Arbitrary Enforcement Of Federal Law Roils Classified Documents Case

declassified  |  Jack Smith's Florida case. "[Judge Aileen] Cannon repeatedly asked both sides for examples of criminal prosecution for 'other officials who did the same.' She questioned the 'arbitrary enforcement' of the espionage statute, forcing the government to admit that no other former president or vice president has faced criminal prosecution for keeping similar documents and failing to return them.

'This speaks to the arbitrary enforcement...featuring in this case,' Cannon told Bratt. Cannon also pushed back on claims Trump should have expected to face prosecution for storing classified files. Once again noting no former president or vice president-Mike Pence also discovered classified records after Trump was indicted in 2023-has been charged, Cannon suggested it was fair for Trump to expect the same treatment since 'no historical precedent' is on the books. 'Given that landscape,' Cannon continued, Trump could argue he has been unfairly targeted. Which his team already has. 

In a motion emailed to the court and the government last month, Trump's attorneys asked to dismiss the case based on 'selective and vindictive prosecution.' Although the motion is not public, Jack Smith quickly responded to defend the Department of Justice's choice to pursue Trump and not Biden. 'Trump, unlike Biden, is alleged to have engaged in extensive and repeated efforts to obstruct justice and thwart the return of documents bearing classification markings, which provides particularly strong evidence of willfulness and is a paradigmatic aggravating factor that prosecutors routinely rely on when making charging decisions,' Smith wrote in a March 7 response. 'Second, the evidence concerning the two men's intent-whether they knowingly possessed and willfully retained such documents-is starkly different.' 

In an almost comical passage, Smith admits Biden unlawfully retained classified records-just not as many as Trump. 'Biden possessed 88 documents bearing classification markings, including 18 marked Top Secret. By contrast, Trump possessed 337 documents bearing classification markings, including 64 marked Top Secret.

Only Fan(i)s And Her Manchild Niggolo....,

 

NYPost  |  A Georgia district attorney accused of hiring her lover to prosecute former President Trump broke her silence on the controversy, saying she and the prosecutor were targeted because they are black.

The comments were Willis’ first time addressing the allegations publicly — but she neither confirmed nor denied the claims lobbed at her and special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who helped secure an indictment against the former Republican president in an election interference case.

“They only attacked one,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis Sunday at Big Bethel AME Church in Atlanta. “First thing they say, ‘Oh, she’s gonna play the race card now.’

“But no God, isn’t it them that’s playing the race card when they only question one?” 

She called Wade “a great friend and a great lawyer,” along with a “superstar,” but failed to mention him by name once during her more than 30 minute speech, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The pair were accused by Trump co-defendant Michael Roman of having a “clandestine” and “improper” affair when appointments were made for the 2020 election interference case.

Roman, a former official on the Trump 2020 campaign, argued in a court filing last week that the integrity of the case had been compromised by their alleged affair and asked that all charges against him be dropped.

“The district attorney chose to appoint her romantic partner, who at all times relevant to this prosecution has been a married man,” the filing read.

Roman contended in the filing that Wade used some of the $654,000 in legal fees he’d earned on the case to take Willis on vacations to “Napa Valley, California, Florida and the Caribbean.”

Willis pointed out during her speech that the other two prosecutors assigned to the case, Anna Green Cross and John Floyd, both are white, and noted that allegations have only emerged targeting the two prominent black members of the prosecution — her and Wade.

“Isn’t it them playing the race card when they constantly think I need someone from some other jurisdiction in some other state to tell me how to do a job I’ve been doing almost 30 years?” she asked.

Roman was unmoved by Willis accusations of the charges being racially charged.

 

 

DOJ Letting Up On SBF To Protect DNC Recipients Of Ill-Gotten Largesse

NYPost  |  The decision to avoid a second trial charging Sam Bankman-Fried with a conspiracy to make unlawful political donations and bribery of foreign officials has many conservatives up in arms.

Federal prosecutors said Friday that they do not plan to proceed with a second trial against Sam Bankman-Fried, citing public interest in a speedy resolution of the case that has seemingly irritated those who were hoping to see the disgraced FTX founder prosecuted to the fullest extent.

In a Friday letter filed in federal court in Manhattan, prosecutors said they do “not plan to proceed with a second trial” as “much of the evidence that would be offered in a second trial was already offered in the first trial and can be considered by the Court at the defendant’s March 2024 sentencing.”

“Given that practical reality, and the strong public interest in a prompt resolution of this matter, the Government intends to proceed to sentencing on the counts for which the defendant was convicted at trial,” the prosecutors added.

The decision by prosecutors not to hold a second trial against Bankman-Fried quickly drew backlash from those who had followed the case.

“So we won’t know which politicians he bribed or who’s campaigns he influenced? That collective sigh of relief you are hearing is from the DEEP STATE,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., wrote in a Friday night post to X.

Conservative commentator John Cardillo also weighed in on the announcement from prosecutors, accusing the Department of Justice of shielding Democrats from being named as recipients of Bankman-Fried donations.

“Sam Bankman-Fried will not face second trial,” Cardillo wrote in an X post. “DOJ is protecting his Dem donation recipients.”

CryptoLaw founder John Deaton, who has consistently commented on Bankman-Fried’s case, slammed the decision by prosecutors as a “disgrace.”

“The DOJ has shown again, that it is NOT an independent agency,” Deaton said on X. “Who is the Attorney General protecting?”

