Showing posts with label just-us. Show all posts
Showing posts with label just-us. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

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.”

Friday, April 21, 2023

Elderly Black LARP's Make The Empire Even More Ridiculous

justice |  A federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, returned a superseding indictment charging four U.S. citizens and three Russian nationals with working on behalf of the Russian government and in conjunction with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct a multi-year foreign malign influence campaign in the United States. Among other conduct, the superseding indictment alleges that the Russian defendants recruited, funded and directed U.S. political groups to act as unregistered illegal agents of the Russian government and sow discord and spread pro-Russian propaganda; the indicted intelligence officers, in particular, participated in covertly funding and directing candidates for local office within the United States.

Additionally, in a separate case out of the District of Columbia, a criminal complaint was unsealed charging Russian national Natalia Burlinova with conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal agent of Russia in the United States.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”

“Efforts by the Russian government to secretly influence U.S. elections will not be tolerated,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “As today’s announcement demonstrates, the Criminal Division is committed to eradicating foreign malign influence from the U.S. political system and helping ensure the integrity of our elections.”

“Today’s announcement paints a harrowing picture of Russian government actions and the lengths to which the FSB will go to interfere with our elections, sow discord in our nation and ultimately recruit U.S citizens to their efforts,” said Acting Assistant Director Kurt Ronnow of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. “All Americans should be deeply concerned by the tactics employed by the FSB and remain vigilant to any attempt to undermine our democracy. The FBI remains committed to confronting this egregious behavior and ultimately disrupting our adversaries and those who act on their behalf.”

United States v. Ionov, et al.

According to the superseding indictment returned in the Middle District of Florida, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a resident of Moscow, was the founder and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow, Russia, and funded by the Russian government. Ionov allegedly utilized AGMR to carry out Russia’s malign influence campaign. Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by Moscow-based FSB officers, including indicted defendants Aleksey Borisovich Sukhodolov and Yegor Sergeyevich Popov.

“The prosecution of this criminal conduct is essential to protecting the American public when foreign governments seek to inject themselves into the American political process,” said U.S. Attorney Roger B. Handberg for the Middle District of Florida. “We thank our partners at the FBI for their tireless investigation of these events and their commitment to ensure justice is done.”

Among other illegal activities, the superseding indictment alleges that Ionov, Sukhodolov and Popov conspired to directly and substantially influence democratic elections in the United States by clandestinely funding and directing the political campaign of a particular candidate for local office in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2019. For instance, the superseding indictment alleges that Popov expressly referred to this effort on behalf of the FSB as “our election campaign,” and Ionov referring to the candidate as the “candidate whom we supervise.” Ionov and Popov allegedly intended that this election interference plot would extend beyond the 2019 local election cycle in St. Petersburg, and subsequently discussed that the “USA Presidential election” was the FSB’s “main topic of the year.”

Moreover, from at least November 2014 until July 2022, Ionov allegedly engaged in a years-long foreign malign influence campaign targeting the United States. As a part of the campaign, Ionov allegedly recruited members of political groups within the United States, including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement (collectively, the APSP) in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia and a political group in California (referred to in the superseding indictment as U.S. Political Group 3), to participate in the influence campaign and act as agents of Russia in the United States, including the following indicted defendants:

  • Omali Yeshitela, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the chairman and founder of the APSP;
  • Penny Joanne Hess, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as the leader of a component of the APSP;
  • Jesse Nevel, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri, who served as a member of a component of the APSP; and
  • Augustus C. Romain Jr., aka Gazi Kodzo, a U.S. citizen residing in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Atlanta, who served as a leader of the APSP and a founder of Black Hammer in Georgia.

One focus of Ionov’s alleged influence operation was to create the appearance of American popular support for Russia’s annexation of territories in Ukraine. For example, in May 2020, Ionov allegedly sent a request he stated was from “Russia, the Donetsk People’s Republic” – an apparent reference to a Russian-occupied region in eastern Ukraine – to Yeshitela and members of other U.S. political groups to make statements in support of the independence of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, a Russian-backed breakaway state in eastern Ukraine. Ionov later allegedly touted to the FSB that Yeshitela’s video-recorded statement of support was the first time that “American nonprofit organizations congratulated citizens” of the occupied region.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Chosen Whiteness: Israeli Ethnocracy Democratic Toward Jews Jewish Toward Palestinians

NYTimes  | For most of the Palestinians under Israeli control — those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—Israel is not a democracy. It’s not a democracy because Palestinians in the Occupied Territories can’t vote for the government that dominates their lives. When Mr. Gantz sends Israeli troops to shut down their human rights groups, West Bank Palestinians can’t punish him at the ballot box. They can complain to the Palestinian Authority. But the P.A. is a subcontractor, not a state. Like other Palestinians, its officials need Israeli permission even to leave the West Bank. In Gaza, too, Israel determines, with help from Egypt, which people and products enter and exit. And Gaza’s residents, who live in what Human Rights Watch calls “an open-air prison,” can’t vote out the Israeli officials who hold the key.

