mRNA Neo-Vaccinoid Mandate Admittedly A Workaround Constitutional Objections

jonathanturley |   In the law, it is called an admission against interest or an out-of-court statement by a party that, when uttered, is against the party’s pecuniary, proprietary, or penal interests. In politics, it is called just dumb. White House chief of staff Ronald Klain offered a doozy this week when he admitted that the announced use of the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for a vaccine mandate was a mere “work around” of the constitutional limit imposed on the federal government. The problem is that the thing being “worked around” is the Constitution. Courts will now be asked to ignore the admission and uphold a self-admitted evasion of constitutional protections.

Notably, before inauguration, Klain publicly assured the public that Biden would that, on “his first day in office, I will issue a nationwide masking mandate, requiring that people wear masks where the federal authority extends and then urging governors and other local officials to impose mask mandates in their states.” That statement was then walked back due to the lack of legal authority to issue such a mandate.

Klain retweeted MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, who posted, “OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.”

The “work around” was needed because, as some of us have previously during both the Trump and Biden Administration, the federal government does not have clear authority to impose public health mandates. Authority for such mandates has traditionally been recognized within state authority.

Make no mistake about it. This is a clever move to use the OSHA as the vehicle for the mandate to avoid the federalism issues of a direct mandate. President Joe Biden has been ping ponging on the issue for over a year in first suggesting that he could impose a national mandate and then admitting that he probably could not. Ironically, this move comes on the same day that Attorney General Merrick Garland denounced the “clever” use of the Texas abortion law to make it more difficult to challenge. Judging from the praise for Garland, it appears that such work arounds are noble when done for the right cause.

The question is whether this clever work around will in fact work. It might, but there are ample grounds from challenge. Under this interpretation OSHA could impose a federal mandate for any measure that impacts workers, including public health measures not directly linked to a given workplace or job. That may be more of a sticker shock for some on the federal bench, including some justices.

The move is unnecessary and therefore reckless. There are already challenges to the law which the Justice Department could join as amicus.  It would then not have to risk the creation of additional losses in court after the impressive litany of losses of the Biden Administration. This was another filing that followed a public call from the President. It is again politics driving litigation by the Justice Department. The media covered such pressure extensively during the Trump Administration and legal experts objected that the Trump White House was attacking the independence of the Justice Department and other agencies. There is little attention to his pattern that extends from immigration to debt relief to the eviction moratorium.

The Courts WILL UPHOLD Cornpop's Mandate And Minority Resistance WILL BE Crushed

LATimes |  As Biden said in introducing his program Thursday, COVID vaccination “is not about freedom or personal choice. it’s about protecting yourself and those around you — the people you work with, the people you care about, the people you love.”

That said, there are still some questions and issues about the program that deserve answers. Here are some of the most important points.

The court

The Supreme Court has endorsed vaccination mandates for more than 105 years. The court first weighed in on mandates in 1905, with a 7-2 decision in Jacobson vs. Massachusetts, upholding a fine imposed by the city of Cambridge, Mass., on a resident who refused to get inoculated against smallpox.

“Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members,” Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote for the majority.

Harlan saw no problem with constraining “liberty” in the name of public welfare: “In every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

The Jacobson decision has been the linchpin of vaccine requirements coast to coast and at almost all levels of American society. As Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University Law School observed late last year, “All states require childhood vaccines as a condition of school entry.” Adult mandates may be rare, but “at least 16 states require influenza or hepatitis B vaccinations for postsecondary education.”

It’s true that Jacobson has sometimes been exploited to support noxious public policies — Oliver Wendell Holmes cited it as precedent, for instance, in Buck vs. Bell, the 1927 opinion in which he upheld Virginia’s forced sterilization law with the notorious comment, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

It’s also true that the court’s approach to questions of individual rights has evolved over the last century, generally in the direction of narrowing government’s ability to restrict them. But constitutional scholars tend to find that the pandemic is sufficiently dangerous to warrant the constraints Harlan endorsed.

“A law that authorizes mandatory vaccination during an epidemic of a lethal disease ... would undoubtedly be found constitutional,” Wendy Mariner of Boston University wrote in 2005. “However, the vaccine would have to be approved by the FDA as safe and effective, and the law would have to require exceptions for those who have contraindications to the vaccine.” Those conditions would appear to be met by the Biden program.

Federal powers

Biden is relying on the power of federal funding and federal workplace laws. The government’s power to set conditions on its funding are largely unquestioned.

In mentioning an earlier order he issued requiring vaccinations of all nursing home workers who treat Medicare and Medicaid patients, he stated, “I have that federal authority.” The administration’s position is that the same authority extends to firms holding federal contracts and employees of the federal government, as well as 300,000 workers in federally funded Head Start preschool programs.

 

 

 

When The Herd Grows Restive - Teachable Moments And Hard Examples BECOME IMPERATIVE!!!

sicsempertyrannis |   It appears to me that Schumer has in mind to try former President Trump in the senate with John Roberts presiding.  IMO this is unconstitutional.  As Alan Dershowitz said on the TeeVee today, the prospect of such a procedure should be horrifying to all.  Why?  If the congress can try a private citizen and bar him/her from holding federal office, then whichever party controls the congress can simply bar significant opposition figures from office by re-defining the meaning of statutes, imputing motive where there is none and through guilt by association.   This all begins to smell like Stalin's show trials in the 30s in which he killed off his Old Bolshevik comrades and the leadership of the Red Army.  Trump will always remain vulnerable to the civil courts.  The Dems fear that Florida or federal courts in Florida will not extradite him?  They should live with that in the interest of maintaining the Union.

