshit right after your own post proves it wrong. 
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 13, 2023, 12:58:14 PM
Ummm , , ,

"Who in the R wing of the Uniparty has backed Rand Paul?"

Perhaps I am being overly lawyerly here, but I read this as acknowledging that there are Reps who are NOT part of the Uniparty.
Title: FBI lawless again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 13, 2023, 01:22:39 PM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/jan-6-attorney-alleges-fbi-criminally-altered-evidence-requests-special-master-review-of-leaked-messages_5117377.html?utm_source=China&src_src=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2023-03-13&src_cmp=uschina-2023-03-13&utm_medium=email&est=bIO%2BoExCCz289kIQyWXnQ7YMrup%2Fsxcw9VHlKN6Ez1TgVjK6h6vqPXHarwghlZE30wcb
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on March 13, 2023, 05:16:15 PM
Ummm , , ,

"Who in the R wing of the Uniparty has backed Rand Paul?"

Perhaps I am being overly lawyerly here, but I read this as acknowledging that there are Reps who are NOT part of the Uniparty.

Exactly. There are a few.
Title: This should horrify you
Post by: G M on March 14, 2023, 06:59:37 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/13/a-spill-of-fbi-secrets/
Title: FBI caught breaking the law yet again
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 14, 2023, 09:31:49 AM


https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/13/a-spill-of-fbi-secrets/
Title: Re: This should horrify you
Post by: G M on March 15, 2023, 11:29:57 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/13/a-spill-of-fbi-secrets/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/judge-denies-requests-jan-6-defendants-cross-examine-fbi-agent-leaked-messages

Can't wait for Andrew (I vouched for the current AG) McCarthy's discussion of this.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 16, 2023, 06:34:06 AM
We are in complete agreement that this is precisely the sort of issue that calls for AMcC's analysis.

Surprised that it was a Trump appointed judge.
Title: the indictment can come at any day
Post by: ccp on March 16, 2023, 10:36:49 AM
we've been hearing for months

https://www.axios.com/2023/03/15/trump-indictment-charges-manhattan-2024

MSM DEM machine in the loop getting production crews ready to go with bomb cyclone , river storm, hurricane winds announcements and wall to wall coverage
and its associated hysteria

Wolf and Cooper both ready to display their "serious " facies while reporting the mega news in a true "jornolister " fashion with pundits as Axelrod and the rest of the dem partisan gang and TDS characters schizophrenics to unleash their emotions on TV bashing orange man and by way of association every chance they can dream of DeSantis .

DJT offered the big boobed boob a bribe - and it is the crime of the 21st century

CCP and Ukrainians bribing Biden et al .  - yawn , ignore , belittle , nothing there

So emails show Trump encouraged Georgia officials to adjust election results

while the entire Dem machine and TDS sufferers rigged the entire '20 election

so why would anyone be cynical other then those who are are white supremacists fasciits evil phobes of every Dem voting block or stupid , dumb , ignorant or party of a brain washed cult.



Title: The Homostasi marches
Post by: G M on March 17, 2023, 07:06:28 AM
https://twitter.com/KyleSeraphin/status/1636464764221276160

Not your FBI.
Title: Dersh: Bragg = Beria
Post by: ccp on March 18, 2023, 01:22:45 PM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-indictment-donald-trump/2023/03/18/id/1112627/

also Turley:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-prosecutor-outside-lane-potential-trump-indictment-jonathan-turley
Title: Re: Dersh: Bragg = Beria
Post by: G M on March 18, 2023, 02:07:16 PM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-indictment-donald-trump/2023/03/18/id/1112627/

also Turley:

https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-prosecutor-outside-lane-potential-trump-indictment-jonathan-turley

Trump had his chance. He should have been ready to cross the Rubicon in 2020. He and his family will be imprisoned/murdered.

The man who replaces Trump will build his throne from the skulls of the Uniparty.

Title: J6 rioter didn't vote for Trump
Post by: G M on March 21, 2023, 07:32:22 AM
https://100percentfedup.com/doj-releases-sentencing-statement-on-violent-jan-6-defendant-who-smashed-capitol-window-sprayed-cops-in-face-with-pepper-spray-doesnt-mention-he-encouraged-others-to-attack-cops-voted-for-obama/

False flag.
Title: This will sort out who is who
Post by: G M on March 21, 2023, 04:13:49 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/21/matt-gaetz-house-republicans-legislation-rejecting-new-fbi-headquarters/

Prepare to be disappointed.
Title: We must vote our way out of this corrupt police state!
Post by: G M on March 23, 2023, 07:03:22 AM
https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1638619833125183496
Title: of course, he blames DJT
Post by: ccp on March 23, 2023, 07:50:07 AM
https://news.yahoo.com/manhattan-da-accuses-house-republicans-142000058.html

in a world with real justice this guy would have complaints to the NY bar and an investigation be brought for possible disbarment

for withholding exculpatory evidence

just thinking

or he would be fired by the governor who I think has the power to do that.

His term ends on 1/1/26

watch , he'll run again anyway




Title: Re: of course, he blames DJT
Post by: G M on March 23, 2023, 09:06:51 AM
https://news.yahoo.com/manhattan-da-accuses-house-republicans-142000058.html

in a world with real justice this guy would have complaints to the NY bar and an investigation be brought for possible disbarment

for withholding exculpatory evidence

just thinking

or he would be fired by the governor who I think has the power to do that.

His term ends on 1/1/26

watch , he'll run again anyway

Laws and rules of conduct do not apply to dems. Especially in service to Soron.
Title: Can't or don't want to?
Post by: G M on March 24, 2023, 07:39:13 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/132/950/517/original/1c31f191e9548793.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/132/950/517/original/1c31f191e9548793.jpeg)
Title: One Eye mole for Hunter in FBI?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 24, 2023, 12:34:30 PM
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6323185511112
Title: I bet Deep State Andy is writing a very insightful analysis about this!
Post by: G M on March 26, 2023, 04:15:31 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/go-go-go-help-them-push-them-new-leaked-j6-footage-shows-dc-metro-cop-encouraging-people
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 27, 2023, 07:11:22 AM
Very good to see this footage escaping from the Memory Hole!

GM, can you go to the source material and post URLs of it directly?  I want to save it so as to protect if from being deleted again by the Goolag.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on March 27, 2023, 07:20:55 AM
Very good to see this footage escaping from the Memory Hole!

GM, can you go to the source material and post URLs of it directly?  I want to save it so as to protect if from being deleted again by the Goolag.

I will look for the best site hosting it.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 27, 2023, 07:27:00 AM
THANK YOU.
Title: The parliamentary motive behind the J6 FEDsurrection
Post by: G M on March 27, 2023, 07:35:09 AM
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/03/12/the-parliamentary-motive-behind-the-j6-fedsurrection/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 27, 2023, 02:23:02 PM
In case the Goolag memory holes that URL, here is the article:

The Parliamentary Motive Behind the J6 Fedsurrection
March 12, 2023 | Sundance | 1,678 Comments
The Ring of Truth – “I am too well accustomed to the taking of evidence not to detect the ring of truth.” 1908, Edith Wharton

Much has been made of the events of January 6, 2021, and with the latest broadcast of CCTV video from inside the Capitol Hill complex, more questions have been raised.

Within the questions: the FBI and government apparatus had advanced knowledge of the scale of the J6 mall assembly yet doing nothing?  Why were the Capitol Hill police never informed of the FBI concerns?  Why didn’t House Speaker Nancy Pelosi secure the Capitol Hill complex, and why did she deny the request by President Trump to call up the national guard for security support?  Why did the FBI have agent provocateurs in the crowd, seemingly stimulating rage within a peaceful crowd to enter the Capitol building?  There have always been these nagging questions around ‘why’?



Long time CTH reader “Regitiger” has spent a great deal of time reviewing the entire process, looking at the granular timeline and then overlaying the bigger picture of the constitutional and parliamentary process itself.  What follows below is a brilliant analysis of the federal government motive to create a J6 crisis that permitted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to trigger an emergency session and avoid the 2020 election certification challenges.

Those congressional floor challenges, known and anticipated well in advance of the morning of January 6, 2021, would have formed a legal and constitutional basis for ‘standing’ in judicial challenges that would have eventually reached the Supreme Court.  The certification during “emergency session” eliminated the problem for Washington DC.

Regitiger explains below, only edited by me for clarity and context:

I think most, not all, but a large number of people, are totally missing what happened; and why this happened on Jan 6th.  I am going to try my best to outline the events that day, blast past the commonly held assumptions and get right down to the core corruption.

I will present this as a series of questions and answers.


♦ Q1: How do you prevent congress from delaying the certification of state electoral votes?

A: It requires a crisis. A crisis that creates an “emergency” …An “emergency” that invokes special house rules.

FACTS: Remember carefully, focus please. Just moments, literally 3 minutes before two representatives issued a vote for motions to suspend the certification, the House members were “informed” by capitol police and other “agents” that a protest was about to breach the chambers. It was at this time that key people: Pence, Pelosi, Schumer, Mcconnell can be seen being walked out and escorted from the chamber. This effectively halted the Entire Chamber Process.

♦ Q2: Why was it necessary to halt the chamber process?

A: The crisis was created to eliminate the motion challenges to halt the certification and to begin voting to look into voting irregularities and fraud

FACTS: The two motions were completely legal and constitutional under at least two constitutionally recognized procedures… procedures that would REQUIRE the house to pause the certification and then vote to determine whether the motions of suspend could move forward.

♦ Q3: What was so important to refuse this motion and the subsequent votes to suspend the electoral certification?

A: It was important to remove that process entirely and continue the fraud and certify the fraud with no detractors on record. This effectively gives no standing for a SCOTUS ruling appeal!  Understand this.  If those two motions, even just one had successfully been voted EVEN IF THE MOTIONS were DENIED IN VOTE, this gives those who presented them with STANDING FOR A CONSTITUTIONAL LEGAL ARGUMENT BEFORE SCOTUS.

♦ Q4: Could this have been done some other way other than creating a crisis/protest?

A: Unlikely. In order to prevent those two motions, requires that speaker of the house, minority leaders, and the president of the congress (vice president of the United States: Pence), to NOT BE PRESENT IN THE CHAMBERS.

Once the capitol police and other “law enforcements agents” informed the speaker and these three other individuals, Pelosi UNILATERALLY UNDER EMERGENCY RULES, suspended the business of the congress. This protest was necessary. The crisis was created because there is no other way to suspend the business of certification UNILATERALLY. By creating a crisis invokes emergency procedures. No other circumstances other than war or mass simultaneous explosive diarrhea can create such unilateral speaker delivered suspension of the certification.

♦ Q5: Why did the motions, once that the speaker RECONVENED congress, move forward back again to the floor for votes? Why were members disallowed to even consider putting forward ANY motions to the floor in when the chamber business was reopened?

A: The Speaker initiated the NEW sessions under special emergency rules. These rules abandon and make it clear that the ONLY purpose of the new session was to EXPEDITE the certification and dismiss all prior regular session procedural rules. This is why those two motions to table votes to consider a debate and pause to the certifications of state vote electors never happened later that evening when the house business was reconvened!

♦ Q6: Other than new rules, emergency rules, what other peculiar things occurred when the speaker reconvened?

A: Members were allowed to “vote” in proxy, remotely, not being present.  You can use your imagination about what conditions were placed on ALL members during this time to prevent anyone from “getting out of line”.

Also clearly, it was at THIS NEW SESSION that VP Pence, President of Congress, would also have no ability to even consider pausing the electoral certification, because there were no motions of disagreements on the matter. So, in a technical legal claim, he is correct that he had no constitutional authority to address any issues of fraud or doubts about electoral irregularities. But this completely dismisses the FACT that congress created rules in this crisis/emergency that never allowed them to be floored!

Understand what happened in Jan 6, 2021.  Don’t get hung up on Viking impostors, stolen Pelosi computers, podium heists, and complicit capitol police. Understand the process and what happened and what WAS NOT ALLOWED TO HAPPEN.

This was a coup….it was a very organized and carefully planned coup. VP Pence without a doubt as well as most members of the house were quite aware of how the certification was going to be MANAGED.  It would require new rules to prevent the debate clause from occurring!  New rules that ONLY AN EMERGENCY CRISIS COULD CREATE! So, they created an emergency.

•NOTED: I understand why many people have great interest in debunking the j6 event. I get that. I think it is important to dissect and examine the events of that day but please, step back and understand WHY these things happened. Examine the chain of events in congress.  Why those two motions that would have at least paused the certification THAT WOULD GIVE VP PENCE THE CONSTITUTIONALLY RECOGNIZED POWER TO MOVE TO SUSPEND THE ELECTORAL CERTIFICATION AND THEN EXAMINE THE IRREGULARITIES AND CLAIMS OF FRAUD!

At the very center of this coup stands Mike Pence, the same individual who also spoiled President Trump’s first opportunities in the earlies hours of his Presidency just 4 years prior, when he created and facilitated the removal of Lt General Michael Flynn. I will not spend much time on this thread explaining why Lt Gen Flynn was so important to President Trump and why the IC was so afraid he would have advisory power to the President. That I will leave for another day, another time. But understand this clearly: MIKE PENCE WAS AND IS WORKING FOR THE MOST CORRUPT CRIMINAL TREASONOUS PEOPLE IN GOVERNMENT.

•PRO TIP: If you really want to get a true understanding of this matter videos of protesters walking in the capitol is not going to address them. Actual video and timeline records of events and the specific actions taken by the speaker just moments before TWO MAJOR ELECTORAL ALTERING MOTIONS WERE ABOUT TO BE FLOORED.

This crisis was developed just in time with a precise coordination to prevent those two motions to be entered into the chamber record. The two motions do not exist. The emergency powers established in the new session made sure they never could be entered. The emergency powers could never happen without a crisis.

God Bless America!”

[link]



Note from Author: “I started this effort years ago.  To date, no one and I mean no one has replied.  It’s as if everyone that can expose it that has a larger platform is either disinterested, or suspiciously withdrawn from the issue.  I made several comments about this over the years right here at CTH, on article threads that are relevant to the topic.

I was watching the certification live that day. I recorded it ALL on every channel. I was doing this because no matter what happened that day, I KNEW IT WOULD BE A PROFOUND AND SIGNIFICANT EVENT TO REMEMBER. I never in my wildest imagination (and I have a pretty vivid imagination, always have), expected to see the unmistakable perfectly timed “coincidences” that occurred.

One member raises a motion (with another in waiting for his turn) those two motions were well known and advertised. These were motions to vote for a pause in the certification to examine electoral vote fraud and irregularities. I can’t speak to the veracity and substance of those motions. They were never allowed to even be floored. it was at that exact moment that the house chambers were suspended and 4 of the key members, Pence, Pelosi, Schumer and McConnell were escorted OUT right after initiating the end of the session.

Effectively, this resulted in that motion never being floored at all.  Then, when reconvened under special emergency rules, inexplicably those two motions (and perhaps more – we will never know – or will we?) were not even attempted to be motioned. That was not just peculiar to me.

It all started to make more sense when I did some study on constitutional law AND THE HISTORY of specific special authorities given to president of the congress, Pence in this case. Not only did he have the authority and power to suspend the certification, but the duty to address the motion in the same sense that it becomes vital to the debate clause.

There really is no higher significance of weight given to the debate clause than the certification of the votes. This was more than odd to me the way that the media and pence framed their narrative: Pence would not have the constitutional power to suspend certification.  Then it hit me, like the obvious clue that was there all the time. He was right. But the reason he is right, is because there WAS NO MOTION ON THE FLOOR TO CAUSE HIM TO SUSPEND!

Understanding this, happened for me about 4 or 5 months after this Jan 6 day.  I took me this long to examine the facts, look at the video again, compare it to the arguments made by several leading constitutional academics, and again, inexplicably even some that I respect seemed to dodge that central reality.  The motions were never allowed to be floored in the re-convened house rules later that evening. Most would not even venture to address the exotically coincidence that the moment those two members would stand to place the motion before the house, that the House Speaker Pelosi AND Pence ended the session, effectively blocking the motions from being heard in normal house rules.

It’s been a journey for me. A journey that was initiated because I am just a simple but curious person. Perhaps even to a point where I get obsessive in those efforts. Many days and nights combing over the details. praying and trying to make sense of what makes little sense. With over 6 states having serious well known and obvious defects in the voting process, some more credible to believe – some less, but one would not expect the house would be so deliberate in marching past the motions that were definitely going to be present to slow this process down and take the time to get it right. Even IF the claims never reached an intersection that would change the outcome.

There are two possibilities: Millions of people, against all the odds, hitting all-time records even past Obama and Clinton, voted for a naval gazing ambulatory pathological racist moron. And chose Joe Malarkey as their leader.  Or this was a coup, a conspiracy, and a treasonous manipulation regime change because President Trump could not be controlled by the deep state and globalists who OWN AND OPERATE WASHINGTON DC.

BOTH POSSIBILITIES ARE TERRIFYING.

The only way for THE PEOPLE to gain power in this country is to force the transfer of it.  If truth isn’t the fuel and vehicle, we will just be replacing deck chairs and hitting the next series of expected ice bergs.

Knowing the truth is not enough; however, it is truth that makes it a righteous cause.

God Bless America!”

~ Regitiger



Sundance provides an addendum in support:

Julie Kelly – […] Just as the first wave of protesters breached the building shortly after 2 p.m., congressional Republicans were poised to present evidence of rampant voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Ten incumbent and four newly-elected Republican senators planned to work with their House colleagues to demand the formation of an audit commission to investigate election “irregularities” in the 2020 election. Absent an audit, the group of senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) pledged to reject the Electoral College results from the disputed states.

The Hail Mary effort was doomed to fail; yet the American people would have heard hours of debate related to provable election fraud over the course of the day.

And no one opposed the effort more than ex-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

During a conference call on December 31, 2020, McConnell urged his Republican Senate colleagues to abandon plans to object to the certification, insisting his vote to certify the 2020 election results would be “the most consequential I have ever cast” in his 36-year Senate career.

From the Senate floor on the afternoon of January 6, McConnell gave a dramatic speech warning of the dire consequences to the country should Republicans succeed in delaying the vote. He downplayed examples of voting fraud and even mocked the fact that Trump-appointed judges rejected election lawsuits.

“The voters, the courts, and the States have all spoken,” McConnell insisted. “If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”

Roughly six hours later, McConnell got his way. Cowed by the crowd of largely peaceful Americans allowed into the building by Capitol police, most Republican senators backed off the audit proposal. McConnell, echoing hyperbolic talking points about an “insurrection” seeded earlier in the day by Democratic lawmakers and the news media, gloated. “They tried to disrupt our democracy,” he declared on the Senate floor after Congress reconvened around 8 p.m. “This failed attempt to obstruct Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our Republic.”
Title: AG: McConnell's exhilarating insurrection
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 27, 2023, 02:25:00 PM
second:

Cited in that article is this article:

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/28/mcconnells-exhilarating-insurrection/

By Julie Kelly
April 28, 2022
Adirty little secret about January 6—one of many—is that Democrats and establishment Republicans, not Trump supporters, wanted to shut down the official proceedings of that day.

Just as the first wave of protesters breached the building shortly after 2 p.m., congressional Republicans were poised to present evidence of rampant voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Ten incumbent and four newly-elected Republican senators planned to work with their House colleagues to demand the formation of an audit commission to investigate election “irregularities” in the 2020 election. Absent an audit, the group of senators, including Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) pledged to reject the Electoral College results from the disputed states.

The Hail Mary effort was doomed to fail; yet the American people would have heard hours of debate related to provable election fraud over the course of the day.

And no one opposed the effort more than ex-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

During a conference call on December 31, 2020, McConnell urged his Republican Senate colleagues to abandon plans to object to the certification, insisting his vote to certify the 2020 election results would be “the most consequential I have ever cast” in his 36-year Senate career.

From the Senate floor on the afternoon of January 6, McConnell gave a dramatic speech warning of the dire consequences to the country should Republicans succeed in delaying the vote. He downplayed examples of voting fraud and even mocked the fact that Trump-appointed judges rejected election lawsuits.

“The voters, the courts, and the States have all spoken,” McConnell insisted. “If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever. If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral.”

Roughly six hours later, McConnell got his way. Cowed by the crowd of largely peaceful Americans allowed into the building by Capitol police, most Republican senators backed off the audit proposal. McConnell, echoing hyperbolic talking points about an “insurrection” seeded earlier in the day by Democratic lawmakers and the news media, gloated. “They tried to disrupt our democracy,” he declared on the Senate floor after Congress reconvened around 8 p.m. “This failed attempt to obstruct Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our Republic.”

Congress officially certified the Electoral College results early the next day.

While he projected a sober tone to the American public, McConnell privately was ecstatic, a new book about the 2020 election reveals. “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” McConnell told New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin late on January 6, 2021 about Trump. Martin is the co-author of This Will Not Pass, of which excerpts were published in the Washington Post this week. Martin in the book recounts his midnight conversation with McConnell.

Trump, McConnell claimed, “put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger,” Martin writes. He then asked the reporter what he had heard about members plotting to invoke the 25th Amendment. Calling Trump a “despicable person,” McConnell reportedly bragged how he “crushed the sons of bitches” on January 6 and promised to do the same to them in the 2022 primaries.

Now, that seems like an oddly celebratory demeanor for someone who just survived an “attack on our democracy” and an alleged attempt to “overthrow” the seat of government power, doesn’t it? And why was McConnell so certain the four-hour disturbance would spell the end for Donald Trump?

Further—and more importantly—why did McConnell’s office fail to protect the Capitol on January 6?

His Sergeant at Arms at the time served on the U.S. Capitol police board, a four-man body that manages security at the sprawling Capitol complex. McConnell appointed Michael Stenger in 2018 to serve in that role; Stenger, in addition to his House counterpart, Paul Irving, rejected multiple requests by the Capitol Police chief for extra help in advance of January 6.

Steven Sund, a Capitol Police captain, said he spoke with Stenger on January 4, 2021 to ask for National Guardsmen. “Instead of approving the use of the National Guard, however, Mr. Stenger suggested I ask them how quickly we could get support if needed and to ‘lean forward’ in case we had to request assistance on January 6.”

He spoke with Stenger again on January 5; the board still refused to advance his plan for extra guardsmen.

As the chaos unfolded right as the joint session of Congress convened on January 6, Sund said he “notified the two Sergeant at Arms by 1:09 p.m. that I urgently needed support and asked them to declare a State of Emergency and authorize the National Guard.” Stenger and Irving, who were together that afternoon, said he was waiting for “authorization” by congressional leadership.

That approval came an hour later, but with a caveat: Sund also needed the Pentagon’s authorization.

“Almost two hours later, we had still not received authorization from the Pentagon to activate the National Guard,” Sund testified in February 2021. “Mr. Stenger offered to have Senator McConnell call the Secretary of the Army to expedite the request. I agreed that this would be a good idea. I followed up approximately 20 minutes later to check on the call and express the need for leadership to call to assist in expediting the request.”

Guardsmen did not arrive until 5:40 p.m., four-and-a-half hours after Sund’s first dispatch and after the protest had ended.

McConnell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser—the three leaders responsible for protecting the Capitol on January 6—still have not explained their failure to do so. Not only did McConnell’s top law enforcement officials purportedly overlook the potential for violence on January 6, he denied requests for more officers days before and delayed sending guardsmen to Capitol Hill that afternoon.

And it will be nearly impossible to find out why: Stegner, along with Irving and Sund, all resigned on January 7, 2021.

So, perhaps there is a darker explanation for McConnell’s  giddiness on January 6. What unfolded that day on McConnell’s watch ended Republican demands for an election audit; criminalized criticism of the 2020 election, which McConnell still describes as “fair” and legitimate; vilified Republican lawmakers; and prompted Trump’s second impeachment. McConnell also believed the protest would spell the end of the Trump movement, something the Beltway crony long attempted to quash.

Like the Biden regime, congressional Democrats, and the national news media, the aftermath of the Capitol protest achieved all sorts of political ends for Mitch McConnell.

And when it comes to January 6, there are no coincidences.


Julie Kelly is a political commentator and senior contributor to American Greatness. She is the author of January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right and Disloyal Opposition: How the NeverTrump Right Tried―And Failed―To Take Down the President. Her past work can be found at The Federalist and National Review. She also has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Hill, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, and Genetic Literacy Project. She is the co-host of the “Happy Hour Podcast with Julie and Liz.” She is a graduate of Eastern Illinois University and lives in suburban Chicago with her husband and two daughters.

Archive
Photo: Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer stand back to back in the House Chamber during a joint session of Congress on January 06, 2021. A group of Republican senators said they would reject the Electoral College votes of several states unless Congress appointed a commission to audit the election results. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Title: The Deep State targets Matt Taibbi
Post by: G M on March 28, 2023, 07:15:56 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/jim-jordan-demands-docs-after-irs-attempt-intimidate-journalist-matt-taibbi-during-govt
Title: Funny how the DOJ won't protect Justices
Post by: G M on March 29, 2023, 07:04:27 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/mar/28/us-marshals-told-not-arrest-protesters-outside-jus/
Title: Grand Jury will be delayed for another month
Post by: ccp on March 29, 2023, 10:50:43 AM
nothing to see here; not political strategy
a month break was "previously scheduled"

expect one of the other cases against Trump to be brought first now as the shysters
were praying for :

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/29/manhattan-trump-grand-jury-set-to-break-for-a-month-00089422
Title: Re: Grand Jury will be delayed for another month
Post by: G M on March 29, 2023, 10:54:24 AM
nothing to see here; not political strategy
a month break was "previously scheduled"

expect one of the other cases against Trump to be brought first now as the shysters
were praying for :

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/29/manhattan-trump-grand-jury-set-to-break-for-a-month-00089422

I was told the walls are closing in…
Title: OrangeManBad and indicted
Post by: G M on March 30, 2023, 02:56:42 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/403803.php

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 30, 2023, 03:41:13 PM
charges not clear yet

but we know what they are

yes orange man bad
republicans bad
they are in the way of reparations checks
the religion of woke
replacement of Jewish religion with Democrat partisanship is on display

circus is on
we know what will be mass media blitz 24/7 wall to wall this weekend

good time to rent cabin in woods and get drunk like David Susskind said he did in order to quit smoking back the 70s

HISTORICAL! / FIRST!/ WATERGATE !/ SHOULD NOT RUN FOR '24 !

CNN PBS MSPCP NYT WP NPR NBC CBS ABC
ALL PARTYING !!

and we just have to sit here and watch the hypocrisy....complete made up twisting of the law ....
before our very eyes ....
thanks to corrupt media deep state etc.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on March 30, 2023, 11:19:08 PM
"good time to rent cabin in woods"

I would suggest buying. And getting ready for what is now inevitable.

Not sure if this is the final match to be lit, but we are damn close.


charges not clear yet

but we know what they are

yes orange man bad
republicans bad
they are in the way of reparations checks
the religion of woke
replacement of Jewish religion with Democrat partisanship is on display

circus is on
we know what will be mass media blitz 24/7 wall to wall this weekend

good time to rent cabin in woods and get drunk like David Susskind said he did in order to quit smoking back the 70s

HISTORICAL! / FIRST!/ WATERGATE !/ SHOULD NOT RUN FOR '24 !

CNN PBS MSPCP NYT WP NPR NBC CBS ABC
ALL PARTYING !!

and we just have to sit here and watch the hypocrisy....complete made up twisting of the law ....
before our very eyes ....
thanks to corrupt media deep state etc.
Title: Noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy still unaware of Ray Epps for some reason...
Post by: G M on March 31, 2023, 07:36:19 AM
https://www.revolver.news/2023/03/desperate-ray-epps-enlists-notorious-dem-clinton-operatives-to-threaten-tucker-and-revolver-news-for-j6-reporting/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 31, 2023, 08:32:13 AM
Epps , the supposed Trump fan
has a  Clinton Lawyer and one of the biggest Dem operative sleaze bags David Brock
working for him

to "get" Fox

clearly seen telling people to "get IN the Capitol"

yet never arrested
like noted in tape never trumpers as well as Leftist media protecting him unlike everyone of the other 1000+ who protested and got arrested and another 1,000 + to be arrested ...





Title: Total control, they think
Post by: G M on March 31, 2023, 09:50:36 AM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/403813.php

Title: Dersh Grand Jury leak a IS A CRIME IN NY
Post by: ccp on March 31, 2023, 01:43:56 PM
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-trump-indictment/2023/03/31/id/1114597/

[but never mind]

No Manhattan judge wants to miss out on the social circuit:

"He also said he doesn't think a Manhattan judge will dismiss the case to avoid being known as the person who freed Trump.

"Consider what happened to me in Martha's Vineyard when I simply defended President Trump on the floor of the Senate," he said. "I lost all of my friends. My wife lost all of our friends. No judges want to throw this case out.