 

Not A Fan Of Mayor Eric Adams - But - What Did He Do To Become An Enemy Of The State?

epochtimes  |  An attorney for New York City Mayor Eric Adams confirmed on Friday that the FBI seized the mayor's phones and an iPad as part of an investigation into his campaign financing.

“After learning of the federal investigation, it was discovered that an individual had recently acted improperly. In the spirit of transparency and cooperation, this behavior was immediately and proactively reported to investigators. The Mayor has been and remains committed to cooperating in this matter," his attorney Boyd Johnson said in a statement.

"On Monday night, the FBI approached the mayor after an event. The Mayor immediately complied with the FBI’s request and provided them with electronic devices. The mayor has not been accused of any wrongdoing and continues to cooperate with the investigation."

Mr. Adams also denied any wrongdoing in a statement.

“As a former member of law enforcement, I expect all members of my staff to follow the law and fully cooperate with any sort of investigation—and I will continue to do exactly that. I have nothing to hide,” he stated.

Last week, the FBI raided the home of Brianna Suggs, one of the mayor's chief political consultants, after which the mayor also issued a statement that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

“I feel extremely comfortable about how I comply with rules and procedures. I’ve stated this over and over again. I hold myself to a high standard, I hold my campaign to a high standard, and I hold my staffers at city hall to a high standard,” he said. He also said that Ms. Suggs was a "real professional" and would remain on his team for his 2025 reelection campaign.

“I am outraged and angry if anyone attempted to use the campaign to manipulate our democracy and defraud our campaign,” Mr. Adams said in the statement.

“I want to be clear, I have no knowledge, direct or otherwise, of any improper fundraising activity—and certainly not of any foreign money.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in Manhattan declined to comment.

Investigation

The FBI has not made public details of the investigation, but a search warrant was first reported by the New York Times, which reported that the federal investigation is related to alleged corruption in Mr. Adams's 2021 campaign and possible ties to the Turkish government.

The seized devices, which the FBI has likely made copies of, were returned days later.

The mayor's staff has confirmed that his office has met with the federal prosecutors, but did not disclose what they discussed.

After the raid on Ms. Suggs's home, media reported that the relationship between the mayor's 2021 campaign and Brooklyn-based KSK Construction Group's ties to Turkey is the center of the probe.

The KSK Construction Group owns apartment buildings and condominiums throughout the city. It is owned by the KiSKA Construction Corp., a company that possesses two branches of a Turkish hotel chain in the United States.

Turkey

Mr. Adams has visited Turkey multiple times, including as part of official duties in different public offices.

“I’m probably the only mayor in the history of this city that has not only visited Turkey once, but I think I’m on my sixth or seventh visit to Turkey,” Mr. Adams said at a Turkish flag-raising ceremony in New York recently.

Two of those trips were made while he was the Brooklyn Borough President.

Campaign records show that he received donations from three members of a foundation opened by the son of the Turkish president.

At an event this week, the mayor answered reporters' questions about the probe and his ties to Turkey.

“We just thought it was a great opportunity to exchange ideas as we do with all these…countries and we want to attract businesses here,” he said of the trips, according to The City.

“So Turkey as well as any other country, I want to attract people to the city. There’s nothing specific about that one particular country.”

He added that he frequently told his staff to "follow the law."

“I just strongly believe you have to follow the law. It would really shock me if someone that was hired by my campaign did something that was inappropriate,” he said.

 

Inventory Shrinkage Continues To Grow

WSJ  | You may have heard that a mob of teenagers looted stores in downtown Philadelphia on Tuesday night, and Target said the same day it is closing nine stores in four states because of rampant crime. Rack up more victories for progressive prosecutors.

The mobs in Philly hit Apple, Lululemon and Foot Locker stores in Center City, which ought to be a safe space for civilized commerce. The Foot Locker store was “ransacked in a coordinated attack,” said police. Police have made more than 50 arrests and are investigating property damage and theft elsewhere in the city. Some 76 incidents have been reported.

Interim Police Commissioner John Stanford said police are looking into whether “there was possibly a caravan of a number of different vehicles that were going from location to location.” He added, “Everyone in the city should be angry.”

Anger is justified in particular toward District Attorney Larry Krasner, who waves away property crime. His office reports 424 retail theft charges so far in 2023—compared to more than 1,500 by the same date in 2017, the year before he took office. Reports of retail theft in Philly have increased by more than 30%—to 13,330—compared to a year ago, according to the city’s latest weekly crime report.

Retail theft is a nationwide epidemic, according to a National Retail Federation (NRF) survey released Tuesday. For the 2022 fiscal year, retailers reported a “shrink” rate of 1.6%, mostly from theft, which as a percentage of all retail sales would be a $112.1 billion loss for the industry, says NRF.

“We cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests, and contributing to unsustainable business performance,” Target said in explaining its decision to close two stores in Seattle, three in Portland, Ore., three in San Francisco and Oakland, and one in New York. Target said the closures are despite efforts to prevent theft by “adding more security team members, using third-party guard services, and implementing theft-deterrent tools across our business.” CEO Brian Cornell said in May that Target could lose $500 million from shrink.

More than a quarter of retailers in the NRF survey reported closing stores because of violence and crime, and 45% reduced operating hours. Of the cities in Target’s closure list, all but Portland make the NRF survey’s top-10 cities for organized retail crime in 2022.

