Tag Archives: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

Justice?

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On Wednesday, The Daily Caller posted a report about the trial of one of the Proud Boys involved in the January 6th protest.

The article reports:

At least one Proud Boys member on trial over the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol had a previously-concealed FBI informant set to appear as a witness in their case, a defense attorney said Wednesday.

Former Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio and members Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola are all on federal trial after being accused in a June 2022 indictment of conspiring “to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force.” The government revealed Wednesday that a witness scheduled to appear in the defense case Thursday had been an FBI confidential human source from April 2021 to at least January 2023, Rehl’s lawyer Carmen Hernandez said in a court filing obtained by American Greatness’ Julie Kelly.

The article concludes:

Court filings previously suggested that the FBI had up to eight informants within the Proud Boys in the months surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, The New York Times reported.
The FBI declined the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
This is beyond disgusting. There are real questions as to the role the FBI played in instigating the violence on January 6th, and now we see that the FBI was spying on the defense of those charged with crimes on that day.
Every single person currently in jail for their actions on January 6th needs to be freed immediately. If our major cities are freeing hardened criminals, Washington, D.C., should at least have the courtesy to free prisoners who are simply political prisoners whose constitutional rights have been seriously violated.

Breaking The Law When You Are Supposed To Be The Law

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On Sunday, The Western Journal posted an article about evidence tampering in the trials of the January 6th protesters.

The article reports:

The FBI has been accused of doctoring evidence against a defendant who was involved in the Capitol incursion.

The controversy erupted last week after an attorney for Ethan Nordean, a Proud Boys member facing charges over the events of Jan. 6, 2021, said “hidden” messages between FBI agents had been found in a document presented to the court by FBI Special Agent Nicole Miller, according to Newsweek.

“[A] close examination of the agent’s sheet revealed over one thousand hidden Excel rows of messages,” a court document said.

“Nordean must be permitted to cross-examine Miller with the hidden Lync messages to determine whether defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights have been violated through government collection of attorney-client communications about trial strategy,” said the court filing by Nordean’s attorney, Nicholas Smith.

The disclosure resulted in a pause on the trial of several Proud Boys members until next week, including Dominic Pezzola, a co-defendant of Nordean’s who is facing obstruction and conspiracy charges.

The article notes:

Roger Roots, an attorney for Pezzola, explained the significance of the find.

“There are a couple of emails between FBI agents casually discussing altering a document and destroying hundreds of pieces of evidence. It’s very disturbing and right now we have more questions than answers,” Roots said, according to the Epoch Times.

Roger Roots has filed a motion to dismiss the charges against Dominic Pezzola.

The article concludes:

The motion also cited footage from Jan. 6, 2021, aired by Fox News host Tucker Carlson in the effort to dismiss the charges. The footage showed protester Jacob Chansley walking through the Capitol in the company of Capitol police, who were not making any physical effort to remove him.

“This footage is plainly exculpatory; as it establishes that the Senate chamber was never violently breached, and — in fact –was treated respectfully by January 6 protestors. To the extent protestors entered the chamber, they did so under the supervision of Capitol Police,” the motion claimed.

Please follow the link to the article for further details of the FBI’s misconduct.

 

 

Hidden (or not so hidden) In Biden’s Budget Proposal

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On March 9th, The Daily Caller posted the following about President Biden’s budget proposal:

President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2024 proposes increasing funding to the FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to crack down on guns.

The funding, which draws from a $17.8 billion “investment” in the DOJ’s federal law enforcement capacity, will be used to further regulate the firearms industry, create gun trafficking strike forces, enforce background checks and implement the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, according to the budget. The ATF alone will receive $1.9 billion, a $200 million increase from the 2023 budget.

Alongside the DOJ and ATF, the FBI will receive $51 million to support the continued implementation of enhanced background checks required by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, implemented in 2022, provided funding for the implementation of red flag laws, expanded background checks and invested in state crisis intervention orders, according to the legislation.

The article concludes:

The ATF’s “zero tolerance” police has been criticized by Republican lawmakers and Second Amendment advocacy groups, as Federal Firearm License (FFL) revocations hit a 16-year high in 2022 under the rule. The increase in license revocations, 92 in 2022 alone, is due to the new policy and the updated procedure that the ATF follows, as they no longer always go through a multi-step process, often opting to pull licenses for a multitude of “willful” violations.

“That’s not how regulatory agencies are supposed to work in the sector that they’re supposed to regulate. They are supposed to help the companies, they’re supposed to ensure compliance but they’re not supposed to punish and destroy an entire industry based on just political opposition or political distaste,” Gun Owners of America’s director of federal affairs Aidan Johnston told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Many of the Democrats currently in power in Washington are working feverishly to overrule the Second Amendment and the freedom it protects. The only way to block this is through continuing court challenges to new regulations. There are a number of organizations that are pursuing these court cases as new regulations are put in place. Please do your research, find an organization challenging these laws, and support their work.