"They are elected judges in New York, so this case has to be moved to a place where a judge can do honest justice rather than political or ideological injustice."
Title: The constitution is dead
Post by: G M on March 31, 2023, 02:04:26 PM
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-nyc-jury-finds-douglass-mackey-guilty-in-first-ever-meme-trial-after-making-memes-that-disparaged-hillary-clinton-in-the-2016-election?utm_campaign=64483
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on March 31, 2023, 02:51:46 PM
agree with those
who point out it is past time for
Republican DAs to start doing their work in Red areas
where juries , judges , not rigged

for Democrats

Title: McConell still silent
Post by: ccp on March 31, 2023, 02:52:50 PM
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mcconnell-silent-trumps-indictment-house-gop-leaders-slam-weaponized-justice-system
 :x
Title: Re: McConell still silent
Post by: G M on March 31, 2023, 05:31:34 PM
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mcconnell-silent-trumps-indictment-house-gop-leaders-slam-weaponized-justice-system
 :x

It’s almost like there is a DC Uniparty!
Title: In the FUSA, the wrong speech is a felony!
Post by: G M on April 01, 2023, 05:06:20 PM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/916/761/original/94fc36327db3ca9f.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/916/761/original/94fc36327db3ca9f.jpg)
Title: Re: In the FUSA, the wrong speech is a felony!
Post by: G M on April 01, 2023, 05:08:55 PM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/916/761/original/94fc36327db3ca9f.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/916/761/original/94fc36327db3ca9f.jpg)

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/913/571/original/f118d317d4d24161.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/913/571/original/f118d317d4d24161.jpg)
Title: Re: In the FUSA, the wrong speech is a felony!
Post by: G M on April 01, 2023, 05:29:27 PM
https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/46313/



https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/916/761/original/94fc36327db3ca9f.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/916/761/original/94fc36327db3ca9f.jpg)

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/913/571/original/f118d317d4d24161.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/133/913/571/original/f118d317d4d24161.jpg)
Title: No One Is Above the Law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 03, 2023, 07:31:44 PM
When a Democratic President Was above the Law
By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
April 3, 2023 3:04 PM
NRO

If you told us that perjury should go unpunished because it was ‘just about sex,’ you should sit out the ‘nobody is above the law’ argument.

One of the mantras of Democrats and their media voices in response to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump has been that “no one is above the law.” That’s a fine sentiment, but there are three very big problems with Democrats making this argument: They don’t believe it, they don’t mean the same thing by “law” as the rest of us, and Alvin Bragg is about the worst possible representative for the theory that violations of the law will never be tolerated.



In particular, I never want to hear another word — not another syllable — about how “nobody is above the law” from people who spent years on end telling us that perjury and obstruction of justice by the president should not lead to consequences because it was “just about a blow job.” I never want to hear this from people who professed to be horrified by “lock her up” chants on the theory that one should never call for jailing political opponents even when they have violated specific federal criminal statutes regarding the handling of sensitive information — least of all in defense of a prosecutor who ran for office publicly promising to go after this particular political opponent of his. I never want to hear it from people who said that the vice president could break a federal law without consequence so long as there was “no controlling legal authority” interpreting the law. I certainly do not want to hear this from people who are, even today, arguing that the president can get away with breaking the law and seizing the powers of Congress to give away half a trillion dollars of our money to his supporters so long as he can argue that nobody has standing to sue him in federal court.

Consider a sampling of statements by Democrats on the Trump indictment:


• Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois: “No one is above the law — not even a former president.”


• Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts: “No one is above the law, not even a former president of the United States.”

• Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona: “We’re a country of laws and nobody’s above the law.”

• Ex-Democrat Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona: “Politicians aren’t above the law.”

• Senator Mark Warner of Virginia: “In the United States nobody is above the law, especially not the leaders who have been entrusted with the privilege and responsibility of serving the American people.”

• Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.” (Forget the part about the defendant having to prove innocence, she’s rolling.)


• Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California: “No one is above the law.”

• Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts: “Nobody is above the law.”

• Congressman Dan Goldman of New York: “Donald Trump has demonstrated his belief that he is above the law, and nobody is above the law.”

• Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado: “Former President Trump’s indictment reminds us that no one is above the law and that we are all afforded due process and equal protection under the law.”

• Congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado: “No one is above the law in this country. Not even former presidents!”

• Congressman Chuy Garcia of Illinois: “Nobody is above the law.”

• Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas cited the indictment as “evidence that no one is above the law, even the president of the United States.”

I could go on, but you get the idea. If a memo didn’t literally go out, it may as well have.


This is not how Democrats talk about the law when one of their own is in the crosshairs. The most obvious and glaring parallel is Bill Clinton’s perjury. At the time, the all-but-uniform argument among Democrats was that the Clinton impeachment was “just about sex,” as if covering up a sexual affair is somehow a defense to breaking the law. On the simplest charge against Clinton, perjury in his civil deposition, there really was no question that Clinton lied under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He did so again in the grand jury. And yet, we were told that he should be neither prosecuted nor impeached, and that even investigating him for this was a terrible affront because he was the president.

Democrats were united in treating Clinton as being above the law against perjury, even though federal judges had previously been removed from office for committing perjury and filing false documents such as income-tax returns. Two hundred of the 205 House Democrats voted against impeachment. Every single Democrat in the Senate — every last one — voted for acquittal on all charges. That includes six Senate Democrats who are still there (Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray, Dianne Feinstein, Jack Reed, and Ron Wyden); it includes prominent Democrats who were in the House then, including Pelosi, Neal, Lee, Schumer (who voted against impeachment before joining the Senate and voting for acquittal), and Ed Markey; and it includes Joe Biden.

In his closing speech, Durbin argued that senators should focus on the partisan motives of Republicans bringing the charges: “When I listen to Paul Sarbanes recount the painstaking efforts to avoid partisanship during the impeachment hearing on President Nixon, it is a stark contrast to the committee process which voted these articles of impeachment against President Clinton. . . . The American people clearly believe that the process which brings him before us in this trial was too partisan, too unfair, too suspect.”


Biden literally argued that presidents should be judged by different standards:

We have heard it argued repeatedly that the Constitution does not create different standards for judges and the President. But that argument fails to comprehend the organizing principle of our constitutional system — the separation of powers. The framers divided the power of the Federal Government into three branches in order to safeguard liberty. This innovation — the envy of every Nation on earth — can only serve its fundamental purpose if each branch remains strong and independent of the others.

We needed a President who was independent enough to spearhead and sign the Civil Rights Act. We needed a President who was independent enough to lead the Nation and the world in the Persian gulf war. We still need an independent President.

The constitutional scholarship overwhelmingly recognizes that the fundamental structural commitment to separation of powers requires us to view the President as different than a Federal judge.

Consider our power to discipline and even expel an individual Senator. In such a case, we do not remove the head of a separate branch and so do not threaten the constitutional balance of powers. To remove a President is to decapitate another branch and to undermine the independence necessary for it to fulfill its constitutional role.

Only a President is chosen by the people in a national election. No Senator, no Representative can make this claim. To remove a duly elected President clashes with democratic principles in a way that simply has no constitutional parallel. By contrast, there is nothing antidemocratic in the Senate removing a judge who was appointed and not elected by the people. [Emphasis added.]

In remarks at the National Press Club in November 1998, Biden warned that enforcing the law against a president without scrupulous fairness could undermine public confidence:

The American people have a greater right than all of you. They have a greater right than the Congress, they have a greater right in the press as an institution, they have a greater right than the Senate. They have a greater right than any other single institution to make their own judgment. And they have made that judgment. And when we are going to take away. . . . We better be darn sure . . . that we can convince them that we’re doing it on the merits, as called for by the law and the Constitution and doing it fairly, for if we do not, we will further undermine the confidence in the American people in a democratic system that we have, and that’s all it runs on. The moment we lose the confidence of the American people that the system meets their needs is the day we lose our legitimacy.

He also argued that Kenneth Starr had gone too far in insisting that the law must be vindicated:

The grand jury system has been around for hundreds of years. . . . No one has ever pushed it to the limits that this man has. And what I worry about is what [a legal scholar] said to me. . . . He said Joe, remember, everything that is constitutionally permissible, is not necessarily wise, and everything, every exercise of power by a single branch of government is not necessarily prudent. No one in my view has pushed the envelope as far as this man has. And I think that is — I won’t say dangerous — I think that’s imprudent.

Clinton, in the end, was not removed from office. He was not prosecuted. The only legal consequence he faced was a brief suspension of his law license in Arkansas. He was welcomed back to speak at the Democratic convention in 2012, and there was nary a peep at returning him to the White House when his wife and vocal defender was the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2016. In the years since, even as progressives have developed post hoc qualms about Clinton’s predatory sexual behavior, scarcely any Democrat or any liberal or progressive commentator has argued that Clinton should have been prosecuted. When Kenneth Starr died in September 2022, there were no rethinkings or apologies for the period in which, as the Associated Press obituary accurately put it, “The White House pilloried Starr as a right-wing fanatic doing the bidding of Republicans bent on destroying the president.” It remains the position of most Democrats to this day that a federal prosecutor had no business investigating the president for a flagrant violation of an unambiguous federal criminal law.

If anything, Starr’s case against Clinton was much stronger than Bragg’s case against Trump. I will delve back into the precise details of New York’s false-business-records law when we see the indictment, but there are two fundamental and related differences between the law against perjury and the law against false business records, and they boil down to the questions of clear notice of the law and who exactly was harmed.

First, notice and clarity. I do not argue that former presidents should be above the law. They have no special immunity from prosecution. But Biden had a point in 1998-99: Presidents occupy a unique role in our system, which makes them very tempting targets for creative prosecutors, and which could easily touch off a cycle of partisan retribution. And our laws have expanded in complexity and vagueness in all manner of ways that give prosecutors too much discretion in deciding whom to investigate and charge. What should be true of every American citizen should be particularly true in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president:

If Trump — before, during, or after his presidency — unambiguously broke a clear law for which an ordinary person would be prosecuted, such as shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, [the Manhattan district attorney] would have a duty to prosecute him. But trumped-up charges against former leaders are a familiar sight in banana republics, one that America has thus far avoided. Mounting a prosecution against a former president — especially a former president who was investigated extensively in office without the bringing of charges by the self-styled “Resistance” — is a grave step for the nation and its confidence in the rule of law. That Rubicon should be crossed only on the basis of a case that can be easily explained and shown to people outside of deep-blue Manhattan as a well-known and traditional crime.

When you learn criminal law in law school, you learn the distinction between crimes that are malum in se and malum prohibitum. This is fancy Latin for things that are crimes because they universally recognized as bad acts, and things that are bad because they are against the law. The distinction tends to break down as a legal doctrine, but it is still a helpful way to think about the law. Murder, robbery, rape, fraud — these sorts of things have been banned by the law since Moses and Hammurabi, and in the English common law, many of them were treated as crimes even without the king or Parliament writing down a law against them. Every ordinary citizen knows without asking a lawyer or a policeman that stealing stuff is a crime.

Perjury may not quite be malum in se, but it is a simple and well-known crime, and any legal system that takes the testimony of witnesses needs a rule against lying on the stand. Most of us learn as kids from the first time we see a courtroom scene on TV or in the movies that you can get sent to jail for lying under oath. People get charged with perjury all the time. The decision not to charge Bill Clinton was a very public announcement that he, as the president, was above the law.

Falsifying business records is a very different thing. It is clearly on the malum prohibitum side of the line. It is easy to imagine a society that has no such law. One of the hallmarks of a malum prohibitum crime is that it is written without some of the traditional elements of common-law crimes. In a traditional common-law fraud case, for example, there must be a victim who relied on the lie and suffered damage. The statute intentionally omits these elements.

New York’s false-records law is what we might call a hybrid law: It requires proving a bunch of separately stitched-together elements, some of which are defined in other laws. Bragg, for example, is apparently going to try to rest his case on the theory that Trump was attempting to conceal a violation of the famously arcane and Byzantine federal campaign-finance rules. I doubt that the average New York attorney, let alone the average citizen, could define for you offhand what is and is not against the law under section 175 of the New York Penal Law.

That brings us to the other question: Who was harmed? In a perjury case, that’s easy. Bill Clinton was sued by Paula Jones, a subordinate employee during his tenure as governor of Arkansas, who claimed that he sexually harassed her with a fairly direct and crude pants-dropping proposition. Under the civil-discovery rules, Jones had the right to explore whether Clinton had done similar things to other women serving under him. When asked about Monica Lewinsky, Clinton lied and denied having “sexual relations” with her — after he reviewed an exhibit that explicitly defined “sexual relations” to include “contact with the genitalia” performed to “arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” Jones’s lawsuit was dismissed not long after, but when Clinton’s perjury came to light, he settled the case on appeal for $850,000.

The harm from Clinton’s perjury was straightforward: Jones was entitled to develop truthful, relevant evidence in order to have her day in court. Her lawyers asked a direct question. Clinton could have quibbled with them, but he chose instead to stonewall and conceal the facts.

Here, the theory is that Michael Cohen made hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels to cover up Trump’s affair with her — all of which was entirely legal, however tawdry and dishonest — that Trump wrote checks to Cohen to reimburse him, that those checks falsely classified the payments as legal fees, and that they were accordingly entered as such on the books of the Trump Organization. Even under Section 175.10 of the Penal Law, the courts have still required prosecutors to prove that a false entry was “material” — that is, that it was important to someone who might review those books — and that the defendant had an “intent to defraud,” i.e., that he at least intended there to be a victim.

This is why the bulk of uses of the false-records law have involved insurance frauds, government-benefits frauds, tax evasion, or the like — situations in which the false record is presented to someone else in order to claim money from them. “Intent to defraud,” in the law, typically refers to defrauding someone of money or property. In one 1998 case, a New York court threw out a charge that a call-girl ring falsely classified payments for prostitution as payments for other services (such as a limousine). The prosecution said that this was a fraud on American Express, but American Express wouldn’t actually care what the bill said, so long as it got paid. As the court noted, the real targets of the deception would be the wives of men visiting prostitutes — not someone who was defrauded in a business transaction. The one major case where the false-records law was used against a campaign-finance violation involved a Brooklyn politician who received payments from a lobbyist that exceeded the legal limits under state campaign-finance law. This was money he wasn’t entitled to receive.

Who was harmed by what Trump wrote on his checks, or by what the Trump Organization wrote about the checks in its ledgers? Trump clearly never wanted anybody but Cohen and his accountants to see the checks. The Trump Organization isn’t a public company with innocent shareholders; Trump owns it. The Manhattan DA already abandoned an investigation into Trump defrauding his lenders, because they were big, sophisticated banks who knew who they were lending to and got paid back. The checks were written at a point when any campaign-finance reports covering that period wouldn’t be filed until after the election anyway. There are a couple of possible legal weak links in the case, including the statute of limitations and the question of whether the New York law can properly be read to allow a backdoor to enforcing Federal Election Commission regulations, but the one at the heart of the case is the flimsiness of the theory that these were material false statements aimed at defrauding anybody at all.

It is precisely in cases of such charges under artificially vague and hybrid laws that a prosecutor has maximum discretion to decide how far to stretch the law beyond its ordinary contours onto unprecedented ground. That is where a prosecutor should exercise that discretion with maximum judgment. To speak of that discretion as “the law” is to confuse the rule of law with the rule of lawyers. And it is a spectacular feat of chutzpah to do so in defense of Alvin Bragg, whose tenure as a prosecutor has been defined by his refusal to prosecute whole categories of violations of the law, while publicly pledging to pursue one particular man.

So, when these people talk about who is and isn’t “above the law,” remember: They don’t mean a word of it.
Title: Re: No One Is Above the Law
Post by: G M on April 04, 2023, 07:41:10 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/134/214/894/original/a666f0434a7508e7.png

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1050,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/134/214/894/original/a666f0434a7508e7.png)

When a Democratic President Was above the Law
By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
April 3, 2023 3:04 PM
NRO

If you told us that perjury should go unpunished because it was ‘just about sex,’ you should sit out the ‘nobody is above the law’ argument.

One of the mantras of Democrats and their media voices in response to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump has been that “no one is above the law.” That’s a fine sentiment, but there are three very big problems with Democrats making this argument: They don’t believe it, they don’t mean the same thing by “law” as the rest of us, and Alvin Bragg is about the worst possible representative for the theory that violations of the law will never be tolerated.



In particular, I never want to hear another word — not another syllable — about how “nobody is above the law” from people who spent years on end telling us that perjury and obstruction of justice by the president should not lead to consequences because it was “just about a blow job.” I never want to hear this from people who professed to be horrified by “lock her up” chants on the theory that one should never call for jailing political opponents even when they have violated specific federal criminal statutes regarding the handling of sensitive information — least of all in defense of a prosecutor who ran for office publicly promising to go after this particular political opponent of his. I never want to hear it from people who said that the vice president could break a federal law without consequence so long as there was “no controlling legal authority” interpreting the law. I certainly do not want to hear this from people who are, even today, arguing that the president can get away with breaking the law and seizing the powers of Congress to give away half a trillion dollars of our money to his supporters so long as he can argue that nobody has standing to sue him in federal court.

Consider a sampling of statements by Democrats on the Trump indictment:


• Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois: “No one is above the law — not even a former president.”


• Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts: “No one is above the law, not even a former president of the United States.”

• Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona: “We’re a country of laws and nobody’s above the law.”

• Ex-Democrat Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona: “Politicians aren’t above the law.”

• Senator Mark Warner of Virginia: “In the United States nobody is above the law, especially not the leaders who have been entrusted with the privilege and responsibility of serving the American people.”

• Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “No one is above the law, and everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.” (Forget the part about the defendant having to prove innocence, she’s rolling.)


• Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California: “No one is above the law.”

• Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts: “Nobody is above the law.”

• Congressman Dan Goldman of New York: “Donald Trump has demonstrated his belief that he is above the law, and nobody is above the law.”

• Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado: “Former President Trump’s indictment reminds us that no one is above the law and that we are all afforded due process and equal protection under the law.”

• Congresswoman Diana DeGette of Colorado: “No one is above the law in this country. Not even former presidents!”

• Congressman Chuy Garcia of Illinois: “Nobody is above the law.”

• Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas cited the indictment as “evidence that no one is above the law, even the president of the United States.”

I could go on, but you get the idea. If a memo didn’t literally go out, it may as well have.


This is not how Democrats talk about the law when one of their own is in the crosshairs. The most obvious and glaring parallel is Bill Clinton’s perjury. At the time, the all-but-uniform argument among Democrats was that the Clinton impeachment was “just about sex,” as if covering up a sexual affair is somehow a defense to breaking the law. On the simplest charge against Clinton, perjury in his civil deposition, there really was no question that Clinton lied under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He did so again in the grand jury. And yet, we were told that he should be neither prosecuted nor impeached, and that even investigating him for this was a terrible affront because he was the president.

Democrats were united in treating Clinton as being above the law against perjury, even though federal judges had previously been removed from office for committing perjury and filing false documents such as income-tax returns. Two hundred of the 205 House Democrats voted against impeachment. Every single Democrat in the Senate — every last one — voted for acquittal on all charges. That includes six Senate Democrats who are still there (Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray, Dianne Feinstein, Jack Reed, and Ron Wyden); it includes prominent Democrats who were in the House then, including Pelosi, Neal, Lee, Schumer (who voted against impeachment before joining the Senate and voting for acquittal), and Ed Markey; and it includes Joe Biden.

In his closing speech, Durbin argued that senators should focus on the partisan motives of Republicans bringing the charges: “When I listen to Paul Sarbanes recount the painstaking efforts to avoid partisanship during the impeachment hearing on President Nixon, it is a stark contrast to the committee process which voted these articles of impeachment against President Clinton. . . . The American people clearly believe that the process which brings him before us in this trial was too partisan, too unfair, too suspect.”


Biden literally argued that presidents should be judged by different standards:

We have heard it argued repeatedly that the Constitution does not create different standards for judges and the President. But that argument fails to comprehend the organizing principle of our constitutional system — the separation of powers. The framers divided the power of the Federal Government into three branches in order to safeguard liberty. This innovation — the envy of every Nation on earth — can only serve its fundamental purpose if each branch remains strong and independent of the others.

We needed a President who was independent enough to spearhead and sign the Civil Rights Act. We needed a President who was independent enough to lead the Nation and the world in the Persian gulf war. We still need an independent President.

The constitutional scholarship overwhelmingly recognizes that the fundamental structural commitment to separation of powers requires us to view the President as different than a Federal judge.

Consider our power to discipline and even expel an individual Senator. In such a case, we do not remove the head of a separate branch and so do not threaten the constitutional balance of powers. To remove a President is to decapitate another branch and to undermine the independence necessary for it to fulfill its constitutional role.

Only a President is chosen by the people in a national election. No Senator, no Representative can make this claim. To remove a duly elected President clashes with democratic principles in a way that simply has no constitutional parallel. By contrast, there is nothing antidemocratic in the Senate removing a judge who was appointed and not elected by the people. [Emphasis added.]

In remarks at the National Press Club in November 1998, Biden warned that enforcing the law against a president without scrupulous fairness could undermine public confidence:

The American people have a greater right than all of you. They have a greater right than the Congress, they have a greater right in the press as an institution, they have a greater right than the Senate. They have a greater right than any other single institution to make their own judgment. And they have made that judgment. And when we are going to take away. . . . We better be darn sure . . . that we can convince them that we’re doing it on the merits, as called for by the law and the Constitution and doing it fairly, for if we do not, we will further undermine the confidence in the American people in a democratic system that we have, and that’s all it runs on. The moment we lose the confidence of the American people that the system meets their needs is the day we lose our legitimacy.

He also argued that Kenneth Starr had gone too far in insisting that the law must be vindicated:

The grand jury system has been around for hundreds of years. . . . No one has ever pushed it to the limits that this man has. And what I worry about is what [a legal scholar] said to me. . . . He said Joe, remember, everything that is constitutionally permissible, is not necessarily wise, and everything, every exercise of power by a single branch of government is not necessarily prudent. No one in my view has pushed the envelope as far as this man has. And I think that is — I won’t say dangerous — I think that’s imprudent.

Clinton, in the end, was not removed from office. He was not prosecuted. The only legal consequence he faced was a brief suspension of his law license in Arkansas. He was welcomed back to speak at the Democratic convention in 2012, and there was nary a peep at returning him to the White House when his wife and vocal defender was the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 2016. In the years since, even as progressives have developed post hoc qualms about Clinton’s predatory sexual behavior, scarcely any Democrat or any liberal or progressive commentator has argued that Clinton should have been prosecuted. When Kenneth Starr died in September 2022, there were no rethinkings or apologies for the period in which, as the Associated Press obituary accurately put it, “The White House pilloried Starr as a right-wing fanatic doing the bidding of Republicans bent on destroying the president.” It remains the position of most Democrats to this day that a federal prosecutor had no business investigating the president for a flagrant violation of an unambiguous federal criminal law.

If anything, Starr’s case against Clinton was much stronger than Bragg’s case against Trump. I will delve back into the precise details of New York’s false-business-records law when we see the indictment, but there are two fundamental and related differences between the law against perjury and the law against false business records, and they boil down to the questions of clear notice of the law and who exactly was harmed.

First, notice and clarity. I do not argue that former presidents should be above the law. They have no special immunity from prosecution. But Biden had a point in 1998-99: Presidents occupy a unique role in our system, which makes them very tempting targets for creative prosecutors, and which could easily touch off a cycle of partisan retribution. And our laws have expanded in complexity and vagueness in all manner of ways that give prosecutors too much discretion in deciding whom to investigate and charge. What should be true of every American citizen should be particularly true in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president:

If Trump — before, during, or after his presidency — unambiguously broke a clear law for which an ordinary person would be prosecuted, such as shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue, [the Manhattan district attorney] would have a duty to prosecute him. But trumped-up charges against former leaders are a familiar sight in banana republics, one that America has thus far avoided. Mounting a prosecution against a former president — especially a former president who was investigated extensively in office without the bringing of charges by the self-styled “Resistance” — is a grave step for the nation and its confidence in the rule of law. That Rubicon should be crossed only on the basis of a case that can be easily explained and shown to people outside of deep-blue Manhattan as a well-known and traditional crime.

When you learn criminal law in law school, you learn the distinction between crimes that are malum in se and malum prohibitum. This is fancy Latin for things that are crimes because they universally recognized as bad acts, and things that are bad because they are against the law. The distinction tends to break down as a legal doctrine, but it is still a helpful way to think about the law. Murder, robbery, rape, fraud — these sorts of things have been banned by the law since Moses and Hammurabi, and in the English common law, many of them were treated as crimes even without the king or Parliament writing down a law against them. Every ordinary citizen knows without asking a lawyer or a policeman that stealing stuff is a crime.

Perjury may not quite be malum in se, but it is a simple and well-known crime, and any legal system that takes the testimony of witnesses needs a rule against lying on the stand. Most of us learn as kids from the first time we see a courtroom scene on TV or in the movies that you can get sent to jail for lying under oath. People get charged with perjury all the time. The decision not to charge Bill Clinton was a very public announcement that he, as the president, was above the law.

Falsifying business records is a very different thing. It is clearly on the malum prohibitum side of the line. It is easy to imagine a society that has no such law. One of the hallmarks of a malum prohibitum crime is that it is written without some of the traditional elements of common-law crimes. In a traditional common-law fraud case, for example, there must be a victim who relied on the lie and suffered damage. The statute intentionally omits these elements.

New York’s false-records law is what we might call a hybrid law: It requires proving a bunch of separately stitched-together elements, some of which are defined in other laws. Bragg, for example, is apparently going to try to rest his case on the theory that Trump was attempting to conceal a violation of the famously arcane and Byzantine federal campaign-finance rules. I doubt that the average New York attorney, let alone the average citizen, could define for you offhand what is and is not against the law under section 175 of the New York Penal Law.

That brings us to the other question: Who was harmed? In a perjury case, that’s easy. Bill Clinton was sued by Paula Jones, a subordinate employee during his tenure as governor of Arkansas, who claimed that he sexually harassed her with a fairly direct and crude pants-dropping proposition. Under the civil-discovery rules, Jones had the right to explore whether Clinton had done similar things to other women serving under him. When asked about Monica Lewinsky, Clinton lied and denied having “sexual relations” with her — after he reviewed an exhibit that explicitly defined “sexual relations” to include “contact with the genitalia” performed to “arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” Jones’s lawsuit was dismissed not long after, but when Clinton’s perjury came to light, he settled the case on appeal for $850,000.

The harm from Clinton’s perjury was straightforward: Jones was entitled to develop truthful, relevant evidence in order to have her day in court. Her lawyers asked a direct question. Clinton could have quibbled with them, but he chose instead to stonewall and conceal the facts.

Here, the theory is that Michael Cohen made hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels to cover up Trump’s affair with her — all of which was entirely legal, however tawdry and dishonest — that Trump wrote checks to Cohen to reimburse him, that those checks falsely classified the payments as legal fees, and that they were accordingly entered as such on the books of the Trump Organization. Even under Section 175.10 of the Penal Law, the courts have still required prosecutors to prove that a false entry was “material” — that is, that it was important to someone who might review those books — and that the defendant had an “intent to defraud,” i.e., that he at least intended there to be a victim.

This is why the bulk of uses of the false-records law have involved insurance frauds, government-benefits frauds, tax evasion, or the like — situations in which the false record is presented to someone else in order to claim money from them. “Intent to defraud,” in the law, typically refers to defrauding someone of money or property. In one 1998 case, a New York court threw out a charge that a call-girl ring falsely classified payments for prostitution as payments for other services (such as a limousine). The prosecution said that this was a fraud on American Express, but American Express wouldn’t actually care what the bill said, so long as it got paid. As the court noted, the real targets of the deception would be the wives of men visiting prostitutes — not someone who was defrauded in a business transaction. The one major case where the false-records law was used against a campaign-finance violation involved a Brooklyn politician who received payments from a lobbyist that exceeded the legal limits under state campaign-finance law. This was money he wasn’t entitled to receive.

Who was harmed by what Trump wrote on his checks, or by what the Trump Organization wrote about the checks in its ledgers? Trump clearly never wanted anybody but Cohen and his accountants to see the checks. The Trump Organization isn’t a public company with innocent shareholders; Trump owns it. The Manhattan DA already abandoned an investigation into Trump defrauding his lenders, because they were big, sophisticated banks who knew who they were lending to and got paid back. The checks were written at a point when any campaign-finance reports covering that period wouldn’t be filed until after the election anyway. There are a couple of possible legal weak links in the case, including the statute of limitations and the question of whether the New York law can properly be read to allow a backdoor to enforcing Federal Election Commission regulations, but the one at the heart of the case is the flimsiness of the theory that these were material false statements aimed at defrauding anybody at all.

It is precisely in cases of such charges under artificially vague and hybrid laws that a prosecutor has maximum discretion to decide how far to stretch the law beyond its ordinary contours onto unprecedented ground. That is where a prosecutor should exercise that discretion with maximum judgment. To speak of that discretion as “the law” is to confuse the rule of law with the rule of lawyers. And it is a spectacular feat of chutzpah to do so in defense of Alvin Bragg, whose tenure as a prosecutor has been defined by his refusal to prosecute whole categories of violations of the law, while publicly pledging to pursue one particular man.