George Soros and the progressive DAs he finances claim to be helping the poor and minorities, but those communities are the main victim of rampaging theft. The Target store shutting down in New York is in Harlem, which staged a renaissance during the Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg mayoralties. It is now sliding back into crime and disorder.

The State Goes To Great Lengths To Protect Itself - You Taxpaying MF'ers Are On Your Own

mises  |  In all the media and regime frenzy over the Janaury 6 riots and the Pentagon Leaker in recent months, it is interesting to examine the contrast between how the regime treats "crimes" against its own interests, and real crime committed against ordinary private citizens. 

Witness, for example, how the Biden administration and corporate media have treated the January 6 riot as if it were some kind of military coup, demanding that draconian sentences be handed down even to small-time vandals and trespassers. Regime paranoia has led the Justice Department to ask for a 30-year sentence for Enrique Tarrio, a man who was convicted of the non-crime of "seditious conspiracy" even though he wasn't even in Washington on January 6. In recent months, Jacob Chansley, the "QAnon Shaman," received a sentence of three-and-a-half years, even though prosecutors admit he did nothing violent. Riley Williams was given three years for simply trespassing in Nancy Pelosi's office. Members of the Capitol Police force have been lionized in the media as great protectors of "sacred" government buildings, and any threat to the property or persons of Washington politicians has been equated with an assault on "democracy." 

Yet, had these supposed insurrectionists inflicted these same actions against an ordinary private individual, there's a good chance the perpetrators would not even be arrested, let alone given years of prison time. Consider, for example, the mobs that ransack private businesses in American cities, stealing tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise while police and prosecutors consider it all to be low priority.  Violent crime and property crime surge in many areas of the United States, with violent crime rising 30 percent in New York City in 2022. Unsolved murders in the US are at a record high. Meanwhile, progressives and social democrats are looking for ways to reduce criminal penalties against violent criminals. Police departments often devote only tiny portions of their budgets to homicide investigations, and if your property is stolen, odds are good you can forget about ever seeing it again. 

The situation is quite different when it comes to protecting the state, its agents, and its property from any threat. During urban riots, such as those which occurred in Ferguson, Missouri and Minneapolis, Minnesota, the police went to great lengths to protect themselves and government property. If you were just a private shopkeeper or ordinary citizen, however, you were on your own. At the Uvalde School shooting in 2022, hundreds of law enforcement officers from all levels of government chose to protect themselves rather than the children who were being murdered inside. When Uvalde parents demanded the police act, the police attacked the parents. 

We find similar phenomena at the federal level. There are, of course, special federal laws against violence perpetrated against federal employees. Ordinary taxpayers receive no such consideration. Note how federal agencies move to arm themselves to the teeth while also seeking to disarm the private-sector. Federal agents will spare no expense finding someone who put his feet up on Nancy Pelosi's desk, but it's another matter entirely when we're talking about serious violent crime against regular people.  Federal agents, of course, allowed 9/11 to occur right under their noses, they refused to investigate known rapist Larry Nasser, and shrugged off reports about the man who would end up slaughtering children at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Contrast this with how long the federal government has been conniving to get revenge on Julian Assange for merely telling the truth about US war crimes.  

Naturally, law enforcement officers rarely face any sanctions for their failures to bother themselves with private property, life, or limb. The federal courts have made it clear that law enforcement officers are not obligated to actually protect the public. In other words, the taxpayers must always pay taxes to hold up their end of the imagined "social contract" or face fines and imprisonment. But the other side of that "contract," the state, has no legal obligation to make good on its end. This, of course, is not how real contracts work.

What If Qualified Immunity Isn’t Real?

TNR  | The provision comes from Civil Rights Act of 1871, also known as the Enforcement Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act. Radical Republicans in Congress and President Ulysses S. Grant pushed it through at the height of Reconstruction to strengthen protections for recently freed Black Americans living in the South. Section 1983 is most often associated with lawsuits over policing tactics and prison conditions since those interactions are far more likely to involve a person’s constitutional rights than, say, getting your driver’s license renewed at the DMV. But it can apply to all sorts of state and local officials, making it a valuable tool for Americans to vindicate their rights in court.

In response to Rogers’s lawsuit, the prison officials disputed the facts of the case and also invoked qualified immunity for their actions. As its name suggests, qualified immunity is a partial shield for state and local officials against Section 1983 claims. It falls short of the absolute immunity enjoyed by judges, prosecutors, and lawmakers for their official duties. But it can still be a potent barrier against lawsuits. An investigation by Reuters in 2020 found that courts were increasingly likely to use it to defeat excessive force claims against police officers.

Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, qualified immunity kicks in when a state or local official’s conduct does not violate “clearly established law” at the time of the violation. A federal district court ruled in favor of the prison officials in Rogers’s case and held that their conduct did not meet that threshold. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision in a March ruling.

“What happened to Rogers was unfortunate,” the panel concluded. “Maybe it was negligent. But was it the product of deliberate indifference? Not on this record. And even if it were, these officials did not violate clearly established law on these facts.”

But one of the Fifth Circuit panel’s three members, Judge Don Willett, wrote a separate concurring opinion. He explained that he agreed with his colleagues as a matter of precedent. He then took aim more broadly at qualified immunity, pointing to recent scholarship that cast serious doubt on its lawfulness and its historical basis.