This lack of democratic rights helps explain why Palestinians are less motivated than Israeli Jews to defend Israel’s Supreme Court. As the Israeli law professors David Kretzmer and Yael Ronen note in their book, “The Occupation of Justice,” “in almost all of its judgments relating to the Occupied Territories, especially those dealing with questions of principle, the Court has decided in favor of the authorities.” Enfeebling the court would undermine legal protections that Israeli Jews take for granted but most Palestinians did not enjoy in the first place.

To be fair, roughly 20 percent of the Palestinians under Israeli control enjoy Israeli citizenship and the right to vote in Israeli elections. Yet it is often these Palestinians who protest most vociferously against Israel’s democratic credentials. In 2009 the Palestinian Knesset member Ahmad Tibi quipped that Israel was indeed “Jewish and democratic: Democratic toward Jews and Jewish toward Arabs.” To many liberal Zionists, that might sound churlish. After all, Mr. Tibi has now served in Israel’s Parliament for almost 25 years. But he understands that the Jewish state contains a deep structure that systematically denies Palestinians legal equality, whether they are citizens or not.

Consider how Israel allocates land. Most of the land inside Israel proper was seized from Palestinians during Israel’s war of independence in the late 1940s, when more than half the Palestinian population was expelled or fled in fear. By the early 1950s, the Israeli government controlled more than 90 percent of Israel’s land. It still does. The government distributes that land for development and leases it to citizens through the Israel Land Authority. Almost half the seats on its governing council are reserved for the Jewish National Fund, whose mission is “strengthening the bond between the Jewish people and its homeland.”

This helps explain why Palestinians comprise more than 20 percent of Israel’s citizens but Palestinian municipalities, according to a 2017 report by a variety of Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups, encompass less than 3 percent of Israel’s land. In 2003, an Israeli government commission found that “many Arab towns and villages were surrounded by land designated for purposes such as security zones, Jewish regional councils, national parks and nature reserves or highways, which prevent or impede the possibility of their expansion.” Unable to gain permission, many Palestinian citizens build homes illegally — which are therefore subject to government demolition. Ninety-seven percent of the demolition orders in Israel proper between 2012 and 2014, according to the 2017 report, were against Palestinians.

This isn’t an accident. It’s the logical outgrowth of Israel’s self-definition. Israel is not a “state for all its citizens,” a concept Mr. Lapid said in 2019 that he has opposed “my entire life.” In 2018, when several Palestinian lawmakers introduced legislation “to anchor in constitutional law the principle of equal citizenship,” the Knesset’s speaker ruled that it could not even be discussed because it would “gnaw at the foundations of the state.” That same year, the Knesset passed legislation reaffirming Israel’s identity as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” which means that the country belongs to Jews like me, who don’t live there, but not to the Palestinians who live under its control, even the lucky few who hold Israeli citizenship. All this happened before Mr. Netanyahu’s new government took power. This is the vibrant liberal democracy that liberal Zionists want to save.

Some Jews may worry that by advocating genuine liberal democracy — and thus exposing themselves to accusations of anti-Zionism — Mr. Netanyahu’s critics will marginalize themselves. But if they widen their vision they’ll see that the opposite is true. By including Palestinians as full partners, Israel’s democracy movement will discover a vast reservoir of new allies and develop a far clearer moral voice. Ultimately, a movement premised on ethnocracy cannot successfully defend the rule of law. Only a movement for equality can.

Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Adam Schiff's "Expulsion From Congress" Seems Like A Pretty Small Price To Pay

ronpaulinstitute |  With each new release of the “Twitter Files” we learn more and more about the deep corruption in Washington. We sensed during Covid that something was really wrong – for example the bizarre denial of natural immunity. But thanks to Elon Musk’s decision to open the books, our worst fears have been proven true. Each new release seems to show something even more criminal inside America’s rotten ruling class.

