Since October, criminal organizations have smuggled more than two dozen Central American migrant groups - each numbering in the hundreds - to remote stretches of the US-Mexico border
By Seth Robbins
InSight Crime
January 23, 2019
Border Patrol agents have found several large Central American migrant groups crossing the US-Mexico border along remote stretches of desert — a smuggling tactic that requires the buy-in of larger criminal groups.
Since October, criminal organizations have smuggled more than two dozen migrant groups to the desolate region near the Antelope Wells port of entry in southwest New Mexico, US Border Patrol officials said in a news release. The groups — each numbering in the hundreds — have all surrendered to authorities upon entering.
Last Wednesday, a group of 274 migrants — composed mostly of Central American families and children seeking asylum — crossed just after midnight. Border Patrol officials later said that the crossing was used as a distraction while two suspected drug mules moved 265 pounds of marijuana across the border. A group of 115 migrants surrendered the next night in the same region.
“Unscrupulous organized smugglers are exploiting the area,” the Border Patrol said in its statement.
Smugglers were also accused of aiding a group of 376 migrants who tunneled under a border fence near the southwest tip of Arizona on Jan. 14. The group — with the help of the smugglers — dug seven short, shallow holes under the steel barrier ten miles east of the border crossing in San Luis, and then turned themselves in to authorities, ABC News reported.
A Guatemalan man told the news outlet that he had paid a coyote $5,000 to get him and his 12-year-old daughter to the border with that group.
InSight Crime Analysis
The sudden movement of large groups of Central American migrants to remote stretches of the US-Mexico border is a sign that smugglers are profiting from this tactic, which requires coordination with Mexico’s larger criminal organizations.
Smuggling these migrants is a large revenue stream for organized crime groups. Payments first must be made to several so-called “coyotes,” or “polleros,” traffickers who shepherd migrants to the US. These traffickers make protection payments to Mexico’s drug cartels, which control migrant and drug smuggling routes in border regions. The cartels profit from these payoffs and through other criminal enterprises, such as the kidnapping and extortion of migrants.
The last time large groups illegally crossed the border in New Mexico and Arizona was in the early to mid-2000s when criminal groups used them as a diversion to smuggle loads of marijuana, said Jeremy Slack, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, who has written about the relationship of coyotes and drug trafficking organizations.
Thousands of migrants fleeing crime and poverty have recently reached the US border in caravans, but they have largely been stopped at ports of entry in places like Tijuana, California.
The bottleneck of asylum seekers from President Donald Trump’s crackdown on the border is responsible for the smugglers’ return to moving large groups, Slack told InSight Crime. And their prices are likely increasing.
“This is going to be a bonanza for them,” he said.
Such large operations, however, cannot be carried out without the aid and approval of criminal organizations.
“I guarantee that whoever the smugglers are with these big groups,” he said, “they are paying off the cartels.”
Sunday, January 27, 2019
RUSSIA TELLS ISRAEL TO STOP BOMBING SYRIA
Foreign ministry warns about the possible consequences of provoking a new round of chaos in the Middle East
Israel Today
January 24, 2019
Moscow on Wednesday cautioned Israel to halt its "arbitrary" airstrikes against targets in Syria, lest the Jewish state spark wider conflict in the region.
"The practice of arbitrarily launching strikes on the territory of a sovereign state, in this case Syria, should be simply excluded," said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. "We urge everyone to think about the possible consequences of provoking a new round of chaos in the Middle East."
Zakharova was addressing a press briefing following a rare daytime Israeli aerial assault on Iranian military targets near Damascus. Iranian forces responded by firing a surface-to-surface missile at Israel, which was promptly intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile shield.
The Russian statement failed to address the Iranian military build-up in Syria, which Tehran has acknowledged serves to further threaten the Jewish state, which Iran's leaders have in turn openly admitted they wish to annihilate.
Israel Today
January 24, 2019
Moscow on Wednesday cautioned Israel to halt its "arbitrary" airstrikes against targets in Syria, lest the Jewish state spark wider conflict in the region.
"The practice of arbitrarily launching strikes on the territory of a sovereign state, in this case Syria, should be simply excluded," said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. "We urge everyone to think about the possible consequences of provoking a new round of chaos in the Middle East."
Zakharova was addressing a press briefing following a rare daytime Israeli aerial assault on Iranian military targets near Damascus. Iranian forces responded by firing a surface-to-surface missile at Israel, which was promptly intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile shield.
The Russian statement failed to address the Iranian military build-up in Syria, which Tehran has acknowledged serves to further threaten the Jewish state, which Iran's leaders have in turn openly admitted they wish to annihilate.
Saturday, January 26, 2019
FBI GONE BONKERS
SWAT-like FBI team with assault rifles at the ready arrests Roger Stone in pre-dawn raid
At one time I had the utmost respect for the FBI. That was in the J. Edgar Hoover era. I even had a couple of FBI buddies who sponsored me for membership in the Elks Lodge. That respect began to wane with every passing day after Hoover’s death. On Friday, I lost what little respect I had left for the FBI.
Roger Stone was a former longtime confidant of President Trump. Special Counsel Robert Mueller obtained a multi-count federal indictment against Stone related to the Wikileaks matter. One would expect a couple of FBI agents or U.S. Marshals, or even a couple of sheriff’s deputies to serve the arrest warrant at Stone’s Florida home some time during the daylight or early evening hours.. But that is not what happened.
In the predawn hours on Friday, a SWAT-like FBI team wearing full-body armor with assault rifles at the ready, raided the Florida home of the 66-year-old Stone. An agent pounded on the door and shouted, “FBI! Open the door! We have a warrant!” Stone opened the door, and with a bunch of flashlights beaming up his face, admitted who he was. He was led away in custody, the arrest having been made without a whimper.
The FBI appears to have gone bonkers. Stone was not an armed fugitive. He was not one of drug lord El Chapo’s henchmen. He was not a dangerous Mafia mobster. He was simply a political operative.
If Stone goes to prison, he will not serve time at the supermax prison in Colorado where Islamic terrorists, Mexican drug cartel members, ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski and other dangerous criminals are doing time. Stone will serve his time at a minimum-security prison along with millionaire white collar lawbreakers.
I cannot fathom what possessed the FBI to conduct such an atrocious raid.
At one time I had the utmost respect for the FBI. That was in the J. Edgar Hoover era. I even had a couple of FBI buddies who sponsored me for membership in the Elks Lodge. That respect began to wane with every passing day after Hoover’s death. On Friday, I lost what little respect I had left for the FBI.
Roger Stone was a former longtime confidant of President Trump. Special Counsel Robert Mueller obtained a multi-count federal indictment against Stone related to the Wikileaks matter. One would expect a couple of FBI agents or U.S. Marshals, or even a couple of sheriff’s deputies to serve the arrest warrant at Stone’s Florida home some time during the daylight or early evening hours.. But that is not what happened.
In the predawn hours on Friday, a SWAT-like FBI team wearing full-body armor with assault rifles at the ready, raided the Florida home of the 66-year-old Stone. An agent pounded on the door and shouted, “FBI! Open the door! We have a warrant!” Stone opened the door, and with a bunch of flashlights beaming up his face, admitted who he was. He was led away in custody, the arrest having been made without a whimper.
The FBI appears to have gone bonkers. Stone was not an armed fugitive. He was not one of drug lord El Chapo’s henchmen. He was not a dangerous Mafia mobster. He was simply a political operative.
If Stone goes to prison, he will not serve time at the supermax prison in Colorado where Islamic terrorists, Mexican drug cartel members, ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski and other dangerous criminals are doing time. Stone will serve his time at a minimum-security prison along with millionaire white collar lawbreakers.
I cannot fathom what possessed the FBI to conduct such an atrocious raid.
WILL HER CONSTITUENTS EVER DUMP SHEILA JACKSON LEE?
Sheila Jackson Lee has been an embarrassment to both the city of Houston and the state of Texas
By Howie Katz
Big Jolly Times
January 25, 2019
Like the two poverty pimps, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee never fails to pop up for a photo-op. The most recent example was her appearance next to Sherriff Ed Gonzales during his briefing on the murder of 7-year-old Jasmine Barnes. Jackson Lee’s remarks were longer than those of the sheriff.
The latest news about Jackson Lee is not to her liking and you do not see her talking about it before a camera. A former staffer has accused the congresswoman of firing her for reporting that she had been raped several years before by a supervisor of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, of which Jackson Lee was the chairwoman.
Jackson Lee denies the former staffer’s allegations, but she resigned Wednesday as chairwoman of the caucus. The New York Times reports that she has also decided to temporarily step aside from her position on the House Judiciary subcommittee.
The allegation that she fired a staffer for reporting a rape flies in the face of a congresswoman who has declared herself to be a champion of women’s rights.
But one would have to ask why would the staffer lie about Jackson Lee firing her? Considering the large turnover of her aides and the stories they’ve told, the rape victim is most likely telling the truth.
Over the years there have been many complaints by Jackson Lee’s aides about her erratic behavior which caused them to quit or be fired. You can check out some of her erratic behavior by googling up “Congressional Bosses From Hell: Sheila Jackson Lee,” published by The Daily Caller on March 2, 2011. In 2014 and again in 2017, The Washingtonian gave Jackson Lee the dubious award of meanest Congress member among Democrats.
Jackson Lee has been an embarrassment to both the city of Houston and the state of Texas.
When Congressman Al Green, another embarrassment to Houston, introduced his Articles of Impeachment against President Trump last December, there were only three Texas House members who supported him, and Jackson Lee was one of them.
Will her constituents ever dump Jackson Lee? In Houston there are only three things for certain – death, taxation and the reelection of Sheila Jackson Lee.
By Howie Katz
Big Jolly Times
January 25, 2019
Like the two poverty pimps, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee never fails to pop up for a photo-op. The most recent example was her appearance next to Sherriff Ed Gonzales during his briefing on the murder of 7-year-old Jasmine Barnes. Jackson Lee’s remarks were longer than those of the sheriff.
The latest news about Jackson Lee is not to her liking and you do not see her talking about it before a camera. A former staffer has accused the congresswoman of firing her for reporting that she had been raped several years before by a supervisor of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, of which Jackson Lee was the chairwoman.
Jackson Lee denies the former staffer’s allegations, but she resigned Wednesday as chairwoman of the caucus. The New York Times reports that she has also decided to temporarily step aside from her position on the House Judiciary subcommittee.
The allegation that she fired a staffer for reporting a rape flies in the face of a congresswoman who has declared herself to be a champion of women’s rights.
But one would have to ask why would the staffer lie about Jackson Lee firing her? Considering the large turnover of her aides and the stories they’ve told, the rape victim is most likely telling the truth.
Over the years there have been many complaints by Jackson Lee’s aides about her erratic behavior which caused them to quit or be fired. You can check out some of her erratic behavior by googling up “Congressional Bosses From Hell: Sheila Jackson Lee,” published by The Daily Caller on March 2, 2011. In 2014 and again in 2017, The Washingtonian gave Jackson Lee the dubious award of meanest Congress member among Democrats.