When Cooler Heads Don’t Prevail

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On Wednesday, Red State posted an article about the raid on Mar-a-Lago. The Red State article heavily quotes an article from The Washington Post.

The Washington Post reports:

Months of disputes between Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents over how best to try to recover classified documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and residence led to a tense showdown near the end of July last year, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

Prosecutors argued that new evidence suggested Trump was knowingly concealing secret documents at his Palm Beach, Fla., home and urged the FBI to conduct a surprise raid at the property. But two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the search resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek Trump’s permission to search his property, according to the four people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation.

Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute, one of several previously unreported clashes in a tense tug of war between two arms of the Justice Department over how aggressively to pursue a criminal investigation of a former president. The FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug. 8, recovering more than 100 classified items, among them a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.

First of all, I question the list The Washington Post is providing. Has that information ever been made public?

Red State notes:

The FBI was criticized by both sides during those debacles—Hillary almost had a coronary in 2016 over then-FBI Director James Comey’s handling of her illegal server which contained classified information. Yet, her home was never raided, and she never faced charges. It doesn’t take a partisan to point out that there seem to be two systems of justice at play here.

The article at Red State concludes:

As we all know, the FBI’s concerns fell on deaf ears, and the raid went ahead as planned. The fact that there was such internal division within the DOJ shows that the surprise offensive was always politicized and heavy-handed. Merrick Garland has repeatedly shown in his term that he values politics over justice, and he will continue to act that way till he’s called to account.

There are currently two systems of justice in America. I am not sure how much longer that will last before it becomes a major problem.

Religious Freedom Under Attack (Only Some Religions)

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In January I posted an article about the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck’s all Muslim City Council passing a law to allow the religious sacrifice of animals on private property. Evidently that is part of the Muslim religious tradition. America has laws that would overrule that law, but evidently they are being ignored so that Muslims can practice their religion.

Meanwhile, on February 10th, The Patriot Journal reported the following:

Oh, boy is the FBI having a hard few years. The country’s highest law enforcement agency got a black eye after it was outed in several attempts to sway American politics. That included investigations aimed at slandering Trump and attempts to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story.

But the agency’s only gotten worse under Biden. They raided Trump’s home with 30 armed agents. They went after parents for simply questioning school boards. And now, it seems the bureau has even tried to destroy the religious freedoms of millions of Americans. The FBI is now scrambling to retract a disturbing memo aimed at Catholics.

NewsMax reported the following:

The FBI has renounced a leaked internal memo from its field office in Richmond, Virginia, that warned white supremacists found a home with “radical traditionalist Catholics” who favored the Latin Mass…

“Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters quickly began taking action to remove the document from FBI systems and conduct a review of the basis for the document,” the FBI statement continued.

The article at The Patriot Journal continues:

How odd, that an agency that is supposed to be hunting down real criminals is targeting a religious institution. Keep in mind, “white supremacy” isn’t a crime. Acts against people because of their race are crimes, hate crimes. But Democrats have labeled millions of Americans “white supremacists” in order to justify political persecution of them.

The article lists a few takeaways from the incident:

Key Takeaways:

  • The FBI scrambled to revoke a memo targeting Catholics as “white supremacists.”
  • The memo claimed “radical traditional Catholics” were welcoming white supremacists and should be investigated.
  • The agency rushed to remove traces of the document from its systems once it reached the public.

Stay tuned.

 

The Twitter Saga Continues

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In understanding any of what was going on at Twitter, it is a good idea to refer to a series of articles posted at The Conservative Treehouse describing Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop. The basic premise of the articles about Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop is that the business model for Twitter does not work unless various agencies prop it up. Twitter is the the U.S. government as Tik Tok is to the Chinese Communist government.

On Sunday, Breitbart posted an article about some of the things we have recently learned about the collaboration between Twitter and various government agencies.

The article reports:

The CIA was among a number of security state agencies, including the State Department and the Pentagon, involved in censorship at Twitter, according to the ninth tranche of Twitter Files released by Elon Musk, via journalist Matt Taibbi.

Following the bizarre statement released by the FBI, calling the Twitter Files reporting “misinformation” spread by “conspiracy theorists” with the “sole purpose of discrediting the agency,” Taibbi posted a new tranche revealing much more widespread government involvement in censorship than previously known — adding, “Why stop with one [agency]?”

The ninth release of Twitter Files displays aggressive efforts by the CIA and other agencies in the security state to force Twitter’s hand in censoring various political opinions and speech, through constant contact with the company’s executives, one of whom Taibbi reveals is ex-CIA himself.

Taibbi writes that the FBI was the primary link between the intelligence community and Twitter, describing the bureau as a “doorman” for the other agencies to connect with Twitter.

“The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship,” Taibbi writes, “encompassing agencies across the federal government – from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”

The article concludes:

Taibbi explains how the government would push Twitter according to its theories about “foreign influence” that Twitter did not see borne out in its own data. Twitter would respond to the government’s “constant pressure” that there was no evidence for their assertions, however, Twitter still surrendered its independence.