We now have most of downtown Washington, DC transformed into a Green Zone on the Baghdad model.  25,000 federalized National Guard troops plus various kinds of cops occupy that zone.  25,000?  How about 1,000?  How about 2.000?  What do they expect, an attack on the Biden inauguration platform from the other end of the Mall?  The bridges from Virginia are closed by order of his majesty Ralph Northam.   We live here under Ralph's imperial decrees in a vast outdoor prison.  The ability of the imperial authorities to wall us up, each in our own crummy little domain bodes ill for the future.

Not for the first time am I disgusted by the susceptibility of those I thought my countrymen to waves of hysteria.   German and then Communist spying in WW1,  Prohibition, internment of Japanese descended citizens of the US in WW2,  McCarthyism, the 2K fantasy in which people waited for the end of civilized life, 9/11, after which the whole country went into a profound funk and stumbled about terrified of the NEXT ATTACK.   And now, we have the Left's desire to destroy opposition, the opposition of 75 million citizens and to do it through mass mobilization of political hysteria.

This will never be the same country again.  We have lost the talent needed to maintain a federal republic.

Pelosi Kicks Katie Porter Off The House Financial Services Committee

Rep. Katie Porter challenged big bank CEO Jamie Dimon to pay his workers a living wage by literally showing him the math pic.twitter.com/FpzxrIc8Co

— ᴿealfarmacist (@real_farmacist) April 13, 2019

nakedcapitalism |  Katie Porter has been a star since being elected to Congress in 2018. Two years after narrowly ousting GOP incumbent Mimi Walters– 158,906 (52.1%) to 146,383 (47.9%)– the Republican Party was on the war-path in Orange County but not serious about taking on Porter. They defeated corporate conservative Democrats Harley Rouda and Gil Cisneros but never really got behind former Mission Viejo mayor Greg Raths, their candidate against Porter. The NRCC spent no money on Raths’ behalf and Porter beat him 221,843 (53.5%) to 193,096 (46.5%).

Several weeks ago, Porter was elected Deputy Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Having won two terms in Congress as a supporter of Medicare for All in a district where Republicans outnumber Democrats, she is best known for holding corporate special interests accountable and advocating for stronger worker protections. Her star shined brightly as a fierce questioner of banksters and government bureaucrats who came before the House Financial Services Committee.

On Thursday evening, I read that Pelosi has pushed her off the committee at the urging on the banksters, the Fed and Wall Street special interests. In a conversation with another member of the committee, an admirer of Porter’s, I was told that it was a combination of the Fed and Wall Street that demanded her removal. The member told me that “It is, in fact, a tragedy for that committee to lose someone like her. It’s a staff-run committee, with revolving-door staff… Also taking someone off a committee means they’re losing their committee seniority, which is very, very bad karma, since the whole system is built on that.”

Robert Kraft Walked While Trafficked Asian Women Got The Book Thrown At Them

palmbeachpost |  After the arrests, prosecutors and several law-enforcement agencies said they believed the spas may be linked to human trafficking. To date, no one has been charged with human trafficking in relation to these cases, according to court records.

Once the case was brought to court, the recordings were challenged by lawyers and barred by judges from being used as evidence because of the controversial means in which law enforcement obtained the video, known as "sneak-and-peek" warrants. 

MORE: Search warrant used to catch Robert Kraft built for terrorists, not johns, critics say

After prosecutors spent a year fighting the charges, an appeals court ruled in August that the lower court was correct and that "total suppression was the appropriate remedy under the circumstances of this case."

"The type of law enforcement surveillance utilized in these cases is extreme," the 23-page opinion read. 

Florida's Attorney General Ashley Moody said she wouldn't take an appeal to the Florida Supreme Court, so the prostitution solicitation charges were dropped in September.

Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg said he and his office were forced to drop the charges after the rulings.

"Without these videos, we cannot move forward with our prosecutions, and thus we are ethically compelled to drop the cases against all the defendants," he said in September. 

When asked why the charges against the women were not dropped, Aronberg said there was still enough evidence without the recordings to prosecute them. 

"Orchids of Asia Day Spa was a notorious brothel in a family shopping center," Aronberg said.

"Rich guys from a local country club lined up to receive sex acts throughout the day until the place closed around midnight," Aronberg said.

Salvador Cienfuegos: Crime For Thee - Not For Me - I Am Free....,

mexiconewsdaily |  It is said that a “brotherhood” within the army called “El Sindicato” (The Syndicate) can in fact take the credit for Cienfuegos’ return as a free man.

Emeequis said that it was told by army sources that just a few hours after news broke of the former army chief’s arrest, a representative of El Sindicato – mainly made up of active and retired four-star generals – knocked on the door of the office of current Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval.

The representative, according to the sources, was a general who has experience combating drug cartels in the north of Mexico and a longstanding friendship with Sandoval.

One source told Emeequis that the message to the defense minister was: “The high-ranking commanders of the army were not going to remain with their arms crossed while a foreign government tore their credibility to shreds.”