Jackson Lee has been an embarrassment to both the city of Houston and the state of Texas.
When Congressman Al Green, another embarrassment to Houston, introduced his Articles of Impeachment against President Trump last December, there were only three Texas House members who supported him, and Jackson Lee was one of them.
Will her constituents ever dump Jackson Lee? In Houston there are only three things for certain – death, taxation and the reelection of Sheila Jackson Lee.
THERE SHOULD BE A DEATH PENALTY FOR MONSTERS WHO INFLICT HORRIBLE INJURIES ON LITTLE CHILDREN
Terre Haute couple charged after toddler’s tongue is split, possibly with scissors
By Kyle Hicks
Fox 59
January 23, 2019
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. – A Terre Haute couple is facing charges after police say a toddler’s tongue was split down the middle, possibly with scissors.
The Terre Haute Police Department began investigating the child abuse case last Wednesday, when an officer was called to Union Hospital. That’s where the 14-month-old victim was taken, suffering from a split tongue, a swollen scrotum and severe bruises all over his body, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by WTHI.
When the officer asked the child’s mother, Holly Cota, about her son’s injuries, the affidavit says she claimed the boy had fallen out of his crib multiple times and she believed he bit his tongue, which caused it to split. She said her son “must have straddled the toy box when he fell, causing damage to his scrotum,” the affidavit says.
The child was then transported to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, where police say a doctor with the Child Protection Team told them that the laceration separating the boy’s tongue was not caused by his teeth, because the teeth don’t run in that direction.
“She said that the cut appeared clean and was not torn which indicated that some type of tool, possibly scissors, were used,” the affidavit says. “She also said that a piece at the tip of the tongue was missing.”
The doctor went on to say that a fall or even two falls wasn’t consistent with the boy’s injuries, according to the affidavit. She said the injuries were inflicted trauma and not caused by accidental falls.
During a later interview, police say the boy’s mother told them her boyfriend, Scott Edwards, was watching her son when he was injured.
Edwards was later arrested and charged with aggravated battery, battery, and neglect of a dependent. Cota was also arrested on obstruction of justice charges.
Family and friends of the child told WTHI that they’re devastated after hearing of what happened.
Chelsie Loose has been a friend of the family for 20 years.
“I am appalled. I am disgusted. My heart hurts. When that’s all you can think about is that poor baby going through that with nobody for him to be his voice and say stop…you’re hurting me. It just breaks my heart,” Loose said.
Loose said she’ll never understand how someone could do something like this.
By Kyle Hicks
Fox 59
January 23, 2019
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. – A Terre Haute couple is facing charges after police say a toddler’s tongue was split down the middle, possibly with scissors.
The Terre Haute Police Department began investigating the child abuse case last Wednesday, when an officer was called to Union Hospital. That’s where the 14-month-old victim was taken, suffering from a split tongue, a swollen scrotum and severe bruises all over his body, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by WTHI.
When the officer asked the child’s mother, Holly Cota, about her son’s injuries, the affidavit says she claimed the boy had fallen out of his crib multiple times and she believed he bit his tongue, which caused it to split. She said her son “must have straddled the toy box when he fell, causing damage to his scrotum,” the affidavit says.
The child was then transported to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, where police say a doctor with the Child Protection Team told them that the laceration separating the boy’s tongue was not caused by his teeth, because the teeth don’t run in that direction.
“She said that the cut appeared clean and was not torn which indicated that some type of tool, possibly scissors, were used,” the affidavit says. “She also said that a piece at the tip of the tongue was missing.”
The doctor went on to say that a fall or even two falls wasn’t consistent with the boy’s injuries, according to the affidavit. She said the injuries were inflicted trauma and not caused by accidental falls.
During a later interview, police say the boy’s mother told them her boyfriend, Scott Edwards, was watching her son when he was injured.
Edwards was later arrested and charged with aggravated battery, battery, and neglect of a dependent. Cota was also arrested on obstruction of justice charges.
Family and friends of the child told WTHI that they’re devastated after hearing of what happened.
Chelsie Loose has been a friend of the family for 20 years.
“I am appalled. I am disgusted. My heart hurts. When that’s all you can think about is that poor baby going through that with nobody for him to be his voice and say stop…you’re hurting me. It just breaks my heart,” Loose said.
Loose said she’ll never understand how someone could do something like this.
CANNIBAL ATE EX-GIRLFRIEND’S BRAIN, HEART AND LUNGS
Man accused of killing woman, eating body parts was insane, attorneys say
By Matthew Glowicki
Louisville Courier Journal
January 24, 2019
Defense attorneys for Joseph Oberhansley, the man accused of killing his estranged girlfriend and consuming parts of her body in 2014, plan to argue at trial that their client was insane at the time of the murder.
Newly filed court documents in the four-year-old case show two psychiatrists from LifeSpring, a mental health service provider in Jeffersonville, Indiana, will examine Oberhansley to determine if he was legally insane at the time of the killing.
The same psychiatrists are required to testify at trial, which is set for Aug. 19 before Clark Circuit Court Judge Vicki Carmichael.
Oberhansley, 37, was arrested in September 2014 after police found his ex-girlfriend Tammy Jo Blanton dead in her Jeffersonville home.
A grisly police affidavit filed in court alleges the estranged ex-boyfriend broke into Blanton's home, stabbed her and eventually ate parts of her body.
Oberhansley, charged with murder, burglary and rape, faces up to the death penalty if convicted.
Under Indiana state law, a person isn't responsible for the crime if "as a result of mental disease or defect" — defined as "a severely abnormal mental condition that grossly and demonstrably impairs a person's perception" — they were unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of their actions at the time.
Indiana state law states that besides guilty or not guilty, a defendant can be found not responsible by reason of insanity or guilty but mentally ill.
The issue of competency has dominated the case in recent years, with Oberhansley undergoing a number of evaluations to see if he was fit for trial.
Oberhansley was found incompetent to stand trial in October 2017 and was committed to a state mental health facility with the aim of bringing him to competency.
The following summer, a psychiatrist at Logansport State Hospital decided Oberhansley was legally competent.
Still, his attorneys, Brent Westerfeld, Bart Betteau, told the judge in court papers their client was still expressing "bizarre and irrational beliefs" including that they were working for the devil and were trying to control his thoughts.
Again, Oberhansley was evaluated by medical professionals, and in November 2018, Judge Carmichael ruled he was fit for trial.
By Matthew Glowicki
Louisville Courier Journal
January 24, 2019
Defense attorneys for Joseph Oberhansley, the man accused of killing his estranged girlfriend and consuming parts of her body in 2014, plan to argue at trial that their client was insane at the time of the murder.
Newly filed court documents in the four-year-old case show two psychiatrists from LifeSpring, a mental health service provider in Jeffersonville, Indiana, will examine Oberhansley to determine if he was legally insane at the time of the killing.
The same psychiatrists are required to testify at trial, which is set for Aug. 19 before Clark Circuit Court Judge Vicki Carmichael.
Oberhansley, 37, was arrested in September 2014 after police found his ex-girlfriend Tammy Jo Blanton dead in her Jeffersonville home.
A grisly police affidavit filed in court alleges the estranged ex-boyfriend broke into Blanton's home, stabbed her and eventually ate parts of her body.
Oberhansley, charged with murder, burglary and rape, faces up to the death penalty if convicted.
Under Indiana state law, a person isn't responsible for the crime if "as a result of mental disease or defect" — defined as "a severely abnormal mental condition that grossly and demonstrably impairs a person's perception" — they were unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of their actions at the time.
Indiana state law states that besides guilty or not guilty, a defendant can be found not responsible by reason of insanity or guilty but mentally ill.
The issue of competency has dominated the case in recent years, with Oberhansley undergoing a number of evaluations to see if he was fit for trial.
Oberhansley was found incompetent to stand trial in October 2017 and was committed to a state mental health facility with the aim of bringing him to competency.
The following summer, a psychiatrist at Logansport State Hospital decided Oberhansley was legally competent.
Still, his attorneys, Brent Westerfeld, Bart Betteau, told the judge in court papers their client was still expressing "bizarre and irrational beliefs" including that they were working for the devil and were trying to control his thoughts.
Again, Oberhansley was evaluated by medical professionals, and in November 2018, Judge Carmichael ruled he was fit for trial.
4-YEAR-OLD SHOOTS MOM WITH PAROLEE’S SHOTGUN
Parolee Arrested After Child Shoots Mother With Shotgun In Norwalk
CBS Los Angeles
January 24, 2019
NORWALK, Calif. -- A 24-year-old parolee was being held without bail Thursday following his arrest in connection with the accidental shooting of a woman by her young son, who authorities say found a shotgun in the backseat of their car.
Deputies responded around 3:30 p.m. Wednesday to the 14600 block of Dinard Street to investigate a report of an assault with a deadly weapon.
Upon arrival, they found the woman, a resident of Norwalk, with a gunshot wound to her mid-torso, said Deputy Juanita Navarro-Suarez of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
She was taken in critical condition to a hospital, where her condition was later upgraded to fair, the deputy said. She was in stable condition and expected to survive, according to the sheriff’s department.
The arrested man was identified as Brandon Ambriz of Norwalk, who was arrested Wednesday and booked on suspicion of possession of a firearm and child endangerment and was being held without bail for allegedly violating his parole.
No details were immediately released about what led to Ambriz being on parole or why the shotgun was in the car.
“Preliminary information gathered at the scene revealed that the female’s three children were in the backseat of the vehicle when one of the children accessed an unsecured shotgun and shot her through the back of the seat,” Navarro-Suarez said.
The mother was in the driver’s seat when she was wounded. The child was described as being less than five years old, according to the sheriff’s department.
“The three children in the backseat, another female adult and young child who sat in the front passenger seat were not injured,” according to Navarro-Suarez.
The shotgun was recovered.
All four children were placed in the custody of the county Department of Children and Family Services.
CBS Los Angeles
January 24, 2019
NORWALK, Calif. -- A 24-year-old parolee was being held without bail Thursday following his arrest in connection with the accidental shooting of a woman by her young son, who authorities say found a shotgun in the backseat of their car.
Deputies responded around 3:30 p.m. Wednesday to the 14600 block of Dinard Street to investigate a report of an assault with a deadly weapon.
Upon arrival, they found the woman, a resident of Norwalk, with a gunshot wound to her mid-torso, said Deputy Juanita Navarro-Suarez of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
She was taken in critical condition to a hospital, where her condition was later upgraded to fair, the deputy said. She was in stable condition and expected to survive, according to the sheriff’s department.
The arrested man was identified as Brandon Ambriz of Norwalk, who was arrested Wednesday and booked on suspicion of possession of a firearm and child endangerment and was being held without bail for allegedly violating his parole.
No details were immediately released about what led to Ambriz being on parole or why the shotgun was in the car.
“Preliminary information gathered at the scene revealed that the female’s three children were in the backseat of the vehicle when one of the children accessed an unsecured shotgun and shot her through the back of the seat,” Navarro-Suarez said.