“The #TwitterFiles show execs under constant pressure to validate theories of foreign influence – and unable to find evidence for key assertions,” Taibbi writes, providing a number of examples.

“‘Due to a lack of technical evidence on our end, I’ve generally left it be, waiting for more evidence,’ he says. ‘Our window on that is closing, given that government partners are becoming more aggressive on attribution’,” Taibbi reports, adding, “Translation: ‘more aggressive’ ‘government partners’ had closed Twitter’s ‘window’ of independence.”

The CIA did not respond for request for comment, Taibbi reports:

“The CIA has yet to comment on the nature of its relationship to tech companies like Twitter. Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote. The searches were carried out by third parties, so what I saw could be limited.”

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. We are running out of conspiracy theories–they are all turning out to be true.

This Was Not An Individual Effort

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On Saturday, Michael Flynn posted an editorial in The Western Journal about some of things that are being revealed in the federal trial of Igor Danchenko. Please follow the link to read the entire editorial. I will try to  highlight it, but there is a lot of good information in the piece.

The editorial notes:

The FBI is not alone in this coup perpetrated against our nation.

For years, Americans were force-fed lie after lie by the propaganda press doing the dirty work of the Obama-Biden gang and their half-wit minions at the Department of Justice, FBI and others that caused havoc across our country and sought to destroy lives and families. Mine included.

…Now, Americans learned the FBI offered to pay $1 million of taxpayer money to a foreign spymaster conspiring with the Clinton campaign and others, plotting against America and striking at the heart of democracy and the republic. The extent to which they would go to destroy America had no boundaries.

The editorial concludes:

It matters less to me if these thugs spend the rest of their lives in jail, for this is the most consequential time in our nation’s history, and if we don’t correct the path this country is headed down, we may be seeing the last vestiges of the America our Founders envisioned — a free nation of self-governed citizens emboldened with their God-given rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Thank God the truth has broken through since the Durham trial began. Truth has no fear and will always surface to the top. And there are no more disguises of righteousness for those who seek to dismantle the American way of life. No hiding places, no rocks to climb under — America is informed.

The relentless and brutal attacks on me and my love for God and country will continue, but these are whistles in the wind. They will not deter me from honoring my oath and duty to protect this country from harm or my love for my family — my children and grandchildren — for whom I will give my last breath so that they will live free.

The ongoing trial is giving us a lot of insight into the bad behavior of what is now known as the ‘deep state’ during the Trump administration. General Flynn is correct in stating that the actions of those involved in undermining the Trump administration were also undermining our republic. There need to be some consequences for everyone who was involved.

Looking Or Taking?

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On Saturday, The New York Post posted an article about a recent FBI raid on a Beverly Hills safety deposit company that uncovered $86 million in cash and millions more other assets, according to a new report.

Pocketsense notes:

No laws exist that prevent you from keeping cash in a safe deposit box. However, while not illegal, bankers typically discourage customers from keeping cash in safe deposit boxes because funds inside the box are not insured. Additionally, you can only access your box during regular bank hours, which means you have no access to your cash during weekends and evenings when banks are closed.

It should also be noted that money in a safe deposit box is not earning interest.

The article at The New York Post notes:

The FBI and US Attorney’s Office misled a judge who issued a warrant for a controversial raid on a Beverly Hills safety deposit company that uncovered $86 million in cash and millions more other assets, according to a new report.

A senior FBI agent recently testified that central to the plan, and not disclosed to the judge, was the permanent confiscation of the contents of every box that contained at least $5,000 in cash or goods, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The alleged disclosure failure came out in FBI documents and agent depositions in a class-action lawsuit by box holders at U.S. Private Vaults, who say the 2021 raid violated their rights.

The FBI justified the seizure by arguing that the goods were tied to unknown crimes, the Times reported, citing court records.

Court filings also showed that agents defied a judge’s restrictions in the warrant by searching through box holders’ belongings for evidence of crimes, the paper said.

“The government did not know what was in those boxes, who owned them, or what, if anything, those people had done,” Robert Frommer, a lawyer who represents nearly 400 box holders in the class-action case, wrote in court papers, according to the Times.

It does seem as if the FBI has overstepped its bounds and been less than honest in its dealings lately. If the FBI truly misrepresented their intentions to the judge, I hope the people in the FBI who planned the raid will be fired.

The Further Destruction Of The Federal Bureau Of Investigation

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On Friday, John Hinderaker posted an article at Power Line Blog about the current priority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The article quotes a recent article at PJ Media:

Current and former FBI agents have come forward saying the Biden administration is deliberately exaggerating the danger posed by white supremacists. They claimed that high-ranking FBI officials were pressuring field agents to fabricate domestic terrorism cases and label people as white supremacists in order to “meet internal metrics.”

John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog states in the article that he has never met a white supremacist. Since moving to North Carolina, I have met two. On the surface they seemed to be ordinary people, but when you talked to them, their ideas were scary. However, I don’t believe in either case they will ever act on those ideas.