“For more than half a century, the Supreme Court has claimed that (1) certain common-law immunities existed when Section 1983 was enacted in 1871, and (2) ‘no evidence’ suggests that Congress meant to abrogate these immunities rather than incorporate them,” Willett wrote. “But what if there were such evidence?”

That evidence, he wrote, can be found in a February article published in California Law Review by Alexander Reinart, a law professor at Yeshiva University in New York. Reinart, as Willett explained, noted that the Supreme Court had consistently read Section 1983 in the U.S. Code to not exclude so-called “common-law immunities,” which it then revived in the form of qualified immunity. But that reading was flatly contradicted by the text of Section 1983 itself when enacted in 1871.

“In between the words ‘shall’ and ‘be liable,’ the statute contained the following clause: ‘any such law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage of the State to the contrary notwithstanding,’” Reinart explained. “And it is a fair inference that this clause meant to encompass state common law principles.”

How had the courts missed this part of the text over the last 150 years? It was not removed by Congress itself in subsequent legislation. The answer lies in a scrivener’s error. The United States Code is, technically speaking, not actually the law: It is merely a compilation of the laws enacted by Congress that is presented in a more readable and usable format. When it was first compiled almost a century ago, Reinart noted, it drew upon an earlier official attempt at codification known as the Revised Statutes of the United States, which were published in 1874.

The Revised Statute’s first edition was somewhat notorious for its errors, which prompted repeated updates and eventually a wholesale replacement. “Although the Revised Statutes were supplemented and corrected over time until the first United States Code was published in 1926, the Reviser’s error in omitting the Notwithstanding Clause from the reported version of the Civil Rights Act of 1871 was never corrected,” Reinhart noted.

This is the civil rights lawyer’s equivalent of double-checking the stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai and finding that one actually says, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Reinart’s discovery—and he does appear to be the first person to discover this—was a sensational find when his paper was published earlier this spring, even garnering coverage in The New York Times. The missing text upends the origin story for qualified immunity as a doctrine and indicates that it may be fundamentally flawed.

“These are game-changing arguments, particularly in this text-centric judicial era when jurists profess unswerving fidelity to the words Congress chose,” Willett wrote in his concurring opinion. “Professor Reinert’s scholarship supercharges the critique that modern immunity jurisprudence is not just atextual but countertextual. That is, the doctrine does not merely complement the text—it brazenly contradicts it.”

Politicians Seeing "Which Way The Wind Blows" On Homeless Eliminationism

vice  |  New York City’s mayor and the state’s governor, who have tied their reputation to increasing the vaguely-defined feeling of safety that people get on the subway, were alternately vague or quick to deflect blame. When asked about the killing on Wednesday, Governor Hochul initially said, "People who are homeless in our subways, many of them in the throes of mental health episodes, and that's what I believe were some of the factors involved here. There's consequences for behavior." It was not clear who was deserving of consequences, in Hochul’s view, but many interpreted it to be Neely. 

On Thursday, Governor Hochul tried to strike a different tone, saying, ​​"I do want to acknowledge how horrific it was to view a video of Jordan Neely being killed for being a passenger on our subway trains. And so our hearts go out to his family. I’m really pleased that the district attorney is looking into this matter. As I said, there had to be consequences.” After apparently viewing the video, she said, “the video of three individuals holding him down until the last breath was snuffed out of him, I would say it was a very extreme response.”

Mayor Eric Adams is more hesitant to denounce Neely’s killing.“There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened here, so I’m going to refrain from commenting further,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement to Gothamist. “However,” he added in his statement, “we do know that there were serious mental health issues in play here, which is why our administration has made record investments in providing care to those who need it and getting people off the streets and the subways.” In a CNN interview, Adams called comptroller Brad Lander and others “irresponsible” for labeling the man who killed Neely a vigilante and calling his killing a lynching. 

When asked during the same interview whether it was right to intervene, Adams, a former transit cop, told interviewer Abby Phillip of CNN: “We have so many cases where passengers assist other riders. And we don't know exactly what happened here,” he said.

Adams has been intentionally provocative on the issue of houselessness: he made a rhetorical show of increasing sweeps of encampments, though they have more or less proceeded at the same pace as under his predecessor, who made 9,600 sweeps during his tenure. In November, he instructed police and medical workers that they can involuntarily detain people who appear mentally ill and homeless, though so far it hasn’t led to more people being taken to the hospital.

The statement released by Daniel Penny’s lawyers seemed to mostly reflect Adams’ perspective, pointing to the mental health crisis as the real culprit. They also presented Penny’s actions as a group attempt to maintain order and safety: “Daniel, with the help of others, acted to protect themselves, until help arrived,” they wrote.

The idea that visible homelessness means public order is breaking down, with an attendant rise in violent crime, is a powerful narrative being pushed by right-wingers and the wealthy, but Democratic mayors and civic leaders also participate in this rhetoric. Predictably, vigilantism has become normalized across the country. 

There have been a few high-profile cases just in the last few weeks where these violent fantasies are on full display. In San Francisco, a businessman named Don Carmigniani claimed to have been assaulted by an unhoused person wielding a metal pipe on April 5, and a 24-year old man named Garrett Doty was arrested for it.  