The mother was in the driver’s seat when she was wounded. The child was described as being less than five years old, according to the sheriff’s department.
“The three children in the backseat, another female adult and young child who sat in the front passenger seat were not injured,” according to Navarro-Suarez.
The shotgun was recovered.
All four children were placed in the custody of the county Department of Children and Family Services.
THE MUELLER SQUIRREL CAGE
Round and round the investigation goes. Where it stops…
By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review
January 22, 2019
Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted yet another peripheral character in his Trump probe, Russian attorney Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, for alleged money laundering in a matter quite separate from Trump.
Like almost all of Mueller’s indictments of the past 20 months, the charges against Veselnitskaya had nothing to do with his original mandate of finding any possible Trump–Russia collusion. No matter; within minutes, Veselnitskaya’s name was injected into the media cycle as if the fact that she was Russian and connected to the name Mueller were de facto proof that Trump was guilty of something — if not collusion, something worse.
If Mueller was not a special counsel, and if he was not looking for anyone deemed useful to flip to find dirt on Donald Trump, then Veselnitskaya would have been just another daily Washington foreign influence-peddler being courted with impunity by her American influence-peddling and often equally suspect counterparts.
To date, in almost every one of his indictments of Americans, Mueller has gone after Trump staffers, often quite minor, for alleged crimes that either were committed well before Mueller began his investigations, or came as a result of plea bargaining in exchange for providing expected dirt on Trump, or were the result of government surveillance or the use of government informants, or all of that and more. And all that sensationalism, through leaks and insinuations, was packaged by the media as “bombshells” and “watersheds” and “turning points” ad nauseam for 20 months.
When Mueller indicted and obtained a confession from Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser, it followed from an elaborate perjury ambush set up by the now fired, ethically conflicted, disgraced, and perhaps soon to be indicted deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. McCabe sent the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced agent Peter Strzok to interview Flynn — a process overseen by the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced James Comey.
And even then, Mueller seemed to be the beneficiary of leaks from someone in the Department of Justice who sent to the media elements of surveillance transcripts of Flynn’s conversations.
We sometimes forget that Mueller would not now exist if Hillary had just done what she was supposed to do — win the Electoral College vote. Nor would it exist if she had not paid Christopher Steele to author a hit piece, hide her handprints, and then salt it among officials at the Obama DOJ and FBI to spawn a media frenzy, first to ensure Trump’s defeat in 2016 and then, after his victory, to explain the supposedly inexplicable blown election.
The Mueller team’s modus operandi starts with the assumption that President Donald J. Trump is responsible for Russian collusion. Or he must at least be found guilty of something or other from his past decades as a wheeler-dealer, high-profile Manhattan provocateur.
Given that starting point, the special counsel then tries to prove his particular charge by rounding up those who have worked for Trump, examining in detail their personal history, discovering that they were imperfect, and threatening to ruin them (or their family members) with long prison sentences or crippling legal bills unless they aid what are becoming his Captain Ahab–like obsessions.
Far worse, Mueller has overlooked dozens of likely tangential felonies related to his investigations — they are not deemed useful to his zealous pursuit of Donald Trump.
Deputy Director Andrew McCabe probably lied to federal investigators. He faces no charges.
James Comey, the former FBI director, probably misled a FISA court and likely lied under oath to a congressional committee by claiming 245 times that he did not know or did not remember various important facts. It’s also likely that Comey broke the law by deliberately leaking secret and confidential FBI memos to friends and the press for his own particular agendas. Comey’s FBI team knew as early as July 31, 2016, that the Steele dossier was an unverified, biased product of Hillary Clinton’s opposition research, and yet he helped to send it to the FISA court as the primary evidence used to justify surveillance of Carter Page — in order to look for something on Trump.
Comey earlier had warped the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server and emails by his own admission that he assumed she was going to be president and therefore deserved special treatment rather than a process that followed the letter of the law. He apparently faces no criminal liability on any of these issues.
Comey — and later, after his firing, his lieutenants — apparently conducted a counterintelligence investigation of President Trump. The likely illegal move was based on the ridiculous notion that Trump had colluded with Russia, either as a dupe and fool or as a canny and treasonous Russian operative. These fantasies were the pretext for using Clinton opposition research to prompt their investigations.
Worse still, the FBI later was apparently terrified that a President Trump would eventually demand the release of documents disproving the FBI canard that it was generically investigating “collusion” rather than Trump himself. Recall that Comey, according to his sworn testimony, assured Trump three times that he was not the object of a FBI official investigation.
Yet just such an investigation of the president of the United States was under way. It occurred in a landscape in which Comey himself, later Mueller team members Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and recently journalists as diverse as Michael Isikoff and Jonathan Karl have admitted either that there is likely to be no proof of collusion, or that the Mueller team will not find any evidence of collusion, or that the Steele dossier was mostly inaccurate and made up — or all that and more.
Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s blue-chip prosecutor, was briefed in August 2016 by Bruce Ohr, the fourth-ranking official in the Obama Department of Justice, that the Steele dossier was unverified, that it was a campaign opposition hit piece paid for by Hillary Clinton, and that Ohr’s own wife worked with Steele on it.
Those facts about the prior role of Weissmann seemed of no interest to Mueller. Nor did Mueller seem bothered by the fact that the DOJ and the FBI went to a FISA court on four occasions to use that very dossier to obtain surveillance on Carter Page, who was to become a subject of Mueller’s own investigation.
One would have thought that at some point Mueller might have gone down the hall and asked, “Hey, Andy, did you guys at DOJ ever hear anything worrisome about that dossier before you used it to get wiretaps and intercepts on an American citizen?”
In sum, one result of the entire Mueller inquest is that we are now witnessing one of the greatest political scandals in U.S. history, given that:
1) the FBI conducted a secret investigation of the sitting president of the United States and kept it from all oversight, based on nothing other than unfounded accusations from untrustworthy sources and the FBI’s policy differences with candidate and later President Trump;
2) presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the middle of the 2016 campaign hired a foreign national, British subject Christopher Steele, to conduct opposition research on her rival Donald Trump, and she hid her use of campaign funds to pay for the ensuing dossier by funneling the payments as “legal fees” through both a law firm and an opposition-research firm;
3) members of Obama’s Department of Justice and FBI deliberately and repeatedly misled FISA courts by presenting a dossier as evidence without disclosing that it was unverifiable, paid for by Hillary Clinton, used circularly for “corroborating” news accounts, and authored by a fired FBI informant — all of which was previously known to the top echelon of the FBI and DOJ;
4) key members of the U.S. government in the FBI, DOJ, CIA, and State Department took great pains in the midst of a presidential campaign to spread knowledge of the unverified dossier among top government officials and to ensure leaks of the dossier to the media;
5) few involved in any of these felonious acts are currently under investigation, and fewer are apt to be subject to criminal prosecution, given the hysteria over the supposed Trump collusion;
6) Mueller’s top lieutenant, Andrew Weissmann, by intent or default, probably had a role in the deception of a federal FISA court that was deliberately misled by fellow DOJ attorneys who withheld information that they knew would impugn their own evidence.
Again, the reason Mueller is not interested in such lawbreaking seems to be that it does not serve his interests. He shows little concern that both former FBI director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper — figures who have popped in and out of his investigation — have lied under oath to Congress and probably have also lied about their knowledge of the Fusion GPS dossier compiled by Steele and the leaking of its contents. These lies of the nation’s three top intelligence officials — Brennan, Clapper, and Comey — are of far more importance to the sanctity of the republic than whether George Papadopoulos got his stories straight.
Finally, Mueller’s own team has been at times as mendacious as those they have hounded.
When FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page were let go from the Mueller team for bias and unethical behavior, Mueller’s staff for weeks hid the real reason for their departures. Their firings were staggered to suggest that they were unconnected, again misleading the media and the public.
When these two fired FBI employees turned in their government phones, on which they had sent each other thousands of relevant personal texts, the Inspector General belatedly discovered that months of messages had “disappeared” — according to the Mueller team due to bureaucratic sloppiness, technical glitches, or determinations that the messages were irrelevant and thus destroyed.
Had any of Mueller’s own targets lost key communications on their phones or pads and then claimed such extenuating circumstances, they likely would have been indicted. Had they, under oath, pled poor memories or no knowledge on 245 occasions, they would have been indicted. Had they misled a federal court with inexact or fraudulent evidence, they would have been indicted. Had they destroyed evidence under subpoena, they would have been indicted. Had they leaked confidential information, they would have been indicted.
In sum, Robert Mueller’s investigation has turned American jurisprudence upside down . In this country, we investigate crimes to see who committed them. We do not start by assuming the guilt of a person and then search for his necessary wrongdoing, although the perverse notion of “guilty until proven innocent” has now permeated throughout a frenzied American culture.
The latest BuzzFeed scandal is a good example. The online news magazine alleged that it had documentary evidence from the special counsel’s office proving that Trump ordered his consigliere Michael Cohen to lie about the Trump organization’s business dealings with Russians.
For an entire news cycle, that yarn prompted journalists and Democratic congressional members to call for Trump’s immediate impeachment — until Mueller himself issued a denial of the BuzzFeedstory. (One wonders why he had not done so immediately, whether he was worried that some of his own staffers were the sources for the BuzzFeed pseudo-news story, and why in the past he has not stepped up to discredit earlier false stories supposedly leaked from his team about his impending actions. Perhaps because other fake news did not so endanger the reputation of his investigation?)
But stranger still was the attitude of supposed journalists calling for impeachment: They believed that Trump was capable of ordering Cohen to lie; it was therefore excusable to assume that Trump had in fact done so, even in the absence of any evidence that he had.
In other words, we have abandoned the idea of innocent until proven guilty and instead appropriated a number of Bolshevik protocols: Find the person first, the crime second; if a suspect in theory could commit a crime, then he most likely did; waiting to pass judgement until all the facts are in is telling proof of pro-Trump bias.
In America, there is still an idea of equality under the law. But Mueller has taught us that whether you go to jail for perjury, illegal leaking, lying to federal investigators, destroying key evidence, obstructing a federal court, or trying, as a foreign citizen, to warp the outcome of a U.S. presidential election, all depend entirely on the particular agendas of a particular prosecutor, not the law per se.
Mueller’s legacy will likely be that he has now institutionalized the idea of inequality under the law — seeking out bothersome outsider minnows while establishment sharks devoured the Constitution.
By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review
January 22, 2019
Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted yet another peripheral character in his Trump probe, Russian attorney Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, for alleged money laundering in a matter quite separate from Trump.
Like almost all of Mueller’s indictments of the past 20 months, the charges against Veselnitskaya had nothing to do with his original mandate of finding any possible Trump–Russia collusion. No matter; within minutes, Veselnitskaya’s name was injected into the media cycle as if the fact that she was Russian and connected to the name Mueller were de facto proof that Trump was guilty of something — if not collusion, something worse.
If Mueller was not a special counsel, and if he was not looking for anyone deemed useful to flip to find dirt on Donald Trump, then Veselnitskaya would have been just another daily Washington foreign influence-peddler being courted with impunity by her American influence-peddling and often equally suspect counterparts.