The general told Sandoval to pass the message on to President López Obrador, making it clear that the high-ranking members of El Sindicato were not happy about the federal government not going to bat for their former colleague.

Emeequis said that in addition to generals, lieutenants and colonels began complaining that López Obrador appeared to be siding more with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) than the powerful “brotherhood,” which according to the report “pulls strings” on crucial issues for the federal government, such as the deployment of the National Guard, the construction of the new Santa Lucía airport and the construction of the new refinery on the Tabasco coast.

When Cienfuegos was transferred to a prison in New York from Los Angeles, even the most patient army officials – people who had been calling for the president to be given more time to negotiate with U.S. authorities – were infuriated, the report said.

El Sindicato consequently increased its pressure on the government. Several more representatives of the organization visited Sandoval or spoke to him over the telephone to tell him to tell López Obrador that there was a risk that the discontent in the army could cause problems for the government.

The president then reportedly ordered Foreign Minister Ebrard to harden his tone in complaining to the United States about arresting Cienfuegos without informing the Mexican government, and told him to insist on having the former defense minister returned to Mexico given that he allegedly committed crimes here rather than in the U.S.

Ebrard told reporters on October 29 that Mexico had expressed its “profound discontent” to the United States over not being informed.

To support their demand that the former defense minister be sent back to Mexico, the FGR and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the United States that the federal government would reevaluate its future collaboration with the DEA, Emeequis said.

The Washington Post reported that prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York attributed the decision to drop charges against Cienfuegos to the Mexican government’s threats to limit the role of the DEA in Mexico.

 

Military And Law Enforcement Collaboration To Violate Rights And Grift Taxpayer Dollars

newyorker  |  Before dawn on January 23, 2019, Mark McConnell arrived at the Key West headquarters of the military and civilian task force that monitors drugs headed to the United States from the Southern Hemisphere. McConnell, a prosecutor at the Department of Justice and a former marine, left his phone in a box designed to block electronic transmissions, and passed through a metal detector and a key-card-protected air lock to enter the building. On the second floor, he punched in the code for his office door, then locked it behind him. On a computer approved for the handling of classified information, he loaded a series of screenshots he had taken, showing entries in a database called Helios, which federal law enforcement uses to track drug smugglers. McConnell e-mailed the images to a classified government hotline for whistle-blowers. Then he printed backup copies and, following government procedures for handling classified information, sealed them in an envelope that he placed in another envelope, marked “SECRET.” He hid the material behind a piece of furniture.

McConnell had uncovered what he described as a “criminal conspiracy” perpetrated by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. Every year, entries in the Helios database lead to hundreds of drug busts, which lead to prosecutions in American courts. The entries are typically submitted to Helios by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the F.B.I., and a division of the Department of Homeland Security. But McConnell had learned that more than a hundred entries in the database that were labelled as originating from F.B.I. investigations were actually from a secret C.I.A. surveillance program. He realized that C.I.A. officers and F.B.I. agents, in violation of federal law and Department of Justice guidelines, had concealed the information’s origins from federal prosecutors, leaving judges and defense lawyers in the dark. Critics call such concealment “intelligence laundering.” In the nineteen-seventies, after C.I.A. agents were found to have performed experiments with LSD on unwitting Americans and investigated Vietnam War protesters, restrictions were imposed that bar the agency from being involved in domestic law-enforcement activities. Since the country’s founding, judges, jurors, and defendants have generally had the right to know how evidence used in a trial was gathered. “This was undisclosed information, from an agency working internationally with different rules and standards,” Nancy Gertner, a retired federal district judge and a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, told me. “This should worry Trump voters who talk about a ‘deep state.’ This is the quintessential deep state. This is activities beyond your view, fundamentally affecting what happens in American courts.”

But the scheme benefitted the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.: the former received information obtained during operations, and the latter reported increased arrests and was able to secure additional federal funding as a result. The scope of the scheme was corroborated in hundreds of pages of e-mails, transcripts, and other documents obtained by The New Yorker.

For weeks, C.I.A. officials had been trying to stop McConnell from revealing the agency’s activities. They sent a lawyer to Key West with nondisclosure agreements, but McConnell refused to sign. A day before his early arrival at the office, McConnell had learned of an order to delete the screenshots on his computer. “I knew that I had to get the electronic evidence to outside investigators,” he told me. “There was no doubt about what I needed to do, and there was no doubt retaliation against me would follow.” He worked quickly, not knowing when security officers would arrive. Later that day, they came to McConnell’s office and deleted the images.

A little more than a month later, after C.I.A. officials accused McConnell of “spilling” classified information, the director of the task force suspended him. Soon, the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel, visited the task force and was briefed on the matter. According to a sworn affidavit that McConnell filed with the Senate Intelligence Committee, and to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Haspel said that there needed to be repercussions for McConnell. (A C.I.A. spokesperson, Timothy Barrett, called the allegation “inaccurate and a gross mischaracterization.”) The military leadership of the task force ignored McConnell’s appeal of his suspension, and discussions about future assignments came to an abrupt halt. Six officials said that they believed the C.I.A. had retaliated against McConnell, leaving him nominally employed but unable to find a new post after decades of public service.