So, when these people talk about who is and isn’t “above the law,” remember: They don’t mean a word of it.
Title: The legal doctrine of "OrangeManBad"
Post by: G M on April 05, 2023, 07:12:25 AM
https://www.revolver.news/2023/04/journalist-paul-sperry-drops-bomb-about-daughter-of-judge-presiding-over-trumps-case/
Title: Paging noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy…
Post by: G M on April 06, 2023, 10:41:51 AM
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1643941971298271232.html
Title: Another "Whoopsie" from DOJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 08, 2023, 07:53:58 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/6/doj-says-it-inadvertently-hid-evidence-in-case-of-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=f6S5fqle1Lg3FCKCsI0EK2PsWmrN8h%2F3bvx8rX9dc7gpQ48uGhz9X36x3lxhpdzR&bt_ts=1680793701924
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on April 08, 2023, 03:52:45 PM
anyone else notice that suddenly after some rich tech guy gets murdered on the streets of SF , NOW we are hearing more and more about how SF has declined

not mentioned on MSM until it was one of their own tech elites....

they think they are immune because they were badges with letter D on their lapels

they better think again ... :wink:
Title: The leaker needs to be prosecuted, just like Hillary was!
Post by: G M on April 14, 2023, 01:54:16 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/taibbi-crackdown-cometh
Title: Sam Brinton escapes the clink
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 14, 2023, 02:41:45 PM
https://www.oann.com/newsroom/ex-biden-official-sam-brinton-escapes-jail-time/
Title: Re: The leaker needs to be prosecuted, just like Hillary was!
Post by: G M on April 16, 2023, 08:12:04 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/taibbi-crackdown-cometh

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/04/lt-col-vindman-admitted-leaking-documents-meant-to-help-dems-impeach-trump-never-served-time-while-21-yr-old-jack-teixeira-was-arrested-for-the-same-crime/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on April 16, 2023, 09:00:32 AM
Very good to see this footage escaping from the Memory Hole!

GM, can you go to the source material and post URLs of it directly?  I want to save it so as to protect if from being deleted again by the Goolag.

https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63661

https://rumble.com/v2en5uk-january-6-care-package.html
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2023, 09:43:09 AM
Can one of us download this footage before it is disappeared please?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on April 16, 2023, 09:47:46 AM
Can one of us download this footage before it is disappeared please?

Why? What is the point? So someone can smuggle it to Andrew McCarthy someday and the scales will fall from his eyes?

 :roll:
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2023, 09:50:59 AM
So that we can fight the Big Lies of the Deep State!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on April 16, 2023, 09:56:00 AM
So that we can fight the Big Lies of the Deep State!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How many of your lefty friends have seen the massive evidence of the J6 FEDsurrection? Did they care?

Has noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy avoided seeing it?

Bezmenov warned us.

You aren't voting your way out of this.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 16, 2023, 08:14:29 PM
Nonetheless, would you please download it for future reference?

Some of us have not given up.
Title: Judge to Bragg
Post by: ccp on April 20, 2023, 01:49:17 AM
"no one is above the law"

https://nypost.com/2023/04/19/pomerantz-must-testify-before-congressional-committee-judge/

 :-D
Title: I wonder if noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy will comment on this...
Post by: G M on April 20, 2023, 07:37:03 AM
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1648683243980374016.html

The hour is later than you think.
Title: Endorsed by noted legal expert, Andrew McCarthy
Post by: G M on April 20, 2023, 11:10:38 PM
https://nypost.com/2023/04/20/merrick-garland-at-center-of-hunter-biden-whistleblower-claim/
Title: Mike Morell and Anthony Blinken and the Letter of the 51
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 22, 2023, 11:19:44 AM
A trip down memory lane about Mike Morell on our forum:

https://firehydrantoffreedom.com/index.php?action=search2
Title: Deep State Andy on Mike Morell
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 22, 2023, 02:15:11 PM
The Obama-Era Hatchet Man at the Center of Biden’s 2020 Campaign Deception

Left: President Joe Biden holds a meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., June 1, 2022. Right: Former CIA acting director Michael Morell speaks during a forum on election security in Washington, D.C., October 30, 2019. (Jonathan Ernst, Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
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By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
April 22, 2023 6:30 AM
Gee, what a surprise to find Mike Morell deeply involved in Biden’s cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
So how shocked, shocked should we be that, when the Biden campaign needed to call in a pro in the dark art of politicizing intelligence, it turned to none other than former CIA muckety-muck Michael Morell? You may remember him as the man behind the infamous Benghazi talking points . . . about which he has been just as honest as he is now in Deep State–splaining to us that his effort to help Joe Biden slough off Hunter’s scandalous laptop as Russian disinformation was not — really not, cross-his-heart — a scam to frame the laptop as Russian disinformation.



As our Ari Blaff reports, Morell has fessed up to the House Judiciary Committee that, in the weeks just before the 2020 presidential election, he and his pal Antony Blinken (then a top Biden campaign adviser, now the secretary of state) cooked up the shameful letter signed by 51 partisan Democrats — I mean, er, scrupulously nonpartisan former intelligence and national-security officials. That letter, which branded the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, is itself an exquisite piece of disinformation, based on exactly zero, zip, nada evidence, and trading exclusively on the credentials of the former officials.

In other words, this is strictly a case of Washington insiders’ cashing in, for partisan gain, on the perception of credibility that results from having had privileged access to national-defense secrets. Worse, they issued their deceptive letter in the teeth of incontestable indicia of the Hunter laptop’s authenticity — evidence so overwhelming that even alumni of our spotty $90 billion per annum intelligence community should have figured it out.


As illustrated by Steve Hayes’s excellent review of Morell’s revisionist memoir, he and his admirers in the media–Democrat complex have energetically labored to memory-hole his doctoring of the talking points generated by the Obama administration following the jihadist massacre of U.S. personnel in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. As Obama officials well knew, the operation in Libya that night, on the eleventh anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 atrocities, was a coordinated terrorist attack. But because it occurred less than two months before Election Day, with Obama campaigning for reelection on the fiction that he had “decimated” al-Qaeda, the unvarnished truth would not do. Thus did Obama officials strain to depict the massacre as triggered by protests run amok in reaction to an anti-Muslim video.

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The CIA knew right away that jihadists had attacked the compound. This patent fact was immediately reported to Washington, including to the State Department. Indeed, it was known that jihadists were conducting surveillance of the American compounds even before the attacks. The later indictment of Ahmed Katallah made the terrorism instigation clear (even though, of course, the Obama Justice Department made no mention of al-Qaeda in the charging document).


In the days after the massacre, the Obama White House wanted the role of terrorism erased. To report what had happened forthrightly would not only have undermined the president’s reelection-campaign messaging. It would also have underscored the reckless failures to secure the American compounds. That’s what made them such an inviting target for jihadists who, on that fateful night, murdered U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, State Department official Sean Smith, and two government-security contractors and former Navy SEAL officers, Glen Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods.

More on
HUNTER BIDEN
 
Biden Campaign Played Active Role in Suppressing Hunter Biden Laptop Story, Congressional Testimony Reveals
Of Course There Has Been Biden Administration Political Interference in the Biden Family Criminal Investigation
Hunter Biden Grand Jury Witness Asked to Identify ‘Big Guy’ in Chinese Equity Deal
Consequently, as Obama adviser Ben Rhodes put it in outlining the administration’s messaging “goals,” officials needed “to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.” Gregory Hicks, the State Department official who was briefing his superiors from Libya during and after the attack, later testified that the video was a “non-event” in Benghazi. Yet, after consulting with President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put out a statement blaming the video for the attack, despite privately informing her daughter and the Libyan president that the attack appeared to have been carried out by Ansar al-Sharia, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

Talking points about the attack, to be shared with Congress and ultimately the public, were prepared by intelligence officials in coordination with the White House, the State Department, the FBI, and other relevant agencies. The originally drafted talking points mentioned attacks that had been conducted by Islamic militants with ties to al-Qaeda, including Ansar al-Sharia. The talking points were then edited and, as Hayes recounts:

In every case, the changes made by administration and intelligence officials to the Benghazi talking points originated by the CIA had the effect of downplaying the significance of the attacks—cutting “Islamic,” replacing “attacks” with “demonstrations,” removing “with ties to al Qaeda,” excising mention of the involvement of Ansar al Sharia.

The talking points became a script for Susan Rice, the Obama White House adviser — and now Biden White House adviser — who notoriously made the Sunday talk-show rounds to sell the administration’s claim that the video had ignited the attack.

When it eventually emerged that the intelligence had been politicized to obscure the role of terrorists and create the misimpression of a “spontaneous” uprising, members of Congress pressed intelligence agencies for answers. At a House Intelligence Committee hearing in mid November 2012, Morell testified along with Obama’s national-intelligence director, James Clapper, and other top intelligence officials. The committee asked Clapper who was responsible for the talking points. As Clapper replied that he had no idea, Morell — who had been directly responsible — sat mum.

Later, as Obama mulled nominating Rice to replace Clinton as secretary of state but worried that her disastrous post-Benghazi Sunday show rounds would prevent her confirmation, the White House persuaded the ever-accommodating Morell to accompany her to Capitol Hill meetings with key senators. Morell knew Rice’s statements in the media appearances had been misleading, but agreed to tag along when she met with three Republicans who had closely followed Benghazi developments — John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte. Pressed about the editing of the talking points, Morell falsely told the senators that the FBI had been the culprit. Risibly, he elaborated about how the bureau had supposedly raised concerns that allusions to al-Qaeda could compromise its criminal investigation.


Senator Graham proceeded to call FBI headquarters, and later recalled that “they went ballistic” over Morell’s allegation. Whereupon Morell changed his tune, suddenly remembering that, well, actually, his CIA had made the changes to the talking points. Eventually, called to testify under oath, he further, shall we say, refined this account, conceding that he’d personally made significant changes.

I know this will stun you, too: Originally, Morell insisted that the talking points were developed by intelligence officials and shared with the White House only for its “awareness,” and certainly not to coordinate a message about the events in Benghazi. Later, when the administration was forced to release emails that showed close coordination, Morell admitted that, well, there just might have been some coordination afoot.

Remarkably, in putting together the letter from the 51 former officials, Morell has told House investigators that his motive was twofold: “One intent was to share our concern with the American people that the Russians were playing on this issue; and, two, it was [to] help Vice President Biden.”


Good ol’ Mike Morell, always with the security of the American people in the front of his mind. In point of fact, while the Russians had nothing to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop, the data from the laptop elucidated the tight connection between the Biden family and America’s most challenging adversary, the Chinese Communist Party. The latter’s operatives, with their close ties to Xi Jinping and his regime, have poured millions of dollars into the Biden family coffers, and the laptop contents corroborate that the point of this operation was to buy the elder Biden’s influence.

But why would that be of any concern to a selflessly dedicated, scrupulously nonpartisan intelligence pro, right?

Editor’s Note: This article has been emended since its original posting to correct the spelling of Ben Rhodes’s last name.
Title: Does noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy watch "60 Minutes"?
Post by: G M on April 24, 2023, 07:12:17 AM
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/04/22/60-minutes-steps-up-to-defend-ray-epps-who-is-absolutely-not-a-fed-oh-no-n1689517

Title: Elizabeth Holmes may not go to jail
Post by: ccp on April 27, 2023, 09:23:23 AM
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/26/no-prison-yet-for-elizabeth-holmes-following-last-ditch-appeal.html

Justice continues to sink to new lows
puts thousands of human beings lives at risk knowingly doing inaccurate testing

Rule of Law

"rule of lawyers"

Title: Re: Elizabeth Holmes may not go to jail
Post by: G M on April 27, 2023, 09:29:47 AM
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/26/no-prison-yet-for-elizabeth-holmes-following-last-ditch-appeal.html

Justice continues to sink to new lows
puts thousands of human beings lives at risk knowingly doing inaccurate testing

Rule of Law

"rule of lawyers"

Good line!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 27, 2023, 12:31:46 PM
Stealing that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on April 27, 2023, 01:32:57 PM
would make a great front for  T shirts

but would probably have some DA go after the makers
Title: Jonathan Turley : Biden's "made men"
Post by: ccp on April 28, 2023, 08:02:44 AM
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3963743-antony-blinken-and-the-made-men-of-the-biden-administration/

John McCain was right about this :  Blinken is no good and dangerous:

https://nypost.com/2021/08/19/mccains-2014-attack-on-tony-blinken-reemerges-amid-afghan-exit-chaos/

And now we witness the total chaos during his being SoS all around the world with enemies and former allies

he should be jailed along with Myorkas Sullivan and Biden
Title: Re: Jonathan Turley : Biden's "made men"
Post by: G M on April 28, 2023, 09:16:57 AM
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3963743-antony-blinken-and-the-made-men-of-the-biden-administration/

John McCain was right about this :  Blinken is no good and dangerous:

https://nypost.com/2021/08/19/mccains-2014-attack-on-tony-blinken-reemerges-amid-afghan-exit-chaos/

And now we witness the total chaos during his being SoS all around the world with enemies and former allies

he should be jailed along with Myorkas Sullivan and Biden

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/on-war-and-wars/

You aren’t voting your way out of this.
Title: Good thing this won’t be abused!
Post by: G M on May 01, 2023, 11:09:44 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/over-10000-fbi-agents-can-access-data-secretive-surveillance-program-inspectors-general
Title: " proud boy "
Post by: ccp on May 04, 2023, 09:14:18 AM
gets 20 yrs for texting about 1/6.

he wasn't even in DC on 1/6!

https://nypost.com/2023/05/04/ex-proud-boys-leader-enrique-tarrio-found-guilty-of-jan-6-sedition-plot/

2 injustice systems in the USA
rule of law

rule of lawyers !

 
Title: what "deep state"?
Post by: ccp on May 05, 2023, 06:27:57 AM
"deep state" is just a right wing conspiracy theory -

https://nypost.com/2023/05/05/ex-cia-chief-michael-morell-wrote-hunter-biden-laptop-disinfo-letter-for-biden-to-use-as-during-debate/

(we had no clue  :wink:)

if only we can dive into the CNN MSLSD NYT WP  emails
and put into black and white on the front page their machinations



Title: A win! AG Kim Gardner kicked to curb!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 05, 2023, 08:49:56 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/05/soros-backed-st-louis-attorney-kim-gardner-resigns/
Title: Re: A win! AG Kim Gardner kicked to curb!
Post by: G M on May 05, 2023, 09:00:41 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/05/soros-backed-st-louis-attorney-kim-gardner-resigns/

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/404303.php

Don't worry, the dems will have a job lined up for her.
Title: VA AG rips AG Garland over failure to protect SCOTUS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 05, 2023, 09:01:17 AM


https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/may/4/jason-miyares-virginia-ag-rips-justice-department-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=tfuO2RkWCTtFw4nsXrgI%2Ft0i5lj58TTNfOFwjgsky%2FFqTvncJKwqJ%2Fzt7OpoIeGN&bt_ts=1683281664247
Title: Re: VA AG rips AG Garland over failure to protect SCOTUS
Post by: G M on May 05, 2023, 09:05:27 AM


https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/may/4/jason-miyares-virginia-ag-rips-justice-department-/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=tfuO2RkWCTtFw4nsXrgI%2Ft0i5lj58TTNfOFwjgsky%2FFqTvncJKwqJ%2Fzt7OpoIeGN&bt_ts=1683281664247

OOOOH! Will he follow up with a letter written in a stern tone?

Title: Seems just
Post by: G M on May 05, 2023, 10:17:52 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/840/444/original/d1945af6799611b0.jpeg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/136/840/444/original/d1945af6799611b0.jpeg)
Title: Burning down the house-Andrew McCarthy unavailable for comment
Post by: G M on May 09, 2023, 06:40:45 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/federal_government_burns_the_whole_house_down.html
Title: The Deep State and the DC Uniparty
Post by: G M on May 09, 2023, 10:24:19 PM
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1387911271652147201.html
Title: Re: Burning down the house-Andrew McCarthy unavailable for comment
Post by: G M on May 11, 2023, 06:34:23 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/federal_government_burns_the_whole_house_down.html

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/549/849/original/5ad4ab6a77f9f4e2.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/549/849/original/5ad4ab6a77f9f4e2.jpg)
Title: FBI: You know that laptop we said we didn't have...
Post by: G M on May 15, 2023, 02:26:06 PM
https://nationalfile.com/fbi-asks-judge-to-delay-seth-rich-laptop-release-for-66-years/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2023, 02:28:24 PM
Whoa.

Please stay on top of this for us.
Title: Kunstler nails it
Post by: G M on May 15, 2023, 02:45:55 PM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/kunstler-elites-are-useful-idiots-security-state
Title: Defund and dissolve the FBI
Post by: G M on May 15, 2023, 06:30:00 PM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/929/709/original/8f166010c5a86121.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/929/709/original/8f166010c5a86121.jpg)
Title: IRS Team investigating Hunter removed!!!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 15, 2023, 07:38:48 PM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/may/15/irs-removes-entire-investigative-team-hunter-biden/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=yy4Em%2FiMTCkLQViAJr5GllkuZ7FlhC9oo7pNXTvjFzESuP2ZboeuiVeUE6%2BjQqHQ&bt_ts=1684200888871
Title: Lots of people should go to prison, none will
Post by: G M on May 16, 2023, 07:07:48 AM
https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/16/in-a-healthy-democracy-john-brennan-would-already-be-in-prison/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2023, 07:44:24 AM
AGREE.
Title: IRS Whistleblower removed from Hunter investigation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2023, 10:45:36 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/irs-whistleblower-removed-from-hunter-biden-criminal-investigation-at-request-of-doj-attorneys_5267785.html?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-05-16-1&src_cmp=breaking-2023-05-16-1&utm_medium=email&est=4I2t3jSCwjoIw9NoO9eP2d5jQEFvG5mnGervnksnZAd%2BcCnwVOx1iAGz8l82dbTebx8B
Title: whistle blower and the entire team removed
Post by: ccp on May 16, 2023, 12:18:24 PM
“Today, the [IRS] Criminal Supervisory Special Agent we represent was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress,” the whistleblower’s lawyers said in a May 15 letter (pdf) addressed to multiple congressional lawmakers, first obtained by Just the News."

we will not only go after you, but we will go after your entire family !

so to speak ....

nothing to see here
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 16, 2023, 12:53:22 PM
The Sounds of Silence on this are deafening  :cry: :cry: :cry:
Title: Perhaps noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy could explain this...
Post by: G M on May 18, 2023, 07:18:12 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/069/837/original/a013ad59bc195b09.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/069/837/original/a013ad59bc195b09.jpg)

I'm sure he will right after he covers Ray Epps!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on May 18, 2023, 07:27:28 AM
"Perhaps noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy could explain this..."

not clear why you are going after AM for this
I am pretty sure he would put his stamp of approval
on  your point about the lying hypocrisy of MSM from this post .
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on May 18, 2023, 07:36:30 AM
"Perhaps noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy could explain this..."

not clear why you are going after AM for this
I am pretty sure he would put his stamp of approval
on  your point about the lying hypocrisy of MSM from this post .

He avoids covering obvious criminal conduct from his friends at the DOJ.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 18, 2023, 07:40:16 AM
A most fair point-- but one that should not be used to fail to acknowledge all the quality work AM does in other regards.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on May 18, 2023, 07:41:00 AM
"Perhaps noted legal expert Andrew McCarthy could explain this..."

not clear why you are going after AM for this
I am pretty sure he would put his stamp of approval
on  your point about the lying hypocrisy of MSM from this post .

He avoids covering obvious criminal conduct from his friends at the DOJ.

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/135/746/original/95e41344895dc406.png

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/135/746/original/95e41344895dc406.png)

I want Deep State Andy to admit it.
Title: Patriot Post agrees with GM
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 18, 2023, 07:43:00 AM
I would love to have you interview him on FOX  :-D

=====================

https://patriotpost.us/alexander/97410?mailing_id=7495&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.7495&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=body
Title: Re: Patriot Post agrees with GM
Post by: G M on May 18, 2023, 09:18:52 AM
I would love to have you interview him on FOX  :-D

=====================

https://patriotpost.us/alexander/97410?mailing_id=7495&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.7495&utm_campaign=alexander&utm_content=body

He wouldn’t enjoy it. He at least twice swore an oath to protect and defend the constitution against all enemies. He had plausible deniability when he criticized Tucker for Tucker’s accurate reporting on the J6 FEDsurrection, but he has exactly ZERO excuses now for not addressing that J6 was part of a COUP that ended the American Republic.

He at the minimum should use his position to scream to the masses the truth, instead he helps the COUP by his weak tea criticism of the DOJ.

Title: Anyone with integrity is being destroyed by the Deep State
Post by: G M on May 18, 2023, 09:50:09 AM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/404489.php

Hey Andy, I have a topic you might want to cover…
Title: ZH: FBI sabotaged Clinton Foundation investigations
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2023, 09:58:35 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-leadership-sabotaged-clinton-foundation-investigations-durham-report?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1498


HT to GM:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/fbi-suddenly-dropped-four-investigations-hillary-bill-clinton/
Title: WSJ: Durham on Comey's culpability
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2023, 10:08:33 AM
second

Durham on Comey’s Culpability
The report shows FBI headquarters ignored all the rules in the Trump-Russia probe.
Kimberley A. Strassel hedcutBy Kimberley A. StrasselFollow
May 18, 2023 6:30 pm ET


Special Counsel John Durham leaves the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Washington, May 23, 2022. PHOTO: SAMUEL CORUM/ZUMA PRESS
The Federal Bureau of Investigation received some shocking intelligence in 2018, suggesting the Russians might have compromised Christopher Steele’s sources even before the opposition researcher began feeding his infamous dossier to the FBI. Just as shocking was the edict that came next.


According to special counsel John Durham’s report, the team reviewing the intelligence was told in a meeting with a top member of the Trump-Russia collusion probe to “be careful” because “issues relating to Steele were under intense scrutiny.” Dina Corsi, the deputy assistant director for counterintelligence, then ordered that findings be reported only “orally.” One FBI lawyer told the Durham team it was “the most inappropriate operational or professional statement” he’d ever heard at the FBI and that he was so “appalled,” he walked off the review. The lawyer didn’t know exactly who’d given the order but said Ms. Corsi was “speaking for FBI leadership.”

Readers won’t find many direct quotes in the report from former Director James Comey or former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe—both refused to cooperate with Mr. Durham. Mr. Comey has publicly distanced himself from events, honing his mastery of “I don’t recall.” The Durham report gives the lie to this claim, which in turn explains what went wrong. The Trump probe was run by the “seventh floor”—by two men who were thrilled to be playing political kingmakers, and who broke all the rules.

The roots of the collusion investigation were planted in early April 2016, when Mr. Comey requested from underlings “relevant information pertaining to any Presidential candidate.” (He was already deep in the Hillary Clinton email probe.) The report says that he was then briefed that the New York field office was looking at recently named Trump adviser Carter Page. It wasn’t “concerned about Page” so much as the “Russians reaching out” to him. Yet the Page case and “ones like it” became a “top priority for Director Comey.”


When the FBI got wind in July 2016 of a conversation between another Trump adviser and an Australian diplomat, Mr. McCabe ordered FBI agent Peter Strzok to skip all preliminary steps and launch a full counterintelligence investigation. Similarly, when the FBI received separate information from a Clinton attorney claiming a secret Trump server communicating with Russia, FBI leadership intervened to order a full probe, even though both cyber agents and Chicago-based agents were skeptical. One agent explained: “people on the 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server.” McCabe would tell an inspector general that Mr. Comey “was getting daily briefings on this stuff.” Compare this with Mr. Comey’s later interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier in which he suggested he was only vaguely aware of details.

All this was then centralized in FBI headquarters. Line agents early on wanted to interview Mr. Page—a step agents said made only “too much sense” and the Durham report says would likely have put the whole issue to rest. They were “prohibited” by Messrs. Comey and McCabe, who remained fixated on getting a secret surveillance warrant on Mr. Page. The attorney prepping that application recalled “being constantly pressured” by “management” to push it through—being told that Mr. Comey “wants to know what’s going on,” while Mr. McCabe exhorted to “get this going.” When a deputy assistant attorney general raised concerns with the application’s reliance on Mr. Steele—given his work as a Clinton oppo researcher—supporters of the warrant went straight to Messrs. Comey and McCabe, who said to move ahead “despite his concerns.”


The Durham report is littered with agents recalling their frustration that they were “excluded from the flow of information and decision-making process” and steamrolled when they objected to unjustified inquiries. One agent was told in 2017 that his primary job was renewing the Page surveillance application. Yet his team didn’t believe Mr. Page to be a “threat” and thought the investigation a “dry hole.” When he told his superior, he was “ignored and directed to continue.”

That supervisor told the Durham team it wasn’t “normal” and she “did not know why the 7th floor was so involved,” but felt her boss, counterintelligence head Bill Priestap, was “not in charge and had to get approvals” from the brass. Mr. Priestap told Durham investigators that it drove him “insane” that his own underlings—Mr. Strzok and Lisa Page—went “around him to the 7th floor” whenever he disagreed with their approach. In 2018, as mistakes began to come to light, that seventh floor ordered a review team to stop writing things on paper.

Some are responding to the Durham report with calls to dismantle the FBI. But the report shows the rank and file doing exactly what the FBI is supposed to do—question, verify. The fault rests with an arrogant leadership that discarded the usual layers of oversight—a seventh floor that took charge with no regard for rules, little care for the truth, and no accountability from above.
Title: WSJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2023, 10:16:41 AM
third

How Can We Keep the CIA and the FBI Out of Our Politics?
Let’s not allow the 2024 presidential election to include the third straight intervention by the national-security state.
James Freeman hedcutBy James FreemanFollow
May 16, 2023 2:58 pm ET

This month brings more evidence that the U.S. government’s national-security apparatus was used to help Democrats in our last two presidential elections. The challenge for all Americans is to prevent this corruption from infecting the election of 2024.

This week Justice Department special counsel John Durham’s report confirms that right from the start, the FBI’s Russia collusion investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign was biased, reckless and irresponsible. The Durham report notes that the FBI’s Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, who “had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump,” opened the Crossfire Hurricane case as a full investigation in 2016 without even a modest attempt to vet claims about the Trump campaign and adds:

... FBI records prepared by Strzok in February and March 2017 show that at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that at any time during the campaign anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials.
The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.
Of course as it went along the FBI’s conduct went from biased, reckless and irresponsible all the way to criminal in the case of FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith. He falsified an email that was critical to securing surveillance approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to target a law-abiding American participating in politics.

Some liberals have stopped worrying about abuses by the intelligence community because their team has generally been the beneficiary. To his credit George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley is not among them. He writes in the Messenger and focuses on Mr. Durham’s reporting on the infamous Steele dossier of bogus claims about Mr. Trump:


The Justice Department — as well as the media that covered it — effectively shut down a duly elected presidency, based on what turned out to be a politically engineered hoax...The fact is, in this instance, Donald Trump was correct when he said he was the target of a political hitjob funded by the Clinton campaign and maintained by virtually every media outlet. There is a word for that: disinformation.
Speaking of disinformation peddled by numerous major media outlets, there is growing evidence that actors within both the FBI and the CIA encouraged the suppression of the New York Post’s accurate 2020 reporting about Biden family enrichment schemes.

Prior to the Post’s reporting during that campaign season, social media companies were warned by the FBI—which already had the material from Hunter Biden’s laptop—to be on guard against alleged Russian propaganda or hacked information. Then after the Post reporting, Joe Biden led an aggressive effort to falsely portray the facts about his family’s river of foreign cash as some sort of Russian disinformation. And it seems that the FBI wasn’t the only helpful government outfit. On Friday the Journal’s Kimberley Strassel wrote:

It seems President-elect Biden on Nov. 4, 2020, owed thanks not only to a cabal of former intelligence officials, but to the Central Intelligence Agency.
That’s the big takeaway of this week’s interim report from House committees detailing the origins of the October 2020 disinformation letter about Hunter Biden’s laptop. An earlier release revealed that Joe Biden’s campaign helped engineer a statement from 51 former U.S. spies that claimed the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” That letter provided Democrats, journalists and social-media companies the excuse to dismiss and censor evidence of Hunter’s influence peddling, removing an obstacle from his father’s path to victory.
Now we find out that, according to a written statement supplied to the committee, an active CIA official joined the effort to solicit more signers to the letter. The campaign to elect Joe Biden extended into Langley.
A CIA employee participating in a campaign to deceive American voters is intolerable. The FBI targeting an American citizen and lying to a court to gain surveillance powers against him is intolerable. Sadly we now know that we can’t rely on the press to guard against such abuses, and we also know that big government doesn’t reform itself.

Steven Nelson of the New York Post reports this week:

The IRS on Monday removed the “entire investigative team” from its long-running tax fraud probe of first son Hunter Biden in alleged retaliation against the whistleblower who recently contacted Congress to allege a cover-up in the case, The Post has learned.
The purge allegedly was done on the orders of the Justice Department, the whistleblower’s attorneys informed congressional leaders in a letter.
“Today the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Criminal Supervisory Special Agent we represent was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress. He was informed the change was at the request of the Department of Justice,” Mark Lytle and Tristan Leavitt wrote...
Advertisement - Scroll to Continue


The first son wrote in communications retrieved from the abandoned laptop that he paid up to “half” of his income to his father, and Hunter frequently involved then-Vice President Biden in his international business relationships.
As a very modest first step in limiting the ability of the rogue agencies to abuse our constitutional rights again in 2024, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) should demand significant FBI and CIA budget cuts, including defunding any offices that have participated in any efforts to influence what is reported and shared in U.S. media.

***

James Freeman is the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi” and also the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

***
Title: WT: FBI vs. Whistleblowers
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2023, 10:20:30 AM
fourth

FBI whistleblowers describe retaliation by bureau brass against rank and file who speak out


Three FBI whistleblowers testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee Thursday and described abuses they witnessed at the bureau and how the FBI retaliates against its employees who speak out against the agency.

Two current and former agents testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee and made several remarkable claims.

FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle, FBI Staff Operations Specialist Marcus Allen and former FBI Special Agent Stephen Friend testified that the bureau suspended or revoked their security clearances.

Additionally, they testified the bureau restricted them from seeking outside employment to support themselves and their families during their unpaid suspensions after they filed whistleblower disclosures to Congress about the agency.

The FBI told The Washington Times, “The FBI’s mission is to uphold the Constitution and protect the American people. The FBI has not and will not retaliate against individuals who make protected whistleblower disclosures.”