To date, in almost every one of his indictments of Americans, Mueller has gone after Trump staffers, often quite minor, for alleged crimes that either were committed well before Mueller began his investigations, or came as a result of plea bargaining in exchange for providing expected dirt on Trump, or were the result of government surveillance or the use of government informants, or all of that and more. And all that sensationalism, through leaks and insinuations, was packaged by the media as “bombshells” and “watersheds” and “turning points” ad nauseam for 20 months.
When Mueller indicted and obtained a confession from Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser, it followed from an elaborate perjury ambush set up by the now fired, ethically conflicted, disgraced, and perhaps soon to be indicted deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. McCabe sent the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced agent Peter Strzok to interview Flynn — a process overseen by the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced James Comey.
And even then, Mueller seemed to be the beneficiary of leaks from someone in the Department of Justice who sent to the media elements of surveillance transcripts of Flynn’s conversations.
We sometimes forget that Mueller would not now exist if Hillary had just done what she was supposed to do — win the Electoral College vote. Nor would it exist if she had not paid Christopher Steele to author a hit piece, hide her handprints, and then salt it among officials at the Obama DOJ and FBI to spawn a media frenzy, first to ensure Trump’s defeat in 2016 and then, after his victory, to explain the supposedly inexplicable blown election.
The Mueller team’s modus operandi starts with the assumption that President Donald J. Trump is responsible for Russian collusion. Or he must at least be found guilty of something or other from his past decades as a wheeler-dealer, high-profile Manhattan provocateur.
Given that starting point, the special counsel then tries to prove his particular charge by rounding up those who have worked for Trump, examining in detail their personal history, discovering that they were imperfect, and threatening to ruin them (or their family members) with long prison sentences or crippling legal bills unless they aid what are becoming his Captain Ahab–like obsessions.
Far worse, Mueller has overlooked dozens of likely tangential felonies related to his investigations — they are not deemed useful to his zealous pursuit of Donald Trump.
Deputy Director Andrew McCabe probably lied to federal investigators. He faces no charges.
James Comey, the former FBI director, probably misled a FISA court and likely lied under oath to a congressional committee by claiming 245 times that he did not know or did not remember various important facts. It’s also likely that Comey broke the law by deliberately leaking secret and confidential FBI memos to friends and the press for his own particular agendas. Comey’s FBI team knew as early as July 31, 2016, that the Steele dossier was an unverified, biased product of Hillary Clinton’s opposition research, and yet he helped to send it to the FISA court as the primary evidence used to justify surveillance of Carter Page — in order to look for something on Trump.
Comey earlier had warped the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private server and emails by his own admission that he assumed she was going to be president and therefore deserved special treatment rather than a process that followed the letter of the law. He apparently faces no criminal liability on any of these issues.
Comey — and later, after his firing, his lieutenants — apparently conducted a counterintelligence investigation of President Trump. The likely illegal move was based on the ridiculous notion that Trump had colluded with Russia, either as a dupe and fool or as a canny and treasonous Russian operative. These fantasies were the pretext for using Clinton opposition research to prompt their investigations.
Worse still, the FBI later was apparently terrified that a President Trump would eventually demand the release of documents disproving the FBI canard that it was generically investigating “collusion” rather than Trump himself. Recall that Comey, according to his sworn testimony, assured Trump three times that he was not the object of a FBI official investigation.
Yet just such an investigation of the president of the United States was under way. It occurred in a landscape in which Comey himself, later Mueller team members Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and recently journalists as diverse as Michael Isikoff and Jonathan Karl have admitted either that there is likely to be no proof of collusion, or that the Mueller team will not find any evidence of collusion, or that the Steele dossier was mostly inaccurate and made up — or all that and more.
Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s blue-chip prosecutor, was briefed in August 2016 by Bruce Ohr, the fourth-ranking official in the Obama Department of Justice, that the Steele dossier was unverified, that it was a campaign opposition hit piece paid for by Hillary Clinton, and that Ohr’s own wife worked with Steele on it.
Those facts about the prior role of Weissmann seemed of no interest to Mueller. Nor did Mueller seem bothered by the fact that the DOJ and the FBI went to a FISA court on four occasions to use that very dossier to obtain surveillance on Carter Page, who was to become a subject of Mueller’s own investigation.
One would have thought that at some point Mueller might have gone down the hall and asked, “Hey, Andy, did you guys at DOJ ever hear anything worrisome about that dossier before you used it to get wiretaps and intercepts on an American citizen?”
In sum, one result of the entire Mueller inquest is that we are now witnessing one of the greatest political scandals in U.S. history, given that:
1) the FBI conducted a secret investigation of the sitting president of the United States and kept it from all oversight, based on nothing other than unfounded accusations from untrustworthy sources and the FBI’s policy differences with candidate and later President Trump;
2) presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the middle of the 2016 campaign hired a foreign national, British subject Christopher Steele, to conduct opposition research on her rival Donald Trump, and she hid her use of campaign funds to pay for the ensuing dossier by funneling the payments as “legal fees” through both a law firm and an opposition-research firm;
3) members of Obama’s Department of Justice and FBI deliberately and repeatedly misled FISA courts by presenting a dossier as evidence without disclosing that it was unverifiable, paid for by Hillary Clinton, used circularly for “corroborating” news accounts, and authored by a fired FBI informant — all of which was previously known to the top echelon of the FBI and DOJ;
4) key members of the U.S. government in the FBI, DOJ, CIA, and State Department took great pains in the midst of a presidential campaign to spread knowledge of the unverified dossier among top government officials and to ensure leaks of the dossier to the media;
5) few involved in any of these felonious acts are currently under investigation, and fewer are apt to be subject to criminal prosecution, given the hysteria over the supposed Trump collusion;
6) Mueller’s top lieutenant, Andrew Weissmann, by intent or default, probably had a role in the deception of a federal FISA court that was deliberately misled by fellow DOJ attorneys who withheld information that they knew would impugn their own evidence.
Again, the reason Mueller is not interested in such lawbreaking seems to be that it does not serve his interests. He shows little concern that both former FBI director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper — figures who have popped in and out of his investigation — have lied under oath to Congress and probably have also lied about their knowledge of the Fusion GPS dossier compiled by Steele and the leaking of its contents. These lies of the nation’s three top intelligence officials — Brennan, Clapper, and Comey — are of far more importance to the sanctity of the republic than whether George Papadopoulos got his stories straight.
Finally, Mueller’s own team has been at times as mendacious as those they have hounded.
When FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page were let go from the Mueller team for bias and unethical behavior, Mueller’s staff for weeks hid the real reason for their departures. Their firings were staggered to suggest that they were unconnected, again misleading the media and the public.
When these two fired FBI employees turned in their government phones, on which they had sent each other thousands of relevant personal texts, the Inspector General belatedly discovered that months of messages had “disappeared” — according to the Mueller team due to bureaucratic sloppiness, technical glitches, or determinations that the messages were irrelevant and thus destroyed.
Had any of Mueller’s own targets lost key communications on their phones or pads and then claimed such extenuating circumstances, they likely would have been indicted. Had they, under oath, pled poor memories or no knowledge on 245 occasions, they would have been indicted. Had they misled a federal court with inexact or fraudulent evidence, they would have been indicted. Had they destroyed evidence under subpoena, they would have been indicted. Had they leaked confidential information, they would have been indicted.
In sum, Robert Mueller’s investigation has turned American jurisprudence upside down . In this country, we investigate crimes to see who committed them. We do not start by assuming the guilt of a person and then search for his necessary wrongdoing, although the perverse notion of “guilty until proven innocent” has now permeated throughout a frenzied American culture.
The latest BuzzFeed scandal is a good example. The online news magazine alleged that it had documentary evidence from the special counsel’s office proving that Trump ordered his consigliere Michael Cohen to lie about the Trump organization’s business dealings with Russians.
For an entire news cycle, that yarn prompted journalists and Democratic congressional members to call for Trump’s immediate impeachment — until Mueller himself issued a denial of the BuzzFeedstory. (One wonders why he had not done so immediately, whether he was worried that some of his own staffers were the sources for the BuzzFeed pseudo-news story, and why in the past he has not stepped up to discredit earlier false stories supposedly leaked from his team about his impending actions. Perhaps because other fake news did not so endanger the reputation of his investigation?)
But stranger still was the attitude of supposed journalists calling for impeachment: They believed that Trump was capable of ordering Cohen to lie; it was therefore excusable to assume that Trump had in fact done so, even in the absence of any evidence that he had.
In other words, we have abandoned the idea of innocent until proven guilty and instead appropriated a number of Bolshevik protocols: Find the person first, the crime second; if a suspect in theory could commit a crime, then he most likely did; waiting to pass judgement until all the facts are in is telling proof of pro-Trump bias.
In America, there is still an idea of equality under the law. But Mueller has taught us that whether you go to jail for perjury, illegal leaking, lying to federal investigators, destroying key evidence, obstructing a federal court, or trying, as a foreign citizen, to warp the outcome of a U.S. presidential election, all depend entirely on the particular agendas of a particular prosecutor, not the law per se.
Mueller’s legacy will likely be that he has now institutionalized the idea of inequality under the law — seeking out bothersome outsider minnows while establishment sharks devoured the Constitution.
Friday, January 25, 2019
PELOSI VS. TRUMP ….. NANCY WINS
President Trump surrenders to Pelosi on State of the Union address
I never thought President Trump would surrender to Nancy Pelosi’s declaration that the House would not be open to his State of the Union address, but he sure as hell did.
In an exchange of letters, Trump had dared Pelosi to ban him from the floor of the House … and she did.
Trump then made some tweets about holding the SOTU address in the Senate chamber or even at an alternative site. But late Wednesday night Trump tweeted:
“This is her prerogative - I will do the Address when the Shutdown is over. I am not looking for an alternative venue for the SOTU Address because there is no venue that can compete with the history, tradition and importance of the House Chamber.”
In this battle between two powerful leaders, Trump surrendered. Game over … Nancy wins.
The bigger game over the wall continues. Although Trump made immigration a cornerstone of his campaign and promised to build a border wall that Mexico will pay for, he’s not going to get the wall because the Democrats are resolute in their opposition to it and Mexico ain’t about to pay for it.
Trump says if the Democrats refuse to provide the funds, he will declare a national emergency to build the wall. Immigration a national emergency? That’s a real stretch and his order will probably be shot down by the courts.
With the polls showing his approval numbers plunging to the low 30s, look for another surrender when Trump tries to wiggle out of his promise. He’ll tell his base that he did everything possible to keep his promise, but that the radical liberal Democrats made it impossible for him to build the wall.
I never thought President Trump would surrender to Nancy Pelosi’s declaration that the House would not be open to his State of the Union address, but he sure as hell did.
In an exchange of letters, Trump had dared Pelosi to ban him from the floor of the House … and she did.