The Seth Rich Assassination And Coverup Yet Another Reason Julian Assange Must Die In Jail

sicsempertyrannis |  While the law enforcement and intelligence community, along with the mainstream media, has been pushing the meme that there is no basis to believe that Seth Rich, as claimed by multiple independent sources, had contact with Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, the evidence suggests otherwise and it turns out the FBI has been covering up more relevant documents.

The first hint of the coverup came from David Hardy, an FBI Senior official, who affirmed in a 2017 affidavit that there were no responsive records. Hardy is the Section Chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section (“RIDS”), Information Management Division (“IMD”), Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), in Winchester, Virginia. Here are the relevant portions of his first affidavit:

(19) CRS Search and Results. In response to Plaintiff’s request dated September 1, 2017, RIDS conducted an index search of the CRS for responsive main and reference file records employing the UNI application of ACS. The FBI searched the subject’s name, “Seth Conrad Rich,” in order to identify files responsive to Plaintiff’s request and subject to the FOIA. The FBI’s searches included a three-way phonetic breakdown5 of the subject’s name. These searches located no main or reference records responsive to Plaintiff’s FOIA request.

(9) By letter executed on November 9, 2017, OIP advised Plaintiff it affirmed the FBI’s determination. OIP further advised Plaintiff that to the extent his request sought access to records that would either confirm or deny an individual’s placement on any government watch list, the FBI properly refused to confirm or deny the existence of any such records because their existence is protected from disclosure pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(E). . .

David Hardy either was lying or dangerously incompetent. The FBI did have documents–emails to be specific. The FBI’s habit of stonewalling or denying that it has documents, in this case documents related to Seth Rich, is not unique to this case. Just ask Carter Page or General Michael Flynn.

  The FBI finally admitted to Judicial Watch in January 2020 that they had emails between the Washington Field Office and FBI Headquarters. These are dynamite because they show that the FBI’s Washington Field Office (which is not located at FBI Headquarters on 9th and Pennsylvania Avenue, NW in Washington, DC) was communicating with the FBI’s Peter Strzok and the Counter Intelligence Division. Why in the world would the FBI be involved in investigating what was supposedly a mere robbery of an unfortunate white victim (i.e., Seth Rich) and communicating on this investigation with the Counter Intelligence Division (CID) of the FBI. The CID only works international spy cases.

Here are the emails (I transcribed them and put them in chronological order to facilitate your ability to read them and understand what is being communicated).

Biggest Source Of Coronavirus Infections In Illinois Are Federal, State And County Prisons And Jails

investigatemidwest  | Newly obtained confidential statewide data shows that coronavirus outbreaks in workplaces, schools and prisons are driving Illinois’ rising cases — and many of these outbreaks have never been made public. 

Illinois surpassed 300,000 confirmed cases this past weekend and recorded its highest daily death count since late June on Friday. 

The internal data — prepared by the state health department and covering four different days between July and September — was obtained by the Documenting COVID-19 project at Columbia University’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting as part of an open-records request. It gives detailed information and case counts for nearly 2,600 separate outbreaks across Illinois. 

The Illinois Department of Public Health, citing a state communicable diseases law, does not release details about where many outbreaks have occurred, limiting its disclosures to long-term care and assisted living facilities. Separately, the Illinois Department of Corrections and some counties regularly release numbers of infected inmates and prison staff. 

Public health officials issued a “warning list” last week for 28 Illinois counties at risk for coronavirus surges and blamed, in part, businesses who were "blatantly disregarding mitigation measures, people not social distancing, gathering in large groups and not using face coverings."

“Even though they are close to it, sometimes the infected don’t know that there’s a serious outbreak where they work. It’s a problem,” said Dr. Michael D. Cailas, an associate professor of occupational and environmental health sciences at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, who reviewed the confidential state data for this story. Cailas, who has mapped Chicagoland mortality data, added that many of the workplace outbreaks in Illinois are simply “not publicly known.”

In refusing to release the locations of outbreaks, the Illinois Department of Public Health said that it is bound by state and federal laws that are designed to protect the identity of those infected.

“Another consideration is the fact that people may not have become infected at the business location,” said department spokeswoman Melaney Arnold.

As part of its contract tracing efforts, the health department is compiling data on the types of facilities and locations where outbreaks are occurring and is “working to make this information available.” (The Documenting COVID-19 project and the Midwest Center have made the data available in a searchable format below.)

The data shows:

• The single biggest source of coronavirus infections in Illinois are federal, state and county prisons and jails. The Cook County Jail, once considered the worst outbreak in the U.S., listed 1,074 positive cases as of Sept. 30, the largest count of any single outbreak. (The Cook County figure is now up to 1,118, according to the jail’s website, including the deaths of seven inmates and four staffers.)
  
  But significant outbreaks at other Illinois prisons, including Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, near Chicago; East Moline Correctional Center in Rock Island; and Robinson Correctional in Crawford, brings the prison total as of Sept. 30 to at least 3,500 cases across 36 different facilities. That’s nearly double the almost 1,800 prison figure for Illinois reported by the Marshall Project and The Associated Press.
  
  In response to questions, the Illinois Department of Corrections said its response to the coronavirus “continues to be deliberate and aggressive,” noting that, in mid-March, it suspended visitation and placed all of its facilities in quarantine to stem the virus’s spread. 
  
  Aside from personal protective equipment and cleaning, all state prison staff are screened and temperature checked; inmates are regularly reviewed for early release; and the department appointed a statewide infection coordinator to handle the response.