In the latest release, thanks to the excellent reporting of independent journalist Matt Taibbi, we see outgoing Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), continuously pressuring Twitter to validate his fantasies of “Russian bots” manipulating US politics.

The short version of what Taibbi reported comes from around the time then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) was about to release his Committee’s findings about the FBI misuse of the FISA Court to spy on the Trump presidential campaign. The FBI, it turns out, relied exclusively on the widely-discredited “Steele Dossier” – paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign – as justification to spy on the Trump campaign.

When pressure grew to release the Nunes findings, Twitter exploded with users demanding that Congress “release the memo.” That’s where then-ranking Member Schiff and his staff began relentlessly pressuring Twitter to show that the accounts demanding the release of the memo were actually Russian agents, out to help their supposed favorite, Donald Trump. Schiff was not alone. Fellow “Russiagate” hoaxers like Sen. Feinstein (D-CA) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) also pressured Twitter to find Russians behind the demand to release Nunes’ findings.

Over and over, Twitter – which was hardly sympathetic to Trump – told Schiff and his colleagues there was simply no evidence of Russian involvement. As much as some Twitter employees may have liked to report the opposite, to their credit they refused to participate in the scam.

Even after Twitter had informed Schiff and his fellow hoaxers that there was no Russian involvement, Sen. Blumenthal released a statement he knew was not true: “We find it reprehensible that Russian agents have so eagerly manipulated innocent Americans.” Again, this was right after he had been informed by Twitter employees - who were by-and-large strongly opposed to Trump - that there was just no evidence to back up such a statement.

We are moving closer and closer to a nuclear showdown with Russia over Ukraine. For political gain the Democrats – and plenty of Republicans – have been pushing the “Russiagate” hoax and in so doing have fertilized the ground for the obsessive Russia hatred prevalent in the US today.

I do not believe it is an exaggeration to say that if US/Russia relations had not been poisoned by the lie of “Russiagate” for pure political gain, we would not be anywhere near our current state of near-direct conflict with the largest nuclear power on earth, Russia.

It is shocking that Schiff and his "Russiagate" allies would potentially sacrifice millions of dead Americans to defeat Trump and other political enemies. 

Let’s not forget: Rep. Jim Trafficant was expelled from Congress for asking his staffers to wash his boat. Shouldn’t there be at least equal punishment for Senators and Members who are lying us into World War III?

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Elon Musk Asks Adam Schiff If He Approves Of State Censorship In Violation Of The Constitution

jonathanturley |  This week, the media continued to fulfill that common view of a de facto state media by ignoring new evidence of FBI coordination in censorship targets with Twitter in the latest news blackout.

On Friday, Twitter released additional information showing that the FBI and CIA actively pushed for censorship, supplying lists of accounts to be suspended or banned.

Journalist Matt Taibbi described Twitter as acting as a “subsidiary” of the FBI and wrote that “between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

The evidence continues to establish a system of censorship by surrogate or proxy.  While the First Amendment applies to the government and not private corporations generally, it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.

Once again, however, the major networks and newspapers have largely ignored the story. There has been a full mobilization of media, political, and business interests against Elon Musk and Twitter to oppose the restoration of free speech protections at the company. The media is heavily invested in suppressing this story after years of denials of any problems of censorship. Previously, they denied censorship was occurring. When such censorship became obvious, they denied that there was any involvement of the FBI and the government. Now that such involvement is confirmed, they are simply not covering the story.

Instead, the media is “all-in” on the doxxing suspensions (which Musk has now lifted).  I have been critical of Musk’s response to the doxxing controversy.  In part this is due to the scope of the suspensions and the fact that they occurred only 24 hours after the new policy was implemented. I would have preferred warnings and further clarity on the issue, particularly in what constituted doxxing in some of these tweets from journalists.

Despite the overwhelming coverage, there is little explanation of the media’s approach to the underlying doxxing question. Some have said that this is a “grey area” or may be below the threshold.

For years, the media has supported suspensions due to doxxing. In this case, the location of Musk’s plane may have been used by an individual to threaten his family. Most reports omit any discussion of whether the sending of such live locations information is doxxing. If it is, it has long been banned by most sites and journalists are not exempt.

Previously, figures connected with mainstream media from CNN to the Washington Post have been accused of doxxing. Liberal groups were accused of doxxing conservative justices and others, including dangerously posting information on the children of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It does not seem to matter when the targets are conservative, Republican, or libertarian.

Elon Musk Asks Ted Lieu About His Censorious Lil'Bish Credentials Too

democraticunderground |  This is the tweet from Taibbi that started it, a continuation of the transparency in the Twitter Files Musk hired him to post on Twitter.