The article at PJ Media notes:

“The demand for white supremacy” coming from FBI brass “vastly outstrips the supply of white supremacy,” one agent told the Washington Times. “We have more people assigned to investigate white supremacists than we can actually find.”

The FBI agent, who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal bureau politics, said that top officials in the FBI “have already determined that white supremacy is a problem” and established a policy to prioritize investigations into racially-motivated domestic extremism.

“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”

It is sad that the FBI is wasting their time on this nonsense when there are serious threats facing America. Our millennial gets most of its news from social media–including TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese, who do not have our best interests at heart. How many of our college professors have been accused of spying for the Chinese? How trustworthy are the people currently negotiating the nuclear treaty with Iran?

As long as a white supremacist does not act on his beliefs, he is entitled to believe anything he wants to. If he wants to cut himself off from some really special Americans, that is his privilege. However, if he is not harming anyone, he is allowed to believe anything he chooses, and he also has the right of free speech. We don’t have to agree with what he says, but we can agree that he has the right to say it.

This Is Disturbing

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On Tuesday, The New York Post reported that the FBI had seized Mike Lindell’s cell phone. As you know, Mike Lindell, CEO of My Pillow, has been very outspoken about voter fraud in the 2020 election and is said to have proof of that fraud.

The article reports:

MyPilllow CEO Mike Lindell said FBI agents pulled up to his car in a Hardee’s drive-thru in Minnesota and seized his phone — apparently as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into 2020 election interference. When is the Justice Department going to investigate Hunter Biden?

The pro-Trump conspiracy theorist retold the dramatic moment live on his show the Lindell Report Tuesday — claiming his phone was seized and he was served a subpoena.

Lindell said he and a pal decided to pick up food at a Hardee’s in his hometown of Mankato after a fishing trip when three cars pulled up and surrounded his vehicle, blocking him from exiting the drive-thru lane.

“I said to my buddy, I said ‘that’s either a bad guy or it’s FBI’,” Lindell said on his show, according to a clip posted on the conservative news site The Post Millennial.

I object to Mike Lindell being called a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist. Actually, most of the conspiracy theories in the past six years have turned out to be true.

The article continues:

The pillow entrepreneur — known for falsely insisting Donald Trump won the 2020 election — said the agents began peppering him with questions about Colorado, Colorado clerk Tina Peters — who faces felony charges related to a security breach of her office’s election equipment — and the Dominion voting machines.

The article concludes:

“I said ‘If I don’t give it to you, will you arrest me then?’” Lindell said he asked the agents, noting that he runs “five companies” off his phone because he apparently doesn’t have a computer.

However, after calling a lawyer, Lindell said he handed over his phone.

Lindell, known as the “My Pillow guy” from his TV commercials, is not the only Trump ally to have their phone seized by the FBI in recent days.

Agents for the Justice Department seized the phones of longtime Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn and campaign strategist Mike Roman, the New York Times reported Monday.

The department also issued about 40 subpoenas over the past week — a sign that it is intensifying its criminal probe into the former president’s role in attempts to steal the election.

There was no attempt by President Trump to steal the election. That is a Democrat talking point and does not belong in a supposed news report. There are serious questions about ballot harvesting, computer glitches, and mail-in ballots in the 2020 election that have never been fully investigated. The taking of Mike Lindell’s cell phone has nothing to do with a criminal probe–it is a move to intimidate Trump supporters to prevent him from running in 2024 and to intimidate Republicans in general. This is not how a representative republic (we are NOT a Democracy) is supposed to work.

Fighting For Transparency

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On August 31, The Conservative Treehouse posted an screenshot of a memo Merrick Garland sent to DOJ and FBI employees reminding them of the restrictions involved when they talk to Congress. Coincidentally, the memo was written after several members of Congress had reported that they had been contacted by whistleblowers within the Department of Justice.

On September 1, Just the News reported that Senator Chuck Grassley has responded to that memo.

The article reports:

The Attorney General insisted the memo was not intended to discourage whistleblowers from reporting issues to Congress, but it came amid a string of whistleblower allegations from within the FBI both before and after the bureau raided former President Donald Trump’s estate.

“I write this letter to make clear to you that whistleblowers are the most patriotic people I know and they play an integral part in ensuring that inappropriate influences, political influence, and improper conduct within the Department and its components, such as the FBI, are exposed,” Grassley wrote. “Under your leadership, the Department and FBI have failed to be responsive to congressional oversight requests. Accordingly, it is often only because of whistleblowers that Congress and the American people are apprised of the type of wrongdoing that your memo seeks to protect against.”

“Even with your whistleblower caveats, and due to the timing of your memo, I remain concerned about the chilling effect it may have on whistleblowers who wish to approach Congress with information relating to fraud, waste, abuse, and gross mismanagement,” he concluded.

Congress is charged with oversight of the Department of Justice. It is becoming obvious that the current Department of Justice does not welcome that oversight.

 

Is Anyone Surprised?

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On Thursday, The Daily Wire posted an article about Joe Rogan’s recent interview of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg stated that he was approached by the FBI and told to be aware of Russian propaganda before the New York Post published the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The article reports:

“I mean, basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was, we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant,’” Zuckerberg said.