The Hidden Cost Of American Criminal Injustice

Time  |  We all know getting entangled in the criminal justice system leads to serious consequences. But few among us really understand that the slightest brush with the law bears an even stricter potential sentence – a lifetime trapped in an inescapable cycle of poverty.

A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law shows that $372 billion in earnings are lost in the United States each year for those who have a criminal conviction or have spent time in prison. That is enough money to close New York City’s poverty gap 60 times over.

While it is no secret that our criminal justice system has economic implications for those who serve time, we now understand just how devastating those impacts are. Time in prison slashes annual earning potential in half, which results in a loss of nearly half a million dollars over the course of a career. But if you are a person of color, these gaps widen even more dramatically. Blacks and Latinos who have a prison record experience a nearly flat trajectory in earnings after imprisonment, while their white counterparts’ earnings climb steadily across a lifetime.

These findings have enormous implications for the U.S. economy. More than 7 million people living in the U.S. have served time in prison and more than 45 million, and well over a tenth of all Americans, have been convicted of a misdemeanor, such as shoplifting.

These lost earnings impact the entire country, and they disproportionally drain resources and wealth from communities of color. Blacks are jailed at more than triple the rate of whites, and nearly half of all people serving effective life sentences are Black. This overrepresentation exacerbates an already disturbingly wide racial wealth gap that sees the median white family holding 10 times the wealth of the median Black family.

Will Durham Investigation "Strike The Root" And Go Back To The Clinton Foundation?

washingtonexaminer |   U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the handling of the FBI’s investigation of possible bribery and pay-to-play at the Clinton Foundation as part of his broader inquiry of the Trump-Russia investigators, according to a new report.

The New York Times reported Thursday that Durham “has sought documents and interviews about how federal law enforcement officials handled an investigation … into allegations of political corruption” at the Clinton Foundation, founded by former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Durham was picked by Attorney General William Barr in 2019 to investigate the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation, and the outlet said that “Durham’s team members have suggested to others that they are comparing the two investigations.” The article claimed that “it was not clear whether Mr. Durham’s investigators were similarly looking for violations in the Clinton Foundation investigation."

Durham’s office declined the Washington Examiner’s request for comment. The Clinton Foundation told the New York Times that it “has regularly been subjected to baseless, politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have been proven false.”

Barr has denied that he is being pressured by President Trump in his handling of Durham’s inquiry and claimed that any actions taken won't affect the 2020 election. House and Senate Democrats have called for the Justice Department's independent watchdog to investigate Durham’s work.

After Robert Mueller was appointed in 2017 to look into the Russia matter, Republicans called for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate Clinton-related controversies. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions tasked U.S. Attorney John Huber of Utah in November 2017 to investigate several issues, including the FBI's corruption investigation into the 2010 Uranium One deal and allegations that Clinton orchestrated a "quid pro quo." The sale of Uranium One, a Canada-based company with U.S. mine holdings, to Russian state-owned Rosatom was the focus of scrutiny from Republicans who claimed Clinton may have helped coax the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States not to block the deal and that the Clinton Foundation may have stood to benefit.

Barr told CBS’s Jan Crawford in May 2019 that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz and Durham had taken over much of Huber’s inquiry. Barr said that “the other issues [Huber has] been working on relate to Hillary Clinton” are "winding down and hopefully we'll be in a position to bring those to fruition.” Crawford asked Barr if “now Durham is going to pick up this” Huber inquiry, and Barr said, “Yes, right.” Huber's inquiry did not lead to any "known impacts," according to a Washington Post report in January. Fox News reported Thursday that "parts of what Huber was investigating in 2017 — involving the Clinton Foundation — have been incorporated in Durham’s investigation."

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said in August that “there was a clear double standard by the Department of Justice and FBI when it came to the Trump and Clinton campaigns in 2016.” Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley told Fox News in April 2019 that “if the Democrats want to be consistent, they'll have to treat Clinton, Uranium One, and Russia-related investigations the same.”

Will The October Surprise Encompass John Brennan?

 realclearinvestigations |  Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan's take that Russian leader Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House, according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials detailing Brennan’s role in drafting the document.

The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.

The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report — known as the "Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections (ICA)” — just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump.

The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the “collusion” probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.

RealClearInvestigations has learned that one of the CIA operatives who helped Brennan draft the ICA, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, financially supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign and is a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella, identified last year by RCI as the Democratic national security “whistleblower" whose complaint led to Trump’s impeachment, ending in Senate acquittal in January.

The two officials said Brennan, who openly supported Clinton during the campaign, excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a “wild card.”

The dissenting analysts found that Moscow preferred Clinton because it judged she would work with its leaders, whereas it worried Trump would be too unpredictable. As secretary of state, Clinton tried to “reset” relations with Moscow to move them to a more positive and cooperative stage, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow perceived as a threat.

These same analysts argued the Kremlin was generally trying to sow discord and disrupt the American democratic process during the 2016 election cycle. They also noted that Russia tried to interfere in the 2008 and 2012 races, many years before Trump threw his hat in the ring.