Trump then made some tweets about holding the SOTU address in the Senate chamber or even at an alternative site. But late Wednesday night Trump tweeted:
“This is her prerogative - I will do the Address when the Shutdown is over. I am not looking for an alternative venue for the SOTU Address because there is no venue that can compete with the history, tradition and importance of the House Chamber.”
In this battle between two powerful leaders, Trump surrendered. Game over … Nancy wins.
The bigger game over the wall continues. Although Trump made immigration a cornerstone of his campaign and promised to build a border wall that Mexico will pay for, he’s not going to get the wall because the Democrats are resolute in their opposition to it and Mexico ain’t about to pay for it.
Trump says if the Democrats refuse to provide the funds, he will declare a national emergency to build the wall. Immigration a national emergency? That’s a real stretch and his order will probably be shot down by the courts.
With the polls showing his approval numbers plunging to the low 30s, look for another surrender when Trump tries to wiggle out of his promise. He’ll tell his base that he did everything possible to keep his promise, but that the radical liberal Democrats made it impossible for him to build the wall.
SOME GOOD NEWS FOR P G & E
by Bob Walsh
CalFire has just determined that the disastrous Tubbs Fire from a bit over a year ago was NOT caused by P G & E equipment but was rather started by privately owned (and improperly installed) electrical equipment that P G & E had nothing to do with and no legal responsibility for.
Of course the Tubbs Fire pales in comparison to the Camp Fire, which destroyed the city of Paradise and killed 86 people. That's kind of like hearing that you don't have hay fever but you do have a brain tumor.
It is anticipated that P G & E will declare bankruptcy at the end of this month to avoid going down the toilet over liability from the Camp Fire.
CalFire has just determined that the disastrous Tubbs Fire from a bit over a year ago was NOT caused by P G & E equipment but was rather started by privately owned (and improperly installed) electrical equipment that P G & E had nothing to do with and no legal responsibility for.
Of course the Tubbs Fire pales in comparison to the Camp Fire, which destroyed the city of Paradise and killed 86 people. That's kind of like hearing that you don't have hay fever but you do have a brain tumor.
It is anticipated that P G & E will declare bankruptcy at the end of this month to avoid going down the toilet over liability from the Camp Fire.
BERKELEY ABOUT TO BE MADE SAFE FROM THE SCOURGE OF PLASTIC CUPS
They should make food containers and beverage holders from compressed broccoli
by Bob Walsh
In a brave and far-sighted move the city government of Berkeley, CA. has decided that people who consume beverages in restaurants in their fair city must pay 25 cents each for the privilege or carry around their own drinking cups with them. (I am getting flashbacks of Renaissance Faires with a bunch of strange people in costume and pewter or wooden mugs lashed to their clothing for their issue of grog, meade or whatever.) This will kick in in 2020.
It also requires that take-out food containers be compostable by 2020.
I think they should make food containers and beverage holders from compressed broccoli. But that's just me. That way anybody who actually is stupid enough to go along with this program will be easily identifiable by the fact that they will smell like the dumpster behind a vegan restaurant.
by Bob Walsh
In a brave and far-sighted move the city government of Berkeley, CA. has decided that people who consume beverages in restaurants in their fair city must pay 25 cents each for the privilege or carry around their own drinking cups with them. (I am getting flashbacks of Renaissance Faires with a bunch of strange people in costume and pewter or wooden mugs lashed to their clothing for their issue of grog, meade or whatever.) This will kick in in 2020.
It also requires that take-out food containers be compostable by 2020.
I think they should make food containers and beverage holders from compressed broccoli. But that's just me. That way anybody who actually is stupid enough to go along with this program will be easily identifiable by the fact that they will smell like the dumpster behind a vegan restaurant.
POPE SLAMS TRUMP’S WALL, REMAINS SILENT ON SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN BY PRIESTS
Pope Francis is currently touring Central America. In Panama on Wednesday reporters asked the Pope about Trump’s border wall. He responded:
“It is the fear that makes us crazy.”
In 2016, after celebrating Mass on the Mexican side of the U.S. border, reporters asked Francis what he thought about Trump’s campaign promise to build a border wall. He said:
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel,”
While the Pope thinks Trump is a nutjob and not a Christian, he has for the most part remained silent on the scandalous sexual abuse of children by thousands of priests.
Me thinks Francis has the Church’s priorities all mixed up. Instead of slamming Trump and his wall, the Pope should do something about the hundreds-of-thousand children that have been molested by thousands of priests in the U.S. alone and countless priests all over the world.
“It is the fear that makes us crazy.”
In 2016, after celebrating Mass on the Mexican side of the U.S. border, reporters asked Francis what he thought about Trump’s campaign promise to build a border wall. He said:
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian. This is not the gospel,”
While the Pope thinks Trump is a nutjob and not a Christian, he has for the most part remained silent on the scandalous sexual abuse of children by thousands of priests.
Me thinks Francis has the Church’s priorities all mixed up. Instead of slamming Trump and his wall, the Pope should do something about the hundreds-of-thousand children that have been molested by thousands of priests in the U.S. alone and countless priests all over the world.
MEANWHILE THE PEASANTS ….. LET THEM EAT CAKE
The King of New York City: Billionaire Ken Griffin buys the most expensive home EVER sold in the United States for $238MILLION - a 24,000 sq. ft. penthouse overlooking Central Park - just days after snapping up luxury home near Buckingham Palace for $124m
Daily Mail
January 24, 2019
Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin has completed the purchase of a penthouse on New York's Central Park South for $238million - the most ever paid for a home in the United States.
The building, 220 Central Park South, is a residential skyscraper that is currently under construction. Developed by Vornado Realty Trust, the building will have 70 floors and a total of 116 residential units by the time construction is completed.
The penthouse which Griffin is buying went into contract - meaning an offer was made and accepted - in 2015, but sales of this magnitude take years to close, according to real estate experts.
It comes just days after Mr Griffin bought the exclusive $124million 3 Carlton Gardens in St James's, near Buckingham Palace in London, which had been on the market for the past two years for $163.5million.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If the filthy rich can spend money that way, they deserve to be taxed at 70 percent like socialist-democrat Alexandira Ocasio-Cortez proposes.
Daily Mail
January 24, 2019
Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin has completed the purchase of a penthouse on New York's Central Park South for $238million - the most ever paid for a home in the United States.
The building, 220 Central Park South, is a residential skyscraper that is currently under construction. Developed by Vornado Realty Trust, the building will have 70 floors and a total of 116 residential units by the time construction is completed.
The penthouse which Griffin is buying went into contract - meaning an offer was made and accepted - in 2015, but sales of this magnitude take years to close, according to real estate experts.
It comes just days after Mr Griffin bought the exclusive $124million 3 Carlton Gardens in St James's, near Buckingham Palace in London, which had been on the market for the past two years for $163.5million.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If the filthy rich can spend money that way, they deserve to be taxed at 70 percent like socialist-democrat Alexandira Ocasio-Cortez proposes.
CALIFORNIA’S FAR-LEFT GOVERNOR STARTS TERM OFF ON RIGHT FOOT
Gov. Newsom Blocks Parole For San Diego Police Killer Jesus Cecena
LAPPL News Watch
January 24, 2019
Gov. Gavin Newsom has reversed the decision by a state parole board to release Jesus Cecena, who was convicted of murder as a teenager in 1979 for gunning down San Diego Police Officer Archie Buggs.
The decision marks the fourth time in the last five years that the governor’s office has reversed the decision by parole board members to free the 57-year-old Cecena.
Cecena shot Buggs to death during a routine traffic stop the evening of Nov. 4, 1978. After being convicted of first-degree murder, he was sentenced to life without parole.
His sentence was modified to life with the possibility of parole in 1982 after an appellate court ruled that juveniles could not be sentenced to no-parole terms.
__________
CALIFORNIA’S FAR-LEFT GOVERNOR STARTS TERM OFF WITH FAR-LEFT YOUTH PRISON PROPOSAL
California Governor Seeks To Transform Youth Prisons
LAPPL News Watch
January 24, 2019
Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed Tuesday to change the way California’s juvenile prisons are overseen, eventually closing facilities to cut what he called the “ludicrous” cost.
“If we’re going to get serious about changing the trajectory of the lives of these young children, I think we need to do it through a different lens and not the traditional corrections lens,” Newsom said at one of the state’s four remaining juvenile detention centers.
The Democratic governor is asking state lawmakers to put youth prisons under California’s Health and Human Services Agency. Youthful offenders currently are overseen by the same agency that runs adult prisons.
The current system isn’t working, he said, with about three out of four young offenders arrested again within three years of their release. More than half are convicted of new crimes and more than a third are soon back in state custody, according to 2017 figures.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Score one for Newsom and subtract two.
Jesus Cecena should be locked up where the sun don’t shine for the rest of his worthless life. Why the parole board keeps recommending him for parole is beyond belief – even if he is now a Jesus freak.
Closing down the youth prisons and placing young criminals under the Health and Human Services Agency? Newsom has gotta be kidding! If they do that, those bleak recidivism stats will only get worse ….. but not much more worse because they can’t get much worse than they already are.
LAPPL News Watch
January 24, 2019
Gov. Gavin Newsom has reversed the decision by a state parole board to release Jesus Cecena, who was convicted of murder as a teenager in 1979 for gunning down San Diego Police Officer Archie Buggs.
The decision marks the fourth time in the last five years that the governor’s office has reversed the decision by parole board members to free the 57-year-old Cecena.
Cecena shot Buggs to death during a routine traffic stop the evening of Nov. 4, 1978. After being convicted of first-degree murder, he was sentenced to life without parole.
His sentence was modified to life with the possibility of parole in 1982 after an appellate court ruled that juveniles could not be sentenced to no-parole terms.
__________
CALIFORNIA’S FAR-LEFT GOVERNOR STARTS TERM OFF WITH FAR-LEFT YOUTH PRISON PROPOSAL
California Governor Seeks To Transform Youth Prisons
LAPPL News Watch
January 24, 2019
Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed Tuesday to change the way California’s juvenile prisons are overseen, eventually closing facilities to cut what he called the “ludicrous” cost.
“If we’re going to get serious about changing the trajectory of the lives of these young children, I think we need to do it through a different lens and not the traditional corrections lens,” Newsom said at one of the state’s four remaining juvenile detention centers.
The Democratic governor is asking state lawmakers to put youth prisons under California’s Health and Human Services Agency. Youthful offenders currently are overseen by the same agency that runs adult prisons.
The current system isn’t working, he said, with about three out of four young offenders arrested again within three years of their release. More than half are convicted of new crimes and more than a third are soon back in state custody, according to 2017 figures.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Score one for Newsom and subtract two.
Jesus Cecena should be locked up where the sun don’t shine for the rest of his worthless life. Why the parole board keeps recommending him for parole is beyond belief – even if he is now a Jesus freak.
Closing down the youth prisons and placing young criminals under the Health and Human Services Agency? Newsom has gotta be kidding! If they do that, those bleak recidivism stats will only get worse ….. but not much more worse because they can’t get much worse than they already are.