Instead of chasing child sex predators or terrorists, the FBI has agents — lots of them — analyzing and mass-flagging social media posts. Not as part of any criminal investigation, but as a permanent, end-in-itself surveillance operation. People should not be okay with this.

Lieu's response:


Dear @mtaibbi: I’m on the House Judiciary Committee that has oversight over the
@FBI and you are lying. The FBI has lots of agents chasing child sex predators and terrorists. Please stop undermining and lying about federal law enforcement.


Taibbi replied, and then Musk jumped in with a reply addressing Lieu, though his reply went only to Taibbi and the RW media outlet RSBN:


Taibbi to Lieu:

Being on that committee you should know:
- How much has been spent, and how many DHS/DOJ employees have been assigned, to monitoring and flagging social media?
- Why is the FBI asking for "location information" about ordinary Americans and media outlets like
@RSBNetwork?


Musk to Lieu:

Replying to @mtaibbi and @RSBNetwork

Congressman Lieu, were you aware of this program and did you approve it? Simple questions require simple answers.



While this is just on Twitter now, and probably the RW media outlets cheering Musk on, this will be affecting what the GOP majority does in the House, starting next month

Tuesday, November 08, 2022

Economics Of The American Prison System

smartasset  |  The American prison system is massive. So massive that its estimated turnover of $74 billion eclipses the GDP of 133 nations. What is perhaps most unsettling about this fun fact is that it is the American taxpayer who foots the bill and is increasingly padding the pockets of publicly traded corporations like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. Combined both companies generated over $2.53 billion in revenue in 2012, and represent more than half of the private prison business. So what exactly makes the business of incarcerating Americans so lucrative?

Most of it has to do with the way the American legal system works and how it has changed over the last 40 years. In the 1970’s, lawmakers were dealing with a nationwide rash of drug-use and crime. By declaring a nation-wide war on drugs in 1971, President Richard Nixon set a precedent for hard-line policies towards drug-related crime.

New York governor Nelson Rockefeller followed suit declaring “For drug pushing, life sentence, no parole, no probation.”  His policies once put into action promised 15 years to life in prison for drug users and dealers. His policies catalyzed the growth of a colossal corrections system that currently houses an estimated 2.2 million inmates.

The runaway growth of US corrections did not come overnight, and did not come from the government alone. Since the 1970’s federal and state correction agencies have consistently struggled to meet the increased demands brought on by the US Department of Justice and strict drug laws.

In 1982, three Texas businessmen, Tom Beasley, John Ferguson, and Don Hutto saw an opportunity in the shortcomings of the Texas corrections system’s inability to deal with this influx of incarcerations. They devised and executed a plan to secure the first government contract to design, build, and operate a corrections facility from the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Texas Department of Justice.

Contract in hand, the trio was given 90 days to open a detention center for undocumented aliens. As their January 28 deadline neared, Hutto, Ferguson, and Beasley had no facility, no staff and their experiment seemed doomed to fail.

On New Year’s Eve, 1983, Beasley decided to get crafty, “Well, we’ll just go to Houston and find a place,” he reportedly told Ferguson. Incredulous, Ferguson replied, “Tom, you’re crazy. There’s no possible way. This is New Year’s Day. There is no possible way we can find a place today.” Beasley simply responded, “We have to.”

The three men immediately got on a plane and began their search. After a litany of rejections they came upon the Olympic Motel at 1am on New Year’s Day and immediately began negotiations that lasted for three days.

After hiring the motel owner’s family and promising to return the motel to its original condition, the group was in business. They then converted all of the motel rooms to secure cells, procured secure transportation and opened shop on January 28, 1983 when 87 inmates were brought in. Hutto, Ferguson and Beasley formed Corrections Corporation of America, the largest prison private prison network in the United States.

With the precedent it set with the first private detention center, CCA changed the face of US corrections for good. The private sector came to be seen as a quick-fix to the problem of overcrowded, understaffed public prisons. Today, privatized prisons make up over 10% of the corrections market—turning over $7.4 billion per year.

 

Wednesday, November 02, 2022

Who Was The Gay Male Hustler Witness To Paul Pelosi's Memorial Day Porsche Crash?

NYTimes | Speaker Nancy Pelosi had just urged Brown University graduates to stay resilient and summon their “better angels” on Memorial Day weekend when she was forced to turn her attention to a less uplifting situation: her husband’s arrest in California.