“So our protocol is different from Twitter’s. What Twitter did is they said, ‘You can’t share this at all.’ We didn’t do that,” Zuckerberg continued. “What we do is we have, if something was reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation, we also use third-party fact-checking program, because we don’t want to be deciding what’s true and false. And for the — I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it. So you could still share it; you could still consume it.”

Zuckerberg said that the reduced distribution on the platform meant that the story was ranked lower in people’s newsfeeds “so fewer people saw it than would have otherwise.”

On Thursday The Western Journal reported:

His (Zuckerberg) admission of FBI involvement in Big Tech censorship follows whistleblower claims of an organized operation to prevent a meaningful investigation of Hunter Biden before the 2020 presidential election.

NewsBusters polling suggests that as many as 9.4 percent of Biden voters in swing states would’ve reconsidered their vote if they had had full knowledge of the Hunter Biden controversy.

We have ceded a tremendous amount of power to social media. Maybe it is time to take some of that power back and make sure social media is an open, unbiased place to express opinions.

Creating A Police State

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John Solomon at Just the News is one of the few investigative reporters left. On Tuesday he posted an article about the decisions that led up to the raid on Mar-a-Lago. One of the things he reports on was the role that the Biden White House played in the raid.

The article reports:

Long before it professed no prior knowledge of the raid on Donald Trump’s estate, the Biden White House worked directly with the Justice Department and National Archives to instigate the criminal probe into alleged mishandling of documents, allowing the FBI to review evidence retrieved from Mar-a-Lago this spring and eliminating the 45th president’s claims to executive privilege, according to contemporaneous government documents reviewed by Just the News.

The memos show then-White House Deputy Counsel Jonathan Su was engaged in conversations with the FBI, DOJ and National Archives as early as April, shortly after 15 boxes of classified and other materials were voluntarily returned to the federal historical agency from Trump’s Florida home.

By May, Su conveyed to the Archives that President Joe Biden would not object to waiving his predecessor’s claims to executive privilege, a decision that opened the door for DOJ to get a grand jury to issue a subpoena compelling Trump to turn over any remaining materials he possessed from his presidency.

The article contains information about the decision to waive executive privilege in the case of President Trump. I still believe this is about the deep state’s concern that President Trump has documents that will incriminate the FBI and DOJ in the Russia probe.

The article includes some comments by Alan Dershowitz, the famed Harvard law professor emeritus and lifelong Democrat, about the waiving of executive privilege:

“I was very surprised,” Dershowitz said after reading the text of Wall’s letter. “The current president should not be able to waive the executive privilege of a predecessor, without the consent of the former president. Otherwise, [privilege] means nothing. What president will ever discuss anything in private if he knows the man who beat him can and will disclose it.”

While some courts have upheld the notion of a successor president waiving privilege for a predecessor, Dershowitz said the matter remains to be decided definitively by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. The evidence is there that the Biden White House used the Department of Justice and the FBI as political weapons. The question is, “Is there anyone in Congress with the integrity to do anything about it?”

Protecting The Civil Rights Of All Americans

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One of the main problems with the deep state that has entrenched itself in Washington, D.C., is that very few people have the resources to fight it. Right now it appears that President Trump is the only person bothering to fight back.

On Monday, The Western Journal posted an article about President Trump’s reaction to the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

The article reports:

Former President Donald Trump announced a lawsuit Monday seeking an audit and return of the items taken from his Mar-a-Lago home in an FBI raid earlier this month.

“We have just filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida strongly asserting my rights, including under the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution, regarding the unnecessary, unwarranted, and unAmerican Break-In by dozens of FBI agents, and others, of my home, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida,” Trump wrote in a statement.

He specifically singled out alleged requests from FBI agents to turn off security cameras during the raid.

“They demanded that the security cameras be turned off, a request we rightfully denied,” Trump wrote. “They prevented my attorneys from observing what was being taken in the raid, saying ‘absolutely not.’ They took documents covered by attorney-client and executive privilege, which is not allowed. They took my passports. They even brought a ‘safe cracker’ and successfully broke into my personal safe, which revealed…nothing!

“We are now demanding that the Department of ‘Justice’ be instructed to immediately STOP the review of documents illegally seized from my home. ALL documents have been previously declassified.”

The article concludes:

In conclusion, Trump called the FBI raid “illegal and unconstitutional.” He said he wanted the FBI to return the documents taken from his home “so that I can give them to the National Archives until they are required for the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum.”

“I will never stop fighting for the American people, our Country and the Rule of Law,” Trump wrote. “Make America Great Again!”

I believe (and have believed for a while) that the FBI and the DOJ are searching for whatever documents President Trump has related to the Russia hoax. Those documents at the very least cast the FBI and the DOJ in a very bad light–showing partisanship and a willingness to conduct a politically-based investigation into something they knew was false. If President Trump releases those documents and the information gets to the American people, that action will have a tremendous impact on how people view the FBI and the DOJ and possibly on how people view President Trump.