During the criminal case against Carmigniani’s assailant, video was released showing Carmigniani moments earlier approaching Doty while he was lying on the sidewalk and appearing to spray him with bear spray before Doty, startled, gets up and is confronted by Carmigniani, who a third party witness said was threatening the unhoused man. Based on police reports, defense attorneys alleged that Carmiginiani was regularly spraying houseless people with bear spray. Prosecutors later told the 52-year-old Carmigniani that they were dropping charges against Doty.

When tech executive Bob Lee was murdered in April, tech executives including Elon Musk blamed the killing on out of control violent crime. (According to Mission Local, violent crime in San Francisco is still near historic lows.). When police arrested a suspect, it turned out to be another tech executive, Nima Momeni, who had allegedly stabbed Lee. 

The rush of some in the tech sector to cast blame made sense, as the industry is complicit in this crisis: aside from causing rents to spike and exacerbating the homelessness crisis in the Bay Area, the Citizen app enables vigilantism,  and NextDoor is a cesspool of NIMBYism and anti-homeless rhetoric, 

Public camping bans have sprung up independently all over the country, and a single conservative think tank headed by a co-founder of surveillance tech company Palantir  has successfully made it a felony to sleep outdoors  in multiple states.

 

Where My Hunter Biden Tax And Gun Charges At?!?!?!

 cnbc  |  Federal prosecutors have considered charging Hunter Biden with three tax crimes and a charge related to a gun purchase, said two sources familiar with the matter.

The possible charges are two misdemeanor counts for failure to file taxes, a single felony count of tax evasion related to a business expense for one year of taxes, and the gun charge, also a potential felony.

Two senior law enforcement sources told NBC News about “growing frustration” inside the FBI because investigators finished the bulk of their work on the case about a year ago. A senior law enforcement source said the IRS finished its investigation more than a year ago.

The Washington Post previously reported that federal investigators believed they had gathered enough evidence to charge Hunter Biden with tax crimes and a false statement related to a gun purchase.

The decision on which charges to file, if any, will be made by U.S. Attorney David Weiss, who was appointed by President Donald Trump and retained by the Biden administration to continue the Hunter Biden investigation. There are no indications a final decision has been made, said the two sources familiar with the matter.

The IRS Criminal Investigation division, the Justice Department, the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware and attorneys for Hunter Biden declined to comment.

Teixeira Just An Immature IT CHUD - MTG Is The Actual Face Of Resistance

theguardian  |  Washington lawmakers have written off Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman accused of being behind the worst US intelligence leak in a decade, as an “alleged criminal” after his arrest yesterday, but that hasn’t stopped him from winning praise from the political right.

“He revealed the crimes, therefore he’s the criminal. That’s how Washington works. Telling the truth is the only real sin,” declared the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson on Thursday evening in the opening monologue of his show, which is the most watched on cable television. “The news media are celebrating the capture of the kid who told Americans what’s actually happening in Ukraine. They are treating him like Osama bin Laden,” the late al-Qaida terrorist leader.

Federal prosecutors allege Teixeira took secret documents from the Massachusetts air national guard base where he worked as a low-ranking cyber specialist and posted them online. They first appeared on one of the gaming messaging platform Discord’s servers in January before spreading to other social media sites and being reported on by news outlets earlier this month.

Shortly after he was taken into custody in Massachusetts on Thursday, the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene – who has persistently called for the Joe Biden White House and Washington in general to cut off support to Kyiv – rallied to his defense.

“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and anti-war. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime. And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more,” she tweeted in an apparent reference to one of the leaked documents that indicates 14 US special forces soldiers were present in Ukraine during the past two months.

“Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen [sic]? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-Nato nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”

Other documents have revealed details of how the United States gathers its information and how deeply its intelligence agencies have penetrated Russia’s military. Also among the leaked material is a pessimistic assessment of Ukraine’s prospects of recapturing territory from Russia this spring – a subject Carlson seized on.

“Ukraine is in fact losing the war,” he said, citing other documents that indicate Washington’s concerns about Kyiv’s ability to defend its airspace.

“The Biden administration is perfectly aware of this. They’re panicked about it, but they have lied about this fact to the public. Just two weeks ago, for example, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told the US Senate that Russian military power is ‘waning’. In other words, Russia is losing the war. That was a lie. He knew it was when he said it, but he repeated it in congressional testimony. That is a crime, but Lloyd Austin has not been arrested for committing that crime.”

Americanism Failed When America Failed To Integrate Its Public Schools

theconversation  |   Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, wants a “national divorce.” In her view, another Civil War is inevitable unless red and blue states form separate countries.

She has plenty of company on the right, where a host of others – 52% of Trump voters, Donald Trump himself and prominent Texas Republicans – have endorsed various forms of secession in recent years. Roughly 40% of Biden voters have fantasized about a national divorce as well. Some on the left urge a domestic breakup so that a new egalitarian nation might be, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “brought forth on this continent.”

The American Civil War was a national trauma precipitated by the secession of 11 Southern states over slavery. It is, therefore, understandable that many pundits and commentators would weigh in about the legality, feasibility and wisdom of secessionwhen others clamor for divorce.

But all this secession talk misses a key point that every troubled couple knows. Just as there are ways to withdraw from a marriage before any formal divorce, there are also ways to exit a nation before officially seceding.

I have studied secession for 20 years, and I think that it is not just a “what if?” scenario anymore. In “We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776,” my co-author and I go beyond narrow discussions of secession and the Civil War to frame secession as an extreme end point on a scale that includes various acts of exit that have already taken place across the U.S.