The details emerging from the incident were not especially flattering.

The night before, May 28, Paul Pelosi, 82, had been in Oakville, among the country’s most exclusive enclaves, leaving a small dinner at the hedgerow-lined estate of Alexander Mehran, a longtime friend and Democratic donor.

Mr. Pelosi got behind the wheel of his black 2021 Porsche 911 to drive the six miles to the Pelosis’ Napa Valley country house. It was around 10 p.m., according to a police report and eyewitnesses.

He went a little more than half a mile and was trying to cross State Route 29 and make a left. But a Jeep was coming down the highway and hit Mr. Pelosi’s car as he made the turn.

The police who responded arrested him on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol and suspicion of driving with a .08 blood alcohol content or higher. He is due back in court on Aug. 3. If criminal charges are filed, he will be arraigned then. (The driver of the Jeep was not arrested.)

It may not have been only alcohol that hindered Mr. Pelosi’s driving. 

A person who witnessed the accident said both cars were totaled, and that Mr. Pelosi simply sat in the car, seemingly frozen, for several minutes, until the sheriff and members of the Fire Department arrived moments later.

Neither Mr. Pelosi nor the driver of the Jeep was injured.

Some friends felt that Mr. Pelosi’s full night in custody at the Napa County Jail after the accident was excessive. Others were puzzled why their friend hadn’t pre-empted the whole ordeal by simply taking a car service home.

And some local residents suggested that, in an earlier era in Napa, driving after drinking was met with understanding, rather than criminal charges.

“I feel just awful about what’s happened because there was a time when if a thing like this happened, the cops would take you home,” said the society doyenne Diane Wilsey, better known as Dede.

Ms. Wilsey, who is Mr. Pelosi’s fellow trustee at the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, is a Republican, but she has donated to several of the speaker’s political campaigns, and sees the couple socially in California.

“I don’t agree with Nancy on everything, but I cannot think of anyone nicer than Nancy or Paul,” she said.

 

Saturday, August 27, 2022

On Huntergate - DOJ OIG Horowitz Tells Sen. Ron Johnson "Investigate Deez Nutz!!!!"

DailyMail |  The FBI deliberately dragged its feet on the Hunter Biden investigation and told agents not to look into the Hunter Biden laptop, according to new whistleblowers who spoke with Sen. Ron Johnson.  

Johnson, R-Wisc., sent a letter to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on Tuesday bringing forth the new whistleblower claims. 

'Recently, my office heard from individuals with knowledge of the FBI’s apparent corruption,' Johnson said. 

'After the FBI obtained the Hunter Biden laptop from the Wilmington, DE computer shop, these whistleblowers stated that local FBI leadership told employees, "you will not look at that Hunter Biden laptop" and that the FBI is "not going to change the outcome of the election again,"' Johnson wrote to Horowitz. 

Johnson is demanding Horowitz look into the FBI's handling of the Hunter Biden laptop. 

'While I understand your hesitation to investigate a matter that may be related to an ongoing investigation, it is clear to me based on numerous credible whistleblower disclosures that the FBI cannot be trusted with the handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop,' Johnson said. 

'I hope you understand that the longer your office stands on the sidelines and delays investigating the FBI’s actions, the harder it will be for you to uncover the truth and hold individuals accountable for wrongdoing.' 

Horowitz told Johnson in February 2021 that the OIG would not investigate the FBI's handling of the laptop so as not to interfere with the Department of Justice's investigation into Hunter Biden's tax affairs.  

The new claims come after whistleblower allegations emerged in July that in the lead-up to the 2020 election the FBI labeled the laptop as 'disinformation.'  

In October 2020, one month before the election, 'an avenue of derogatory Hunter Biden reporting was ordered closed' by Timothy Thibault, a senior FBI agent at the bureau's Washington Field office, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who fielded the whistleblower complaints, claimed in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Thibault shut down the investigation despite evidence that some of the details were true, according to that whistleblower.  

 'Allegations provided to my office appear to indicate that there was a scheme in place among certain FBI officials to undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation,' Grassley wrote.

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Certain Cause Of Trump's Predicament

johganz |  “But, John, are you saying we should use the Justice Department politically? With the express purpose of getting rid of someone you don’t like.” Kind of! As Trump’s intellectual defenders love to remind us, there’s ultimately no neutral administration of justice, everything is political, and when you get the state apparatus in your hands you use it beat up on your enemies and help out your friends. So, in part, these are their rules. (If you start talking about how you are gonna apply the thought of Carl Schmitt when you administer the state, I may start to get the sense you are my enemy.)