EVANGELIZING THE AMAZON INDIANS TO DEATH
Missionary from Maine could be tried by Brazil for genocide after entering land occupied by isolated tribe and exposing them to deadly disease
Daily Mail
January 24, 2019
An American missionary has been accused of exposing an isolated indigenous tribe in Brazil to potentially fatal diseases.
Steve Campbell, from Maine, is being investigated by officials from FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s Indigenous Affairs Department, amid reports that he could be tried for genocide.
He allegedly entered an area occupied by the Hi-Merimã tribe last month to carry out missionary work there.
The tribe is one of a few dozen isolated communities in Brazil that have had almost no contact with the outside world. Natives there have previously rejected attempts at contact.
It is unclear what penalties Campbell may face, with federal prosecutors or police officials yet to be notified of his actions.
EDITOR’S NOTE; In 1993 my son and I received permission from the Venezuelan government to go into the Yanomami Indian territory … at our risk. These are stone-age Indians whose warriors still raid each other’s villages to kidnap women members of the tribe. We managed to visit two Yanomami villages.
Unfortunately, the Yanomamis are dying off from malaria. And like in Brazil, missionaries have introduced deadly western diseases to the primitive Indians of the Venezuelan Amazon.
The Padamo Mission is located by the Padamo River on the border of the Yanomami reservation. At the time, the well-intentioned evangelical missionaries had been luring members of the tribe away and converting them to Christianity while looking after their health.
But many of the converted Yanomamis end up as drunks in the in the street gutters of Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of the Amazonia Territory.
Daily Mail
January 24, 2019
An American missionary has been accused of exposing an isolated indigenous tribe in Brazil to potentially fatal diseases.
Steve Campbell, from Maine, is being investigated by officials from FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s Indigenous Affairs Department, amid reports that he could be tried for genocide.
He allegedly entered an area occupied by the Hi-Merimã tribe last month to carry out missionary work there.
The tribe is one of a few dozen isolated communities in Brazil that have had almost no contact with the outside world. Natives there have previously rejected attempts at contact.
It is unclear what penalties Campbell may face, with federal prosecutors or police officials yet to be notified of his actions.
EDITOR’S NOTE; In 1993 my son and I received permission from the Venezuelan government to go into the Yanomami Indian territory … at our risk. These are stone-age Indians whose warriors still raid each other’s villages to kidnap women members of the tribe. We managed to visit two Yanomami villages.
Unfortunately, the Yanomamis are dying off from malaria. And like in Brazil, missionaries have introduced deadly western diseases to the primitive Indians of the Venezuelan Amazon.
The Padamo Mission is located by the Padamo River on the border of the Yanomami reservation. At the time, the well-intentioned evangelical missionaries had been luring members of the tribe away and converting them to Christianity while looking after their health.
But many of the converted Yanomamis end up as drunks in the in the street gutters of Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of the Amazonia Territory.
SHOULD THE FBI RUN THE COUNTRY?
By Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
January 20, 2019
Since the media would doubtless answer that loaded question, “It depends on the president,” let us imagine the following scenario.
Return to 2008, when candidate Barack Obama had served only about three years in the U.S. Senate, his sum total of foreign policy experience. And he was running against the overseas old-hand, decorated veteran, and national icon John McCain—a bipartisan favorite in Washington, D.C.
During the campaign, unfounded rumors had swirled about the rookie Obama that he might ease sanctions on Iran, distance the United States from Israel, and alienate the moderate Arab regimes, such as the Gulf monarchies and Egypt.
Stories also abounded that the Los Angeles Times had suppressed the release of a supposedly explosive “Khalidi tape,” in which Obama purportedly thanked the radical Rashid Khalidi for schooling him on the Middle East and correcting his earlier biases and blind spots, while praising the Palestinian activist for his support for armed resistance against Israel.
Even more gossip circulated that photos existed of a smiling Barack Obama with Louis Farrakhan, the Black Muslim extremist and radical pro-Gaddafi patron, who in the past had praised Adolf Hitler and reminded the Jews again about the finality of being sent to the ovens.
(A photo of a smiling Obama and Farrakhan did emerge, but mysteriously only after President Obama left office).
Imagine that all these tales in 2008 might have supposedly “worried” Bush lame-duck and pro-McCain U.S. intelligence officials, who informally met to discuss possible ways of gleaning more information about this still mostly unknown but scary Obama candidacy.
But most importantly, imagine that McCain’s opposition researchers had apprised the FBI of accusations (unproven, of course) that Obama had improperly set up a private back-channel envoy to Iran in 2008.
Supposedly, Obama was trying secretly to reassure the theocracy (then the object of Bush Administration and allied efforts to ratchet up pressures to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons) of better treatment to come. The conspiratorial accusation would imply that if Iran held off Bush Administration pressures, Tehran might soon find a more conducive atmosphere from an incoming Obama Administration.
Additional rumors of similar Logan Act “violations” would also swirl about Obama campaign efforts to convince the Iraqis not to seal a forces agreement with the departing Bush Administration.
Changing Status Quo Calls for a Federal Investigation
Further, conceive that at least one top Bush Justice Department deputy had a spouse working on the McCain opposition dossier on Obama, and that the same official had helped to circulate its scandalous anti-Obama contents around government circles.
In this scenario, also picture that the anti-Obama FBI soon might have claimed that the Obama Iran mission story might have been not only an apparent violation of the Logan Act but also part of possible larger “conspiratorial” efforts to undermine current Bush Administration policies. And given Obama’s campaign rhetoric of downplaying the threats posed by Iran to the United States, and the likelihood he would reverse long-standing U.S. opposition to the theocracy, the FBI decided on its own in July 2008 that Obama himself posed a grave threat to national security.
More importantly, the FBI, by its director’s own later admission, would have conjectured that McCain was the likelier stronger candidate and thus would win the election, given his far greater experience than that of the novice Obama. And therefore, the FBI director further assumed he could conduct investigations against a presidential candidate on the theory that a defeated Obama would have no knowledge of its wayward investigatory surveillance, and that a soon-to-be President McCain would have no desire to air such skullduggery.
The Bush FBI would be further alarmed in 2008 that Obama would, in addition, reverse long-standing U.S. foreign policy by restoring relations with Venezuela, Cuba, and “resetting” policy with Russia. In short, the intelligence community might suspect that a President Obama would turn enemies into friends, and friends into enemies—and thus endanger the entire post-war order.
Envision as a result that the Bureau would have notified the CIA of its concerns about a likely Obama radical new change in U.S. foreign policy toward archenemy, theocratic Iran. The CIA director would then also begin tipping off important Republican senators of the dangers Obama posed. He would spice up his warnings with the preliminary “data” gleaned from shared FBI-inspired counterintelligence surveillance operations of the various members of the Obama campaign—specifically, FISA-court ordered surveillance focused on, say, the Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett.
Again, no proof of any collusion, but lots of worries that the outsider Obama would pose a level of danger to the status quo.
At about the same time, in the weeks before the election, the Bush FBI and Justice Department would have presented to the FISA court a dossier paid for by the McCain campaign—produced through the use of both law and opposition research firms that had hidden the improper use of McCain campaign fund payments, as well the fact that the anti-Obama dossier was compiled by a British retired spy, with a long known hostility to the Obama candidacy.
Unverified Claims, Anonymous Sources
In this continuing thought experiment, the FBI would not verify any of the dossier’s salacious accusations, which covered lurid accusations concerning Obama’s personal life, his college years, his real estate deals with Tony Rezko, contacts with the felon Bill Ayers and the firebrand Father Michael Pfleger, his full relations with the anti-Semitic and anti-American Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity church, his mysterious college-era trip to Pakistan and his Pakistani friends, his own references to prior drug use, and additional and assorted quite sensational and inflammatory rumors that had come up during the 2008 campaign.
Many of the dossier’s details had been earlier leaked to conservative journalists by the deputy director and general counsel of the FBI, with the intent of damaging the Obama campaign. The conservative media would legitimize its gossip and anti-Obama smears by using terminology such as “two unidentified FBI sources” and “an anonymous source at the DOJ.” During the closing stretch of the campaign, suddenly lurid details from the dossier would be published to suggest that Obama was either a foreign stooge or unfit personally for the nation’s highest office.
Nonetheless, the Bureau would still believe that the dossier was important enough to support further investigation into Obama’s radical and suspicious behavior during the campaign—including the possibility of conducting federal surveillance on his staffers through the FISA courts. Such warrants would be obtained and used to reverse-target Obama campaign officials through the excuse of focusing on Valerie Jarrett and her supposed Iranian ties.
In addition, imagine that in talks with the CIA, the FBI director decided to insert a government informant into the Obama campaign to ascertain whether his outreach to Iranian officials or his ideas about resetting the Middle East comprised a national security threat—and, given some of the salacious material in the McCain bought dossier, whether Obama himself might be compromised as some sort of Manchurian candidate by blackmailers working for Iranian or Russian intelligence.
Finally, after the stunning defeat of John McCain, both the CIA and FBI would have been worried that the incoming Obama Administration might soon learn that the intelligence services had warped the FISA process by not apprising the court that the dossier was unverified, much less that it was paid for by the McCain campaign and its author severed from FBI contact. And they were further anxious that members of the Bush Administration had deliberately unmasked names of surveilled Obama aides and advisors, and leaked them illegally to the press.
Suspicious Activities, Thickening Plots
As a result of partial disclosures of such intelligence community misbehavior, President Obama would have fired the FBI director, who in retaliation would have leaked confidential memos of his private talks that he had with President Obama himself—in hopes of creating enough outrage to lead to the appointment of a special prosecutor to review Obama campaign and administration suspicious activity abroad. The FBI would attempt to create such hysteria over the firing of the director and charges of Obama collusion that the rogue behavior of government agencies would be largely ignored.Meanwhile, imagine also that the FBI secretly continued with its prior counterintelligence investigations of the new president. The Bureau based its persistent surveillance on grounds of new worries during the transition and early months of Obama’s presidency that tended to fuel old suspicious of radical and dangerous new foreign policies.
The FBI noted that Obama’s first interview as president was with the Arab language Al-Arabiya, in which he sharply criticized past U.S. policies toward the Middle East; his June 2009 Cairo speech, in which he seemed to fault the West for much of the chaos in the Middle East while parroting Islamic “talking points” about Islam’s key contributions to Western culture; his silencewhen 1 million Iranians protested the theocracy during the so-called “Green Revolution”; and assorted loose gossip that he might be willing soon to trade billions of dollars for hostages and ease sanctions to conclude a so-called Iran deal.
Finally, also imagine that by 2012 under increasing pressure due to endless leaks, and Republican hostility, President Obama had relented and allowed the appointment of a special counsel, who turned out to be a friend of the fired FBI anti-Obama director. The counsel was charged with investigating whether Iran and radical Islamic groups had played an inordinate role in the 2008 campaign, and whether other foreign entities had exercised undue influence on the Obama campaign and administration.