Separatist ideas come from the Left, too.

“Cal-exit,” a plan for California to leave the union after 2016, was the most acute recent attempt at secession.

And separatist acts have reshaped life and law in many states. Since 2012, 21 states have legalized marijuana, which is federally illegal. Sanctuary cities and states have emerged since 2016 to combat aggressive federal immigration laws and policies. Some prosecutors and judges refuse to prosecute women and medical providers for newly illegal abortions in some states.

Estimates vary, but some Americans are increasingly opting out of hypermodern, hyperpolarized life entirely. “Intentional communities,” rural, sustainable, cooperative communes like East Wind in the Ozarks, are, as The New York Times reported in 2020, proliferating “across the country.”

In many ways, America is already broken apart. When secession is portrayed in its strictest sense, as a group of people declaring independence and taking a portion of a nation as they depart, the discussion is myopic, and current acts of exit hide in plain sight. When it comes to secession, the question is not just “What if?” but “What now?”

 

The FBI Found No Evidence Of January 6th Planning Or Coordination Outside Of Its Own

reuters  |  The FBI has found scant evidence that the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was the result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result, according to four current and former law enforcement officials.

Though federal officials have arrested more than 570 alleged participants, the FBI at this point believes the violence was not centrally coordinated by far-right groups or prominent supporters of then-President Donald Trump, according to the sources, who have been either directly involved in or briefed regularly on the wide-ranging investigations.

Kash Patel calls on Tucker Carlson to release footage of undercover feds:

"Ray Epps was on FBI's most wanted list one day, and the next day he was off. There are only two ways that happens: you die, or you are an informant. Jill Sanborn, the head of the FBI counterintelligence… https://t.co/RALaXMKxX3 pic.twitter.com/8DJXX5JN1z

— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 8, 2023

"Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases," said a former senior law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation. "Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages."

Stone, a veteran Republican operative and self-described "dirty trickster", and Jones, founder of a conspiracy-driven radio show and webcast, are both allies of Trump and had been involved in pro-Trump events in Washington on Jan. 5, the day before the riot.

FBI investigators did find that cells of protesters, including followers of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups, had aimed to break into the Capitol. But they found no evidence that the groups had serious plans about what to do if they made it inside, the sources said.

Prosecutors have filed conspiracy charges against 40 of those defendants, alleging that they engaged in some degree of planning before the attack.

They alleged that one Proud Boy leader recruited members and urged them to stockpile bulletproof vests and other military-style equipment in the weeks before the attack and on Jan. 6 sent members forward with a plan to split into groups and make multiple entries to the Capitol.

But so far prosecutors have steered clear of more serious, politically-loaded charges that the sources said had been initially discussed by prosecutors, such as seditious conspiracy or racketeering.

The FBI's assessment could prove relevant for a congressional investigation that also aims to determine how that day's events were organized and by whom.

Senior lawmakers have been briefed in detail on the results of the FBI's investigation so far and find them credible, a Democratic congressional source said.

The chaos on Jan. 6 erupted as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives met to certify Joe Biden's victory in November's presidential election.

 

In 2023 Novel Resistance Compositions Will Be Expeditiously Crushed By Enhanced Repression

Dale made me aware of a video in which Gonzalo Lira outgasses nonsense from his pie hole in sufficient volume and density so as to subvert the credibility of everything else he has here-to-date said about Ukraine.  In this instance, he's so completely out of his depth and out of his mind talm'bout major riots coming to major American cities this spring in response to police violence. NOPE! Nyet! No way, no how! Nah Gah Happen....,

Ever since the Occupy Movement got b-slapped out of existence by a coordinated Federal clampdown, the Michael Brown uprisings, followed by the George Floyd uprisings, (A BLM/DNC Warren Buffet production) and finally the mass incarceration of every redneck peckerwood and his cousin who got caught up in January 6th Stop the Steal shenanigans - it has become conspicuously obvious to the casual observer that THE MAN is not fucking around and has not been for quite some time.

Everything else is - as they say - merely conversation.....,

TheIntercept  |  The recent wave of arrests are part and parcel of a “green scare,” which began in the 1990s and has seen numerous environmental and animal rights activists labeled and charged as terrorists on a federal level consistently for no more than minor property destruction. Yet the Atlanta cases mark the first use of a state domestic terrorism statute against either an environmental or anti-racist movement.

The 19 protesters are being charged under a Georgia law passed in 2017, which, according to the Republican state senator who introduced the bill, was intended to combat cases like the Boston Marathon bombing, Dylann Roof’s massacre of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting.

“During legislative debate over this law, the concern was raised that as written, the law was so broad that it could be used to prosecute Black Lives Matter activists blocking the highway as terrorists. The response was simply that prosecutors wouldn’t do that,” Kautz told me. “There are similar laws passed in many other states, and we believe that the existence of these laws on the books is a threat to democracy and the right to protest.”

The Georgia law is exceedingly broad. Domestic terrorism under the statute includes the destruction or disabling of ill-defined “critical infrastructure,” which can be publicly or privately owned, or “a state or government facility” with the intention to “alter, change, or coerce the policy of the government” or “affect the conduct of the government” by use of “destructive devices.” What counts as critical infrastructure here? A bank branch window? A police vehicle? Bulldozers deployed to raze the forest? What is a destructive device? A rock? A firework? And is not a huge swathe of activism the attempt to coerce a government to change policies?