Mr. Friend said he “made protected whistleblower disclosures to my immediate supervisor, assistant special agents in charge and special agent in charge about my concerns regarding Jan. 6 investigations assigned to my office.”

“I believe our departures from case management rules established in the FBI as domestic investigations and Operations Guide could have undermined potentially righteous prosecutions and may have been part of an effort to inflate the FBI statistics on domestic extremism,” he said.


Mr. Friend also testified that he voiced concerns that the FBI’s use of SWAT and large-scale arrest operations to apprehend suspects accused of nonviolent crimes and misdemeanors and are represented by counsel and who pledge to cooperate with the federal authorities in the event of criminal charges created an unnecessary risk to FBI personnel and public safety.

“At each level of my chain of command, leadership cautioned that despite my exemplary work performance, whistleblowing placed my otherwise bright future with the FBI at risk,” he said.

Mr. Friend accused the bureau of leaking his private medical information “in violation of HIPAA” to a reporter at The New York Times.

According to Mr. Friend, the FBI for several months refused to furnish all his training records, which were necessary to obtain a private investigator and firearms licenses in Florida. After releasing some of the records, he said, the FBI would not confirm their legitimacy to the Florida Department of Agriculture, rendering the few documents it provided “practically useless.”

He added, “The FBI denied my request to seek outside employment in obvious attempt to deprive me of the ability to support my family. Finally, the FBI Inspection Division imposed an illegal gag order in an attempt to prevent me from communicating with my family and attorneys.”

The FBI sent a letter to the committee about the revocations of two of the FBI whistleblowers on Wednesday and said Mr. Friend had his security clearance revoked because he “refused to participate in the execution of a court authorized search and arrest of a criminal subject.”

The letter continued, “During his communications with his management about his refusal to participate, he espoused an alternative narrative about the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

“On September 3, 2022, Mr. Friend entered FBI space and downloaded documents from FBI computer systems to an unauthorized removable flash drive. The FBI then required Mr. Friend to attend a Security Awareness Briefing (SAB) regarding his actions, but he refused to do so,” the letter stated.

Mr. Friend disputed these assertions before the panel Thursday, saying he did not refuse to attend the briefing but asked for a lawyer to be present and was denied.

He informed committee staffers that he could not attend the briefing because he was suspended before the scheduled date.

Mr. Friend also disputed the bureau’s claim that he participated in an interview with a Russian government news agency without the bureau’s authorization. But he said his comments were taken from other sources and used by Russia Today (now known as RT) without his knowledge.

Mr. Allen, who told the committee he held a top secret security clearance since 2001 and was employee of the year in 2019, stated that the FBI suspended his security clearance after the bureau accused him of having conspiratorial views of Jan. 6, 2021, and of sympathizing with criminal conduct.

According to the FBI’s letter to Congress, in September 2021, Mr. Allen sent an email using his FBI email account to multiple colleagues that contained links to websites and urged recipients to exercise extreme caution and discretion in pursuit of any investigative inquiries or leads pertaining to the events of Jan. 6.

“I do not. I was not in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, played no part in the events of Jan. 6 and I condemn all criminal activity that occurred,” he said.

“Instead, it appears that I was retaliated against because I forwarded information to my superiors and others that question the official narrative of the events of Jan. 6,” he told the lawmakers. “As a result, I was accused of promoting conspiratorial views and unreliable information. Because I did this, the FBI questioned my allegiance to the United States.”

Mr. Allen indicated he believed that the bureau retaliated against him because he shared an email that questioned the House testimony of FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, who was questioned about FBI confidential human sources and FBI employees at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The suggestion that the FBI‘s confidential human sources or FBI employees in some way instigated or orchestrated Jan. 6th, that’s categorically false,” Mr. Wray said during a House hearing last November in response to Rep. Clay Higgins, Louisiana Republican.

“Specifically, the Security Division found Mr. Allen espoused alternative theories to coworkers verbally and in emails and instant messages sent on the FBI systems, in apparent attempts to hinder investigative activity,” the FBI said.

One of the emails that the FBI took issue with contained a link to a website that stated, among other things, “By now it’s clear that federal law enforcement had some degree of infiltration among the crowds gathered at the Capitol on January 6,’ to which Mr. Allen commented, “brings up serious concerns about USG participation.’”

The FBI said he was told multiple times by a supervisor to “stop circulating these materials,” but Mr. Allen “continued.”

Mr. Allen’s testimony and email were corroborated by Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill, who worked at the Boston field office and testified previously behind closed doors to the committee.

Mr. Hill’s video testimony was played before the committee.

In the video, Mr. Hill testified that the Washington field office pressured the Boston field office to open investigations into 140 people who traveled to Washington to attend the Trump Jan. 6 rally against what protesters saw as a rigged election.

When the Boston office asked the Washington office for more evidence, including video from the Capitol, to predicate the investigations properly, the D.C. office provided pictures of two individuals inside the Capitol.

However, the Washington office refused to provide video evidence from the Capitol out of fear it would disclose undercover officers or confidential human sources inside the Capitol, Mr. Hill said during his closed door testimony.

Mr. Allen has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit to recover his livelihood and restore his reputation. His attorney, Tristan Leavitt, filed a whistleblower complaint with the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

That complaint, according to Mr. Allen, set forth retaliation through misuse of the security clearance process, as well as reprisal against him for making a protected disclosure.

“I have never had the opportunity to defend myself. I only had one interview with the FBI, which occurred a year ago, after apparent prompting from Congress,” he said. “It has been more than a year since the FBI took my paycheck from me and we’re getting financially crushed. My family and I have been surviving on early withdrawals from our retirement accounts.”

Mr. O’Boyle told the committee he was transferred across the country only to be suspended by the FBI on his first day.

“They allowed us to sell my family’s home. They ordered me to report to the new unit when our youngest daughter was 2 weeks old. Then on my first day on the new assignment, they suspended me, rendering my family homeless,” he said.

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, said the panel has talked to over two dozen FBI whistleblowers.

“If you’re a parent, attending a school board meeting, you’re pro-life or praying at a clinic, or you’re a Catholic, simply go into Mass, you are a target of the government, target of the FBI. And maybe even worse than all that,” Mr. Jordan said. “If you’re one of the thousands of good employees, brave whistleblowers who’s willing to come forward, you’re one of these folks willing to come forward and talk about what’s going on out there, you get attacked, they will try to crush you.”

The top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, excoriated each of the whistleblowers, who had served in the military, and listed names of recent federal employees who had leaked classified or top secret information.

“Just because someone served our country, in the military, and that they do work for a federal agency, does not exempt them immediately from being someone who could potentially commit espionage or lose security clearances,” she said. “Should we give everybody a pass just because they served our country? We respect their service, but if they break the law, then that means they have to face the consequences.”

• Kerry Picket can be reached at kpicket@washingtontimes.com.
Title: Yet another chance for GM to take a win from AMcC
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2023, 05:09:11 PM
Democrats Cook the FBI’s Books on Domestic Terrorism
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
May 19, 2023 12:29 PM

The projection of dystopian America mired in a terrorist war waged by the Democrats’ political adversaries is false.
Even before the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021, congressional Democrats had formulated a plan to project the illusion that the most perilous threat to American national security — not just in our time but in our history — was domestic terrorism fueled by white supremacists. This was, and remains, a political narrative through and through. Democrats are not even subtle in signaling to the public that they should think of Trump supporters — not just the unabashed MAGA faction but any of the over 70 million Americans who found Trump preferable to Democrats — as white supremacists, or at least sympathizers of white supremacists, and ergo abettors of domestic terrorism.


I laid this plan bare in January 2021. Again, even before the Capitol riot, House Democrats were proposing their so-called “Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act.” They haven’t gotten it enacted yet, but they’re trying hard, calculating that they can demagogue the Republicans they need to get it across the finish line by masquerading their political project as pro–law enforcement and pro–national security. And, of course, by inveighing that anyone who opposes the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act must necessarily be in favor of domestic terrorism, right? That’s why House Democrats, while they had a slim majority, reintroduced and passed the legislation in 2022. That’s why, just a few days ago, Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, rolled out his symmetrical version in the Judiciary Committee.

The objective of this proposal is not to improve national security. As I explained in 2021, and as NR later editorialized, if that were the aim, Democrats would not engage in the subterfuge of attempting to change federal law’s perfectly serviceable definition of domestic terrorism — for the purpose of insulating jihadists and left-wing radicals while targeting their phantom white supremacists (i.e., Republicans, pro-life activists, parents who object to woke-progressive indoctrination in the schools, et al.).


The real purpose of this legislation is twofold: (1) stigmatize as terrorism policies that progressives oppose; (2) establish in law requirements that induce the FBI and other federal agencies to inflate the number of domestic-terrorism investigations, the better to insist that — though you’d never know it given the absence of, you know, actual terrorist attacks — the country is under a white-supremacist siege.

Exposing this demagogic scheme is an important purpose of House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan’s subcommittee on the weaponization of government. As our Brittany Bernstein has reported, that subcommittee held a hearing on Thursday at which three FBI agents testified as whistleblowers, relating both how the bureau has been politicized into serving this Democratic political gambit, and how they have been retaliated against for reporting the situation to Congress.


Brittany noted that Thursday’s hearing focused, in part, on testimony from Agent Steve Friend, a twelve-year veteran and SWAT-team member, who has detailed how the FBI labors to inflate the number of terrorism cases and uses SWAT resources unnecessarily in arrest scenarios to create the impression that it is apprehending dangerous terrorists:

Friend said the FBI’s handling of the January 6 Capitol riot-related investigations “deviated from standard practice and created a false impression with respect to the threat of DVE [i.e., domestic violent extremism] nationwide.”. . . He testified that the FBI is in need of reform in several areas: “the integrated program management system incentivizes the use of inappropriate investigatory processes and tools to achieve arbitrary statistical accomplishments” and there is “mission creep within the national security branch [that] has refocused counterterrorism from legitimate foreign actors to political opponents within our borders. . . . The FBI weaponizes process crimes and reinterprets laws to initiate pretextual prosecutions and persecute its political enemies[.]”

Jordan’s report excerpts portions of a subcommittee interview with Friend, in which he explains that the bureau is deviating from its normal case-opening and accounting practices in order to make it appear that there are more domestic-terrorism cases and that the suspected terrorists are making mayhem throughout the country. As you’d expect, these shenanigans are woven out of the events of January 6.

That should tell you much of what you need to know. The operating premise of congressional Democrats, the Biden administration, and — therefore — the FBI is that the Capitol riot was a terrorist attack. That is absurd, for reasons I explicated when Attorney General Merrick Garland, putting his office in the service of this narrative, preposterously claimed that the Capitol riot was the most dangerous threat to American democracy he had ever seen.

As a Clinton Justice Department official, Garland supervised the prosecution of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing — a terrorist attack in which a U.S. courthouse was destroyed, 168 people were murdered, and another 759 people were wounded. The Capitol riot was nothing like that, just like it was not like that era’s other jihadist attacks and plots — the World Trade Center bombing, the (unsuccessful) plot to bomb New York City landmarks, the “Bojinka” plot to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky (in which a tourist was killed and a plane nearly downed in a dry-run explosion), the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (destroying buildings and killing 224 people), the Khobar Towers bombing (destroying a building and killing 19 U.S. Air Force members), the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole (killing 17 U.S. Navy members and nearly sinking a destroyer), and the 9/11 atrocities (killing nearly 3,000 Americans, annihilating the World Trade Center, badly damaging the Pentagon, and resulting in a missile-like explosion when Flight 93 crash-landed in Shanksville, Pa.).

What happened at the Capitol on January 6 was a protest that turned violent, devolving into a riot. But no one tried to destroy the Capitol (it sustained property damage that was trivial compared with the destructive force of a terrorist attack). No police and other security personnel were killed (though over a hundred were assaulted and some sustained serious injuries; three rioters died, two of natural causes trigged by the frenzy, one killed by a Capitol police officer). The worst of the violence was over quickly, the Capitol was cleared in a few hours, and so little damage was done — compared with a terrorist attack — that lawmakers were able to reconvene in the Capitol that evening.


It does not diminish the egregiousness of a riot to observe the incontestable fact that it was not an act of domestic terrorism — just like a murder, horrible as it is, is not a terrorist attack. And bad as the Capitol riot was, it did not approach in duration or lethality the radical left-wing rioting that beset this country for months after George Floyd’s death in police custody — rioting that Democrats take pain to exclude from their “domestic terrorism” bookkeeping because, sympathetic to the radicals’ ends, progressives turn a blind eye to their means.

But not January 6. You’re to see that not as a riot, but as domestic terrorism.

From that premise, the FBI’s books are being cooked to make its one “terrorism” case, based on an uprising in one place at one time (over a few hours), look as if it were over a thousand terrorism cases, posing persistent peril all over the country. To understand how, you need to know how the bureau usually works.


Routinely, the FBI field office in the place where the crime mainly happened (which is in the federal district where the case will be prosecuted) heads up the investigation. If the crime involves interstate activity, or if relevant participants or witnesses need to be pursued in other parts of the country, the field office whose agents are running the case sends out investigative “leads” to other field offices. Those field offices elsewhere in the country pursue these leads, which could just be interviewing a witness or could be something more serious like executing a search or arrest warrant. The fruits of those leads are then transmitted to the field office running the case.


To take an example, from 1993 through 1996, when I ran the prosecution of the Blind Sheikh’s jihadist cell – an actual terrorism case – the FBI’s New York field office was responsible for the investigation. Over those years, it sent out hundreds of leads to FBI offices throughout the country (and other parts of the world) to support the case, but it was still just one case, in Manhattan, with lots of leads returnable to the FBI in New York.

That is not what has happened with the Capitol riot. The FBI’s Washington Field Office is running the investigation, but instead of sending out leads, it often sends out directions to other field offices to open new cases in the places where subjects of the Capitol riot reside (and note that the Justice Department has prosecuted over 1,000 people from nearly all 50 states in connection with January 6).


As Agent Friend told Jordan:

The manipulative casefile practice creates false and misleading crime statistics. Instead of hundreds of investigations stemming from a single, black swan incident at the Capitol, FBI and DOJ officials point to significant increases in domestic violent extremism and terrorism around the United States.

He adds:

By opening a separate case for each individual as opposed to one case with however many subjects are involved, they’ve turned one case into a thousand cases. And by spreading them to the field they’ve given the impression that those domestic terror cases are around the country when, in fact, the subjects, if they committed any sort of violation or infraction, they committed a crime at the Capitol on one day as opposed to being a cell that’s operating in El Paso or Cleveland.

Of course, it’s not just turning one case into a thousand cases, but into a thousand terrorism cases. As another whistleblower, Agent Garret O’Boyle explains, the FBI classified “every single January 6 case . . . as a domestic terrorism case,” even though many of these cases involve “petty crimes” — misdemeanors such as trespassing and disorderly conduct.

The effect? The Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy crunches the numbers:

The bureau and the DHS revealed the FBI was conducting approximately 1,400 pending domestic terrorism investigations as of the end of fiscal 2020, and that jumped to roughly 2,700 domestic terrorism investigations by the end of fiscal 2021. The U.S. government report said the FBI arrested approximately 180 domestic terrorism subjects in 2020, while it arrested roughly 800 such subjects in 2021. The FBI and DHS said that “a significant portion” of the 2021 investigations “were directly related to the unlawful activities during the January 2021 siege on the U.S. Capitol.”

Thus, Matt Olson, the chief of the Biden Justice Department’s National Security Division, in his best “sky is falling” voice, has told Jordan’s committee that “the number of FBI investigations of suspected domestic violent extremism has more than doubled since the spring of 2020.” Yes, I’m sure you’ve noticed the mass-murderous explosions all over the country, right? Well, no . . . Olson concedes that a “that number does include the Jan. 6 cases,” and that while “not all of them are characterized as violent extremists . . . many are, and those do account for at least a significant portion of that jump over the past two years in the number of investigations.”

You don’t say?


The FBI is doing what Democrats have been demanding, what they’ve been trying — now, with a push from Durbin and Senate Democrats — to codify into statutory law: manufacture the perception that the country is enveloped by white-supremacist domestic terrorists.

Remember when, on October 4, 2021, Garland issued his outrageous memo directing the FBI and U.S. attorney’s offices throughout America to harass parents who dared to protest the conversion of schools into laboratories of woke-progressivism? It turned out that Garland was acting at the urging of the Biden White House, which had collaborated with progressive activists and the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to craft a letter that described the parents as “domestic terrorists.” They were falsely ginning up threat incidents, many of which were exaggerated or fabricated, but which Garland would have the FBI and federal prosecutors investigate as potential terrorist activity occurring nationwide.

At the time, Jordan became alarmed that, based on Garland’s directive, the FBI had developed domestic-terrorism “threat tags” for these cases. Jordan feared the threat tags meant the bureau was using the Patriot Act and other counterterrorism authorities to monitor protesting parents. Well, they may try to do that ultimately, but as I pointed out at the time, the immediate purpose of the threat tag was to brand these investigations of local dust-ups as a dire nationwide threat, fit for a full-court press by federal, state, and local law enforcement:

Purporting to act pursuant to Garland’s October 4 memo, these top officials instructed FBI personnel that the bureau would henceforth use a new “threat tag” created by the two divisions. The “threat tag” is to be applied to all “investigations and assessments of threats specifically directed against school board administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” Its purpose is to “scope this threat on a national level and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels.”

Creating an illusion of a domestic-terrorism siege by overhauling the way federal agencies account for investigations has always been the point of the Democrats’ push for Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act legislation. To repeat what I said in early 2021:

The Democrats’ new proposal . . . would target domestic terrorism in an unprecedented way. There would be no new domestic terrorism crimes, at least not yet; but there would be a new concentration on investigating, arresting, and prosecuting domestic terrorists. Just not all domestic terrorists. In fact, just a very specific breed of domestic terrorist: white supremacists and neo-Nazis — i.e., what Democrats consider to be right-wing terrorism or, more specifically, Trump-inspired insurrectionists in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot.


The proposed legislation would require domestic terrorism units to be created in the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and the FBI, in addition to a new “Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee” made up of high-ranking federal law-enforcement officials. Besides staffing up, these agencies would be required to file semi-annual reports for the next decade, outlining the extent of the domestic terrorist threat and the efforts they are making to combat it — how many investigations, arrests, indictments, etc. There would also be a mandate to establish “Training to Combat Domestic Terrorism” so that the feds could instruct state, local, and tribal law-enforcement in how to detect domestic terrorists, keep them from infiltrating police forces, and prosecute them.

But again, Democrats are not interested in combating all  domestic terrorism. Not only have they effectively excluded from coverage American-based jihadists who are associated with or inspired by foreign terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. The new proposal, again and again, is explicit in focusing on “white supremacists and neo-Nazis.”

The required reports, for example, would have to “include an assessment of the domestic terrorism threat posed by White supremacists and neo-Nazis, including White supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies.” They would itemize “any White-supremacist-related incidents or attempted incidents” that have occurred since April 19, 1995.

Why that date? Because that’s the date of the aforementioned Oklahoma City bombing. In Democrat lore, served up by the house organ itself, the New York Times, Timothy McVeigh was inspired to bomb the federal courthouse by The Turner Diaries. That’s a novel in which a group of white-supremacists attacks . . . yes . . . the Capitol, in their racist zeal to overthrow the government. Democrats would have us instructed, by writing into law, that there is a straight line from the Oklahoma City bombing to the Capitol riot — a line reflective of an existential threat that has thrummed through the United States for decades, with imminent terrorist attacks now a clear and present danger all over the country.


This is nonsense, of course. There are ideologically driven militants of many stripes. Undoubtedly, there is a smattering of white-supremacism among the -isms, but to suggest that they are ubiquitous and on the rampage — or, indeed, that they are more numerous and dangerous than radical leftists (e.g., Antifa and Black Lives Matter) and jihadists — is delusional.

The projection of dystopian America mired in a terrorist war waged by the Democrats’ political adversaries is false. Since it doesn’t exist in reality, congressional Democrats and the Biden administration are trying to create it by FBI bookkeeping. As we’ve seen over the last eight years, and again this week with the release of the Durham Report, when Democrats say jump, the FBI says, “How high?
Title: The one true branch of government
Post by: G M on May 21, 2023, 03:13:41 PM
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/a_cabal_of_sociopaths.html

Not subject to your vote no matter how hard you vote.
Title: Why congress can't control the FBI
Post by: G M on May 24, 2023, 06:33:18 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/617/666/original/e97f09d49c6a6e90.jpg

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/617/666/original/e97f09d49c6a6e90.jpg)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 24, 2023, 06:34:34 AM
Shades of rumored transvestite J. Edgar Hoover!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on May 24, 2023, 06:37:20 AM
Shades of rumored transvestite J. Edgar Hoover!

The FBI never quit that pattern of conduct, no matter who was supposed to be running it.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 24, 2023, 06:42:47 AM
DC is the Rome of our day.

Coincidentally, at the moment I find myself rewatching the Spartacus series.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on May 24, 2023, 06:48:17 AM
DC is the Rome of our day.

Coincidentally, at the moment I find myself rewatching the Spartacus series.

Or, if you want to get biblical, the Babylon of our day.
Title: Re: The one true branch of government
Post by: G M on May 24, 2023, 06:59:53 AM
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/a_cabal_of_sociopaths.html

Not subject to your vote no matter how hard you vote.

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/556/943/original/66d02d1a3c82cda0.png

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/556/943/original/66d02d1a3c82cda0.png)
Title: DC - > Rome , Babylon or / and
Post by: ccp on May 24, 2023, 07:13:57 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah
Title: Re: DC - > Rome , Babylon or / and
Post by: G M on May 24, 2023, 07:23:59 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodom_and_Gomorrah

https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Babylon

Funny how many verses seem to apply to the FUSA, especially from the book of Revelation.

Must be a coincidence...
Title: Re: The one true branch of government-FBI has crossed the Rubicon
Post by: G M on May 25, 2023, 07:22:17 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-has-crossed-rubicon

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/a_cabal_of_sociopaths.html

Not subject to your vote no matter how hard you vote.

https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/556/943/original/66d02d1a3c82cda0.png

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/556/943/original/66d02d1a3c82cda0.png)
Title: Another political prisoner
Post by: G M on May 26, 2023, 07:47:56 AM
https://summit.news/2023/05/26/obama-judge-sentences-oath-keepers-founder-stewart-rhodes-to-18-years-in-prison-in-j6-sedition-case/

When the law is lawless....
Title: The Dem-Stasi
Post by: G M on May 26, 2023, 09:27:37 AM
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/05/25/corrupt-bedfellows-splc-and-fbi-working-together-to-frame-catholics-as-terrorists-n1698164
Title: How Andrew McCarthy endorsed AG Garland is targeting everyone
Post by: G M on May 26, 2023, 01:42:06 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/404617.php

At war with us.
Title: Re: How Andrew McCarthy endorsed AG Garland is targeting everyone
Post by: G M on May 26, 2023, 02:02:23 PM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/404617.php

At war with us.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/05/biden-regime-lumps-christians-conservatives-republicans-same-category/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=biden-regime-lumps-christians-conservatives-republicans-same-category
Title: apparently he did endorse
Post by: ccp on May 26, 2023, 02:29:47 PM
https://twitter.com/AndrewCMcCarthy/status/1346961865977581570
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 26, 2023, 07:14:36 PM
Well, that sure did not age well!

In fairness, I don't remember anyone calling Garland the scumbag hack he has turned out to be back when he was nominated for SCOTUS
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on May 28, 2023, 07:52:05 AM
Well, that sure did not age well!

In fairness, I don't remember anyone calling Garland the scumbag hack he has turned out to be back when he was nominated for SCOTUS

That is why we depend on insiders, like noted legal analyst Andrew McCarthy.
Title: Just as the founders intended!
Post by: G M on May 28, 2023, 07:52:45 AM
https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/943/788/original/5ae7c9ed20fceec5.png

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/138/943/788/original/5ae7c9ed20fceec5.png)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2023, 09:04:30 AM
Using this one too.
Title: Extremely well done!
Post by: G M on May 28, 2023, 09:37:41 AM
https://twitter.com/GlockfordFiles/status/1661707226287931392

Title: Gatestone: The End of Free Speech
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 28, 2023, 02:33:24 PM

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19677/end-of-free-speech

The Official Truth': The End of Free Speech That Will End America
by J.B. Shurk
May 28, 2023 at 5:00 am

[M]edia polling from Harvard-Harris showing that Americans hold almost diametrically opposing viewpoints from those that news corporations predominantly broadcast as the official "truth."

Americans have correctly concluded that [with the "Russia Hoax" and suppressing reported influence peddling in Hunter Biden's laptop ] journalists and spies advanced a "fraud" on voters as part of an effort to censor a damaging story and "help Biden win." Nevertheless, The New York Times and The Washington Post have yet to return the Pulitzer Prizes they received for reporting totally discredited "fake news."

"Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story." — Professor Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Law School, Twitter, May 15, 2023.

The government apparently took the public's censorship concerns so seriously that it quietly moved on from the collapse of its plans for a "disinformation governance board" within the DHS and proceeded within the space of a month to create a new "disinformation" office known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which now operates from within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Although ostensibly geared toward countering information warfare arising from "foreign" threats, one of its principal objectives is to monitor and control "public opinion and behaviors."

As independent journalist Matt Taibbi concludes of the government's resurrected Ministry of Truth: "It's the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from Congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets."

Democrat Senator Michael Bennet has already proposed a bill that would create a Federal Digital Platform Commission with "the authority to promulgate rules, impose civil penalties, hold hearings, conduct investigations, and support research."

Effectively, a small number of unelected commissioners would have de facto power to monitor and police online communication. Should any particular website or platform run afoul of the government's First Amendment Star Chamber, it would immediately place itself within the commission's crosshairs for greater oversight, regulation, and punishment.

Will this new creation become an American KGB, Stasi or CCP — empowered to target half the population for disagreeing with current government policies, promoting "wrongthink," or merely going to church? Will a small secretive body decide which Americans are actually "domestic terrorists" in the making? US Attorney General Merrick Garland has gone after traditional Catholics who attend Latin mass, but why would government suspicions end with the Latin language? When small commissions exist to decide which Americans are the "enemy," there is no telling who will be designated as a "threat" and punished next.

It is not difficult to see the dangers that lie ahead. Now that the government has fully inserted itself into the news and information industry, the criminalization of free speech is a very real threat. This has always been a chief complaint against international institutions such as the World Economic Forum that spend a great deal of time, power, and money promoting the thoughts and opinions of an insular cabal of global leaders, while showing negligible respect for the personal rights and liberties of the billions of ordinary citizens they claim to represent.

If Schwab's online army were not execrable enough, advocates for free speech must also gird themselves for the repercussions of Elon Musk's appointment of Linda Yaccarino, reportedly a "neo-liberal wokeist" with strong WEF affiliations, as the new CEO of Twitter.

In an America now plagued with the stench of official "snitch lines," censorship of certain presidential candidates, widespread online surveillance, a resurrected "disinformation governance board," and increasingly frequent criminal prosecutions targeting Americans who exercise their free speech, the question is not whether what we inaudibly think or say in our sleep will someday be used against us, but rather how soon that day will come unless we stop it.


If legacy news corporations fail to report that large majorities of the American public now view their journalistic product as straight-up propaganda, does that make it any less true?

According to a survey by Rasmussen Reports, 59% of likely voters in the United States view the corporate news media as "truly the enemy of the people." This is a majority view, held regardless of race: "58% of whites, 51% of black voters, and 68% of other minorities" — all agree that the mainstream media has become their "enemy."

This scorching indictment of the Fourth Estate piggybacks similar polling from Harvard-Harris showing that Americans hold almost diametrically opposing viewpoints from those that news corporations predominantly broadcast as the official "truth."

Drawing attention to the divergence between the public's perceived reality and the news media's prevailing "narratives," independent journalist Glenn Greenwald dissected the Harvard-Harris poll to highlight just how differently some of the most important issues of the last few years have been understood. While corporate news fixated on purported Trump-Russia collusion since 2016, majorities of Americans now see this story "as a hoax and a fraud."

While the news media hid behind the Intelligence Community's claims that Hunter Biden's potentially incriminating laptop (allegedly containing evidence of his family's influence-peddling) was a product of "Russian disinformation" and consequently enforced an information blackout on the explosive story during the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election, strong majorities of Americans currently believe the laptop's contents are "real." In other words, Americans have correctly concluded that journalists and spies advanced a "fraud" on voters as part of an effort to censor a damaging story and "help Biden win." Nevertheless, The New York Times and The Washington Post have yet to return the Pulitzer Prizes they received for reporting totally discredited "fake news."

Similarly, majorities of Americans suspect that President Joe Biden has used the powers of his various offices to profit from influence-peddling schemes and that the FBI has intentionally refrained from investigating any possible Biden crimes. Huge majorities of Americans, in fact, seem not at all surprised to learn that the FBI has been caught abusing its own powers to influence elections, and are strongly convinced that "sweeping reform" is needed. Likewise, large majorities of Americans have "serious doubts about Biden's mental fitness to be president" and suspect that others behind the scenes are "puppeteers" running the nation.

Few, if any, of these poll results have been widely reported. In a seemingly-authoritarian disconnect with the American people, corporate news media continue to ignore the public's majority opinion and instead "relentlessly advocate" those viewpoints that Americans "reject." When journalists fail to investigate facts and deliberately distort stories so that they fit snugly within preconceived worldviews, reporters act as propagandists.