Also, let’s not play innocent. Historically speaking, the F.B.I. has always been used “politically:” it was used against Reds, Nazis, Reds again, the KKK, civil rights leaders, black power leaders, Nazis again etc. A lot of this was abusive and terrible and you know where my political sympathies lie, but this was because the political establishment implicitly or explicitly viewed these groups as threats to the United States itself. In many cases, they were not. (Yeah, yeah, I know what you are gonna say, “but J. Edgar Hoover, blah, blah, blah”—The fact is that Hoover lasted so long because powerful people thought he was useful and mostly right.) But here is a case where the real deal has come along: a bonafide domestic threat to the constitution. People these days are willing to call everything from annoying college students to crummy D.E.I. consultants “totalitarian threats to democracy” or whatever, but when a big, fat threat to democracy is standing right there, suddenly everyone is like, “Well…it’s a little complicated, isn’t it?” No, it really isn’t. And, in this case, we don’t have to break the law or do anything underhanded: just actually try to uphold the law for a change and stop playing little political games around it.

A political class that can’t defend the constitutional order and the rule of law is worse than useless: it’s actually conspiring with its enemies. Trump attacked the very heart of our system of government. If the system can’t respond to that forcefully it doesn’t deserve to exist anymore. Let’s stop pretending Trump is anything but a mobster and a would-be tyrant. In this case, prudence demands action.

Wednesday, August 17, 2022

Mar-A-Lago Raid Was An "Insurance Policy" Taken Out By High-Ranking Democrat Officials

jonathanturley |  In the cult classic, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” the character Scott Stuart is caught in a thick fog that causes him to gradually shrink to the point that he lives in a doll house and fights off the house cat. At one point, Stuart delivers a strikingly profound line: “The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet — like the closing of a gigantic circle.”

If one image sums up the incredibly shrinking stature of Attorney General Merrick Garland, it is that line in the aftermath of the Mar-a-Lago search.

Two years ago, I was one of many who supported Garland when he was nominated for attorney general. While his personality seemed a better fit for the courts than the Cabinet, he is a person with unimpeachable integrity and ethics.

If there are now doubts, it is not about his character but his personality in dealing with political controversies. Those concerns have grown in the past week.

In the aftermath of the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida, much remains unclear. The inventory list confirms that there were documents marked TS (Top Secret) and SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) —two of the highest classification levels for materials. The former president’s retention of such documents would appear to be a very serious violation.

However, the status of the documents is uncertain after Trump insisted that he declassified the material and was handling the records in accordance with prior discussions with the FBI. While the declassified status of these documents would not bar charges under the cited criminal provisions, it could have a significant impact on the viability of any prosecution.

I have not assumed that the search of Mar-a-Lago was unwarranted given that we have not seen the underlying affidavit. Yet in another controversy, Garland seemed largely reactive and rote in dealing with questions over bias or abuse in his department.

In his confirmation hearing, Garland repeatedly pledged that political considerations would hold no sway with him as attorney general. Yet, in just two years, the Justice Department has careened from one political controversy to another without any sign that Garland is firmly in control of the department. Last year, for example, Garland was heavily criticized for his rapid deployment of a task force to investigate parents and others challenging school boards.

When Garland has faced clear demands for independent action, he has folded. For example, Garland has refused to appoint a special counsel in the investigation of Hunter Biden. But there is no way to investigate Hunter Biden without running over continual references to President Biden.

By refusing a special counsel, Garland has removed the president’s greatest threat. Unlike the U.S. Attorney investigating Hunter Biden, a special counsel would be expected to publish a report that would detail the scope of the Biden family’s alleged influence peddling and foreign contacts.

Likewise, the Justice Department is conducting a grand jury investigation that is aggressively pursuing Trump associates and Republican figures, including seizing the telephones of members of Congress. That investigation has bearing on the integrity and the status of Biden’s potential opponent in 2024.

The investigation also has triggered concerns over the party in power investigating the opposing political party. It is breathtaking that Garland would see no need for an independent or special counsel given this country’s continued deep divisions and mistrust.

Democrats often compare the January 6 investigation to Watergate but fail to note that the Watergate investigation was led by an independent counsel precisely because of these inherent political conflicts.

Then came the raid. While Garland said he personally approved the operation, he did little to help mitigate the inevitable political explosion. This country is a powder keg and the FBI has a documented history of false statements to courts and falsified evidence in support of a previous Trump investigation.