 

Get Sara Carter A Little Cosmetic Dentistry And Jeanine Piro's Timeslot On Fox

saracarter |  Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Lindsey Graham hinted more than a week ago that more bombshell information regarding the FBI’s handling of its probe into President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia was about to be public. He was right because it was Graham’s committee that discovered the information., 

In a bombshell letter released a letter Thursday night by Graham’s committee from Justice Department Attorney General William Barr revealed a declassified summary from the bureau indicating that former British spy Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source in his debunked dossier was believed to be a Russian spy. Not only was the sub source believed to be a spy but the FBI knew about it and had conducted a counterintelligence investigation on the individual. 

“In light of this newly declassified information, I will be sending the FISA Court the information provided to inform them how wide and deep the effort to conceal exculpatory information regarding the Carter Page warrant application was in 2016 and 2017,” said Graham. “A small group of individuals in the Department of Justice and FBI should be held accountable for this fraud against the court.  I do not believe they represent the overwhelming majority of patriotic men and women who work at the Department of Justice and FBI.”

One of those individuals being investigated by Connecticut Prosecutor John Durham is former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for lying to the Inspector General on multiple occasions. He is now in Durham’s crosshairs, along with multiple other former senior FBI officials that were involved in the investigation, according to a source with direct knowledge. 

McCabe, along with other FBI officials, withheld that information from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as well as some of the FBI special agents investigating Trump’s campaign and its alleged ties to Russia, according to the source.

“McCabe and others were suppressing information, misrepresenting it or lying about the information that they had in order to purposefully undermine the Trump candidacy and that turned into the predication for undermining the Trump presidency,” said a source with direct knowledge of the situation.

Sherriff David Beth - SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST - Kill'em All!!!!

kiro7  |  Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth in 2018 told reporters that five Black shoplifters who stole about $5,000 worth of clothing before crashing into a teenage driver while fleeing police should be “warehoused” and not allowed to father children.

Beth, who is already under fire following the Aug. 23 shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha city police officers, as well as the killings of two men subsequently protesting Blake’s shooting, is now facing calls for his immediate resignation. Those calls stem from, in part, Beth’s comments regarding a group of Black shoplifters arrested in January 2018.

“I have no issue with these five people completely disappearing,” Beth said during the controversial news conference. “At (this) point, these people are no longer an asset to our community, and they just need to disappear.”

The Washington Post reported that Beth made his incendiary comments in January 2018 after three men and two women from Milwaukee shoplifted clothing from a Tommy Hilfiger outlet store in Kenosha.

Before he even began speaking, Beth admitted that what was to come would be “un-politically correct.” Four days later, he was forced to issue a public apology amid backlash from the community and faith leaders in Kenosha County.

Beth apologized to anyone he offended but refused to retract the comments he’d made.

The 2018 statements are but one of the issues for which the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin has demanded he resign. The organization has also called on Kenosha city police Chief Daniel Miskinis to tender his resignation.

One of the reasons: The Aug. 23 shooting of Blake, a Black man shot at least seven times in the back by a Kenosha police officer as he tried to get into his vehicle, where his three children sat waiting for him. According to Blake’s family, he was partially paralyzed by the shooting.

Ah Yes…, By Its Loud Squeal, We Know A Bad Piglet Got Caught Under The Gate

justsecurity |  Dear U.S. Attorney Durham:

On May 13, 2019, Attorney General William Barr appointed you to review the origins of the 2016 Justice Department investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. At some point, this review turned into a criminal investigation of the Justice Department’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to undermine our democracy.

The need for your appointment was hard to understand at the time it was made, since the Justice Department’s independent Inspector General was already conducting a similar investigation that began in March 2018 into the same issues.  On December 9, 2019, the Inspector General issued his report and concluded that the 2016 Russia investigation had had a legitimate purpose and that there was no evidence of political bias against President Trump in how the investigation had been initiated or undertaken.

We are now in the closing stages of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Longstanding Department policies issued by the past three Attorneys General who served during an election year make plain that Department actions should not be taken in an election year that could influence or affect an election.  George J. Terwilliger III, who served as deputy attorney general under Attorney General William Barr in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, said in 2016, “There’s a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election.”

I strongly urge you to follow this policy and not to issue any report, or bring any indictments, resulting from your investigation in these closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election.

Any public action by the Justice Department in this pre-election period that is associated with your investigation – which by its very nature involves actions taken during the Obama-Biden Administration – is bound to be used by President Trump for partisan political purposes to promote his re-election effort against Vice President Biden.

In testifying during his Senate confirmation hearings, Mr. Barr was asked whether there are “policies in place that try to insulate the investigations and the decisions of the Department of Justice and FBI from getting involved in elections?” Barr said yes and explained that the party in power has “their hands on the levers of the law enforcement apparatus of the country, and you do not want it used against the opposing political party.” But that is precisely what would occur here if a report is issued on your investigation of the Russia investigation or if indictments are brought at this critical stage of the presidential election.

You should not permit your long and distinguished career in the Justice Department to be permanently tainted, or your personal integrity to be irreparably impugned, by what would plainly be an effort to use your investigation to influence or affect the 2020 presidential election.

AG Bill Barr Say He Still Tryna Bring Coup Plotters To Justice

CTH |  AG Bill Barr notes John Durham will bring criminal charges against those in the previous administration: “he is looking to bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses if he can show that there were criminal violations; and that’s what the focus is on.”