Constitutional law scholar Jonathan Turley recently asked, "Do we have a de facto state media?" In answering his own question, he notes that the news blackout surrounding congressional investigations into Biden family members who have allegedly received more than ten million dollars in suspicious payments from foreign entities "fits the past standards used to denounce Russian propaganda patterns and practices." After Republican members of Congress traced funds to nine Biden family members "from corrupt figures in Romania, China, and other countries," Turley writes, "The New Republic quickly ran a story headlined 'Republicans Finally Admit They Have No Incriminating Evidence on Joe Biden.'"

Excoriating the news media's penchant for mindlessly embracing stories that hurt former President Donald Trump while simultaneously ignoring stories that might damage President Biden, Turley concludes:

"Under the current approach to journalism, it is the New York Times that receives a Pulitzer for a now debunked Russian collusion story rather than the New York Post for a now proven Hunter Biden laptop story."

Americans now evidently view the major sources for their news and information as part of a larger political machine pushing particular points of view, unconstrained by any ethical obligation to report facts objectively or dispassionately seek truth. That Americans now see the news media in their country as serving a similar role as Pravda did for the Soviet Union's Communist Party is a significant departure from the country's historic embrace of free speech and traditional fondness for a skeptical, adversarial press.

Rather than taking a step back to consider the implications such a shift in public perception will have for America's future stability, some officials appear even more committed to expanding government control over what can be said and debated online. After the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in the wake of public backlash over First Amendment concerns, halted its efforts to construct an official "disinformation governance board" last year, the question remained whether other government attempts to silence or shape online information would rear their head. The wait for that answer did not take long.

The government apparently took the public's censorship concerns so seriously that it quietly moved on from the collapse of its plans for a "disinformation governance board" within the DHS and proceeded within the space of a month to create a new "disinformation" office known as the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which now operates from within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Although ostensibly geared toward countering information warfare arising from "foreign" threats, one of its principal objectives is to monitor and control "public opinion and behaviors."

As independent journalist Matt Taibbi concludes of the government's resurrected Ministry of Truth:

"It's the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from Congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets."

If it were not jarring enough to learn that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has picked up the government's speech police baton right where the DHS set it down, there is ample evidence to suggest that officials are eager to go much further in the near future. Democrat Senator Michael Bennet has already proposed a bill that would create a Federal Digital Platform Commission with "the authority to promulgate rules, impose civil penalties, hold hearings, conduct investigations, and support research."

Filled with "disinformation" specialists empowered to create "enforceable behavioral codes" for online communication — and generously paid for by the Biden Administration with taxpayers' money — the special commission would also "designate 'systemically important digital platforms' subject to extra oversight, reporting, and regulation" requirements. Effectively, a small number of unelected commissioners would have de facto power to monitor and police online communication. Should any particular website or platform run afoul of the government's First Amendment Star Chamber, it would immediately place itself within the commission's crosshairs for greater oversight, regulation, and punishment.

Will this new creation become an American KGB, Stasi or CCP — empowered to target half the population for disagreeing with current government policies, promoting "wrongthink," or merely going to church? Will a small secretive body decide which Americans are actually "domestic terrorists" in the making? US Attorney General Merrick Garland has gone after traditional Catholics who attend Latin mass, but why would government suspicions end with the Latin language? When small commissions exist to decide which Americans are the "enemy," there is no telling who will be designated as a "threat" and punished next.

It is not difficult to see the dangers that lie ahead. Now that the government has fully inserted itself into the news and information industry, the criminalization of free speech is a very real threat. This has always been a chief complaint against international institutions such as the World Economic Forum that spend a great deal of time, power, and money promoting the thoughts and opinions of an insular cabal of global leaders, while showing negligible respect for the personal rights and liberties of the billions of ordinary citizens they claim to represent.

WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab has gone so far as to hire hundreds of thousands of "information warriors" whose mission is to "control the Internet" by "policing social media," eliminating dissent, disrupting the public square, and "covertly seed[ing] support" for the WEF's "Great Reset." If Schwab's online army were not execrable enough, advocates for free speech must also gird themselves for the repercussions of Elon Musk's appointment of Linda Yaccarino, reportedly a "neo-liberal wokeist" with strong WEF affiliations, as the new CEO of Twitter.

Throughout much of the West, unfortunately, free speech has been only weakly protected when those with power find its defense inconvenient or messages a nuisance. It is therefore of little surprise to learn that French authorities are now prosecuting government protesters for "flipping-off" President Emmanuel Macron. It does not seem particularly astonishing that a German man has been sentenced to three years in prison for engaging in "pro-Russian" political speech regarding the war in Ukraine. It also no longer appears shocking to read that UK Technology and Science Secretary Michelle Donelan reportedly seeks to imprison social media executives who fail to censor online speech that the government might subjectively adjudge "harmful." Sadly, as Ireland continues to find new ways to punish citizens for expressing certain points of view, its movement toward criminalizing not just speech but also "hateful" thoughts should have been predictable.

From an American's perspective, these overseas encroachments against free speech — especially within the borders of closely-allied lands — have seemed sinister yet entirely foreign. Now, however, what was once observed from some distance has made its way home; it feels as if a faraway communist enemy has finally stormed America's beaches and come ashore in force.

Not a day seems to go by without some new battlefront opening up in the war on free speech and free thought. The Richard Stengel of the Council on Foreign Relations has been increasingly vocal about the importance of journalists and think tanks to act as "primary provocateurs" and "propagandists" who "have to" manipulate the American population and shape the public's perception of world events. Senator Rand Paul has alleged that the DHS uses at least 12 separate programs to "track what Americans say online," as well as to engage in social media censorship.

As part of its efforts to silence dissenting arguments, the Biden administration is pursuing a policy that would make it unlawful to use data and datasets that reflect accurate information yet lead to "discriminatory outcomes" for "protected classes." In other words, if the data is perceived to be "racist," it must be expunged. At the same time, the Department of Justice has indicted four radical black leftists for having somehow "weaponized" their free speech rights in support of Russian "disinformation." So, objective datasets can be deemed "discriminatory" against minorities, while actual discrimination against minorities' free speech is excused when that speech contradicts official government policy.

Meanwhile, the DHS has been exposed for paying tens of millions of dollars to third-party "anti-terrorism" programs that have not so coincidentally equated Christians, Republicans, and philosophical conservatives to Germany's Nazi Party. Similarly, California Governor Gavin Newsom has set up a Soviet-style "snitch line" that encourages neighbors to report on each other's public or private displays of "hate."

Finally, ABC News proudly admits that it has censored parts of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s interviews because some of his answers include "false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines." Essentially, the corporate news media have deemed Kennedy's viewpoints unworthy of being transmitted and heard, even though the 2024 presidential candidate is running a strong second behind Joe Biden in the Democrat primary, with around 20% support from the electorate.

Taken all together, it is clear that not only has the war on free speech come to America, but also that it is clobbering Americans in a relentless campaign of "shock and awe." And why not? In a litigation battle presently being waged over the federal government's extensive censorship programs, the Biden administration has defended its inherent authority to control Americans' thoughts as an instrumental component of "government infrastructure." What Americans think and believe is openly referred to as part of the nation's "cognitive infrastructure" — as if the Matrix movies were simply reflecting real life.

Today, America's mainstream news corporations are already viewed as processing plants that manufacture political propaganda. That is an unbelievably searing indictment of a once-vibrant free press in the United States. It is also, unfortunately, only the first heavy shoe to drop in the war against free speech. Many Chinese-Americans who survived the Cultural Revolution look around the country today and see similarities everywhere. During that totalitarian "reign of terror," everything a person did was monitored, including what was said while asleep.

In an America now plagued with the stench of official "snitch lines," censorship of certain presidential candidates, widespread online surveillance, a resurrected "disinformation governance board," and increasingly frequent criminal prosecutions targeting Americans who exercise their free speech, the question is not whether what we inaudibly think or say in our sleep will someday be used against us, but rather how soon that day will come unless we stop it. After all, with smartphones, smart TVs, "smart" appliances, video-recording doorbells, and the rise of artificial intelligence, somebody, somewhere is always listening.

JB Shurk writes about politics and society.
Title: What will Andrew McCarthy say about this?
Post by: G M on June 01, 2023, 06:16:51 AM
https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/image00000163.jpg

(https://westernrifleshooters.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/image00000163.jpg)
Title: AMcC on the Wray-Comey compromise
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2023, 03:28:38 AM
Comer and Wray Strike Compromise, Staving Off Oversight Committee Contempt Citation

Left: Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.) attends a hearing in Washington, D.C., April 26, 2023. Right: FBI director Christopher Wray(Elizabeth Frantz, Alex Wroblewski/Reuters)

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
June 2, 2023 2:50 PM
On balance, this is a win for the Republican House committee chairman, who stuck to his guns and overcame FBI intransigence.
Facing an imminent contempt citation by the House Oversight Committee, FBI director Chris Wray reached a compromise with committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.): The FBI will bring the subpoenaed document at the center of the dispute to the House on Monday. There, Comer and the committee’s ranking member, Jamie Raskin, will review it and receive a related briefing from the bureau.

As Rich and I discussed on the podcast this week, the document in question is an informant report alleging that, while he served as vice president, now-president Joseph Biden was complicit in a bribery scheme involving unidentified foreign actors. (Comer has recently stated that the foreign country involved is not China, nor is it one the committee has previously addressed in its Biden-family investigation — which we discussed in this NR editorial.) The report is memorialized in the FBI’s standard FD-1023 form, which is used to record statements by confidential human sources (CHSs) — i.e., persons who provide information to the FBI, as distinguished from other means of intelligence-gathering (e.g., electronic surveillance).

On balance, this is a win for Comer, who stuck to his guns and overcame FBI intransigence. But the deal struck to end the contempt threat is a compromise, not a wholesale bureau surrender. That is as it should be.

In defiance of the subpoena, Director Wray initially resisted any disclosure. He even refused to concede the existence of the document, to which whistle-blower investigators had alerted Comer and Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), who has done a great deal of investigative work on the Biden family influence-peddling business. After over three weeks, Wray grudgingly acknowledged that the document existed but countered that the FBI would produce only a significantly redacted version of it. Moreover, he tried to dictate that committee members would have to come to FBI headquarters to review only what the FBI was willing to permit them to see, under the bureau’s supervision.


As I’ve explained this week (see here and here), the FBI does not have a valid legal basis to withhold the information Congress is seeking. Legally, Comer knew he had the whip hand; politically, he knew that Wray, who heads a law-enforcement agency that relies on subpoena compliance, was keen to avoid being held in contempt for illegally defying a subpoena. The chairman thus admonished the director that nothing less than the production of the document to the entire committee would constitute satisfactory compliance.

In the end, however, Comer prudently retreated a bit. At least for now, the document will be shown, and the briefing given, only to Comer and Raskin, not the full committee, in a secure Capitol Hill room normally reserved for reviewing classified intelligence (the FD-1023 in question is not classified). This gives the committee what it needs for the purposes of its significant investigation, while giving Wray a face-saving nod to the FBI’s concerns.

Wray Concedes Biden Bribery Document Exists But Continues Refusing to Produce It, Comer and Grassley Say
FBI Director Wray Doesn’t Have a Leg to Stand on in Contempt Fight

Those concerns are worthy. It would cripple the government’s ability to gather evidence and intelligence for law-enforcement and national-security purposes if the FBI could not assure confidentiality to informants. Comer and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) both made clear to Wray that the House’s objective was to obtain the information, not compromise the FBI’s mission. That said, they also were firm in insisting that the FBI’s concerns do not exist in a vacuum; they must be weighed against such imperatives as Congress’s capacity to check the abuse of executive power and ensure that the FBI is not chanting “sources and methods” as a smokescreen to cover up malfeasance or incompetence.

The deal struck should satisfy everyone’s interests.

This illustrates why courts should not get enmeshed in battles pitting the political branches and their divergent but legitimate interests against each other. Even though a lot of furniture can get broken in the heat of the confrontation, rational compromises are typically arrived at. This happens when it is clear that (a) under our constitutional structure, one side gets to be the decision maker — here, Congress; and (b) that side respects the legitimate concerns of the other side — here, the bureau. In this instance, there was more drama than there needed to be, but if things had gotten tied up in court, it would have taken months to get a resolution.

The key lesson of this episode: The FBI must come to terms with the reputational damage it has sustained after eight years of politicization and poor performance. The bureau is simply not as formidable as it used to be in clashes with Congress because the public is not as convinced as it used to be that the bureau is a nonpartisan, by-the-book law-enforcement agency. Lawmakers, who are accountable to the public, are no longer going to take bureau’s “sources and methods” mantra for an answer.

Law-enforcement whistle-blowers did not just point Comer and Grassley to the document at issue. The investigators have complained that, because the politically powerful Biden family is at the center of this probe, their chains of command (which ultimately lead to the Biden Justice Department) have not permitted them to take the rudimentary investigative steps they’d take in a typical case.

According to Comer and Grassley, the subpoenaed FD-1023 form

describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions. It has been alleged [by whistleblower agents] that the document includes a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose.

Comer has not only demanded access to the document. The committee also wants to know what the FBI did to investigate the allegations. It is a vital question, especially in light of disturbing indications that, prior to the 2020 election, top bureau investigators helped congressional Democrats discredit the Biden corruption story as “Russian disinformation” and took steps to shut down investigative leads. To repeat my previous summary:

Three months before the [New York Post] reported on the [Hunter Biden] laptop, there was already not only a Hunter Biden criminal investigation but a Senate Republican investigation of the scandal the media-Democrat complex continues to bury: the cashing in on Joe Biden’s political influence by his family members, with his knowing and willful involvement, to the tune of millions of dollars that poured into Biden family coffers from agents of corrupt and authoritarian regimes, including some, such as China and Russia, that are hostile to the United States.

Obviously worried about the potential effect of these revelations on their party’s presidential nominee, congressional Democrats turned to some of their many sympathizers in the FBI brass. These included Timothy Thibault, who ran the Bureau’s Washington field office until he was forced into early retirement over anti-Republican, anti-conservative posts on his social-media account, and Brian Auten, an intelligence analyst who played an important role in the deeply misleading FISA-warrant applications the FBI filed in federal court, leading the judges to believe the 2016 Trump campaign had colluded with the Kremlin. Through these officials, the FBI helped Democrats peddle a political narrative that the evidence of foreign money lining the Bidens’ pockets was “Russian disinformation” — notwithstanding that much of this evidence was simply money-trail records generated by financial institutions, easily verifiable.

That is, before there ever was a Hunter Biden laptop story, the FBI hadn’t just helped Democrats craft a political storyline to dismiss evidence of Biden family corruption; bureau whistleblowers also reported to Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) that Thibault took internal steps both to bury the Biden investigation and obscure his rationale for doing so.

On Monday, the FBI is going to honor the Oversight Committee’s subpoena for the document alleging Biden’s complicity in a bribery scheme. Chairman Comer, in turn, is dropping — at least for now — the plan to hold Wray in contempt of Congress. Still, we are closer to the beginning than the end of this saga. It is good that the document is being produced, but the FBI has more explaining to do.
Title: can't agree with AM here
Post by: ccp on June 03, 2023, 06:29:23 AM
"In the end, however, Comer prudently retreated a bit. At least for now, the document will be shown, and the briefing given, only to Comer and Raskin, not the full committee, in a secure Capitol Hill room normally reserved for reviewing classified intelligence (the FD-1023 in question is not classified). This gives the committee what it needs for the purposes of its significant investigation, while giving Wray a face-saving nod to the FBI’s concerns."

again the public has not right to know or deep state has to protect the public FROM knowing what is in it.

And of course, Jamie Raskin will get to see it too  :x so he can lie about what it says to the MSM.

Why was Comer "prudent  to retreat" ?

" The deal struck should satisfy everyone’s interests"

What !!!

Agree with GM about AM on this piece.
Title: Re: can't agree with AM here
Post by: G M on June 03, 2023, 07:00:46 AM
"In the end, however, Comer prudently retreated a bit. At least for now, the document will be shown, and the briefing given, only to Comer and Raskin, not the full committee, in a secure Capitol Hill room normally reserved for reviewing classified intelligence (the FD-1023 in question is not classified). This gives the committee what it needs for the purposes of its significant investigation, while giving Wray a face-saving nod to the FBI’s concerns."

again the public has not right to know or deep state has to protect the public FROM knowing what is in it.

And of course, Jamie Raskin will get to see it too  :x so he can lie about what it says to the MSM.

Why was Comer "prudent  to retreat" ?

" The deal struck should satisfy everyone’s interests"

What !!!

Agree with GM about AM on this piece.

Thank you.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2023, 03:45:04 PM
I'm not with AMcC on this one, but at least Comer will get to see whether the sources and methods argument from the FBI has merit or not.

In fairness, Congress does leak like a collander , , ,
Title: Israeli whistle blower in hiding?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 03, 2023, 07:12:50 PM
https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/02/missing-israeli-whistleblower-living-as-fugitive-in-undisclosed-location/
Title: Andy McCarthy won't touch this
Post by: G M on June 04, 2023, 05:25:28 PM
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-security-state-turns-inward?r=e0isq
Title: AMcC: Wray is in contempt
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 04, 2023, 05:27:25 PM
FBI Director Wray Doesn’t Have a Leg to Stand on in Contempt Fight
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
May 31, 2023 11:54 AM

The director’s defiance of Congress’s subpoena is contemptuous. If he persists in it, Congress should hold him accountable.

The era of FBI prestige is over. The FBI killed it, and director Chris Wray seems to be the last one to know. As a result, he’s about to be held in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena that he has no lawful basis to defy. That is a contemptuous act, regardless of whether Wray is engaged in a cover-up or earnestly concerned that House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) is eroding the bureau’s capacity to safeguard intelligence sources and methods.

The director has been watching Efrem Zimbalist Jr. reruns while much of the country reads the Durham Report, and the series of reports on FBI abuses compiled over several years by the Justice Department’s inspector general, and revelations of similar, serial FBI lawlessness generated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Wray seems to think it’s still 1995, or 2005, or even 2015, when an FBI director could, with a measure of credibility, assure Congress that the bureau conducts politically fraught probes with competence and non-partisan rectitude, and lawmakers could then be expected to back down from making disclosure demands, fearing the public might decide they were obstructing the FBI’s good work.

Those days are done. In the last decade, the FBI has become thoroughly partisan.


This was not exactly a new development. The bureau still casts itself in the image of J. Edgar Hoover, the formative director for whom its Washington, D.C., headquarters is named. Hoover climbed the greasy pole by doing the bidding of presidents of both parties. He maintained his position for over four decades by petrifying the Beltway political class, squirreling its humiliating secrets away in his infamous files.

There is something different about today’s bureau, though. Hoover’s machinations were more about power than partisanship. His bureau self-consciously appealed to an unreservedly patriotic America that revered the rule of law. The country has changed, and so has the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Today’s FBI, with the ethos more of a spy agency than a police force, is a contented cog of the progressive administrative state. In the Obama years, it was put in the service of the Democratic Party. It marched to President Obama’s beat, whitewashed and abetted Hillary Clinton’s malevolence, undertook to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency, spent years covering its tracks, and insulated his 2020 opponent from scrutiny. It has spent the Biden years helping Democrats craft a political narrative of a nation besieged by white-supremacist domestic terrorism — all the while slow-walking the investigation of the Biden family’s influence-peddling business.

That record notwithstanding, Wray seems to believe Comer should retreat from his demand for information allegedly implicating President Biden in a $5 million bribery scheme because, the director admonishes the committee, revealing the information — and what, if anything, the FBI has done to investigate it — could compromise the bureau’s cultivation of confidential human sources (CHSs).

There was a time, not long ago, when such a claim by an FBI director would hold a lot of sway on Capitol Hill. In its arrogance, the bureau seems to have forgotten why. No, it is not because the FBI has excellent points, which Wray has made, about CHSs: To wit, that the bureau’s ability to enforce the law and protect national security hinges on persuading CHSs that, if they provide inculpatory information about dangerous, powerful people, the bureau will do its utmost to ensure their confidentiality and security.

Don’t get me wrong. That is all true. But in bygone days, such arguments did not prevail on Capitol Hill because they were true. They prevailed because the FBI had strong allies on both sides of the aisle in each chamber of Congress. The bureau had convinced those allies — a critical mass of Congress — that it was evenhandedly enforcing the law. Lawmakers understood that the public was confident in the FBI; ergo, Congress had much to lose in skirmishes where it might appear that lawmakers were thwarting the bureau. The FBI won these jousts because Congress stayed its whip hand. But that doesn’t mean Congress lacked the whip hand.

Wray ran the Criminal Division in the Bush-43 Justice Department under then-deputy attorney general James Comey. He is a good lawyer. Yet, some basic constitutional law eludes him these days. Just to recap: The nation got by for well over a century of constitutional governance without an FBI. In fact, for most of America’s first century, the Justice Department (of which the bureau is a component) didn’t exist, either. There is no FBI in the Constitution. The bureau was created by statute. It is an agency assigned to the executive branch, but it owes its existence and its authorities to Congress, which also funds its operations with taxpayer money. Congress is obliged to examine how those authorities are exercised and how that funding is spent. It could dispense with the FBI entirely if it chose to do so — if it concluded that the bureau, having forfeited its credibility by playing politics and performing incompetently, had become more trouble than it is worth.

One of the reasons we’ve had one FBI disaster after another in recent years is that Congress has failed to fulfill its duty to conduct thoroughgoing oversight of FBI operations, especially with respect to the bureau’s foreign-counterintelligence mission. Many FBI debacles take place in that context, yet Congress has delegated much of its oversight responsibility to an ill-conceived judicial panel, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which should not be involved in spying (a national-security duty of the political branches) and which is institutionally incapable of investigating the bureau.

There are circumstances in which the executive branch can legitimately defy congressional subpoenas. These deal with legislative efforts to usurp or undermine the constitutional authority of the president, a tendency about which the Framers were deeply concerned. That is why the Supreme Court recognizes executive privilege. It is why presidents refuse to accept the validity of the War Powers Resolution even as they comply with it — grudgingly and incompletely. But Comer’s subpoena to Wray does not present a constitutional-separation-of-powers conflict; it is, instead, the separation of powers as it was intended to operate.

Congress is not permitted to execute. It may not exercise the powers it creates by statute and vests in the executive, such as the FBI’s law-enforcement authorities. But it has undeniable authority to scrutinize the manner in which the FBI is exercising those powers. Wray has no proper basis to refuse compliance with a subpoena demanding to know (a) whether the FBI has gotten a colorable report that the sitting president participated in a criminal scheme said to involve leveraging his federal power for personal gain; and (b) if so, what the FBI has done with that information. Wray can cite “law-enforcement privilege” from now until the end of time. That’s not a constitutional privilege. Whatever law-enforcement authority the FBI has was given to it by Congress; the director has no “privilege” to withhold from Congress information on how that authority has been executed.

Unlike some on the right, I am not a persistent Wray critic. He inherited a mess when he took over, and I’ve tried to cut him slack. It has not been easy to be FBI director in the administrations of Donald Trump and progressive Democrats — the former crassly demanding investigations of his political opponents, the latter requiring nothing less than that their opponents be investigated while the Bidens are insulated.

Still, it was on Wray’s watch that he colluded with his fellow Trump appointee, then-deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, to stonewall the Republican-controlled House from uncovering what we now know was the FBI’s shocking Russiagate malfeasance. I understand why Rosenstein did it: He, after all, approved the FBI’s last Carter Page FISA-warrant application and appointed as special counsel Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who somehow managed to probe a political smear — Trump–Russia collusion — while remaining blissfully blind to the FBI’s role in helping the Clinton campaign promote the smear. But since Wray had nothing to do with the Russiagate debacle, his resistance to exposing it has been mystifying.

In the ensuing years, analogous abuses have proceeded under Wray’s stewardship — the FBI’s (a) illegal surveillance under FISA; (b) general participation in the suppression of political speech on social media; (c) specific complicity in the Democrats’ and the intelligence community’s suppression of the Biden influence-peddling scandal; (d) collaboration in the Democrats’ crafting of a political narrative that the country is overrun by white-supremacist domestic terrorists; and (e) retaliation against whistleblower agents who’ve reported to Congress about some of these issues (at least according to three of those agents, who testified under oath at a recent House hearing).

Now, the mere fact that a CHS may have alleged that Biden took part in a bribery scheme doesn’t mean it happened. It can’t be dismissed out of hand — there’s too much indication of Biden’s sleazy self-dealing and outright lying for that. But people in positions of authority get falsely accused of wrongdoing all the time. The FBI rightly keeps such allegations under wraps because those people are presumed innocent and the bureau can’t investigate without being discrete. Congress has traditionally given the FBI a wide berth because lawmakers know secrecy is a necessity for competent investigations — and it has assumed that the FBI is competent and non-partisan.

On the record of the last eight years, however, Wray can no longer bank on that assumption. To be sure, Comer could end up with egg on his face. If it turned out that he was wrong about the information, or that the FBI was actually doing a bona fide corruption probe that got undermined by his quest to obtain and expose the information, then Comer would be humiliated. The death knell for the House GOP’s Biden investigations would sound.

That, however, is a risk Comer is entitled to run. He knows he should tread carefully. That, undoubtedly is why House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has assured Wray that, as long as he communicates the core of the information, the FBI may redact details that could imperil sources and methods of intelligence-collection. But the House is entitled to the Biden information. Wray has no legal basis to keep it under wraps.

The director’s defiance of Congress’s subpoena is contemptuous. As Chris Wray would say about any American citizen who dared defy a subpoena in an FBI investigation, people who persist in such contemptuous conduct should be held in contempt. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that. But if it does, contempt is just the next step, not the last one.
Title: Re: AMcC: Wray is in contempt
Post by: G M on June 04, 2023, 05:32:39 PM
The DOJ's "Bureau of Investigation" in the beginning, didn't have powers of arrest or the ability to carry firearms. We should return to that ASAP.


FBI Director Wray Doesn’t Have a Leg to Stand on in Contempt Fight
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
May 31, 2023 11:54 AM

The director’s defiance of Congress’s subpoena is contemptuous. If he persists in it, Congress should hold him accountable.

The era of FBI prestige is over. The FBI killed it, and director Chris Wray seems to be the last one to know. As a result, he’s about to be held in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena that he has no lawful basis to defy. That is a contemptuous act, regardless of whether Wray is engaged in a cover-up or earnestly concerned that House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) is eroding the bureau’s capacity to safeguard intelligence sources and methods.

The director has been watching Efrem Zimbalist Jr. reruns while much of the country reads the Durham Report, and the series of reports on FBI abuses compiled over several years by the Justice Department’s inspector general, and revelations of similar, serial FBI lawlessness generated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Wray seems to think it’s still 1995, or 2005, or even 2015, when an FBI director could, with a measure of credibility, assure Congress that the bureau conducts politically fraught probes with competence and non-partisan rectitude, and lawmakers could then be expected to back down from making disclosure demands, fearing the public might decide they were obstructing the FBI’s good work.

Those days are done. In the last decade, the FBI has become thoroughly partisan.


This was not exactly a new development. The bureau still casts itself in the image of J. Edgar Hoover, the formative director for whom its Washington, D.C., headquarters is named. Hoover climbed the greasy pole by doing the bidding of presidents of both parties. He maintained his position for over four decades by petrifying the Beltway political class, squirreling its humiliating secrets away in his infamous files.

There is something different about today’s bureau, though. Hoover’s machinations were more about power than partisanship. His bureau self-consciously appealed to an unreservedly patriotic America that revered the rule of law. The country has changed, and so has the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Today’s FBI, with the ethos more of a spy agency than a police force, is a contented cog of the progressive administrative state. In the Obama years, it was put in the service of the Democratic Party. It marched to President Obama’s beat, whitewashed and abetted Hillary Clinton’s malevolence, undertook to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency, spent years covering its tracks, and insulated his 2020 opponent from scrutiny. It has spent the Biden years helping Democrats craft a political narrative of a nation besieged by white-supremacist domestic terrorism — all the while slow-walking the investigation of the Biden family’s influence-peddling business.

That record notwithstanding, Wray seems to believe Comer should retreat from his demand for information allegedly implicating President Biden in a $5 million bribery scheme because, the director admonishes the committee, revealing the information — and what, if anything, the FBI has done to investigate it — could compromise the bureau’s cultivation of confidential human sources (CHSs).

There was a time, not long ago, when such a claim by an FBI director would hold a lot of sway on Capitol Hill. In its arrogance, the bureau seems to have forgotten why. No, it is not because the FBI has excellent points, which Wray has made, about CHSs: To wit, that the bureau’s ability to enforce the law and protect national security hinges on persuading CHSs that, if they provide inculpatory information about dangerous, powerful people, the bureau will do its utmost to ensure their confidentiality and security.

Don’t get me wrong. That is all true. But in bygone days, such arguments did not prevail on Capitol Hill because they were true. They prevailed because the FBI had strong allies on both sides of the aisle in each chamber of Congress. The bureau had convinced those allies — a critical mass of Congress — that it was evenhandedly enforcing the law. Lawmakers understood that the public was confident in the FBI; ergo, Congress had much to lose in skirmishes where it might appear that lawmakers were thwarting the bureau. The FBI won these jousts because Congress stayed its whip hand. But that doesn’t mean Congress lacked the whip hand.