Turley Been Busy On The FBI's Mar-A-Lago Fishing Expedition...,

jonathanturley |   Fox News is reporting that the FBI seized boxes containing attorney-client privileged and potentially executive privileged material during its raid Mar-a-Lago. When the raid occurred, I noted that the legal team had likely marked material as privileged at the residence and that the collection could create an immediate conflict over such material. Now, sources are telling Fox that the Justice Department not only took attorney-client material but has refused Trump requests for a special master to review the records.

The request for a special master would seem reasonable, particularly given the sweeping language used in the warrant. It is hard to see what material could not be gathered under this warrant.

Attachment B of the warrant has this provision:

“Any physical documents with classification markings, along with any containers/boxes (including any other contents) in which such documents are located, as well as any other containers/boxes that are collectively stored or found together with the aforementioned documents and containers/boxes; b.. Information, including communications in any form, regarding the retrieval, storage, or transmission of national defense information or classified material”

Thus, the agents could not only take an entire box if it contained a single document with classification markings of any kind but could then take all boxes around that box.

It is not surprising that dozens of boxes were seized.

Given that sweeping language (and the various lawsuits and investigations facing Trump), it would seem reasonable to request a special magistrate. That is why the reported refusal is so concerning. What is the harm from such a review? The material is now under lock and key. There is no approaching deadline in court or referenced grand jury.

Moreover, many have accused the Justice Department of using this search as a pretext. While saying that they were seeking potential national security information, critics have alleged that the real purpose was to gather evidence that could be used against Trump in a prosecution over his role in January 6th riot. I have noted that such a pretext would be deeply disturbing given the documented history of Justice Department officials misleading or lying to courts in prior Trump-related investigations.  The continuation of such subterfuge could be disclosed in a later oversight investigation.

The use of a special master could have helped quell such claims of a pretextual search. Conversely, the denial of such a protective measure would fuel even greater concerns.

The refusal to take this protective measures is almost as troubling as the sweeping language in the search warrant itself. We need to see the affidavit that led to this search warrant. I am not going to assume that the search was unwarranted until I see that evidence. However, in the interim, Attorney General Merrick Garland could have allowed accommodations for this review to assure not just the Trump team but the public that the search was not a pretext for seeking other evidence like January 6th-related material.

Friday, July 29, 2022

Ranking Members Of The House And Senate Judiciary Committees Agree About Hunter Biden

nypost  |  The FBI and Justice Department have been accused by “highly credible whistleblowers” of burying “verified and verifiable” dirt on President Biden’s troubled son Hunter by incorrectly dismissing the intelligence as “disinformation,” according to Sen. Chuck Grassley.

The ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee made the explosive claims Monday in an official Senate letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

He insisted the allegations were so serious, they would prove — if confirmed — that both offices were “institutionally corrupted to their very core.”

The senator said that after his earlier concerns about Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings, his office “received a significant number of protected communications from highly credible whistleblowers.”

The info was about the “FBI’s receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI’s false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation,” he wrote.

“The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter,” he said.

The whistleblowers “alleged that the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” Grassley wrote of the key run-up to Biden’s dad’s successful presidential election.

“Based on allegations, verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation,” he wrote.

Such action continued until at least October 2020 — a month before the election — when info was dismissed as disinformation even though it was allegedly “either verified or verifiable via criminal search warrants,” he wrote.

The assistant special agent in charge then “allegedly ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason” — and then “attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” he wrote.

As that information was falsely dismissed, efforts were made to “smear” those investigating Hunter as being tied to “foreign disinformation,” the senator wrote.

If these allegations are true and accurate, the Justice Department and FBI are — and have been — “institutionally corrupted to their very core to the point in which the United States Congress and the American people will have no confidence in the equal application of the law,” he wrote.

 

 

What Did You Tell Yourself To Pretend That What Happened Didn't In Fact Happen?

nzherald  |  Shocking new photos of Hunter Biden's drug-ravaged teeth and a raunchy scene with a woman have emerged days after the President's son released a "tell-all" memoir on his years as an addict.

Hunter, 51, described his years on crack and alcohol and numerous sexual encounters with women in his autobiography Beautiful Things, published this week.

The photos show his ruined teeth while sitting in a dentist's chair, and Biden grinning with new dental veneers as he pulls on the hair of a scantily clad woman.


The images reportedly were taken from his laptop which allegedly has more than 250,000 text messages, emails, photos and videos chronicling his controversial and troubled past.