Elliot Ness Is Spinning In His Grave

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Remember when the FBI were the good guys? Remember the TV series about the FBI going after Al Capone? Somehow in recent years, the FBI has lost its way.

On Friday, The Blaze reported the following:

On August 17, Former FBI Special Agent Robert Cessario signed a plea agreement, admitting to having paid a business to permanently erase data from his hard drive so that forensic examiners could not analyze its contents. The data he had wiped was considered relevant to former state Sen. Jon Woods’ corruption trial (R-Ark.). Woods was convicted of mail and wire fraud in 2018, having received kickbacks for directing funds to Ecclesia College in Springdale.

Cessario admitted in the plea deal that he had erased the contents of the hard drive knowing that the court had ordered the computer be submitted to an FBI forensics examiner in Little Rock. His stated intention was to make “the contents of the computer’s hard unavailable for forensic examination.”

The former FBI special agent also stated that he knew “the contents of the hard drive were relevant to an official proceeding, that is, Cause No. 5:17-CR-50010, United States v. Woods et al.”

Just curious–did anyone raid his house?

The article notes:

Court documents indicate that Cessario’s texts revealed his bias ahead of the trial. In one text, he told Shane Wilkinson, former Arkansas Rep. Micah Neal’s counsel, that the trial would be “hilarious.” In another, he claimed that Woods was a “true narcissist.”

Extra to the perception of bias and the destruction of evidence, there was also a potential conflict of interest related to the trial involving the FBI special agent.

Cessario, who attended and conducted part of an interview of Woods on November 11, 2015, not only knew Woods’ attorney W.H. Taylor, Esq., but had been represented by Taylor. A year prior, Taylor acted on Cessario’s behalf in divorce proceedings.

Taylor is said to have instructed his new client, Woods, to meet with Cessario on numerous occasions without a legal representative present.

I am really concerned about the state of our country. I hope there are enough honest people left in our judiciary and Justice Department to turn things around. Right now I see American on a rapid road to becoming a banana republic.

Reining In The FBI

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This is a post by a guest author, R. Alan Harrop, Ph.D.

Authoritarian governments that limit people’s freedom all have police forces that ensure the compliance of their citizens and keep them in power.  The Romans had the Pretorian Guard, the Nazi’s the Gestapo, and the Soviet Union the KGB.  Alarmingly, it is increasingly apparent that the FBI has morphed into an enforcement arm of the Democrat party/Biden administration.   The Founding Fathers, wisely, did not authorized a federal law enforcement agency in the Constitution.   Let’s examine how we got in this situation and what we can do to reverse it.

        The FBI was originally established in 1908 as a small group (30) of special “investigators” to assist the Department of Justice in prosecuting federal crimes that involved crossing state lines.  As all government agencies do, the bureau not only grew in size but greatly expanded their authority and redefined their role over the years.   By the early 1920’s they began gathering and keeping information on private citizens who were not actually charged with crimes other than their political ideology was unacceptable to the government.   The FBI’s most renowned director J. Edgar Hoover, began keeping information that eventually reached over 450,000 files on people suspected of communist leanings.  A good proportion of these people were deported if they were not citizens.  Few were ever actually charged or given the opportunity to defend themselves in court.  In the 1950s the FBI began gathering similar files on homosexuals in the government and later even non-government employees.  In the 1960s the focus was on civil rights sympathizers and leaders such as the Reverend  M.L.King.   Politicians feared what might be in the FBI files on them.  In the course of gathering this illicit information, the FBI frequently used illegal wire-tapping and abused their subpoena and search authority.   Recently, they issued a subpoena to the newspaper USA Today requiring them to turn over a list of all people who logged in to read a specific article on their website.   

There are many other recent example of the weaponization of the FBI especially as related to President Donald Trump and his associates including the impeachment hoaxes, charging General Flynn, and most recently the totally unjustified and unprecedented  raid on Mar-a Lago.    One of the worst instances was when the FBI in order to protect the identity of one of their informers, allowed false witness testimony at a trial that resulted in four men receiving life sentences.  Two served over 30 years and two died in prison.  A court eventually awarded the victims/families over $100 million in damages.  Still trust the FBI?

So what do we do about it?   Here are my recommendations: (1) Repeal the Patriot Act that greatly expanded the authority of the FBI; (2) Terminate the law enforcement authority of the FBI.  All subpoenas, warrants, searches should be handled by the local Sheriff’s departments.   Sheriffs are the only elected law enforcement officials and therefore accountable directly for their actions to the people. (3)  An elected state official or panel should be given the authority to monitor all FBI activities in their state and report to the state legislature.  (4) It should no longer be a crime to “lie” to the FBI.  This has been abused to entrap people and is a violation of the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. 

There may be other effective actions, but this would be a good start.

Interesting, But Don’t Expect Anything Earthshaking

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On Thursday, Just the News reported that U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart has given he Justice Department one week to deliver a redacted copy of the affidavit used to justify the FBI’s unprecedented search of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

The article reports:

U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart also said at the hearing on that matter that he will decide after the department has completed its redactions whether he wants to make his own.