Wray ran the Criminal Division in the Bush-43 Justice Department under then-deputy attorney general James Comey. He is a good lawyer. Yet, some basic constitutional law eludes him these days. Just to recap: The nation got by for well over a century of constitutional governance without an FBI. In fact, for most of America’s first century, the Justice Department (of which the bureau is a component) didn’t exist, either. There is no FBI in the Constitution. The bureau was created by statute. It is an agency assigned to the executive branch, but it owes its existence and its authorities to Congress, which also funds its operations with taxpayer money. Congress is obliged to examine how those authorities are exercised and how that funding is spent. It could dispense with the FBI entirely if it chose to do so — if it concluded that the bureau, having forfeited its credibility by playing politics and performing incompetently, had become more trouble than it is worth.

One of the reasons we’ve had one FBI disaster after another in recent years is that Congress has failed to fulfill its duty to conduct thoroughgoing oversight of FBI operations, especially with respect to the bureau’s foreign-counterintelligence mission. Many FBI debacles take place in that context, yet Congress has delegated much of its oversight responsibility to an ill-conceived judicial panel, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which should not be involved in spying (a national-security duty of the political branches) and which is institutionally incapable of investigating the bureau.

There are circumstances in which the executive branch can legitimately defy congressional subpoenas. These deal with legislative efforts to usurp or undermine the constitutional authority of the president, a tendency about which the Framers were deeply concerned. That is why the Supreme Court recognizes executive privilege. It is why presidents refuse to accept the validity of the War Powers Resolution even as they comply with it — grudgingly and incompletely. But Comer’s subpoena to Wray does not present a constitutional-separation-of-powers conflict; it is, instead, the separation of powers as it was intended to operate.

Congress is not permitted to execute. It may not exercise the powers it creates by statute and vests in the executive, such as the FBI’s law-enforcement authorities. But it has undeniable authority to scrutinize the manner in which the FBI is exercising those powers. Wray has no proper basis to refuse compliance with a subpoena demanding to know (a) whether the FBI has gotten a colorable report that the sitting president participated in a criminal scheme said to involve leveraging his federal power for personal gain; and (b) if so, what the FBI has done with that information. Wray can cite “law-enforcement privilege” from now until the end of time. That’s not a constitutional privilege. Whatever law-enforcement authority the FBI has was given to it by Congress; the director has no “privilege” to withhold from Congress information on how that authority has been executed.

Unlike some on the right, I am not a persistent Wray critic. He inherited a mess when he took over, and I’ve tried to cut him slack. It has not been easy to be FBI director in the administrations of Donald Trump and progressive Democrats — the former crassly demanding investigations of his political opponents, the latter requiring nothing less than that their opponents be investigated while the Bidens are insulated.

Still, it was on Wray’s watch that he colluded with his fellow Trump appointee, then-deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, to stonewall the Republican-controlled House from uncovering what we now know was the FBI’s shocking Russiagate malfeasance. I understand why Rosenstein did it: He, after all, approved the FBI’s last Carter Page FISA-warrant application and appointed as special counsel Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who somehow managed to probe a political smear — Trump–Russia collusion — while remaining blissfully blind to the FBI’s role in helping the Clinton campaign promote the smear. But since Wray had nothing to do with the Russiagate debacle, his resistance to exposing it has been mystifying.

In the ensuing years, analogous abuses have proceeded under Wray’s stewardship — the FBI’s (a) illegal surveillance under FISA; (b) general participation in the suppression of political speech on social media; (c) specific complicity in the Democrats’ and the intelligence community’s suppression of the Biden influence-peddling scandal; (d) collaboration in the Democrats’ crafting of a political narrative that the country is overrun by white-supremacist domestic terrorists; and (e) retaliation against whistleblower agents who’ve reported to Congress about some of these issues (at least according to three of those agents, who testified under oath at a recent House hearing).

Now, the mere fact that a CHS may have alleged that Biden took part in a bribery scheme doesn’t mean it happened. It can’t be dismissed out of hand — there’s too much indication of Biden’s sleazy self-dealing and outright lying for that. But people in positions of authority get falsely accused of wrongdoing all the time. The FBI rightly keeps such allegations under wraps because those people are presumed innocent and the bureau can’t investigate without being discrete. Congress has traditionally given the FBI a wide berth because lawmakers know secrecy is a necessity for competent investigations — and it has assumed that the FBI is competent and non-partisan.

On the record of the last eight years, however, Wray can no longer bank on that assumption. To be sure, Comer could end up with egg on his face. If it turned out that he was wrong about the information, or that the FBI was actually doing a bona fide corruption probe that got undermined by his quest to obtain and expose the information, then Comer would be humiliated. The death knell for the House GOP’s Biden investigations would sound.

That, however, is a risk Comer is entitled to run. He knows he should tread carefully. That, undoubtedly is why House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has assured Wray that, as long as he communicates the core of the information, the FBI may redact details that could imperil sources and methods of intelligence-collection. But the House is entitled to the Biden information. Wray has no legal basis to keep it under wraps.

The director’s defiance of Congress’s subpoena is contemptuous. As Chris Wray would say about any American citizen who dared defy a subpoena in an FBI investigation, people who persist in such contemptuous conduct should be held in contempt. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that. But if it does, contempt is just the next step, not the last one.
Title: Re: Andy McCarthy won't touch this
Post by: G M on June 04, 2023, 05:39:47 PM
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-security-state-turns-inward?r=e0isq

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/03/what-state-harassment-and-institutional-terror-in-woke-america-looks-like/
Title: Where is this in the US constitution?
Post by: G M on June 08, 2023, 05:46:48 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-helps-ukraine-censor-twitter-users-and-obtain-their-info-including-journalists
Title: hoping for a leak
Post by: ccp on June 08, 2023, 07:52:31 AM
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2023/06/08/comer-cancels-vote-to-hold-director-wray-in-contempt-after-fbi-comes-to-its-senses-n2624225

of course till then the Raskins(als) will be out on left wing media
 lying up the wazooooooo

with zero consequences
Title: Police instigation at J6?
Post by: G M on June 10, 2023, 07:26:01 PM
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-security-state-turns-inward?r=e0isq

https://amgreatness.com/2023/06/03/what-state-harassment-and-institutional-terror-in-woke-america-looks-like/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-video-shows-dc-cops-were-rioters-and-instigators-j-6-protest
Title: Lessons from China
Post by: G M on June 11, 2023, 08:11:46 PM
https://nitter.net/XVanFleet/status/1667889474720735234#m
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 11, 2023, 09:06:21 PM
Yes.
Title: No justice in the FUSA
Post by: G M on June 12, 2023, 07:04:26 AM
https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-nation-two-sets-of-laws/
Title: Ann Coulter
Post by: ccp on June 15, 2023, 06:36:19 AM
my sentiments exactly:

https://anncoulter.com/2023/06/14/the-trump-indictment/

as usual Trump places us in the position of defending the indefensible,
with

well they do it
and other word salads like it depends on what is is

we scream well Dems do it / did it

the Dems scream "what about isim's" [ an new slang for the dictionary now ]

and in the end Trump makes the election about saving his own ass..............

We need someone else ,

please God :
https://www.google.com/search?

maybe if I pray like I was dying on the battlefield my last words , it might help:

q=the+lord+out+god+the+lord+is+one+in+hebrew&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&ei=qROLZLbXDJ2bptQPtoixyAM&ved=0ahUKEwj2z4KmssX_AhWdjYkEHTZEDDkQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=the+lord+out+god+the+lord+is+one+in+hebrew&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzIHCAAQDRCABDIICAAQigUQhgMyCAgAEIoFEIYDMggIABCKBRCGAzIICAAQigUQhgM6CggAEEcQ1gQQsAM6BggAEB4QDToGCAAQFhAeSgQIQRgASgUIQBIBMVCRA1inGmC4G2gEcAF4AIABZYgBygeSAQQxMC4xmAEAoAEBwAEByAEI&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
Title: Re: Ann Coulter
Post by: G M on June 15, 2023, 06:38:02 AM
my sentiments exactly:

https://anncoulter.com/2023/06/14/the-trump-indictment/

as usual Trump places us in the position of defending the indefensible,
with

well they do it
and other word salads like it depends on what is is

we scream well Dems do it / did it

the Dems scream "what about isim's" [ an new slang for the dictionary now ]

and in the end Trump makes the election about saving his own ass..............

We need someone else ,

please God :
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+lord+out+god+the+lord+is+one+in+hebrew&rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS1001US1001&ei=qROLZLbXDJ2bptQPtoixyAM&ved=0ahUKEwj2z4KmssX_AhWdjYkEHTZEDDkQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=the+lord+out+god+the+lord+is+one+in+hebrew&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzIHCAAQDRCABDIICAAQigUQhgMyCAgAEIoFEIYDMggIABCKBRCGAzIICAAQigUQhgM6CggAEEcQ1gQQsAM6BggAEB4QDToGCAAQFhAeSgQIQRgASgUIQBIBMVCRA1inGmC4G2gEcAF4AIABZYgBygeSAQQxMC4xmAEAoAEBwAEByAEI&sclient=gws-wiz-serp

Prayer is one of the few things we have left.
Title: Read Sharyl Attkisson's affidavit and tell me...
Post by: G M on June 17, 2023, 07:44:36 AM
https://sharylattkisson.com/2023/06/new-read-my-affidavit-in-government-computer-intrusion-case/

How you vote your way out of this.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2023, 09:09:17 AM
First let me say how great it is to how her precise summary of everything done to her by the Deep State!

That said, IMHO this level of skullduggery has gone on , , , pretty much always.  Remember J. Edgar Hoover's control over most Washington politicians for decades?  As such, does not meet the burden of proving the end of our Constitutional Republic.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on June 17, 2023, 09:26:21 AM
First let me say how great it is to how her precise summary of everything done to her by the Deep State!

That said, IMHO this level of skullduggery has gone on , , , pretty much always.  Remember J. Edgar Hoover's control over most Washington politicians for decades?  As such, does not meet the burden of proving the end of our Constitutional Republic.

Did Hoover and the US Intel community ever wage war against half the American public and use the same techniques used to overthrow foreign governments? Maybe they did with JFK…

If that’s true, then everything we know about the US for more than a half century is a lie.

Then the American Republic was gone before I was born.

So please, break down how Trump or DeSantis or someone else wins in 2024 and the Pentagon brass and the various high ranking members of the IC and federal LE dutifully line up to have everything taken from them and die in prison.

I’ll wait for your detailed explanation on how this happens…
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 17, 2023, 09:36:53 AM
Sorry, but non-sequitor.

Attkisson asserts bad actor surveillance.  You sought to use that as reason that we cannot win this election despite likely skullduggery.

I challenged by pointing out the JE Hoover example of bad actor surveillance congruent with an essentially functioning democratic process (Mayor Daley in Chicago, others of that ilk not withstanding).

"So please, break down how Trump or DeSantis or someone else wins in 2024 and the Pentagon brass and the various high ranking members of the IC and federal LE dutifully line up to have everything taken from them and die in prison."

A very good question no doubt.

Tis the same one I posed to CCP with his discontents with Trump.
Title: They have plans for this
Post by: G M on June 19, 2023, 07:14:53 AM
https://www.dailywire.com/news/watch-democrat-corrects-herself-after-saying-trump-should-be-shot
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on June 19, 2023, 07:22:04 AM
our response

"what about isms"

not enough

I am tired of defending the indefensible

endlessly distracting
Levin is right about the double standard and the phony self righteous "rule of law " proclamations

Barr is right Trump is reckless and will. bring us down due to his vanity project

Doug Schoen's latest book he early in it speaks of Trumps personality weakness turned out to be his greatest strength in propelling him to the white house, but his his greatest weakness turned out to be his greatest weakness in the longer run


Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on June 19, 2023, 07:24:51 AM
our response

"what about isms"

not enough

I am tired of defending the indefensible

endlessly distracting
Levin is right about the double standard and the phony self righteous "rule of law " proclamations

Barr is right Trump is reckless and will. bring us down due to his vanity project

Doug Schoen's latest book he early in it speaks of Trumps personality weakness turned out to be his greatest strength in propelling him to the white house, but his his greatest weakness turned out to be his greatest weakness in the longer run

Don't worry, they'll never allow Trump or any other outsider into office ever again.
Title: The IRS flexes
Post by: G M on June 19, 2023, 07:28:47 AM
https://archive.fo/e0qMC
Title: Re: The IRS flexes
Post by: G M on June 19, 2023, 07:30:28 AM
https://archive.fo/e0qMC

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/armed-atf-irs-agents-hit-montana-gun-store-soviet-style-intimidation-raid
Title: Shocking! A sweetheart deal for Hunter!
Post by: G M on June 20, 2023, 09:13:41 AM
https://ace.mu.nu/archives/404980.php
Title: Trump the genius predicted this !
Post by: ccp on June 20, 2023, 09:24:29 AM
from Breitbart:

"Donald Trump Correctly Predicted Hunter Biden Would Be Charged with ‘Something Small’"

[ psst...    so did everyone else ]
Title: how the LEFT is going to frame Hunter Biden sweet heart deal
Post by: ccp on June 20, 2023, 10:16:12 AM
the memos are already out to the jurno LISTERS :

https://www.yahoo.com/news/hunter-biden-plea-deal-tax-gun-charges-doj-case-trump-no-jail-time-trump-us-attorney-165434124.html


Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on June 20, 2023, 01:04:23 PM
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/4058616-the-hunter-biden-controlled-demolition-is-complete/

"The House will push ahead, but the media has already imposed another blackout on coverage. The challenge for the White House is that this plea could come at a tactical cost. If this is the end of the Hunter Biden investigation, the Justice Department and FBI will have a more difficult time withholding evidence on the basis of an “ongoing investigation.” That is why it is a bit suspicious to see U.S. Attorney David Weiss state that that there is an “ongoing investigation.”
Title: Deep finally goes after FBI agent - to make an example out of her
Post by: ccp on June 22, 2023, 05:08:30 AM
for political reasons -

https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article276608961.html

funny, how come same logic does not apply to Obama, Pence, Biden,
Clinton (who was not even a president)

only to put up against Trump's situation .

 :wink:
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 22, 2023, 06:34:05 AM
In fairness, the following passages should be noted:

"Kingsbury, who worked for the FBI’s Kansas City Division, unlawfully retained about 386 classified documents in total over the course of more than a dozen years at the agency. While prosecutors didn’t allege a motive, a sentencing memo filed this month says Kingsbury’s phone made and received calls with phone numbers associated with the subjects of counterterrorism investigations."

"Prosecutors said Kingsbury had kept secret documents — on hard drives, CDs and other formats — describing intelligence sources and methods related to U.S. government efforts to defend against counterterrorism, counterintelligence and cyber threats. The documents included information on open FBI investigations. Kingsbury was also alleged to have retained documents with information about Al Qaeda members in Africa, including a suspected associate of Osama bin Laden. Other documents focused on the activities of emerging terrorists and their efforts to establish themselves in support of Al Qaeda in Africa."

"On Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Edwards and FBI Special Agent Joel Feekes cast Kingsbury’s phone calls with the subjects of counterterrorism investigations in a suspicious light, though Feekes acknowledged during his testimony that the FBI has never been able to establish why Kingsbury made the calls. “There is no explanation that can justify her actions,” Edwards said. Feekes said Kingsbury decided to voluntarily admit she had stored classified documents at her home after coming to believe she was under FBI surveillance. Feekes testified Kingsbury wasn’t under FBI surveillance at the time, however."
Title: Yet another failure to act
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 22, 2023, 12:04:52 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/06/22/irs-whistleblower-hunter-joe-biden-chinese-partner/?pnespid=uL5lF3geNrMEgqjS_i2oEJGI7x.0XosoLvGuwPQwrEJmJ2CvnpH_RMGQ7hmJfRTw0_zgnxgM 
Title: Re: Yet another failure to act
Post by: G M on June 22, 2023, 06:08:49 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/06/22/irs-whistleblower-hunter-joe-biden-chinese-partner/?pnespid=uL5lF3geNrMEgqjS_i2oEJGI7x.0XosoLvGuwPQwrEJmJ2CvnpH_RMGQ7hmJfRTw0_zgnxgM

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/405011.php

Will DS Andy cover this?
Title: surprise surprise surprise
Post by: ccp on June 23, 2023, 06:14:42 AM
https://www.dailywire.com/news/whistleblowers-allege-biden-admin-blocked-prosecutors-from-filing-charges-against-hunter-biden-twice-last-year

The lying obnoxious LEFT ->

https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/attractive-woman-being-ignored-stopped-by-320741366

truth justice and the American way

Now is untruths, injustices , and the DNC way........

[and if you don't like it you are a racist bigot phobic and plain simply f/u]
Title: Above the law-DNC, Uke money launderer
Post by: G M on June 23, 2023, 07:14:00 AM
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/15/us-withdraws-new-charges-in-sam-bankman-fried-case-punts-them-to-2024.html
Title: Land of the free! Did Deep State Andy cover this?
Post by: G M on June 24, 2023, 06:22:14 AM
End Wokeness
@EndWokeness
One is a guy who made memes

The other is a group of intelligence agents who colluded with the Biden campaign to discredit a scandal before an election

Guess which one will spend up to 10 years in prison for “election interference”?

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/141/204/174/original/8b5a183016e4c786.png)

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/141/204/198/original/3be97229d6780d86.png)
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2023, 07:12:19 AM
Has he been sentenced yet?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on June 24, 2023, 07:23:22 AM
Has he been sentenced yet?

https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/11/a-pranksters-conviction-sends-a-message-anti-regime-speech-is-a-crime/

Not as of yet. No press release crowing about this atrocity that I can find.
Title: SCOTUS: Ban on encouraging illegal immigration legal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 24, 2023, 07:58:54 AM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/ban-on-encouraging-illegal-immigration-not-unconstitutional-supreme-court_5352185.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2023-06-24&src_cmp=mb-2023-06-24&utm_medium=email
Title: Re: Land of the free! Did Deep State Andy cover this?
Post by: G M on June 25, 2023, 12:46:57 PM
https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/j6-protesters-hunter-biden-jail-time-comparison.jpg?resize=550%2C311&ssl=1

(https://i0.wp.com/politicallyincorrecthumor.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/j6-protesters-hunter-biden-jail-time-comparison.jpg?resize=550%2C311&ssl=1)

End Wokeness
@EndWokeness
One is a guy who made memes

The other is a group of intelligence agents who colluded with the Biden campaign to discredit a scandal before an election

Guess which one will spend up to 10 years in prison for “election interference”?

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/141/204/174/original/8b5a183016e4c786.png)

(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/141/204/198/original/3be97229d6780d86.png)
Title: 1/6 investigation
Post by: ccp on June 26, 2023, 01:35:21 PM
still on going:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/secret-service-agents-jan-6-grand-jury-trump-rcna91182

shysters dragging this out
to keep on back burner as needed

to hit Trump at the right time....so obvious and obnoxious

lawyers ===>

shysters !

rule of law[yers] !

and MSNBC N. Wallace to have Andrew Weissmann on to update on the "progress" of this "investigation " so they can bill for more ads during the broadcast.
Title: A prince of the Deep State-untouchable
Post by: G M on June 26, 2023, 03:35:16 PM
https://twitter.com/CollinRugg/status/1672287239915835392?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1672287239915835392%7Ctwgr%5E07b4c528bd31630495847fa2736e82cd8f9eb530%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.revolver.news%2F2023%2F06%2Funthinkable-move-by-hunter-biden-triggers-mainstream-media-explosion%2F
Title: War on the rule of law; Deep State, John Soloman
Post by: DougMacG on June 27, 2023, 06:31:30 AM
https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/congress-has-begun-unmasking-whole-government-plot-protect-biden

Yes, the deep state has intervened on behalf of Democrats for at least four Presidential elections in a row and I'm already counting 2024.

Failure to fight back isn't going to slow this or reverse it
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on June 27, 2023, 06:35:38 AM
".Failure to fight back isn't going to slow this or reverse it "

I'm with you
and voting as hard as I can.  :-D
Title: Strange story
Post by: DougMacG on June 28, 2023, 07:19:22 AM
One of the strangest stories of the year, my good friend is CFO of this company.  Owner died in a plane crash yesterday;
https://www.startribune.com/owner-of-bloomington-based-precision-lens-dies-in-montana-plane-crash-months-after-federal-judgement/600285735/

Government won a 500 million lawsuit against the company in which they admitted in court the government was out zero dollars and no crime was committed. For every procedure performed one cataract was removed from one eye at the government (Medicare) mandated rate. Owner did entertaining of doctors, billed them for their full share of it but it wasn't enough in the eyes of the government and they were pursued relentlessly until destroyed. Example, doctors were invited to golf and dinner at a country club, billed back for the entire cost of the event but regulators said they weren't billed for the original membership initiation costs.  So the govt added t up the total revenue ever paid to the company, not the profit, of all procedures and multiplied it by ten for punitive measure and won an award for 20 times the total profits the company has ever made, an amount they know can't be collected, causing the wind down of 70 jobs of innocent, hard working people. They held the owner personally liable for an amount they know can't be collected, and now he's dead.

Meanwhile no resources were available over these years to pursue the Biden's selling out the nation to it's adversaries.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: G M on June 28, 2023, 07:24:08 AM
This is exactly the problem. The feral government can crush whomever it wishes to, but some are utterly immune because of status.

One of the strangest stories of the year, my good friend is CFO of this company.  Owner died in a plane crash yesterday;
https://www.startribune.com/owner-of-bloomington-based-precision-lens-dies-in-montana-plane-crash-months-after-federal-judgement/600285735/

Government won a 500 million lawsuit against the company in which they admitted in court the government was out zero dollars and no crime was committed. For every procedure performed one cataract was removed from one eye at the government (Medicare) mandated rate. Owner did entertaining of doctors, billed them for their full share of it but it wasn't enough in the eyes of the government and they were pursued relentlessly until destroyed. Example, doctors were invited to golf and dinner at a country club, billed back for the entire cost of the event but regulators said they weren't billed for the original membership initiation costs.  So the govt added t up the total revenue ever paid to the company, not the profit, of all procedures and multiplied it by ten for punitive measure and won an award for 20 times the total profits the company has ever made, an amount they know can't be collected, causing the wind down of 70 jobs of innocent, hard working people. They held the owner personally liable for an amount they know can't be collected, and now he's dead.

Meanwhile no resources were available over these years to pursue the Biden's selling out the nation to it's adversaries.
Title: Trump just bravado
Post by: ccp on June 28, 2023, 08:46:36 AM
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bravado-trump-says-wasn-t-225942128.html

 :roll:

I would prefer our side to also not make a farce out of our laws
as well as the LEFT

Hunter could also state the email was BS phony just kidding defense as well
 :-(

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 28, 2023, 01:06:09 PM
Actually IMHO the bravado argument has a ring of truth to it , , ,
Title: We are NOT a functional republic
Post by: G M on June 29, 2023, 04:04:13 PM
https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/28/doj-rot-goes-so-much-deeper-than-merrick-garland/
Title: Re: Trump just bravado
Post by: G M on June 29, 2023, 04:11:37 PM
If Trump, as the accidentally elected president, wanted to plaster the outside of the white house with the FUSA's most deeply classified secrets(like Obama's college transcripts), he had the legal authority to do so.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/bravado-trump-says-wasn-t-225942128.html

 :roll:

I would prefer our side to also not make a farce out of our laws
as well as the LEFT

Hunter could also state the email was BS phony just kidding defense as well
 :-(
Title: Re: We are NOT a functional republic
Post by: G M on June 29, 2023, 08:06:10 PM
https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/28/doj-rot-goes-so-much-deeper-than-merrick-garland/

https://booty.substack.com/p/prior-contact-between-mass-shooters

Title: Re: We are NOT a functional republic
Post by: G M on June 29, 2023, 08:16:59 PM
https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/28/doj-rot-goes-so-much-deeper-than-merrick-garland/

https://booty.substack.com/p/prior-contact-between-mass-shooters

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/06/dhs-domestic-intelligence-program-00085544

Who is going to prison for this?

Title: Re: We are NOT a functional republic-Frank Church warned us
Post by: G M on June 29, 2023, 08:40:15 PM
https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/28/doj-rot-goes-so-much-deeper-than-merrick-garland/

https://booty.substack.com/p/prior-contact-between-mass-shooters

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/06/dhs-domestic-intelligence-program-00085544

Who is going to prison for this?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1604913025651298305.html

Title: Ray Epps, Jayden X and Andy McCarthy
Post by: G M on July 01, 2023, 07:00:11 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/jayden-x-who-planned-terriotest-attack-state-capitols/

He will explain why they are free as birds, anytime now!


Right?
Title: weiss disappoints
Post by: ccp on July 02, 2023, 06:46:59 AM
with shyster finagling of the words:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/07/01/u-s-attorney-david-weiss-confirms-limited-authority-to-charge-hunter-biden-outside-delaware/

as weismann will with smirk point out
see, no there there ...

when push came to shove weiss wimped out.
Title: Our deep state wouldn't have anything to do with the current situation in France
Post by: G M on July 02, 2023, 03:47:22 PM
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/us-state-department-trained-french

Unpossible!

Title: Gal Luft
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2023, 08:20:42 AM


https://nypost.com/2023/07/05/missing-biden-corruption-case-witness-dr-gal-luft-details-allegations-against-presidents-family-in-extraordinary-video/?&utm_campaign=devineonline&utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20230706&lctg=649c637ec7c6527b1b0fe213&utm_term=NYP%20-%20Devine%20Online

‘Missing’ Biden corruption case witness Dr. Gal Luft details allegations against president’s family in extraordinary video
By Miranda Devine
July 5, 2023 10:52pm  Updated
MORE FROM:
MIRANDA DEVINE
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Blowing the lid off the cover-up of Hunter Biden's cushy plea deal
Allegations against Biden and his family are too credible to wipe away with 'father's love' sob story
Heroic IRS whistleblower testimony ensnarls Hunter and Joe Biden in bribery scheme
This businessman — who went to prison for 2 years for corrupt donations to Biden — received jail time from the feds because he had wrong last name
The “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, Israeli professor Dr. Gal Luft, has laid out his bribery allegations against the president’s family in an extraordinary video filmed in an undisclosed location while he’s on the run.

In the 14-minute recording, obtained exclusively by The Post, the fugitive former Israeli army officer claims he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals with alleged ties to Chinese military intelligence and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with their benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.

The self-proclaimed fall guy says he provided the incriminating evidence to six officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice in a secret meeting in Brussels in March 2019 — but alleges that it was covered up.

“I, who volunteered to inform the US government about a potential security breach and about compromising information about a man vying to be the next president, am now being hunted by the very same people who I informed — and may have to live on the run for the rest of my life on the run …”

“I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I have no political motive or agenda … I did it out of deep concern that if the Bidens were to come to power, the country would be facing the same traumatic Russia collusion scandal — only this time with China. Sadly, because of the DOJ’s cover-up, this is exactly what happened …”

Dr. Gal Luft

Israeli professor Dr. Gal Luft laid out his bribery allegations against President Biden’s family in an extraordinary video filmed in an undisclosed location while he’s on the run.


Luft claims he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals with alleged ties to Chinese military intelligence.
AP
“I warned the government about potential risk to the integrity of the 2020 elections … Ask yourself, who is the real criminal in this story?”

The House Oversight chairman, Republican James Comer, who was preparing to interview Luft before Luft disappeared, says the Israeli remains a “potential witness” in the Biden family probe, despite his fugitive status.

It remains to be seen whether Luft is the man who will bring down the Bidens, but he is not going quietly into the sunset.

He is determined to tell the American public his version of the truth.

Calling himself “patient zero of the Biden family investigation,” Luft, 57, says he is innocent of charges of conspiring to sell Chinese weapons to Kenya, Libya and the UAE, of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and of making a false statement.

He says he was forced to skip bail in Cyprus in April while awaiting extradition “because I did not believe I will receive a fair trial in a New York court.”

Hunter Biden
The self-proclaimed fall guy says he provided the incriminating evidence to six officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice in a secret meeting in Brussels in March 2019 but alleges that it was covered up.
CNP / Polaris
‘Make evidence public’
Now he is challenging the government to release the minutes of the Brussels meeting and make public the evidence against him.

“Why did the DOJ choose to unseal the indictment on Nov. 1, 2022, the very same week of the midterm elections?” he asks.

“Could this have anything to do with the fear that once Republicans gain control over Congress and begin to investigate, [the DOJ] cover-up would be on full display?”

Luft says he told the DOJ and the FBI in Brussels that Joe Biden, soon after his vice presidential term ended, had attended a meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, DC, with his son Hunter and officials from CEFC.

Luft’s account of the former VP’s presence at that meeting was corroborated 21 months later when the FBI interviewed another attendee, Biden family associate Rob Walker, according to recent testimony before Congress.

Luft disclosed during the Brussels interview that CEFC was paying $100,000 a month to Hunter and $65,000 to his uncle Jim Biden, in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China’s Belt and Road Initiative around the world — and that the money was being funneled through Walker.

The Oversight Committee has written to Walker demanding he submit to questioning about his role in distributing more than $1 million from China to at least three of President Biden’s relatives.

The DOJ sent a delegation of six people to meet Luft in Brussels, he alleges: four FBI agents and two prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, Daniel Richenthal and Catherine Ghosh.

Among the FBI contingent was Special Agent Joshua Wilson from the Baltimore field office, who would go on to sign a subpoena later that year to seize Hunter’s abandoned laptop from a Delaware repair shop.

“Why did the government dispatch to Europe so many people?” asks Luft.

“They knew very well I’m a credible witness and I have insider knowledge about the group and individuals that enriched the Biden family.