Biden left the laptop at a computer repair shop in his father's home state of Delaware and never returned for it.

Another photo appears to show Hunter asleep in a bed with a crack pipe next to him, and another shows him on a bed with two naked women and a small fluffy dog.

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Russiagate PROVES That "A Nation Of Laws And Not Men" Is Utter Nonsense!!!

taibbi |   Last week, in the trial of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis asked ex-campaign manager Robby Mook about the decision to share with a reporter a bogus story about Donald Trump and Russia’s Alfa Bank. Mook answered by giving up his onetime boss. “I discussed it with Hillary,” he said, describing his pitch to the candidate: “Hey, you know, we have this, and we want to share it with a reporter… She agreed to that.”

In a country with a functioning media system, this would have been a huge story. Obviously this isn’t Watergate, Hillary Clinton was never president, and Sussmann’s trial doesn’t equate to prosecutions of people like Chuck Colson or Gordon Liddy. But as we’ve slowly been learning for years, a massive fraud was perpetrated on the public with Russiagate, and Mook’s testimony added a substantial piece of the picture, implicating one of the country’s most prominent politicians in one of the more ambitious disinformation campaigns we’ve seen.

There are two reasons the Clinton story isn’t a bigger one in the public consciousness. One is admitting the enormity of what took place would require system-wide admissions by the FBI, the CIA, and, as Matt Orfalea’s damning video above shows, virtually every major news media organization in America.

More importantly, there’s no term for the offense Democrats committed in 2016, though it was similar to Watergate. Instead of a “third-rate burglary” and a bug, Democrats sent schlock research to the FBI, who in turn lied to the secret FISA court and obtained “legal” surveillance authority over former Trump aide Carter Page (which opened doors to searches of everyone connected to Page). Worse, instead of petty “ratfucking” like Donald Segretti’s “Canuck letter,” the Clinton campaign created and fueled a successful, years-long campaign of official harassment and media fraud. They innovated an extraordinary trick, using government connections and press to generate real criminal and counterintelligence investigations of political enemies, mostly all based on what we now know to be self-generated nonsense.

The Clintons, and especially Hillary, have been baselessly accused of all sorts of things in the past, the murder of Vince Foster being just one example. The “vast right-wing conspiracy” was so successful that the Clintons ended up aligning with and helping fund its chief architect, David Brock, ahead of the 2016 cycle. Along with Perkins Coie and the research agency Fusion-GPS, headed by former Wall Street Journal reporter and current self-admiring sleaze-merchant Glenn Simpson, they engineered three long years of phony “collusion” headlines. No matter what papers like the Washington Post try to argue this week, this was an enormous scandal.

The world has mostly moved on, since Russiagate was thirty or forty “current things” ago, but the public prosecution of the collusion theory was a daily preoccupation of national media for years. A substantial portion of the population believed the accusations, and expected the story would end with Donald Trump in jail or at least indicted, scrolling for a thousand straight days in desperate expectation of the promised justice. Trump was bounced from Twitter for incitement, but Twitter has a policy against misinformation as well. It includes a prohibition against “misleading” media that is “likely to result in widespread confusion on public issues.”

I’m not a fan of throwing people off Twitter, but how can knowingly launching thousands of bogus news stories across a period of years, leading millions of people to believe lies and expect news that never arrived, not qualify as causing “widespread confusion on public issues”?

Let’s travel back in time to the first months of 2017, when “Russiagate” became the dominant news story in the world. Full panic arrived on the wings of a series of blockbuster events. One was the release of an Intelligence Assessment by the office of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on January 6, 2017, which concluded Russia ordered an “influence campaign” with a “clear preference” for Trump. Days later, there was an “absolute bombshell” of a leak reported in CNN, about four intelligence chiefs — Clapper, CIA head John Brennan, FBI chief James Comey, and the NSA’s Mike Rogers — who supposedly presented president-elect Trump with “claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.”

Instantly, much of America was in a fever of speculation over the suddenly plausible-sounding possibility that the incoming president was a real-world “Manchurian Candidate” under Russia’s control. That phrase would be used by the Washington Post, New York Times, Vanity Fair, Salon, Daily News and countless others:

Friday, April 08, 2022

Scott Ritter Off And Back On Twitter: Is Elon Already Kicking Ass And Taking Names?

 

Master Arbitrageur Nancy Pelosi Is At It Again....,

🇺🇸TUCKER: HOW DID NANCY PELOSI GET SO RICH? Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks ar...