Police affidavits on the arrest warrants of forest defenders facing domestic terror charges include the following as alleged examples of terrorist activity: “criminally trespassing on posted land,” “sleeping in the forest,” “sleeping in a hammock with another defendant,” being “known members” of “a prison abolitionist movement,” and aligning themselves with Defend the Atlanta Forest by “occupying a tree house while wearing a gas mask and camouflage clothing.”

It is for good reason that leftists, myself included, have challenged the expansion of anti-terror laws in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riots or other white supremacist attacks. Terrorism laws operate to name the state and capital’s ideological enemies; they will be reliably used against anti-capitalists, leftists, and Black liberationists more readily than white supremacist extremists with deep ties to law enforcement and the Republican right.

Since its passage in 2017, the Georgia domestic terrorism law has not resulted in a single conviction. As such, there has been no occasion to challenge the law’s questionable constitutionality. Chris Bruce, policy director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “the statute establishes overly broad, far-reaching limitations that restrict public dissent of the government and criminalizes violators with severe and excessive penalties.” He said of the forest defender terror charges that they are “wholly inapposite at worst and flimsy at best.”

“The state is attempting to innovate new repressive prosecution, and I think ultimately that will fail for them,” Sara, a 32-year-old service worker who lives by the imperiled forest and has been part of Stop Cop City since the movement began, told me.

Why Did NBC News Suspend Miguel Almaguer For Accurately Reporting On Paul Pelosi?

dailymail  |  NBC News is under mounting pressure to explain its actions after retracting the controversial segment and this week suspending Almaguer, pending an internal inquiry.

It made the move despite a second report on the company-owned-and-operated NBC Bay Area station that repeats many of the same points in his segment.

National correspondent Almaguer quoted sources saying the husband of House Speaker Nancy did not immediately declare an emergency when he answered the door to police at the couple's San Francisco home following a 911 call.

NBC removed the footage from its website hours after airing on November 4, saying it 'did not meet' its reporting standards - and this week suspended the 45-year-old reporter pending an internal investigation.

et San Francisco's local NBC Bay Area news still has available online a report that also questions versions of the horrific incident, asking why Mr. Pelosi didn't flee the $8million house the moment officers arrived.

The suspension of Almaguer- who has been with NBC since 2009 – has now reignited conspiracy theories surrounding the early hours break-in and attack on October 28, allegedly carried out by Canadian national David DePape, 42.

Almaguer has not appeared on the network since the report, which directly contradicted claims made by prosecutors and the police.

One former senior NBC executive told Fox News that station 'needs to be more transparent with its viewers about this error… NBC owes it to its audience to be truthful and not cover this up'.

Unlike most affiliates, NBC Bay Area is directly owned and operated by the parent company. It is one of only around a dozen in the country to have such an arrangement while more than 200 others are independently owned.

In the now retracted report, Almaguer can be heard saying over footage of the four-bedroom Pelosi home: 'NBC News learning new details about the moments police arrived.

'Sources familiar with what unfolded in the Pelosi residence now revealing when officers responded to the high priority call they were seemingly unaware they had been called to the home of the Speaker of the House.

'After a knock and announce the front door was opened by Mr. Pelosi. The 82-year-old did not immediately declare an emergency or try to leave his home, but instead began walking several feet back into the foyer toward the assailant and away from police.'

The correspondent added: 'It's unclear if the 82-year-old was already injured or what his mental state was, say sources.

'According to court documents, when the officer asked what was going on 'defendant smiled and said that everything's good' but instantaneously a struggle ensued as police clearly saw David DePape strike Paul Pelosi in the head with a hammer.

'After tackling the suspect, officers rushed to Mr. Pelosi who was lying in a pool of blood.'

The footage then cut to Almaguer on screen saying: 'Law enforcement officials tell us the bottom line here is this is a terrifying situation.

'We still don't know exactly what unfolded between Mr. Pelosi and the suspect for the 30 minutes they were alone inside the house before police arrived. Officials who were investigating this matter would not go into further details about these new details.'

 

 

More Shady Connections Than Hunter Biden And Jeffrey Epstein Combined...,

Click on the image below to watch the video on Bitchute.

Meet Nathan Wolfe (5 mins)

expose-news  |   Dr. Nathan Wolfe was a founding citizen of Ghislaine Maxwell’s TerraMar Project; a member of the Edge Foundation; a self-proclaimed “virus hunter” whose area of research is zoonotic diseases with a special focus on bats; with links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth Alliance; who previously bungled epidemic responses while selling pandemic insurance; whose company Metabiota which is funded by Rosemont Seneca, Google, The Skoll Foundation, among others, was awarded a sub-contract with the US Military’s DTRA program for work in Ukrainian biolabs.