“Over an intensive two-day meeting, I shared my information about the Biden family’s financial transactions with CEFC, including specific dollar figures. I also provided the name of Rob Walker, who later became known as Hunter Biden’s bagman.”

James Comer
Rep. James Comer, who was preparing to interview Luft before he disappeared, says the Israeli remains a “potential witness” in the Biden family probe, despite his fugitive status.
Getty Images

Think-tank ties
He also told the DOJ and the FBI in Brussels that Hunter had an FBI mole named “One Eye” who had tipped off his CEFC associates, Dr. Patrick Ho and Chairman Ye Jianming, that they were under investigation.

Luft is well connected in intelligence circles in Washington, DC, where he ran a think tank, the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, with former CIA Director James Woolsey and former national security adviser Robert McFarlane as advisers.

He learned in 2017 that Hunter and Jim Biden were being paid by CEFC because Luft was in partnership at the time with a nonprofit think tank associated with the Chinese company.

When Ho was arrested in 2017 in New York on bribery charges, the first person he tried to call was Hunter Biden, whom he had paid $1 million as a “legal retainer.”

But at his trial, Ho was blocked by prosecutors from mentioning the Bidens, according to Luft.

Ho “paid Hunter Biden a million dollars for God-knows-what [but] was not allowed to mention the word Biden before the jury,” says Luft.

Joe Biden, Hunter Biden
Luft also told the DOJ and the FBI in Brussels that Hunter had an FBI mole named “One Eye” who had tipped off his CEFC associates, Dr. Patrick Ho and Chairman Ye Jianming, that they were under investigation.
WireImage

“Prosecutor Daniel Richenthal told the judge at the time that mentioning the name Biden would ‘add a political dimension’ to the case, and the judge agreed. Which means if I was brought before a New York court, I would not be allowed to utter the word Brussels or Biden.”

Luft denies the charge that he is an arms dealer: “I was asked by a bona fide arms dealer, an Israeli friend, to inquire with a company I knew if they had an item and what would be the price of an item. This is where the conspiracy ended. No follow-up, no money, no brokering activity.”


He also faces FARA charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of CEFC.

“The DOJ says I caused a payment of $6,000 a month to former CIA Director James Woolsey in order to put his name on an article I had ghostwritten for the China Daily newspaper … Woolsey had been an adviser to my think tank since 2002 and nothing in the article represented Chinese interests.”

“Why am I being indicted … for ghostwriting an innocuous article for which I received no payment, let alone from a foreign government, when the mother of all FARA cases, the Bidens’ systemic influence-peddling on behalf of foreign governments, for which they raked [in] millions, goes unpunished?”

Attorney met with government
A curious addendum to Luft’s tale comes in October 2020, days after The Post’s bombshell revelations from Hunter’s laptop.

Luft dispatched his attorney, Robert Henoch, to Washington to meet the Trump administration’s acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue to repeat the allegations he had made in Brussels.

Donoghue also had been assigned by Attorney General Bill Barr in February 2020 to coordinate federal investigations into all Ukraine-related corruption allegations against Joe Biden.

Unbeknownst to Luft, on Sept. 4, Donoghue had ordered the Delaware US attorney to pause the criminal investigation into Hunter to avoid leaks in the two months before the election, according to testimony before Congress.

Donoghue agreed to meet Henoch at a Starbucks near DOJ headquarters and corresponded on his private email, says Luft, who showed The Post the emails between his attorney and the senior official.

“The story is about corruption at the very highest levels of government/politics and I think it can all be corroborated,” Henoch wrote.

Nothing ever came of the meeting — until February of this year, when Luft was arrested in Cyprus.
Title: Lin Wood "retired" from practice of law by GA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 06, 2023, 02:48:55 PM
Previous posts of mine have called him a grifter for raising money based upon specious claims.


https://www.theepochtimes.com/pro-trump-lawyer-lin-wood-announces-retirement_5375417.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2023-07-06&src_cmp=mb-2023-07-06&utm_medium=email
Title: whistleblower
Post by: ccp on July 11, 2023, 07:33:32 AM
fodder for Nicolle Wallace to speak about all day in attempt to delegitimize the whistleblower

so they can ignore what he says and simply attack HIM:

https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-doj-announces-multiple-indictments-against-whistleblower-who-alleged-biden-received-payments-from-ccp-affiliated-individuals?utm_campaign=64487

maybe he is guilty but what about Hunter/Joe?
Title: whistleblower : "chinese agent"
Post by: ccp on July 11, 2023, 09:19:59 AM
shysters always find a way:


https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-charges-alleged-gop-whistleblower-012348790.html

so is Hunter - a "chinese agent"
Title: Wray being question by Congress now
Post by: ccp on July 12, 2023, 08:15:04 AM
tonight :

Andrew Weissmand and Harry Litman :

on MSPCP and CNN - ---- >> "no , there , there !!!!!!!!!"

both with smirks and their "questioners" asking their prop guests with leading questions.

Title: epps suing Fox
Post by: ccp on July 13, 2023, 07:32:06 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fox-news-sued-for-defamation-by-man-named-in-jan-6-conspiracy-theories/ar-AA1dMlCU

"” In the recording, Epps urged Trump supporters to enter the Capitol on Jan. 6. “We need to go into the Capitol!” Epps told Gionet.

In his lawsuit, Epps claims he believed parts of the Capitol would be open to the public and that he thought Trump supporters would enter the building lawfully. "

you mean he did not see what we saw - pt climbing the walls and breaking windows to get in .

I still think this lawsuit is shysterism ...........

Title: Whistleblower document reveals
Post by: DougMacG on July 13, 2023, 08:13:35 PM
https://www.idahotribune.org/news/exclusive-bombshell-new-whistleblower-document-reveals-multi-agency-criminal-conspiracy-to-spy-on-and-entrap-law-abiding-americans
Title: Deep State gone wild ...
Post by: DougMacG on July 19, 2023, 02:03:28 PM
https://babylonbee.com/news/trump-indicted-for-the-1996-murder-of-tupac-shakur
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on July 19, 2023, 03:19:08 PM
and if you disagree you are a white racist bigot pig

 :wink:

calling Ben Crump and the "rev"
Title: They've been getting away with murder for a very long time
Post by: DougMacG on July 20, 2023, 06:12:35 AM
https://freebeacon.com/democrats/ted-kennedy-mary-jo-kopechne/
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on July 20, 2023, 04:23:14 PM
what about the cousin accused of rape at the Kennedy compound

what happened to every woman must be believed ?
Title: And thus the outcome of the election was changed by the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 21, 2023, 07:56:55 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/jul/20/fbi-told-twitter-hunter-biden-laptop-was-real-soon/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=9UBPUph4kVeH2g56ysLBGJZckqMCpU2Df%2FmhK8aX%2B3B%2FGnaiX5Jsx9kIuOp1ff1L&bt_ts=1689893390615
Title: Interview w Soros backed DA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 21, 2023, 08:14:54 AM


https://rumble.com/v30q0mm-soros-backed-da-complains-about-families-of-murder-victims.html
Title: WSJ: Retired IRS Attorney: You'd go to prison for what Hunter did:
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 26, 2023, 07:45:04 AM
You’d Go to Prison for What Hunter Biden Did
In reaching his plea deal, the Justice Department violated every norm in the tax-enforcement book.
By Eileen J. O’Connor
July 25, 2023 12:52 pm ET

While the U.S. attorney for Delaware was negotiating for Hunter Biden to plead to two misdemeanor tax charges, other things were happening in neighboring New Jersey. Last week U.S. District Judge Stanley R. Chesler sentenced Gabriel M. Ferrari, owner of a Linden auto-repair shop, to one year and one day in prison after Mr. Ferrari pleaded guilty to filing a false company tax return. His return failed to include all his income and claimed deductions for personal expenses, including gambling on horse races. In addition to the prison term, he will be required to pay restitution.

Prison for tax crimes is real. In the 1990s, New York hotelier Leona Helmsley served nearly two years in prison for defrauding the government by having her business pay her personal expenses and claim tax deductions for them.

According to sworn and transcribed testimony that Internal Revenue Service whistleblowers provided to the House Ways and Means Committee and confirmed at last week’s House Oversight Committee hearing, the IRS investigation of Hunter Biden began “as an offshoot of an investigation the IRS was conducting into a foreign-based amateur online pornography platform.” Agents established that, for the six years 2014 through 2019, Mr. Biden failed to report or pay tax on perhaps $17.3 million he received from questionable sources. He filed returns several years late, and when he did file them, he claimed as business deductions the cost of his drug dealer’s hotel room, call girls, sex-club dues and his daughter’s tuition at Columbia University.

What has been called Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal, however, wasn’t the subject of the House Oversight Committee’s July 19 hearing, where the two whistleblowers testified. Instead, lawmakers intended to explore ways in which the IRS special agents said the Justice Department had thwarted their probe and violated law-enforcement norms—among them:

• Denying permission to execute search warrants for which prosecutors agreed probable cause had been established, including the guest house Hunter Biden had occupied at President Biden’s Delaware home and the storage facility in Virginia where he reportedly had moved records of the numerous entities he had likely used to receive income from various sources.

• Stalling investigative steps on account of an upcoming election six months away, whereas the Justice Department tradition is to refrain from indicting or taking overt investigative steps for only 60 days preceding an election.

• Alerting the attorneys for the subject of the investigation that a search warrant would be executed to obtain documents and other evidence.

• Denying authority to interview essential witnesses, including family members and business associates, including those who could shed light on the meaning of “10% held by H for the big guy.”

Looked at with the full picture in mind, it is difficult not to wonder if those lines of investigation would have found evidence that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s apparent shakedowns of foreign governments and entities. (The president has repeatedly denied ever discussing business matters with his son.)

Democrats on the Oversight Committee accused the witnesses of being overly enthusiastic about bringing criminal charges, and cited testimony that IRS criminal tax attorneys often disagreed with their prosecution recommendations. That’s irrelevant. IRS criminal tax lawyers’ timidity about recommending prosecution is common knowledge in the tax-enforcement community. Further, their views are advisory only. Officials in the Justice Department’s Tax Division decide whether to authorize bringing criminal charges. They did.

The Special Agent Report was sent to the Tax Division in February 2021. It was more than 1,000 pages long, describing each element of each alleged crime for each year, each piece of the evidence supporting each element, and the venue in which those charges could be brought. More than a year after the Tax Division received the report, it produced a 99-page memorandum supporting the recommended charges, six felonies and five misdemeanors. Each of these charges can carry prison time, some of them as long as five years.

Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley testified that Mr. Weiss told the prosecution team he then approached the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia about filing the 2014 and 2015 charges there and was rebuffed. Notwithstanding that Hunter Biden’s attorneys had extended the statute of limitations several times and would have again, Mr. Weiss let it expire.

For the government to permit the statute of limitations to expire is unheard of. When a taxpayer refuses a government request to extend the statute of limitations, the government goes ahead and brings the charges. According to the whistleblowers, that couldn’t happen here because, contrary to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s sworn statements to Congress, Mr. Weiss lacked the authority to bring charges in the District of Columbia.

For many years, it has been Justice Department policy to charge the most serious offense that can be proven. Mr. Garland changed that policy in December 2022. The Tax Division Manual, however, still provides that prosecutors are specifically prohibited from permitting a defendant to plead to a misdemeanor when the elements of a felony can be proven. Yet according to the whistleblowers’ accounts, that is what is happening here.

In 2020 the Justice Department realized that the prosecution of Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn had been based on falsehoods and filed a motion in the federal district court to dismiss the charges. The judge believed the motion to dismiss was politically motivated, and appointed John Gleeson, a retired federal judge, to look into the matter. Judge Gleeson filed a brief asserting that the judge wasn’t obligated to accept an attempt to embroil the judiciary in a “corrupt, politically motivated decision.”

On Wednesday Judge Maryellen Noreika will be presented with the scandalously lenient plea deal Mr. Weiss worked out for Hunter Biden, under which he would suffer no penalty for years of serious and willful violations of U.S. tax laws. Will she accept it?

Ms. O’Connor, a Washington lawyer, headed the U.S. Justice Department’s tax division, 2001-07.
Title: JW sues CIA over Hunter laptop story suppression
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 20, 2023, 07:09:09 AM
Judicial Watch Sues CIA Over Pre-Election Letter Attacking Hunter Laptop Story



Acting CIA Director Michael Morell was up early on October 19, 2020, furthering a scheme that would significantly affect the outcome of the presidential election.

U.S. House investigators are quite curious about that, and so are we.

We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the CIA for all communications of the spy agency’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) regarding an October 19, 2020, email request to review and “clear” a letter signed by 51 former intelligence community officials characterizing the Hunter Biden laptop story as having “all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign” (Judicial Watch v. Central Intelligence Agency (No. 1:23-cv-01844)).

In October 2020, in the run-up to the presidential election, the New York Post reported that Hunter Biden’s laptop, which was abandoned at a Delaware computer shop, contained embarrassing and possibly incriminating information about the Biden family. In a May 10, 2023, report the House Judiciary Committee revealed that on October 19, 2020, three days before the second presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democrat candidate Joe Biden, then-acting CIA Director Michael Morell sent the PCRB the finalized letter for review, calling it a “rush job,” and quickly secured its approval.

We sued after the CIA failed to respond to a May 11, 2023, FOIA request for:
Records and communications of the Prepublication Classification Review Board, Central Intelligence Agency, including emails, email chains, email attachments, text messages, cables, voice recordings, correspondence, statements, letters, memoranda, reports, presentations, notes, or other form of record, regarding an October 19, 2020, email request to review and “clear” a letter involving the Hunter Biden laptop story potentially having Russian involvement or being a Russian disinformation plot.

In a May 16, 2023, letter to CIA Director William Burns, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Michael R. Turner stated that the committees were conducting oversight of the October 2020 “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails” signed by 51 former intelligence community officials.

Jordan and Turner wrote:
The CIA has documents responsive to our requests and necessary to our oversight. On October 19, 2020, at 6:34 a.m., Morell submitted the statement to the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB), instructing it was “a rush job, as it needs to get out as soon as possible.” The PCRB staff responded at 7:11 a.m. that it had received the statement, and cleared it for publication at 12:44 p.m. on the same day.

Morell speculated that the quick turn-around from the PCRB was because “[t]hey are probably afraid I’m coming back” as CIA director. On May 9, 2023, the CIA produced to the Committees two emails: Morell’s email to the PCRB early on October 19, 2023, and the PCRB’s response at 12:44 p.m. However, the Committees have reason to believe additional documents remain in the possession of the CIA.

The Committees have received evidence that the CIA, or at least an employee of the CIA, may have helped to solicit signatories for the statement about Hunter Biden. According to former CIA employee David Cariens, he spoke with the PCRB in October 2020 regarding the review of his memoir and during that call a CIA employee “asked” him if he would sign the statement. As Cariens explained:

When the person in charge of reviewing the book called to say it was approved with no changes, I was told about the draft letter. The person asked me if I would be willing to sign. . . . After hearing the letter’s contents, and the qualifiers in it such as, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement . . ’ I agreed to sign.
If accurate, this information raises fundamental concerns about the role of the CIA in helping to falsely discredit allegations about the Biden family in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

A House Judiciary Committee report details the testimony of former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos and criticized the CIA’s handling of the letter:
Q. Does what [Former CIA official David Cariens] described there, that interaction with the [Prepublication Classification Review Board], sound like a quid pro quo to you?

A. I can’t comment on this. This is—to me, this is something that the [Prepublication Classification Review Board] in my experience would never engage in something like that. They are just straightforward back and forth in terms of approval. The idea they would have a comment on any other thing that they were working on, that to me is not even close to what I’ve experienced with them.

Q. Does that concern you?

A. If it’s true, it would concern me, for sure. But I just—I have a hard time believing that occurred. If it did, that’s incredibly unprofessional.

Congressional testimony also confirms that the Biden campaign was behind the creation of the infamous Hunter laptop letter promoted by the CIA.

The Deep State CIA, it seems, engaged in election interference and a political operation against the American people to help Joe Biden and hurt Trump. And now the CIA is ignoring FOIA law to cover up its role in the scandal, censoring and suppressing the Hunter Biden/Joe Biden laptop story just before the presidential election.

We have multiple federal lawsuits focused on Biden family corruption:
In July, we sued the DOJ for records from the Office of the Attorney General and Office of the Deputy Attorney General regarding the Internal Revenue Service investigation of Hunter Biden.

In June 2023, we filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice for a copy of the FBI FD-1023 form that describes “an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions.” Judicial Watch also asked for communications about the FD-1023.

In May 2023, we filed a FOIA lawsuit against the National Archives for Biden family records and communications regarding travel and finance transactions, as well as communications between the Bidens and several known business associates.

On October 14, 2022, we sued DOJ for all records in the possession of FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten regarding an August 6, 2020, briefing provided to members of the U.S. Senate. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) raised concerns that the briefing was intended to undermine the senators’ investigation of Hunter Biden.

We filed a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department on April 20, 2022, for messages sent through the SMART (State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolkit) system that mention Hunter Biden.

In December 2020, State Department records obtained through our FOIA lawsuit showed that former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch had specifically warned in 2017 about corruption allegations against Burisma Holdings.

In October 2020, we forced the release of State Department records that included a briefing checklist of a February 22, 2019, meeting in Kyiv between then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and Sally Painter, co-founder and chief operating officer of Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic lobbying firm which was hired by Burisma Holdings to combat corruption allegations. At the time of the meeting, Hunter Biden was serving on the board of directors for Burisma Holdings.

I’ll be sure to let you know if and when the CIA ponies up any documents on this Biden election scandal, so be sure to check back here for updates on this and all our other cases.

Title: Levin: The Dems and the 14th Amendment
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 10, 2023, 07:44:16 PM
https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/levin-the-democrat-partys-fetish-for-the-14th-amendment-is-a-vile-attack-on-our-elections-directed-at-one-man-donald-trump
Title: Enrique Tarrio: Feds offered deal if I lied about Trump
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 11, 2023, 03:07:48 AM
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/09/enrique-tarrio-tells-all-after-sentencing-feds-asked/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=enrique-tarrio-tells-all-after-sentencing-feds-asked
Title: DOJ drops case against Flynn's partner
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 11, 2023, 03:27:59 PM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/11/justice-department-case-against-michael-flynns-former-business-partner/?pnespid=6bs3A31YMLwD3aTbuGi1Tp2d4kKqV4R3LfmiwfBxpEdmZIukA22FmH.9RTdaNPG7UzSGProD
Title: Tucker: How Deep is the Deep State? serious read
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 12, 2023, 05:39:38 AM


https://lists.youmaker.com/archive/1Gencyql26/5kdG8QBtO/kMkRvdu2ns4m
Title: Speaker McCarthy's office invaded
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 15, 2023, 09:39:45 AM
https://americanactionnews.com/breaking/2023/09/11/breaking-leftists-storm-the-capitol-mccarthys-office-invaded/?fbclid=IwAR05IjI8FcQ5byjyE92ExQsIGpMLtQaaLGgCrTP0yafMxS7lSOr83PI8GqU
Title: FDA blows off Appeals Court
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 17, 2023, 05:06:02 PM
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/fda-refuses-to-change-anti-ivermectin-statements-after-court-ruling-5492215?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2023-09-17&src_cmp=gv-2023-09-17&utm_medium=email&est=T21uxs%2Fsesmk6%2BcaU8rXZyNLuBLUyzy5Hjx7zGKBXI9bu7Bm9tsp2wzLuDBqaHLGH3LV
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on September 18, 2023, 08:45:25 AM
I think the FDAs view on ivermectin for corona is that it is a waste of time

I agree.

As far as their making recommendation against it , it is their opinion.

I don't see why they cannot make public their opinion.

Doctors can still prescribe it despite what they say.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2023, 03:46:25 PM
"court said it acted outside of its authority when it told people to stop using it"
Title: The FBI knew
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 10, 2023, 08:25:06 AM
FBI FD-302 — SUMMARIZING TONY BOBULINKSI’S INTERVIEW — RELEASED… INCLUDES MORE EVIDENCE THAT THE FBI DEFINITELY KNEW HUNTER’S LAPTOP WAS REAL… FBI Knew New York Post’s Hunter Biden Laptop Story Was Real Ahead Of 2020 Election, FBI Form Shows

The FBI knew the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop featured in the New York Post’s reporting ahead of the 2020 presidential election were real, according to a newly released FBI FD-302 form summarizing the bureau’s interview with Hunter Biden’s former business associate, Tony Bobulinski.

The FBI interviewed Bobulinski on Oct. 23, 2020 after the New York Post’s story contained emails from the Hunter Biden laptop archive Bobulinski was copied on, the FD-302 form states. Bobulinski told the FBI he knew the emails were legitimate and had records of the emails on multiple cell phones, the form asserts.

“In addition, the New York Post recently published HUNTER BIDEN emails in which BOBULINSKI was copied. BOBULINSKI’s name was not redacted from the published emails, which put his name in the public domain and caused significant concern for his family’s safety,” the document reads. The FD-302 form’s contents were first reported by the New York Post.

“Nonetheless, BOBULINSKI was aware that the emails published by the New York Post were legitimate because BOBULINSKI was copied on them and had records of the emails on his own cellular devices,” the document adds.

“BOBULINSKI declined to provide his three cell phones to the FBI for imaging. BOBULINSKI voluntarily provided the interviewing agents with copies of emails and text messages that were contained on PASSANTINO’s laptop computer. The emails and text messages were loaded onto a flash drive that was in the possession of PASSANTINO,” the document specifies.
Title: VDH Excoriates
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 12, 2023, 10:13:13 AM
‘Nuff said:

https://victorhanson.com/two-sets-of-laws-for-two-americas/?fbclid=IwAR0P4RscGDUZRMUq8qiZiO0zOOQzwbOnmWrI4KqSlNoiUxktEadL-czZrhU
Title: Eastman makes his case and pitchese for money
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 14, 2023, 11:17:33 AM
Dear Friend,

The outrageous prosecution of me by California state bar officials has entered its sixth long week.  The term prosecution is really not apt. It's more like persecution by activist lawyers determined to Get President Trump and every lawyer like me who had the temerity to defend his right to lawfully challenge illegalities in the 2020 election.

The crux of the State Bar's case against me is its claim that there was no evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 presidential elections and my legal filings on behalf of President Trump and my public statements to the contrary show that I am unfit to be a lawyer.

Support The John Eastman Legal Defense Fund
This is the outrageous and false position that State Bar prosecutors have staked out in court for week after week.  But now, FINALLY, I have been able to begin to present my defense.

Through the efforts of my legal team and the blockbuster testimony of my amazing witnesses, the American people are FINALLY seeing all of the election illegality and fraud that we all saw with our own eyes back in 2020 get its day in court.

This attack against me by the California State Bar mirrors the charges of a partisan lawfare group that is determined to put me, President Trump and all of his defenders in prison. I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending against these outrageously false charges, and I am looking at over $1 million in additional costs.

All of this is happening because I agreed with President Trump that the 2020 election involved massive irregularities and illegalities, and I agreed to help him present his case in the courts and Congress.  Please help me defend against these false charges and ensure I have the resources needed to take on these leftwing lawfare radicals by donating to the John Eastman Legal Defense Fund, LLC.

DONATE $15

DONATE $25

DONATE $50

DONATE $100

DONATE $250

DONATE $500

DONATE $1,000 or more

Here's a quick run down on how my legal team has demolished the State Bar prosecutors' case against me:

Berkeley Law School Professor John Yoo who, like me, is an expert in constitutional law and particularly in the original meaning of the Constitution, explained in great detail, despite efforts by the Bar's lawyers to block his testimony, that based on his extensive research the majority of the scholarship on this subject agreed with my position as presented in court filings and public statements, that the Vice President had the ultimate decision-making authority to resolve disputes about contested electoral votes.

Justice Michael Gabelman, former Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the individual appointed by the Wisconsin legislature to serve as Special Counsel investigating the Wisconsin elections, testified at length about the widespread illegalities in Wisconsin in 2020.

John Eastman Legal Defense Fund
These included Democrat counties accepting millions in funding from a Mark Zuckerberg group to help them conduct the election, including efforts to boost Democrat turnout, as well as the illegal use of drop boxes, illegal processing of absentee ballots and illegal balloting in nursing homes and similar facilities.  One Democrat operative even took over running the Green Bay elections office!

Then my team brought forth an election integrity expert from Georgia, Garland Favorito, who offered extensive testimony about irregularities and illegalities in that state. These included the destruction of 1.7 million ballot images, the deletion of video surveillance for 181,000 ballots cast at drop boxes, and clearly fraudulent ballots that were counted.

For example, Favorito said there was flat-out fraud where he found 7 falsified tally sheets with 850 Biden votes to 0 Trump votes as well as mail-in ballots in Fulton County that weren't folded even though they must be mailed to voters.

Along with other problems, including ballots that were filled out electronically instead of with a regular pen and other ballots that did not have the correct paper stock, Mr. Favorito testified that the total of counterfeit ballots substantially exceeded Joe Biden's margin of victory in Georgia.

Help Me Fight These False Charges
So much for the ridiculous claim that there was no evidence of election illegalities.

I look forward to continuing to present my defense this week, which hopefully will include testimony from officials in Arizona concerning irregularities and illegalities there.

In addition to the inordinate amount of my time I have had to devote to this trial, all while preparing for the upcoming Georgia prosecution by leftwing DA Fani Willis, the financial burden imposed on me by having full trial teams in place for what will end up being 7 or 8 weeks of trial has also been immense. It weighs heavily on me and my family.

Support The John Eastman Legal Defense Fund
As you know, aside from this disbarment proceeding in California and the upcoming Georgia trial, I have also been named an unindicted co-conspirator in Jack Smith's prosecution of President Trump in Washington, DC over the election challenges.

The only way that I can even comprehend being able to manage the over $1 million in additional legal expenses I am facing is knowing that there are patriotic American like you who will have my back.

The leftwing lawfare Democrats want to destroy me, bankrupt my family, and throw me in prison. My family and I can't do this alone, which is why I am asking if you will step forward with a generous donation to my legal defense fund. I urgently need your help.

I'll help by donating $15

I'll help by donating $25

I'll help by donating $50

l'll help by donating $100

I'll help by donating $250

I'll help by donating $500

I'll help by donating $1,000 or more

Let me end by thanking you for your friendship and support, and with one more request: please keep me and my family in your prayers. This is a spiritual battle as much as it is a legal battle. We need your ongoing prayers.

Sincerely,


John Eastman

Constitutional Scholar

Attorney for President Donald Trump

P.S. Contributions to my legal defense fund are not deductible for federal income tax purposes.


https://john-eastman-legal-defense-fund-llc.revv.co/victoria-email/?ex_tid=20231014_Indigo-5-V3.110704_john-eastman_t1400136-2927
Title: Peter Thiel was an FBI informant?!?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 20, 2023, 11:07:56 AM
https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-fbi-informant-charles-johnson-johnathan-buma-chs-genius-2023-10
Title: Re: Peter Thiel was an FBI informant?!?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 20, 2023, 12:41:16 PM
https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-fbi-informant-charles-johnson-johnathan-buma-chs-genius-2023-10

I saw that and almost shared. It seems more than possible, but I'd really like to see something more before I damn Thiel, though this sounds straight out of the current FBI playbook.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 20, 2023, 01:51:21 PM
Hence the question marks in my Subject line.  Despite its name, my sense of Business Insider is that it is scurrilous left.
Title: Powell Overcharged in GA: Lawfare @ its Finest
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 20, 2023, 01:59:37 PM
This piece argues the Fulton county DA overcharged codefendants to flip them, as she would not have so quickly dealt down to misdemeanors if she had something solid. Makes me wonder if there is not some other lurking hand to be played should this pattern prove consistent, until it's Trump's turn:

https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/20/sidney-powells-plea-proves-fulton-county-prosecutor-went-nuclear-to-get-trump/?fbclid=IwAR0YIoZ8Bv8bn5ESgpg9PRKteP6-Vdrob9GfYesQda_BcNUnm_PZBFKhnb4
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 20, 2023, 02:06:01 PM
This is a very good point BBG, one well worth keeping in mind in discussions with those who are naively impressed by such things.
Title: Another Fulton Refugee
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 20, 2023, 06:15:40 PM
Another GA defendent takes a plea. The letters of apology the prosecutor is stipulating have a Soviet/Orwellian quality to them:

https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/10/trump-georgia-case-kenneth-chesebro-takes-last-minute-plea-deal/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trump-georgia-case-kenneth-chesebro-takes-last-minute-plea-deal
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 21, 2023, 07:35:04 AM
"The letters of apology the prosecutor is stipulating have a Soviet/Orwellian quality to them."

Indeed!!!
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on October 21, 2023, 08:23:37 AM
or terrorist quality

have a hostage speak into the camera and state she is fine, being treated well.
Title: WSJ: Dem War on SCOTUS
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 08, 2023, 03:53:07 PM
Senate Democrats can’t accept that the Supreme Court no longer does their policy bidding, so they’re trying to discredit it. The latest effort is a subpoena threat against the friends of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.


Led by Sheldon Whitehouse and his spokesman Dick Durbin, the Judiciary Committee has been threatening subpoenas against Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo and Robin Arkley II. Their supposed crime: bestowing “lavish, undisclosed gifts” on the Justices, enabling “private access to the justices” while “preventing public scrutiny,” and contributing to a Supreme Court “ethical crisis of its own making.”

There is no crisis, nor are there ethics violations, and Justices are allowed to have friends—even if they’re rich. But this isn’t about the facts. This is about gathering headlines to tarnish these men and the Court.