Almost immediately, more leaks from the new special counsel’s team suggested that Obama himself might be also compromised by Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Accordingly, the counsel’s team quite expansively was suddenly also investigating the laxity shown the Russian government after its annexations of Crimea and eastern Ukraine; the administration’s unwillingness to provide arms to Ukrainian forces; the open mic quid pro quo pre-reelection promise to consider ending completely the U.S.-led efforts to install missile defense in Eastern Europe, should Putin stay quiet during the 2012 election campaign and thus give Obama space and flexibility and a boost in the elections; the strange decision to block U.S. oil companies from federal lands rich in natural gas and oil that enhanced Putin’s pivotal role in adjudicating world energy prices; and serial laxity in replying to continued Russian cyber attacks against private American companies and U.S. government institutions. Again, the effort would be to rebrand Obama’s legitimate but radical shifts in policy as criminal activity in a fashion designed to abort the Obama presidency or at least to shield public scrutiny from past FBI and CIA misdeeds.
During the 2012 Obama reelection campaign, Republican activists, former administration officials, and members of the Romney campaign would find access to some of the Bush-era surveillance dating back to 2008 and began leaking transcripts to the press. At the same time, the special counsel’s “dream team” (inordinately stocked with McCain and Romney contributors) would be rocked by scandal, once it was disclosed that in a series of texts two members of the investigatory team had expressed hatred for Obama, claimed that one could “smell” the presence of his supporters, and had hoped to derail his 2012 campaign. Some of their embarrassing texts would later mysteriously be proved to be unrecoverable, apparently erased or lost by the special counsel’s team.
Where Does It All Lead?
An exasperated Obama himself would have threatened to dismiss the special counsel as he serially complained that he had been an earlier victim of “wiretapping,” based on purchased smears by the McCain campaign, the use of a foreign former national intelligence officer to subvert his campaign, and the serial misconduct of the FBI that had illicitly surveilled his campaign and presidency on the bogus notion that his recalibrations in the Middle East either amounted to treason, or were the result of blackmail by foreign powers who had evidence of the sort of behavior documented in the opposition-research dossier.
Why, Obama would complain, was the special counsel team stocked inordinately with Bush conservatives, McCain donors, and even a few lawyers who had at times been McCain subordinates?
Obama was especially infuriated that Bush Administration officials in the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, State Department, and the National Security Council had worked with McCain campaign operatives to circulate the dossier on his prior friends and activities to media outlets. And why were former Bush CIA and FBI officials going on television to charge Obama with veritable treason?
The president was even more incensed that after his inauguration, the FBI had continued its FISA court surveillance of former campaign operatives, and persisted with surveillance of his own national security advisor.
For most of his presidency, an exasperated and harried President Obama tweeted incessantly that the FBI surveillance and special counsel investigation were constantly marked by leaks to Fox News and the conservative press on irrelevant issues and unproven stale gossip—such as old 2008 Obama campaign finance violations; ancient allegations that Michelle Obama had received favorable treatment at her University of Chicago hospital job once Obama had been elected senator; fossilized stories that Obama had still not paid taxes on the Rezko discounted gift of tangential property; tired narratives that in Obama’s prior senate campaign the sealed divorce records of both his primary and general election opponents had been mysteriously and unlawfully been leaked and published; new revelations that Obama’s own autobiography was little more than a mythography of composite sketches and made up narratives; and insinuations that ongoing scandals at the General Services Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, IRS, and the Environmental Protection Agency might have cross-fertilizations with the special counsel investigations. Racy elements within the fabricated so-called McCain dossier such as unproven drug use, alleged manic chain-smoking, and libelous, unproven personal liaisons, would be favorite gossip of journalists.
A number of former Obama associates—Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, David Axelrod—were reportedly being leveraged by special counsel attorneys in exchange for limiting their own legal exposure in a variety of areas. A sleepless Obama often railed that both the FBI and the special counsel were conducting “witch hunts” and “fishing expeditions,” and that there had been no “collusion” with either Middle East or Russian interests.
Obama, in our thought experiment, would have charged that the role of the Bush-era FBI, CIA, DOJ, and special counsel’s team had become part of a “resistance” to delegitimize his presidency. Indeed, Obama charged that conservative interests had long wanted to abort his presidency by fueling past efforts to subvert the Electoral College in 2008, to invoke the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, and the Emoluments Clause (based on rumors of negotiating lucrative post-presidential book and media contracts by leveraging his presidential tenure), as well as introducing articles of impeachment.
Celebrity talk of injuring Obama and his family would be daily events. Actor Robert De Niro talked of smashing Obama’s face, while Peter Fonda dreamed of caging his children. Johnny Depp alluded to assassination. It soon became a sick celebrity game to discover whether the president should be blown up, whipped, shot, burned, punched, or hanged.
Imagine that if all that had happened. Would the FBI, CIA, or FISA courts still exist in their current form? Would the media have any credibility? Would celebrities still be celebrities? Would there ever again be a special counsel? Would we still have a country?
American Greatness
January 20, 2019
Since the media would doubtless answer that loaded question, “It depends on the president,” let us imagine the following scenario.
Return to 2008, when candidate Barack Obama had served only about three years in the U.S. Senate, his sum total of foreign policy experience. And he was running against the overseas old-hand, decorated veteran, and national icon John McCain—a bipartisan favorite in Washington, D.C.
During the campaign, unfounded rumors had swirled about the rookie Obama that he might ease sanctions on Iran, distance the United States from Israel, and alienate the moderate Arab regimes, such as the Gulf monarchies and Egypt.
Stories also abounded that the Los Angeles Times had suppressed the release of a supposedly explosive “Khalidi tape,” in which Obama purportedly thanked the radical Rashid Khalidi for schooling him on the Middle East and correcting his earlier biases and blind spots, while praising the Palestinian activist for his support for armed resistance against Israel.
Even more gossip circulated that photos existed of a smiling Barack Obama with Louis Farrakhan, the Black Muslim extremist and radical pro-Gaddafi patron, who in the past had praised Adolf Hitler and reminded the Jews again about the finality of being sent to the ovens.
(A photo of a smiling Obama and Farrakhan did emerge, but mysteriously only after President Obama left office).
Imagine that all these tales in 2008 might have supposedly “worried” Bush lame-duck and pro-McCain U.S. intelligence officials, who informally met to discuss possible ways of gleaning more information about this still mostly unknown but scary Obama candidacy.
But most importantly, imagine that McCain’s opposition researchers had apprised the FBI of accusations (unproven, of course) that Obama had improperly set up a private back-channel envoy to Iran in 2008.
Supposedly, Obama was trying secretly to reassure the theocracy (then the object of Bush Administration and allied efforts to ratchet up pressures to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weapons) of better treatment to come. The conspiratorial accusation would imply that if Iran held off Bush Administration pressures, Tehran might soon find a more conducive atmosphere from an incoming Obama Administration.
Additional rumors of similar Logan Act “violations” would also swirl about Obama campaign efforts to convince the Iraqis not to seal a forces agreement with the departing Bush Administration.
Changing Status Quo Calls for a Federal Investigation
Further, conceive that at least one top Bush Justice Department deputy had a spouse working on the McCain opposition dossier on Obama, and that the same official had helped to circulate its scandalous anti-Obama contents around government circles.
In this scenario, also picture that the anti-Obama FBI soon might have claimed that the Obama Iran mission story might have been not only an apparent violation of the Logan Act but also part of possible larger “conspiratorial” efforts to undermine current Bush Administration policies. And given Obama’s campaign rhetoric of downplaying the threats posed by Iran to the United States, and the likelihood he would reverse long-standing U.S. opposition to the theocracy, the FBI decided on its own in July 2008 that Obama himself posed a grave threat to national security.
More importantly, the FBI, by its director’s own later admission, would have conjectured that McCain was the likelier stronger candidate and thus would win the election, given his far greater experience than that of the novice Obama. And therefore, the FBI director further assumed he could conduct investigations against a presidential candidate on the theory that a defeated Obama would have no knowledge of its wayward investigatory surveillance, and that a soon-to-be President McCain would have no desire to air such skullduggery.
The Bush FBI would be further alarmed in 2008 that Obama would, in addition, reverse long-standing U.S. foreign policy by restoring relations with Venezuela, Cuba, and “resetting” policy with Russia. In short, the intelligence community might suspect that a President Obama would turn enemies into friends, and friends into enemies—and thus endanger the entire post-war order.
Envision as a result that the Bureau would have notified the CIA of its concerns about a likely Obama radical new change in U.S. foreign policy toward archenemy, theocratic Iran. The CIA director would then also begin tipping off important Republican senators of the dangers Obama posed. He would spice up his warnings with the preliminary “data” gleaned from shared FBI-inspired counterintelligence surveillance operations of the various members of the Obama campaign—specifically, FISA-court ordered surveillance focused on, say, the Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett.
Again, no proof of any collusion, but lots of worries that the outsider Obama would pose a level of danger to the status quo.
At about the same time, in the weeks before the election, the Bush FBI and Justice Department would have presented to the FISA court a dossier paid for by the McCain campaign—produced through the use of both law and opposition research firms that had hidden the improper use of McCain campaign fund payments, as well the fact that the anti-Obama dossier was compiled by a British retired spy, with a long known hostility to the Obama candidacy.
Unverified Claims, Anonymous Sources
In this continuing thought experiment, the FBI would not verify any of the dossier’s salacious accusations, which covered lurid accusations concerning Obama’s personal life, his college years, his real estate deals with Tony Rezko, contacts with the felon Bill Ayers and the firebrand Father Michael Pfleger, his full relations with the anti-Semitic and anti-American Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity church, his mysterious college-era trip to Pakistan and his Pakistani friends, his own references to prior drug use, and additional and assorted quite sensational and inflammatory rumors that had come up during the 2008 campaign.
Many of the dossier’s details had been earlier leaked to conservative journalists by the deputy director and general counsel of the FBI, with the intent of damaging the Obama campaign. The conservative media would legitimize its gossip and anti-Obama smears by using terminology such as “two unidentified FBI sources” and “an anonymous source at the DOJ.” During the closing stretch of the campaign, suddenly lurid details from the dossier would be published to suggest that Obama was either a foreign stooge or unfit personally for the nation’s highest office.
Nonetheless, the Bureau would still believe that the dossier was important enough to support further investigation into Obama’s radical and suspicious behavior during the campaign—including the possibility of conducting federal surveillance on his staffers through the FISA courts. Such warrants would be obtained and used to reverse-target Obama campaign officials through the excuse of focusing on Valerie Jarrett and her supposed Iranian ties.
In addition, imagine that in talks with the CIA, the FBI director decided to insert a government informant into the Obama campaign to ascertain whether his outreach to Iranian officials or his ideas about resetting the Middle East comprised a national security threat—and, given some of the salacious material in the McCain bought dossier, whether Obama himself might be compromised as some sort of Manchurian candidate by blackmailers working for Iranian or Russian intelligence.
Finally, after the stunning defeat of John McCain, both the CIA and FBI would have been worried that the incoming Obama Administration might soon learn that the intelligence services had warped the FISA process by not apprising the court that the dossier was unverified, much less that it was paid for by the McCain campaign and its author severed from FBI contact. And they were further anxious that members of the Bush Administration had deliberately unmasked names of surveilled Obama aides and advisors, and leaked them illegally to the press.