INGRAHAM – John Brennan was smashing the President’s firing of Inspector General Michael Atkinson, let’s listen:

BRENNAN – “By removing Mr. Atkinson, and I think also sending a signal to others, Mr. Trump continues to show his insecurity in terms of trying to stop anybody who was going to expose, again the lawlessness, that I think he not only has allowed to continue, but also that he abets.”

BARR – “I think the president did the right thing in removing Atkinson. From the vantage point of the Dept. of Justice, he had interpreted his statute; which is a fairly narrow statute that gave him jurisdiction over wrong-doing by intelligence people; and tried to turn it into a commission to explore anything in the government, and immediately report it to congress without letting the executive branch look at it and determine whether there was any problem.  He was told this in a letter from the department of justice, and he is obliged to follow the interpretation of the department of justice, and he ignored it. So I think the President was correct in firing him.”

INGRAHAM – “An it’s the second inspector general he’s fired since the beginning of this pandemic. And of course that’s used to say: ‘well, the president doesn’t want a watchdog’.”

BARR – “No, I think that’s true. I think he want’s responsible watchdogs.”

INGRAHAM – What can you tell us about the state of John Durham’s investigation? People have been waiting for the, the final report, on what happened with this, what can you tell us?

BARR – “Well I think a report y’know, may be, and probably will be, a by-product of his activity; but his primary focus isn’t to prepare a report, he is looking to bring to justice people who were engaged in abuses if he can show that there were criminal violations; and that’s what the focus is on. And, uh, as you know, being a lawyer yourself, building these cases, especially the sprawling case we have between us that went on for two or three years here, uh…, it takes some time, it takes some time to build the case.”

“So he’s diligently pursuing it, uh.. My own view is that, uh, the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness, there was something far more troubling here; and we’re going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law, and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted.”

Browder Another Ahmed Chalabi Type Swindler/Hustler

Telegraph |  Bill Browder has described himself as "Putin's No 1 enemy". Now the Russian president had added weight to that claim by singling out the British investor at his controversial summit with Donald Trump on Monday. 

The UK-based financier appeared to be part of what the US president called an "incredible offer" by Vladimir Putin to assist American investigators in their prosecution of 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking crimes during the 2016 presidential election season.

"He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the 12 people," Mr Trump told reporters during a news conference in Helsinki following his joint summit with Mr Putin.

The special counsel investigating potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin charged a dozen Russian military intelligence officers on Friday with hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and then releasing the stolen communications online as part of a sweeping conspiracy to meddle in the election.

While Mr Trump did not elaborate on the Russian leader's "incredible offer," Mr Putin himself suggested that special counsel Robert Mueller could ask Russian law enforcement agencies to interrogate the suspects. He said US officials could request to be present at such questioning in line with a 1999 agreement on mutual legal assistance in criminal cases.

However, there was a catch: Russia would expect the US to return the favour and cooperate with interrogations of people “who have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia”. Mr Putin highlighted the case of Mr Browder.

"No journalist had asked about me," Mr Browder wrote in Time. "He just brought me up out of the blue ...To my mind, this can only mean that he is seriously rattled."

The American-born Jewish businessman, who has held British citizenship for the past two decades, was last year sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison on fraud and tax evasion charges.

More pertinently, he was also the driving force behind The Magnitsky Act, a 2012 US law targeting Russian officials over human rights abuses. It was named after Sergei Magnitsky, his lawyer whose investigations in 2008 uncovered a web of alleged tax fraud and corruption involving 23 companies and $230 million. He later died in Russian custody.

The FBI has sided with the powerful against the powerless to maintain an unjust social order

counterpunch  |  The indictments are a major political story, but not for the reasons given in mainstream press coverage. Once Mr. Mueller’s indictment is understood to charge the exploitation of existing social tensions (read it and decide for yourself), the FBI, which Mr. Mueller directed from 2001 – 2013, is precisely the wrong entity to be rendering judgment. The FBI has been America’s political police since its founding in 1908. Early on former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover led legally dubious mass arrests of American dissidents. He practically invented the slander of conflating legitimate dissent with foreign agency. This is the institutional backdrop from which Mr. Mueller proceeds.

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the FBI’s targets included the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Black Panther Party and any other political organization Mr. Hoover deemed a threat. The secret (hidden) FBI program COINTELPRO was intended to subvert political outcomes outside of allegations of criminal wrongdoing and with no regard for the lives of its targets. Throughout its history the FBI has sided with the powerful against the powerless to maintain an unjust social order.

Robert Mueller became FBI Director only days before the attacks of September 11, 2001. One of his first acts as Director was to arrest 1,000 persons without any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. None of those arrested were ever charged in association with the attacks. The frame in which the FBI acted— to maintain political stability threatened by ‘external’ forces, was ultimately chosen by the George W. Bush administration to justify its aggressive war against Iraq.

It is the FBI’s legacy of conflating dissent with being an agent of a foreign power that Mr. Mueller’s indictment most insidiously perpetuates. Russians are ‘sowing discord,’ and they are using Americans to do so, goes the allegation. Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders are listed in the indictment as roadblocks to the unfettered ascension of Hillary Clinton to the presidency. Russians are sowing discord, therefore discord is both suspect in itself and evidence of being a foreign agent.