Justice Thomas is under progressive attack for taking private plane trips for summer vacations to the house of his longtime friend, Mr. Crow, among other alleged sins. Justice Alito was raked for a fishing trip to Alaska—15 years ago—with Mr. Arkley and Mr. Leo.

As these pages have explained, the Court’s rules at the time didn’t require that gifts of personal hospitality be disclosed. The U.S. Judicial Conference this year changed its standards to require more disclosure, and Justices have started providing more details about trips. None of the media reports has turned up an instance of a conflict that would have required a Justice to recuse himself from a case.

Democrats have already passed legislation in the Judiciary Committee that would subject the Justices to ethics supervision by lower-court judges. This includes whether they should be able to hear cases when outsiders object—which political actors on the left and right inevitably will if this became law. This attempt by Congress to regulate a co-equal branch of government is probably unconstitutional.

Mr. Leo is a particular target given his role in recommending judges to Presidents and his financial support for conservative causes. In one typical tweet last month, Sen. Whitehouse slammed “the ubiquitous fixer Leonard Leo” as part of a “filthy web of dark money, right-wing billionaires, compliant Supreme Court Justices.” The ad hominem and fact-free slander gives his political game away.

The committee insists its goal is to understand “access to justices made possible by both disclosed and undisclosed transportation, lodging, and other gifts,” but notice the absence of subpoena threats to benefactors of liberal Justices. Those Justices have disclosed hundreds of trips, many to luxury destinations, bankrolled by progressive policy and legal organizations, where the black robes hobnobbed with activists. We have no reason to believe these trips have corrupted their legal opinions, but the one-sided attack tells the real story.

We’re told some of the other Democratic targets have turned over information to the committee under political and business pressure. But Mr. Leo is holding firm and says he won’t “bow to the vile and disgusting liberal McCarthyism that seeks to destroy the Supreme Court simply because it follows the Constitution rather than their political agenda.”

His lawyer, David Rivkin, recently sent a letter to the committee also noting that it has already passed legislation about the Court. Therefore its investigation lacks “legislative purpose” and can’t compel compliance with a subpoena.

Democrats are nonetheless poised on Thursday to vote to subpoena Mr. Leo, and the question is whether Republicans will unite to call this what it is: an attempt to tarnish the Supreme Court by innuendo.

Ranking committee Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told Democrats that he and Sen. Chuck Grassley are crafting their own subpoena list and says: “If you want a subpoena war, you’re going to get one.” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell scored the Democratic subpoena threat as the “targeting” of “private citizens with no legislation purpose” that is “completely and totally inappropriate.”

While the Judiciary Committee can issue subpoenas, they can only be enforced by the full Senate—subject to a 60-vote filibuster. If Republicans wilt on this one, they will contribute to a scurrilous campaign to damage the independence of the judiciary
Title: FBI gets new building bigger than Pentagon
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 10, 2023, 07:55:19 PM

 https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1722456341250285577
Title: NYT wonders of NYC mayor was targetted due to criticism of Biden
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 13, 2023, 06:47:21 AM
https://americanwirenews.com/new-york-times-wonders-if-targeting-of-nyc-mayor-is-tied-to-recent-biden-criticism/?utm_campaign=james&utm_content=11%2F11%2F23%20SOE%20AM&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=Get%20response&utm_term=email
Title: Purging at the FBI
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 13, 2023, 07:12:32 AM
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/nov/10/whistleblowers-fbi-officials-singled-out-agents-wh/
Title: who would have guessed
Post by: ccp on November 16, 2023, 02:24:54 PM
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/11/16/report-joe-biden-escape-charges-mishandling-classified-docs/

all the shysters on MSNBC and CNN telling us, with grinning faces, how this is just, and coming up with novel ways to explain with forked twisted tongues and arguments why Trump's case is *different*

funny, how only shysters can seem to comprehend the differences.

ooh they are soooo smart

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2023, 06:49:36 PM
Pissing on us and calling it rain.
Title: Fox news journolist ordered to give up source
Post by: ccp on November 17, 2023, 07:30:41 AM
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/veteran-journalist-could-face-severe-financial-sanctions-for-refusing-to-give-up-source/ar-AA1k57cr?ocid=msedgntp&pc=DCTS&cvid=8d7313074c6b4a1d957e968f0c2900da&ei=18

I thought the SCOTUS ruled on this a long time ago.

NYT WP "jurnolisters" .

NEVER to my knowledge ever have to give up their sources

but Fox should be held to a different standard because as the shysters will twist turn and lie that this case is "different",
while all the while forceably attempting to hold back their grins.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 17, 2023, 08:08:56 AM
Herridge is a first rate quality reporter.  A real blow to FOX to have lost her.   Hope the article is right that FOX is backing her play on this.   Let's be sure to see how the judge rules!
Title: We win one!
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 17, 2023, 10:51:00 AM
https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/17/ventura-county-police-arrest-pro-palestinian-professor-in-death-of-jewish-protester/
Title: Pompro calls out the Deep State at the State Dept.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 18, 2023, 07:56:41 PM
https://truebattle.org/political-coverage/pompeo-slams-biden-admin-officials-who-signed-dissent-letter-on-israel-hamas-moral-compass-is-broken/
Title: Hillsdale: J6, the corruption of the FBI, and the war on the rule of law
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 03, 2023, 06:57:02 AM


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9km96cZtKBY
Title: speaking of Hillsdale got this in Imprimis this month :CIA corruption
Post by: ccp on December 03, 2023, 09:25:38 AM
Truly eye opening and infuriating how CIA co opted by Dem Party:

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/why-the-cia-no-longer-works-and-how-to-fix-it/
Title: You Can’t Make this Stuff Up, But They Did
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 08, 2023, 10:30:52 PM
Check out the astounding lengths federal Covid fabulists went to enforce a false narrative and abridge the abilities of others to take issue with it:

https://nypost.com/2023/12/07/opinion/bidens-state-dept-paid-newsguard-to-tar-organizations-like-ours/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR3K8mqhb6t5zfxqsbTC3slcbqAJJxbyW9iSWxbG6ejgU5IxEAhf2ix6FNE
Title: Re: You Can’t Make this Stuff Up, But They Did
Post by: DougMacG on December 09, 2023, 10:47:31 AM
Check out the astounding lengths federal Covid fabulists went to enforce a false narrative and abridge the abilities of others to take issue with it:

https://nypost.com/2023/12/07/opinion/bidens-state-dept-paid-newsguard-to-tar-organizations-like-ours/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons&fbclid=IwAR3K8mqhb6t5zfxqsbTC3slcbqAJJxbyW9iSWxbG6ejgU5IxEAhf2ix6FNE

Un bleeping believable.  Except that I fully believe it.  First reaction of mine is visceral beyond words (and should have stopped there).  Second reaction involves action verbs I do not want tied to my name and IP address on the public internet.  Third is to ask, is it remediable through legal channels now and by winning future elections?

What's wrong with this picture?  Too much to name but start with what I call public private partnerships.  The Left and moderate Left brag when they partner with the private sector in their government programs and 'solutions'.  I say run and scream bloody murder every time you hear or see this. 

Government is (should be) the referee enforcing the level playing field, not wearing one team's jersey.

Wrapped up in this is equal treatment under the law, and the disposal of that value.

Not to mention freedom of speech and of the press...

A couple of definitions, communism or pure socialism (in theory) is when the public sector owns everything and we are all equal owners.  Fascism in my definition is when the private sector is controlled by government.  Fascism is worse because of the nefarious dishonesty in it.  'Well it was actually google or facebook that took all your private information and the government got it from them'.  How is that different than the government violating your right of privacy?  Only the fig leaf of legitimism offered by the dishonest, non-existent separation.  So many examples, housing, energy, healthcare, higher education, transportation.  Now journalism.

Reminds me of a refugee from the Soviet Union asked about Pravda, the real one not the ones we joke about here.  It was state media, one channel and every knew it was state lies.  In America, you have dozens, hundreds of thousands of choices to see and hear, and they tell the same lies.  Point is, it is more believable when you have all of them saying it, and that is worse.  Russian collusion, climate catastrophe, Republicans want to starve the poor and take Grandma's meds, and then pandemic.

I hate that about our media and about our failure to figure out how to successfully fight back.

Now they've taken it to another level, violation the first amendment and who knows what else.

The next thing that gets me is the lack of outrage about it on the other side.  First they never get the facts and second they are ho-hum about it when they do.  Do they ever ask themselves honestly what they would think of it if the sides were reversed.  If Trump did this...

IRS targeting was another example, don't get me started on that.  Imagine the outrage if Trump tried what Obama actually accomplished, shutting down his opposition, preventing them from organizing under our tax laws the way Left groups do.  Now they target the same groups and more with FBI.

Then there is the election thing.  They protested and contested every close election when they lost.  But when their opposition does the same thing, it's impeachment, prosecution.  We had a Democrat (Jamie Bowman) disrupt an official proceeding and he received not even a citation for the same thing people are rotting in jail and losing their rights over.

I have very calmly told close friends on the other side there is going to be a civil war.  I'm not calling for it, I don't even own any those instruments of the second amendment type but I can see the signs of what's coming when the overreach keeps reaching further and further.

Consensual government is our foundation.  People need to believe they can do all the legitimate political activities involved in elective government and have a fair chance of process.  They need to feel they had a fair chance to win when they lose and they need to be able to direct and control government within constitutional constraints when they win.  Something else is going on today.
Title: FBI: Law Enforcement Org or Blackmail Machine?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 12, 2023, 09:31:00 PM
This is so freaking infuriating. I’ve come to conclude the FBI is strictly a political organization—one willing to embrace criminal means in support of its political ends—that maintains a veneer of investigative rigor.

Indeed, while laying in bed contending with sundry medical travails I looked for interesting action dramas, and noted there are A LOT of FBI related shows, shows that glorify that thoroughly corrupt agency. This does not happen by accident. Dimes to dollars somewhere in the bowels of some FBI edifice there is an office charged with working with Hollywood to extol the virtues of that foul agency. Those bastards need it, and best pray constitutional order is never restored to the Republic as they have accrued a huge debt to pay.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/congressional-republicans-facilitate-the-fbis-fisa-abuse/?fbclid=IwAR2fpBGbVVK4AXaxhkPeRBLksa2SMZ7Lq3S2TGaEmD-0j4TqJcsRwg_DojI
Title: Hillary, in Fact, was Russia’s Preference
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 15, 2023, 09:26:34 PM
I have read so much self-righteous twaddle based on the false reporting based on these sorts of massaged papers I’m torn between beating the twaddlers over the head with it, or waiting a couple months so I can berate them for failing to admit they were wrong despite ample time to do so.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/09/24/secret_report_how_cias_brennan_overruled_dissenting_analysts_who_thought_russia_favored_hillary_125315.html?fbclid=IwAR1daPNV1KCYheBKY4J0l0kuEqy2UuwduYslhBl6ldmKKx-krk9HytAt9B0
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on December 15, 2023, 09:59:28 PM
we see Hillary "helping" Biden in the news a lot lately

she isn't doing this without expecting something in return.

There are certain people who should be thoroughly gone over with a fine tooth comb

such as Brennan, Garland, the DOJ attorney who resigned Wolf off the top of my head

maybe sally yates loretta lynch....

in the name of justice not revenge

if Trump wins - big if.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 16, 2023, 06:45:12 AM
BBG:  Do I remember correctly that Brennan was a member of the Communist Party at some point?
Title: Re: Hillary, in Fact, was Russia’s Preference
Post by: DougMacG on December 16, 2023, 07:24:16 AM
I have read so much self-righteous twaddle based on the false reporting based on these sorts of massaged papers I’m torn between beating the twaddlers over the head with it, or waiting a couple months so I can berate them for failing to admit they were wrong despite ample time to do so.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/09/24/secret_report_how_cias_brennan_overruled_dissenting_analysts_who_thought_russia_favored_hillary_125315.html?fbclid=IwAR1daPNV1KCYheBKY4J0l0kuEqy2UuwduYslhBl6ldmKKx-krk9HytAt9B0

Right.  The other narrative never made sense.  It cost Putin 4 years in his pursuit of Ukraine, and Trump started the US competing for Russia's oil and gas customers.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on December 16, 2023, 07:39:55 AM
Brennan the stuff online now states he voted for the communist in '76 and when he interviewed for CIA in '80 "he chose to be forthcoming" about this and got hired by CIA anyway.

I think the part where he states he chose to be forthcoming is very telling.
We know now he is an out and out lying DNC member.

I also remember Leon Panetta as a Congressman thought we should do away with national borders.
Another CIA director.
I can't find the source now on this though but am nearly certain this was true.

Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State, Brennan
Post by: DougMacG on December 16, 2023, 07:43:33 AM
I'm sure the statute of limitations ticked away on his congressional testimony.  He should be in jail right now for lying to Congress. 

While we're at it, Lois Lerner should be in jail and Obama impeached.  But no.  But when the Left does it, it isn't a crime.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 16, 2023, 07:59:59 PM
BBG:  Do I remember correctly that Brennan was a member of the Communist Party at some point?

I have heard the same, go figure. There was a time when a Marxist leading the CIA would be seen as a Very Bad Thing, these days the fact causes the MSM to stifle yawns.
Title: Jack Smith then DNC hitman wants trial date
Post by: ccp on December 19, 2023, 06:25:30 AM
for March 4th

https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/jack-smith-wants-a-super-tuesday-trump-trial-heres-why-its-unlikely-5548398?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2023-12-19&src_cmp=mb-2023-12-19&utm_medium=email&est=%2BOvBhnBUfSWK%2BibHXg002sSKAUJQVY76wGeWb2ZYe%2BvWAbJ%2B%2BdtQS2HkdfM%3D

Super Tuesday/Date
Tue, Mar 5, 2024

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Tuesday

THE RULE OF LAW MUST PREVAIL!
NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!
Title: Re: Jack Smith then DNC hitman wants trial date
Post by: DougMacG on December 19, 2023, 07:03:13 AM
Amendment VI
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury ..."
-----------------------------

The constitutional right to a speedy trial is granted to the defendant, not to the prosecution.  The prosecution brought charges because presumably they are ready to try the case.  The defendant and legal representation might need time to prepare for a trial, to hire lawyers, to discover, depose, research and refute the allegations, to develop other theories.

A reasonable question might be, how fast do these things go if it wasn't Trump, if there wasn't an election?

If these crimes are so clear, why did ALL these prosecutors take 3 years to bring charges, and now are so rushed they want all the cases aimed at coincidentally at Super Tuesday.

Nikki Haley had it about right, on Jan 6 Trump could have used a better tone.  That doesn't sound like 90 felonies of wrongdoing.

People have heard it all, at least the prosecutions side of it and pinion polls show that Republicans, Independents and even Democrats smell a rat.

Just like 2016, here we are talking about Trump instead of policies, issues and other candidates because of Left manipulation.
Title: Re: Jack Smith then DNC hitman wants trial date
Post by: DougMacG on December 19, 2023, 07:22:25 AM
Thanks ccp, Hard to turn down a limited time offer for 20% off on implicit bias training.  Wait, I already have implicit bias; don't need training!   )
Title: NPR the Capital "rioters" were armed
Post by: ccp on December 21, 2023, 08:26:45 AM
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/977879589/yes-capitol-rioters-were-armed-here-are-the-weapons-prosecutors-say-they-used

with "weapons" like these our nation was almost doomed   :roll:

I suppose if someone had a flashlight in their pocket it would have been labelled a blunt object that could have helped overthrow the US government .........
Title: Re: NPR the Capital "rioters" were armed
Post by: DougMacG on December 21, 2023, 10:00:20 AM
The 'news' story calls it an "insurrection" rather than report what happened and leave that conclusion for the reader to draw.

From the article :
"If you see a lot of resistance and you're being outgunned, outmanned, outpowered, you tend to kind of fall back a little bit,"

"Outgunned "?   - No guns.   The only shot fired was Capital Police murdering Ashli Babbitt.

"Outmanned"?  - Many were women, c.f. Ashli Babbitt.  Additional security was turned down even though Feds had infiltrated all the 'dangerous' groups.

"Outpowered"?   - Now we have video showing police holding the doors for the protesters.  Why did they withhold that video from npr, to get this narrative out?

The ones accusing a narrative have nothing but a narrative, and it's false.

So, so , so tempting to show them what a real insurrection looks like just to help them with their reporting. But our side doesn't shoot first.

100 police injured, then they list the worst of those injuries. What were the least of those injuries?  How many cracked ribs were there? One is too many but whatever it was, that makes it a riot not an insurrection.

Cracking a police rib is a crime. 300 people arrested didn't crack police ribs.  10,000 who went to the rally didn't crack police ribs. Why are they impuning all of them? Like calling all illegals rapists. I thought they hated that sort of thing.

An insurrection is a serious attempt to overthrow the government. This was unarmed and involved a delay of an official procedure by 3 hours. Not much different than when the guy pulled the fire alarm and received not even a slap on the wrist.

How many were injured in the so-called George Floyd riots, 1600 police or more? How many deaths? Quite a few more than zero in this case.  And that wasn't an insurrection. That wasn't even a riot. That was a "mostly peaceful protest".

How pathetic is our so-called mainstream media.Too bad that NPR, public radio over public airwaves, is among the worst of the Pravdas.
Title: Meet the Colorado Justices
Post by: DougMacG on December 21, 2023, 01:23:33 PM
Three of the four who voted to take Trump off the ballot went to the Poison Ivy. The fourth is openly a major Democrat financial contributor. The three dissenters went to the local law school.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2023/12/21/heres-what-you-should-know-about-the-four-justices-who-deemed-trump-ineligible-to-run-for-president-n4924912

This is literally a case of rule by the elites versus letting the people decide. Strange that Democrats are on the wrong side. We need to change their name.  Elitocrats?
Title: Wolf refuses to explain keeping Joe off the search warrant
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 22, 2023, 07:12:45 AM
https://dailycaller.com/2023/12/21/lesley-wolf-refuse-explain-joe-biden-search-warrant-hunter-biden/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=u_JuVj4XObIei_DS_ijtAo7dpgiqV4d3Ieq6kbNso0VmcXlntzRma3DEaAZKDNw1qqovQ7o0
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on December 22, 2023, 07:23:26 AM
 “Okay. But in your opening statement, I think you indicated that none of these decisions were made for political reasons. Is that fair to say?”

“That is reflected in my opening statement, and I agree with that,” Wolf stated. I

Such liars.
I never thought our government would stoop this low.
But I got educated from my experience at the US Copyright office on how government employees will lie, cover up, deny, obfuscate, and change the subject when confronted with wrong doing.

it is the RULE not the exception.

Indeed, I can't think of any example to the contrary
Occasionally we might see someone resign with full benefits as a consequence, but never an admission, never a penalty, and the scandal goes away with that.

Title: The rule of law may be winning one
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 20, 2024, 06:44:03 AM
https://www.oann.com/newsroom/doj-former-irs-contractor-took-job-in-order-to-steal-donald-trumps-tax-return-documents/
Title: AG: The Deep State and the Upcoming Elections
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 30, 2024, 05:09:39 AM


https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/30/the-deep-state-and-the-2024-us-presidential-election-down-to-the-crossroads/
Title: Re: AG: The Deep State and the Upcoming Elections
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 30, 2024, 01:27:16 PM


https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/30/the-deep-state-and-the-2024-us-presidential-election-down-to-the-crossroads/
Brilliant piece w/ apt comparisons.
Title: The war on the rule of law; Deep State, JBT Jackbooted Thugs
Post by: DougMacG on January 31, 2024, 06:36:00 AM
Should we step up the fight back against the Deep State or just quietly elect the right people and hope they do it?

I was thinking we should label them all JBT, Jack Booted Thugs, but it turns out that idea isn't original.

"[In 1995] the NRA's executive vice-president, Wayne LaPierre, created controversy when he referred to federal agents as "jack-booted thugs" in an NRA fund-raising letter. The term had been invented by United States Representative John Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, in 1981."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackboot

Does anyone remember the bumper sticker, "Resist!" ?

That was the response to Trump being elected. 

It materialized in many different ways, and I would need VDH's encyclopedic mind to list them.  Obviously the Russian COLLUSION hoax.  The Mueller cloud over the 2018 elections that lost the Republicans the House, when Mueller knew on Day One there was no there there.

The problem isn't limited to the FBI.  Recall the Obama ATF scandal and the worst scandal of all time, Obama's IRS targeting that stopped all new conservative groups from organizing (to oppose his reelection) while approving all new liberal groups.

Vindman, the "whistleblower" was a deep stater who overheard Trump was using leverage to look into Biden corruption in the Ukraine and blew the whistle to the pleasure of the new Democratic House.

Along the way we had the arrest of the who's who of the Trump administration, Paul Manifort comes to mind, charged with the exact crime Hunter has still not been charged for, foreign agent registration. 

The jack booted thugs raided too many to name, culminating in the Mar a Lago raid, leading to felony charges on Trump for "crimes" committed by every former President and Vice President including Biden and Pence.

On another plane, "Resist!" applied to the EPA office worker I heard interviewed anonymously on NPR during the transition who said they all planned to continue their work the best they could even if it is contrary to the directives of the new head of the Executive Branch.  And they most certainly did.

So, do we step up the fight back or does all that talk, disband the FBI for example, make it easier to paint us as the extremists?
Title: Brenna/CIA bumped 26 Trump associates to set up RussiaRussia
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2024, 02:20:15 PM
https://nypost.com/2024/02/13/news/cia-and-foreign-intelligence-agencies-illegally-targeted-26-trump-associates-before-2016-russia-collusion-claims-report/?fbclid=IwAR1oVokZV0pVxN0q1QmylNVK4aHStyHxCWR8_3yby5O0z8WsdeWSsbgJcUI
Title: PP: That pipe bomb on J6
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2024, 02:57:00 PM


The latest on that mysterious J6 pipe bomber: One wonders whether this case will ever be cracked, but it gets curiouser and curiouser, and the evidence keeps pointing toward an inside job. As independent journalist Julie Kelly reported earlier this week: "An individual who appeared to be part of a security team guarding the Democratic National Committee headquarters used a canine to conduct a search of a small sport utility vehicle in front of the building more than three hours before a plain-clothed Capitol Police officer discovered an alleged pipe bomb just a few feet away on January 6." What are the odds? As we wrote last July: "The case of the DC pipe bomber is particularly interesting, given that he's somehow avoided capture for a crime that was committed in the most heavily surveilled area of the most heavily surveilled city in the world. As political analyst Tristan Justice notes: 'A whistleblower revealed the agency identified the car used by the prime suspect but refused to track the vehicle down. Both bombs were reportedly inoperable, according to the whistleblower.' When Director Wray refused to talk about the oddities of this case, Kentucky Congressman Brian Massie reminded him that it's been some 900 days since the bombs were discovered." Again, we ask: What are the odds? And why hasn't the FBI gotten to the bottom of it? Incidentally, Kamala Harris was at the DNC headquarters at the time, a fact she concealed to the extent that the Department of Justice falsely stated that she was at the Capitol and used that non-fact to suggest that trespassers there might have been endangering her. These people, these Trump-deranged Democrats, have neither shame nor integrity.
Title: VDH: RussiaRussia and the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2024, 03:41:14 AM
A masterful summary!

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/26/russia-russia-forever-an-anatomy-of-a-left-wing-obsession/
Title: Biden staffer deleted visitor log, retains security clearance
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 26, 2024, 02:14:05 PM
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/02/15/biden_staffer_who_mishandled_china_iran_secrets_retains_high-security_pentagon_job_1011073.html?fbclid=IwAR0fUmZddKheHuwTGW0719fG8E4mwBC7Hplrakf_emOoRGUtI843ov9Zb74 
Title: It's Only a Constitutional Crisis When You Do It!
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 27, 2024, 03:16:16 PM
Jeepers, I remember back when constitutional crises were said to be Bad Things. Imagine if Trump had disregarded a SCOTUS ruling he didn't want to heed:

Did Biden Just Create A Constitutional Crisis? [Yes, BBG]

I & I Editorial Board

February 27, 20247 comments
The Supreme Court told President Joe Biden that he didn’t have the authority to forgive student loan debt. But he did anyway, bragging that the Court “didn’t stop me.” So why do we even have a legislative branch and a high court if the president is going to make law as if he were a king?

It’s Biden’s party, and its activist media, that has been carping for years about losing “our democracy.” Yet when a Democratic president bypasses the checks and balances that are the backbone of our republic, the three co-equal branches framework of government that is intended to guard against descending into a dictatorship, they celebrate rather than condemn.

Maybe it’s because they care about the integrity of our system of government only when it’s making policies they want.

In June 2023, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, struck down the Biden administration’s plan to cancel up to $400 billion in student loans, which it had announced in August 2022. In her concurring opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that “when it comes to” national policy, “the Constitution gives Congress the reins — a point of context that no reasonable interpreter could ignore.”

But high court rulings apparently don’t apply when a Democratic president decides they don’t. Last week, the White House played the role of unreasonable interpreter and announced “$1.2 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 153,000 borrowers.”

“The Biden-Harris administration has now approved nearly $138 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 3.9 million borrowers through more than two dozen executive actions,” according to a White House fact sheet.

Biden acknowledged last week that “my MAGA Republican friends in the Congress, elected officials, and special interests stepped in and sued us,” and that “the Supreme Court blocked it.”

“But that didn’t stop me,” he continued. “I announced we were going to pursue alternative paths for student debt relief for as many borrowers as possible. And that’s the effort that’s been underway the last two years.”

If the president can capriciously set policy, not waiting for Congress to act and ignoring Supreme Court rulings, then the executive branch is no longer one of the separate but equal branches of government. It becomes a separate but predominant branch.

“When the separation of powers becomes seriously distorted,” explains the Pacific Legal Foundation, “the checks and balances of the Constitution lose much of their force to limit government’s tendency toward tyranny.”

If any Republican president had so egregiously and brazenly ignored a Supreme Court ruling, in essence telling the Court it is inferior to the presidency, the Democrats and the media would be constantly shrieking about the dangerous emergence of a “constitutional crisis.” They’ve done it before. In 2018, John Kerry, a Democrat who’s been in Washington almost as long, it seems, as the Washington Monument, claimed that the “off the rails” Trump White House constituted “a genuine constitutional crisis.” It was a typical tale from a Democrat, full of sound and fury, signifying deception.

But what Biden has done is more serious. Keith E. Whittington, a Princeton University professor of politics, identifies three types of constitutional crises: a crisis of operation, a crisis of fidelity and a crisis of bad faith. Biden’s constitutional offense could be placed in either of the last two categories. He is “no longer willing to abide by existing constitutional arrangements” and is clearly a political actor who has refrained “from repudiating the inherited constitutional system but nonetheless” subverted “it by only giving lip service to constitutional requirements.”

Don’t believe that Biden is acting merely out of compassion. The Democrats want to erase constitutional limits on government power, and issuing executive orders that are popular in some corners is a pathway to eventually making law by presidential whim. The end game is a sweeping loss of freedom and consolidated power for a hard-left ruling class.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/27/did-biden-just-create-a-constitutional-crisis/?utm_source=referral&utm_medium=offthepress&utm_campaign=home
Title: The Deep Banana Republic State of America
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on February 27, 2024, 06:37:26 PM
2nd post. More on the long term FBI “trusted source” now indicted for lying in his statements regarding Biden, statements Biden fought against being released, presumably because they were both true and unflattering. Moreover this witness is jailed without bail, unlike various murders and multiple felons traipsing about on bail.

Banana republic horseshit, IMO:

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/02/27/why-the-smirnov-indictment-stinks-to-high-heaven-n4926791?fbclid=IwAR0f2xb2J5foTXyxlq3MrxqOLsAGG-PSKHFpw4bbnp90x4vH2Z_LpfWWBWo
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 28, 2024, 05:08:29 AM
Agree 100% the FBI looks Stalinesque here.

That said, as best as I can tell, flight risk is a legit issue.  Hell, if I were Smirnov, I surely would have the pieces in place and good reason to do so.
Title: Peter Navarro gets ready for prison
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 28, 2024, 03:16:39 PM
Outrageous what has been done to this man!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMMR_HRE-aQ
Title: BBG: Fani's follies on the Stand
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 28, 2024, 03:18:32 PM
Fani’s Follies on the Stand


https://youtu.be/7eWtla_p0VI?si=J0SgASEfrMt8HX2D
Title: Re: Peter Navarro gets ready for prison
Post by: DougMacG on February 29, 2024, 06:46:53 AM
Outrageous what has been done to this man!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMMR_HRE-aQ

I wasn't a big fan of Navarro. I posted something of his during the election fraud dispute, a roadmap of where to look for wrongdoing. Six categories of fraud in six states. We would do well,still, to investigate.

Yes I am outraged at his treatment. His 'crime' was to associate with Trump and they got him.  Now the biggest mission in the country is to dismantle our deep state and two tiered Justice instead of pursuing what (I think) should be the biggest issues of the day, peace and prosperity.

How do we have real jack booted thugs running the show in a constitutional republic?
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 29, 2024, 12:49:33 PM
I thought his piece making the case for fraud, was rather good.  Certainly way better than grifters like Lynn Wood and  , , , I forget her name, she repped Gen Flynn well until she went over the top with her election fraud assertions.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: ccp on February 29, 2024, 01:03:32 PM
"   I forget her name, she repped Gen Flynn well until she went over the top with her election fraud assertions."

I think you are referring to Sidney Powell.
Title: Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 29, 2024, 05:14:26 PM
Thank you.