Suspicious Activities, Thickening Plots
As a result of partial disclosures of such intelligence community misbehavior, President Obama would have fired the FBI director, who in retaliation would have leaked confidential memos of his private talks that he had with President Obama himself—in hopes of creating enough outrage to lead to the appointment of a special prosecutor to review Obama campaign and administration suspicious activity abroad. The FBI would attempt to create such hysteria over the firing of the director and charges of Obama collusion that the rogue behavior of government agencies would be largely ignored.Meanwhile, imagine also that the FBI secretly continued with its prior counterintelligence investigations of the new president. The Bureau based its persistent surveillance on grounds of new worries during the transition and early months of Obama’s presidency that tended to fuel old suspicious of radical and dangerous new foreign policies.
The FBI noted that Obama’s first interview as president was with the Arab language Al-Arabiya, in which he sharply criticized past U.S. policies toward the Middle East; his June 2009 Cairo speech, in which he seemed to fault the West for much of the chaos in the Middle East while parroting Islamic “talking points” about Islam’s key contributions to Western culture; his silencewhen 1 million Iranians protested the theocracy during the so-called “Green Revolution”; and assorted loose gossip that he might be willing soon to trade billions of dollars for hostages and ease sanctions to conclude a so-called Iran deal.
Finally, also imagine that by 2012 under increasing pressure due to endless leaks, and Republican hostility, President Obama had relented and allowed the appointment of a special counsel, who turned out to be a friend of the fired FBI anti-Obama director. The counsel was charged with investigating whether Iran and radical Islamic groups had played an inordinate role in the 2008 campaign, and whether other foreign entities had exercised undue influence on the Obama campaign and administration.
Almost immediately, more leaks from the new special counsel’s team suggested that Obama himself might be also compromised by Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Accordingly, the counsel’s team quite expansively was suddenly also investigating the laxity shown the Russian government after its annexations of Crimea and eastern Ukraine; the administration’s unwillingness to provide arms to Ukrainian forces; the open mic quid pro quo pre-reelection promise to consider ending completely the U.S.-led efforts to install missile defense in Eastern Europe, should Putin stay quiet during the 2012 election campaign and thus give Obama space and flexibility and a boost in the elections; the strange decision to block U.S. oil companies from federal lands rich in natural gas and oil that enhanced Putin’s pivotal role in adjudicating world energy prices; and serial laxity in replying to continued Russian cyber attacks against private American companies and U.S. government institutions. Again, the effort would be to rebrand Obama’s legitimate but radical shifts in policy as criminal activity in a fashion designed to abort the Obama presidency or at least to shield public scrutiny from past FBI and CIA misdeeds.
During the 2012 Obama reelection campaign, Republican activists, former administration officials, and members of the Romney campaign would find access to some of the Bush-era surveillance dating back to 2008 and began leaking transcripts to the press. At the same time, the special counsel’s “dream team” (inordinately stocked with McCain and Romney contributors) would be rocked by scandal, once it was disclosed that in a series of texts two members of the investigatory team had expressed hatred for Obama, claimed that one could “smell” the presence of his supporters, and had hoped to derail his 2012 campaign. Some of their embarrassing texts would later mysteriously be proved to be unrecoverable, apparently erased or lost by the special counsel’s team.
Where Does It All Lead?
An exasperated Obama himself would have threatened to dismiss the special counsel as he serially complained that he had been an earlier victim of “wiretapping,” based on purchased smears by the McCain campaign, the use of a foreign former national intelligence officer to subvert his campaign, and the serial misconduct of the FBI that had illicitly surveilled his campaign and presidency on the bogus notion that his recalibrations in the Middle East either amounted to treason, or were the result of blackmail by foreign powers who had evidence of the sort of behavior documented in the opposition-research dossier.
Why, Obama would complain, was the special counsel team stocked inordinately with Bush conservatives, McCain donors, and even a few lawyers who had at times been McCain subordinates?
Obama was especially infuriated that Bush Administration officials in the FBI, Justice Department, CIA, State Department, and the National Security Council had worked with McCain campaign operatives to circulate the dossier on his prior friends and activities to media outlets. And why were former Bush CIA and FBI officials going on television to charge Obama with veritable treason?
The president was even more incensed that after his inauguration, the FBI had continued its FISA court surveillance of former campaign operatives, and persisted with surveillance of his own national security advisor.
For most of his presidency, an exasperated and harried President Obama tweeted incessantly that the FBI surveillance and special counsel investigation were constantly marked by leaks to Fox News and the conservative press on irrelevant issues and unproven stale gossip—such as old 2008 Obama campaign finance violations; ancient allegations that Michelle Obama had received favorable treatment at her University of Chicago hospital job once Obama had been elected senator; fossilized stories that Obama had still not paid taxes on the Rezko discounted gift of tangential property; tired narratives that in Obama’s prior senate campaign the sealed divorce records of both his primary and general election opponents had been mysteriously and unlawfully been leaked and published; new revelations that Obama’s own autobiography was little more than a mythography of composite sketches and made up narratives; and insinuations that ongoing scandals at the General Services Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, IRS, and the Environmental Protection Agency might have cross-fertilizations with the special counsel investigations. Racy elements within the fabricated so-called McCain dossier such as unproven drug use, alleged manic chain-smoking, and libelous, unproven personal liaisons, would be favorite gossip of journalists.
A number of former Obama associates—Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, David Axelrod—were reportedly being leveraged by special counsel attorneys in exchange for limiting their own legal exposure in a variety of areas. A sleepless Obama often railed that both the FBI and the special counsel were conducting “witch hunts” and “fishing expeditions,” and that there had been no “collusion” with either Middle East or Russian interests.
Obama, in our thought experiment, would have charged that the role of the Bush-era FBI, CIA, DOJ, and special counsel’s team had become part of a “resistance” to delegitimize his presidency. Indeed, Obama charged that conservative interests had long wanted to abort his presidency by fueling past efforts to subvert the Electoral College in 2008, to invoke the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, and the Emoluments Clause (based on rumors of negotiating lucrative post-presidential book and media contracts by leveraging his presidential tenure), as well as introducing articles of impeachment.
Celebrity talk of injuring Obama and his family would be daily events. Actor Robert De Niro talked of smashing Obama’s face, while Peter Fonda dreamed of caging his children. Johnny Depp alluded to assassination. It soon became a sick celebrity game to discover whether the president should be blown up, whipped, shot, burned, punched, or hanged.
Imagine that if all that had happened. Would the FBI, CIA, or FISA courts still exist in their current form? Would the media have any credibility? Would celebrities still be celebrities? Would there ever again be a special counsel? Would we still have a country?
Thursday, January 24, 2019
INSULT COULD BE THE INSULT OF ALL TIMES
'Maybe someday, he’ll have a relationship with a live human woman': Never-Trumper GOP strategist blasts Stephen Miller's personal life and blames him for wall impasse
Daily Mail
January 23, 2019
Rick Wilson who worked on Rudy Giuliani's campaigns in the 1990s but is now a cable news commentator, made the startling remark about Miller on Tuesday while discussing immigration with MSNBC host Chris Hayes.
Hayes had just speculated about immigration hawk Miller's involvement in President Donald Trump's latest offer to end the government shutdown.
Wilson responded in part: 'There's something deeply wrong with Stephen Miller, I think we can all acknowledge that. And maybe someday, he'll have a relationship with a live human woman.'
Daily Mail
January 23, 2019
Rick Wilson who worked on Rudy Giuliani's campaigns in the 1990s but is now a cable news commentator, made the startling remark about Miller on Tuesday while discussing immigration with MSNBC host Chris Hayes.
Hayes had just speculated about immigration hawk Miller's involvement in President Donald Trump's latest offer to end the government shutdown.
Wilson responded in part: 'There's something deeply wrong with Stephen Miller, I think we can all acknowledge that. And maybe someday, he'll have a relationship with a live human woman.'
LA TEACHERS STRIKE OVER ..... PROBABLY
by Bob Walsh
On Tuesday a tentative deal was reached in the six-day teachers strike in the second largest school district in the country. It came out of a 21-hour bargaining session.
The deal is said to include a 6% pay raise and a commitment to reduce class sizes over a period of four years, as well as a commitment to put nurses and librarians in all the public schools in the district.
The teachers are going back to work, pending a vote on the deal. The exact details have yet to be released.
On Tuesday a tentative deal was reached in the six-day teachers strike in the second largest school district in the country. It came out of a 21-hour bargaining session.
The deal is said to include a 6% pay raise and a commitment to reduce class sizes over a period of four years, as well as a commitment to put nurses and librarians in all the public schools in the district.
The teachers are going back to work, pending a vote on the deal. The exact details have yet to be released.
COPS FACES CHARGE IN ON-DUTY CRASH
by Bob Walsh
Nestor Velasquez is a Stockton cop. He was involved in a motor vehicle crash on duty back in 2017. He is now facing both a civil suit and a criminal prosecution because of this.
On June 28, 2017, at 0200, Velasqez and a vehicle driven by Titus Tabotabo, 28, were involved in a crash on S. Airport Way. The officer is facing vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence charges as a result, and has been on paid administrative leave ever since. This is a felony charge.
Officer Velasquez and his partner were driving code 3 to a report of shots fired nearby. The intersection where the collision occurred is a major, light controlled intersection. Both of the roads there are multilane roads traveled by a lot of vehicles. Tabotabo was killed in the crash, both officers were injured.
Nestor Velasquez is a Stockton cop. He was involved in a motor vehicle crash on duty back in 2017. He is now facing both a civil suit and a criminal prosecution because of this.
On June 28, 2017, at 0200, Velasqez and a vehicle driven by Titus Tabotabo, 28, were involved in a crash on S. Airport Way. The officer is facing vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence charges as a result, and has been on paid administrative leave ever since. This is a felony charge.
Officer Velasquez and his partner were driving code 3 to a report of shots fired nearby. The intersection where the collision occurred is a major, light controlled intersection. Both of the roads there are multilane roads traveled by a lot of vehicles. Tabotabo was killed in the crash, both officers were injured.
SOCIALIST UTOPIA TEETERING ON THE BRINK ?
by Bob Walsh
It looks like things are actually becoming unglued in Venezuela. A number of countries, including ours, have withdrawn recognition of the current government and there is rioting in the streets. There is hyperinflation and people are actually starving in major cities.
Perhaps Bernie, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Michael Moore and other socialist morons should go down there to help by telling the locals how wonderful they really have it while they are eating tree bark and grass for dinner.
It looks like things are actually becoming unglued in Venezuela. A number of countries, including ours, have withdrawn recognition of the current government and there is rioting in the streets. There is hyperinflation and people are actually starving in major cities.
Perhaps Bernie, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Michael Moore and other socialist morons should go down there to help by telling the locals how wonderful they really have it while they are eating tree bark and grass for dinner.
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