The posture of simple reporting at work in the indictment— that it isn’t the FBI’s fault that the Russians (allegedly) inserted themselves into the electoral process, runs against the history of the FBI’s political role, the tilt used to craft criminal charges and the facts put forward versus those put to the side. Given the political agendas of the other agencies that the FBI joined through the charges, they are most certainly but a small piece of a larger story.

In the aftermath of the indictments it’s easy to forget that the Pentagon created the internet, that the NSA has its tentacles in all of its major chokepoints, that the CIA has been heavily involved in funding and ‘using’ social media toward its own ends and that the FBI is only reputable in the present because of Americans’ near-heroic ignorance of history. The claim that the Russian operation was sophisticated because it had corporate form and function is countered by the fact that it was, by the various agencies’ own claims, ineffectual in changing the outcome of the election.

I Have a List

While Robert Mueller was busy charging never-to-be-tried Russians with past crimes, Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence, declared that future Russian meddling has already cast a shadow over the integrity of the 2018 election. Why the Pentagon that created the internet, the NSA that has its tentacles in all of its major chokepoints, the CIA that has been heavily involved in funding and ‘using’ social media toward its own ends and the FBI that just landed such a glorious victory of good over evil would be quivering puddles when it comes to precluding said meddling is a question that needs to be asked.

FBI Was Too Busy Policing Politics To "Protect and Serve" Citizens...,

WaPo |  FBI officials declined to say what precise searches were used to try to identify the owner of the account or to possibly link it with other social media profiles. Cruz had two Instagram accounts that also contain his name: cruz_nikolas and nikolascruzmakarov.

A law enforcement official said the FBI will review the steps it took in responding to the tip to determine whether anything could have been done differently or if practices should be changed for the future.

A search of the public records database Nexis for people with the name “Nikolas Cruz” returns 22 results, three of which use different spellings. It was not immediately clear if the FBI attempted to contact any of those people.

Without more to go on, officials felt there wasn’t enough legal justification to issue a subpoena to YouTube for the underlying information about the “nikolas cruz” who had threatened a school shooting, a law enforcement official said.

Google, which owns YouTube, has a policy of not turning over user information to the government without a subpoena, search warrant or other court order forcing it to do so. Google representatives did not return messages seeking comment.

Limited resources

Hosko, the former FBI assistant director, said the FBI gets more than 100 threat reports each day, in addition to other reports of mental health and other issues. That leaves supervisors in the difficult position of deciding how many resources should be devoted to each case and for how long. Even in terrorism cases, Hosko said, the bureau sometimes has to leave suspects unmonitored because the FBI lacks personnel to follow each of them all the time.

“The FBI has terrorism subjects that they’re looking at — they’re not all under 24-7 surveillance, and if they prioritize that wrong, yes, something bad can happen,” Hosko said. “These are the hard resource-allocation decisions you’re making if you don’t have unlimited resources.”

Hosko said in most cases of possible threats, an early question supervisors ask is, “At the end of the day, would we even have a federal crime if we proved a person sent this or posted this?” And in Cruz’s case — where the comment is a not a specific threat — the answer was probably no, he said.

Bennight said that after agents interviewed him about the comment in September, he didn’t hear anything more from the FBI — until Wednesday. Agents called him to say that there had been an incident and that they wanted to follow up on his earlier complaint.

Bennight said he did not know how it was connected to the shooting in Florida until agents informed him that the comment he’d flagged had been posted under a username matching the name of suspected shooter Nikolas Cruz.

Who's Snitching Who's Asking Kwestins In The DOJ?

theconservativetreehouse |  So to summarize so far: during January all the DOJ documents arrived, the HPSCI (Nunes) memo was written, released, declassified and released to the public on February 2nd, 2018 – but no witnesses testified.  [Nunes Memo – Link]

So the question becomes:

How does the exact testimony (including quotes) of Bruce Ohr, and Bill Priestap become part of the Nunes Memo if neither Bruce Ohr or Bill Priestap was ever interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee?

Who is doing the interrogations of Bill Priestap and Bruce Ohr?

It’s not the HPSCI.  It’s not the House Judiciary Committee and it’s not the Senate (Chuck Grassley).  [Remember Grassley is relying on responsive FD-302’s provided by the FBI.]

See where this is going?  DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has interviewed these witnesses and extracted testimony.  Can you see now why Nunes was in ‘no hurry’ to interview the FIVE? (Strzok, Page, Ohr, Baker and Priestap).

Let me remind everyone that each of the aforementioned names is still within the system.  Unlike Mike Kortan, David Laufman, Sally Yates, James Rybicki or Andrew McCabe, none of the five (Strzok, Page, Ohr, Baker, Priestap) have been removed.  Peter Strzok is in FBI HR; Lisa Page is doing something; Bruce Ohr and James Baker are holding down chairs somewhere; and Bill Priestap is still Asst. FBI Director in charge of counterintelligence.

It doesn’t go unnoticed the media are transparently not following up on Peter, Lisa, Bruce Jim or Bill.  No satellite trucks in front of their houses etc.; no pounding on their doors for comment etc.  Nothing.

Further, ask yourself why Inspector General Michael Horowitz (or someone thereabouts) began to advance upon the entire ‘Trump operation’ with releases of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page text messages?  Why them? Surely, other collaborative communication was also captured, yet we only heard of Page and Strzok.  Why?