Reinhart, who approved the warrant for the FBI’s raid last week, also said that if the media or the government object to his proposed redactions, they can file an appeal and that the affidavit will remain sealed during any appeals.

The government argued that unsealing the affidavit would “provide a roadmap” of the ongoing investigation. Prosecutor Jay Bratt said the country is in a “volatile” state and releasing the names of those involved in the probe may “chill” other witnesses. 

“This is not a precedent we want to set,” he said.

Reinhart at the hearing also unsealed more minor documents containing general information, according to NPR.

The Justice Department also argued that redacting the affidavit would leave no substantive information to release and pointed out the search and release of the warrant last week had already resulted in death threats against FBI agents.

I admit that this sounds as if some people might actually be held accountable for using the FBI and Department of Justice for political purposes. However, don’t get your hopes up. We believed in Mueller (for a while), we believed in Barr (for a while), and we believed in Durham (for a while). The deep state has many ways of protecting itself, and there is no reason to believe that protection is weakened. I suspect that when we see the affideavit it will have many redactions (or at least enough to hide what actually happened).

FBI Whistleblowers Have Come Forward

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On Monday, The Epoch Times posted an article about fourteen whistleblowers who have come forward with information about the politicization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The article reports:

Two months ago, Jordan (Representative Jim Jordan) said that six FBI whistleblowers approached the committee. Two came forward about a memo related to alleged violence and intimidation at school board meetings and four in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. In the Senate, meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in July that whistleblowers had come to his office to provide information, including disclosures relating to investigations into Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings.

“It’s becoming a well-worn trail of agents who say this has got to stop, and thank goodness for them and that American people recognize it, and I believe they’re going to make a big change on Nov. 8,” Jordan said, referring to the midterm elections.

In June, Jordan sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray warning that several former FBI officials were coming forward, while alleging the agency is “purging” employees who have conservative views.

…Two months ago, Jordan said that six FBI whistleblowers approached the committee. Two came forward about a memo related to alleged violence and intimidation at school board meetings and four in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. In the Senate, meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in July that whistleblowers had come to his office to provide information, including disclosures relating to investigations into Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings.

“It’s becoming a well-worn trail of agents who say this has got to stop, and thank goodness for them and that American people recognize it, and I believe they’re going to make a big change on Nov. 8,” Jordan said, referring to the midterm elections.

I have said this before–do not count on a Republican wave in November. The media is already censoring conservative speech in preparation for that election, and there is no guarantee that the November election will not have the same sort of shenanigans that the 2020 election had. A number of states that have taken the time to audit the 2020 vote in detail have found major problems with the vote. Hopefully those problems will be fixed by November, but there are no guarantees. Unless we have an honest election, we can expect the corruption in the FBI to continue. There are no guarantees that it will not continue even if the Republicans take Congress. In the past our current Republican Congressional leadership has not shown that they have the courage to clean up the FBI. There is no reason to think that they will do it if they have the majority.

From The Babylon Bee

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Since The Babylon Bee has been blocked on some social media, I would like to do everyone a favor by sharing one of its best posts.

The headline:

‘The FBI Raid On Melania’s Closet Was Justified,’ Says Merrick Garland Wearing Gorgeous New Evening Gown And Sun Hat

The picture:

Highlights from the article:

“We wouldn’t raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate or Melania’s wardrobe unless it was absolutely, 100% necessary,” said Garland. “I resent any accusation that this raid was influenced by partisan politics or my insatiable desire to wear pretty designer dresses.” The Attorney General then did a little spin in his purple gown as the press gasped with delight.

FBI Director Christopher Wray echoed the statement as he strode up to the Hoover Building in a dazzling pair of diamond-encrusted Alexander McQueen stilettos. “The men and women of the FBI are paragons of unassailable integrity and impartiality, and any suggestion otherwise is murderous treason,” he said. Several news outlets present also noted the delicious smell of Chanel No.5 in the air.

At publishing time, Trump took to Truth Social to announce that all his golf clubs were also missing.

This is great satire, but it isn’t really funny. If the Washington establishment can so easily violate the civil rights of a former President who has more lawyers than you can shake a stick at, what can they do to an ordinary citizen? If you have doubts, look at the January 6th prisoners who have been denied most of their civil rights–the right to a speedy trial, the right to confront their accusers, the right to protest (many of those in jail did not even enter the Capitol) etc.

If we do not vote for people who will not be part of the swamp, no one will be happy with the condition of our country.

The Existential Threat

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On Sunday, The Conservative Treehouse posted an article that included the following Tweet:

The Tweet is part of a long, detailed article explaining why Donald Trump is such a serious threat to business as usual in Washington, D.C. The article is very detailed, so I suggest that you follow the link and read the entire article. Basically, the premise is that Washington works for the political elite using the government apparatus to secure and maintain power and helps Congressmen who enter Congress as middle class people become very wealthy in a very short time. Meanwhile, the American taxpayers pay the price.