A few days before the end of March Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marija Zakharova published a timeline of US-Ukraine bioresearch headed “BioBiden.”  Of the 23 timeline points she listed, Nathan Wolfe or organisations associated with him – Metabiota and Global Viral – were explicitly mentioned in 8 of them:

• 2007 – US DoD employee Nathan Wolfe founded Global Viral Forecasting Institute (subsequently – Global Viral), a biomedical company. The mission stated in the charter is non-commercial study of transborder infections, including in China.
• 2014 – Metabiota, a private commercial organisation specialising in the study of pandemic risks is detached from Global Viral. Neil Callahan and John DeLoche, employees of Hunter Biden’s company Rosemont Seneca Partners are appointed to the board of Metabiota. Global Viral and Metabiota begin to get funding from the US Department of Defence.
• 2014 – Metabiota shows interest in Ukraine and invites Hunter Biden to “assert Ukraine’s cultural & economic independence from Russia”.
• 2014 – Metabiota and Burisma Holdings begin cooperation on an unnamed “science project in Ukraine”.
• 2014 – Metabiota, Global Viral and Black & Veatch Special Projects begin full-fledged cooperation within the US DoD programmes.
• 2014-2016 – Implementation of Metabiota and US DoD contracts, including a $300,000 project in Ukraine.
• 2016 – former US Assistant Secretary for Defence Andrew Weber is appointed head of Metabiota’s global partnerships department.
• 2016 – EcoHealth Alliance, a Global Viral founder Nathan Wolfe’s structure, is engaged in the study of bat-transmitted coronaviruses at the research centre in a Wuhan laboratory, China.

Considering the accusation is US political elites’ involvement in the military biological activity in Ukraine, it perhaps indicates Moscow has identified Nathan Wolfe as a person of interest in what Zakharova termed “this truly diabolical plan.”

Read more: Russian Foreign Ministry Releases Alleged “BioBiden” Timeline of US Bioresearch in Ukraine, The Gateway Pundit, 29 March 2022

Meet Nathan Wolfe

“If an alien visited Earth, they would take some note of humans, but probably spend most of their time trying to understand the dominant form of life on our planet –microorganisms like bacteria and viruses.”

Nathan Wolfe, Business Continuity and The Pandemic Threat Robert A Clark (2016)

From 1999 to 2006 Wolfe conducted research as a postdoctoral student and then as an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University.  There he worked with American epidemiologist Donald Burke, who suspected that the practice of hunting bushmeat in Africa had exposed a source of HIV. Based in Cameroon, Wolfe studied the local hunters and their hunting practices.  In 2004 he and his colleagues found that 1% of bushmeat hunters were infected with the simian foamy virus – a virus that is closely related to HIV and carried by nonhuman primates.

In 2006 he joined the department of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He began pursuing ways to monitor, predict, and prevent animal-to-human transfer of viruses and conducted projects in Africa and Southeast Asia. In China, he collaborated with scientists to investigate wet markets (food markets that sell live animals) as a source of zoonoses (diseases from wild animals).

Read more: Nathan Wolfe, Britannica

First Comes Job-loss/Precarity, Then Comes Addiction, Then Mental Illness

Wired |   To promote policy that actually works, reporters and editors need to act more like science journalists and less like stenographers who—whether implicitly or explicitly, accidentally or deliberately—bolster political campaigns that use ignorance to drive fear.

It would be hard to find a better example of this problem than Nellie Bowles’ recent essay in The Atlantic, which argues that San Francisco is a “failed city,” in large part because liberal policies have worsened addiction and mental illness. These policies persist, she suggests, because local politicians refuse to confront the empty-headed but well-intentioned delusions of the hippies and their descendants who just want to let it be. She also claims that the recall of progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin in a June 7 election demonstrates that the city is finally awakening from this daze.

Bowles’ work is far from alone in its failure to look at evidence of effectiveness of various policies when discussing the politics around them. In one 24-hour period in June, a columnist for The Washington Post argued that “Boudin’s recall proves that Democrats have lost the public’s trust on crime”—without any mention of data on which policies work best. A similar news analysis from The New York Times also mentioned no actual data. And a New York magazine essay on “Chesa Boudin and the Debacle of Urban Left-Wing Politics” similarly ignored the question of whose preferred approaches are supported by evidence—and whose aren’t.

Bowles writes that her hometown “became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.” She describes the city’s de facto supervised injection site in the Tenderloin as a place that looks like “young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.”

Her argument falls apart in the face of scientific data. Hundreds of studies support the “harm reduction” approach used in clean needle programs and supervised injection sites—and none of them show that it makes drug use or civic life worse.

Indeed, harm reduction was deliberately adopted based on research evidence, not platitudes from the 1960s. Further undermining her analysis, studies overwhelmingly illustrate the counterproductive nature of using cops and coercion first. For one, red states with old-school tough prosecutors actually have worse crime rates than liberal ones like California.

However, since Bowles apparently assumes that harm reduction tactics were adopted because they seemed groovy, she ignores this research base. (Which, ironically, is the type of mindless approach she critiques San Francisco policymakers for supposedly having used.) What she and many other journalists frame as the failure of harm reduction is actually the failure of criminalization.

A brief tour of the data: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and dozens of other obscure organizations like the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Medical Association, clean needle programs dramatically reduce HIV transmission without increasing drug use rates. One study published in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment showed that, compared to people on the street who do not, those who participate in syringe service programs are five times more likely to seek more traditional forms of recovery and three times more likely to quit injecting.

What about supervised drug consumption? Here are three reviews of the literature, which show that it reduces HIV risk, injecting, harm associated with injection, and overdose death rates—while not increasing and sometimes reducing local crime and needle litter. (A 2018 review widely touted by critics for suggesting that supervised consumption did not have a significantly positive outcome had to be retracted by the International Journal of Drug Policy due to poor methodology.)

How about the “problem” that Bowles identifies with reduced penalties for drug possession and the increased use of incarceration and coerced treatment she apparently prefers?