Here are a few highlights from the article:

What was it that Washington DC and President Obama’s team feared so much about Donald J Trump?

The answer to that question is why the FBI, DOJ and CIA targeted Trump in 2016; and why they continued the targeting in 2017 with the Mueller investigation; and why they continued the targeting through two attempts at impeachment in 2019 and 2020; and why they still keep targeting Donald Trump with the J6 committee and a DOJ investigation two years after he is no longer in office.

Donald J Trump is the existential threat.

When your business involves gaining personal wealth by selling out America, Donald Trump is bad for business.

Barack Obama, John Brennan, Eric Holder and James Comey did not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; the institutions were already weaponized by the Patriot Act. What the Obama era officials did was take the preexisting system and retool it, so those weapons of government only conducted surveillance and targeting toward one side of the political dynamic.

This point is where many people understandably get confused.

The article notes:

What Barack Obama and Eric Holder did with that new construct was refine the internal targeting mechanisms so that only their political opposition became the target of this new national security system.

The problems we face now as a country are directly an outcome of two very distinct points that were merged by Barack Obama. (1) The post 9/11 monitoring of electronic communication of American citizens; and (2) Obama’s team creating a fine-tuning knob that it focused on the politics of the targets.  This is very important to understand as you dig deeper into this research outline.

Washington DC created the modern national security apparatus immediately and hurriedly after 9/11/01.  The Department of Homeland Security came along in 2002, and within the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was formed.

When President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder arrived a few years later, those newly formed institutions were viewed as opportunities to create a very specific national security apparatus that would focus almost exclusively against their political opposition.

The preexisting Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Dept of Justice (DOJ) were then repurposed to become two of the four pillars of the domestic national security apparatus: a domestic surveillance state. However, this new construct would have a targeting mechanism based on political ideology.

The DHS, ODNI, DOJ and FBI became the four pillars of this new institution. Atop these pillars is where you will find the Fourth Branch of Government.

We were not sleeping when this happened, we were wide awake. However, we were stunningly distracted by the economic collapse that was taking place in 2006 and 2007 when the engineers behind Obama started to assemble the design. By the time Obama took office in 2009, we sensed something profound was shifting, but we can only see exactly what shifted in the aftermath. The four pillars were put into place, and a new Fourth Branch of Government was quietly created.

The article concludes:

In the decades before 9/11/01 the intelligence apparatus intersected with government, influenced government, and undoubtedly controlled many institutions with it. The legislative oversight function was weak and growing weaker, but it still existed and could have been used to keep the IC in check. However, after the events of 9/11/01, the short-sighted legislative reactions opened the door to allow the surveillance state to weaponize against domestic enemies.

After the Patriot Act was triggered, not coincidentally only six weeks after 9/11, a slow and dangerous fuse was lit that ends with the intelligence apparatus being granted a massive amount of power. Simultaneously the mission of the intelligence community now encompassed monitoring domestic threats as defined by the people who operate the surveillance system.

The problem with assembled power is always what happens when a Machiavellian network takes control over that power and begins the process to weaponize the tools for their own malicious benefit. That is exactly what the network of President Barack Obama did.

The Obama network took pre-assembled intelligence weapons (we should never have allowed to be created) and turned those weapons into political tools for his radical and fundamental change. The target was the essential fabric of our nation.

Ultimately, this corrupt political process gave power to create the Fourth Branch of Government, the Intelligence Branch. From that perspective the fundamental change was successful.

This is the scale of corrupt political compromise on both sides of the DC dynamic that we are up against. Preserving this system is also what removing Donald Trump is all about…. And like I said in the precursor, I doubt Donald Trump fully comprehends the motives of his opposition.

I was privileged to sit in on a law class at Suffolk University where the professor discussed the Patriot Act as it was being passed. (I was not a student, I was simply an observer). He warned of what was to come although most Americans did not see it. There are some real questions as to whether or not the genie can be put back into the bottle, but there are some real dangers up ahead if it is not.

Trying To Put The Spin In Place Before The Truth Comes Out

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On June 30th, The Washington Examiner reported the following:

A federal judge ordered two defendants charged in an alleged Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) kidnapping scheme to face a retrial, setting a tentative start date for Aug. 9.

The two men charged in the purported plot were back in the courtroom Thursday, arguing the charges against them be dismissed, but the judge denied the request and demanded a new trial instead. Nearly three months ago, a jury deadlocked on the charges against them and a mistrial was declared.

If you remember, this was the case that the FBI was accused of entrapping the defendants.

The article notes:

During the trial, lawyers for Fox and Croft argued that they were victims of federal entrapment and that undercover agents had goaded them into pursuing the alleged scheme.

I mention this case to remind us that in recent years, the federal government has not always acted above board in dealing with its citizens–particularly citizens who oppose those in power.

On July 11th, The Gateway Pundit reported:

A whistleblower has leaked a treasure trove of documents and text messages, some marked “Highly Sensitive”, to the Gateway Pundit. These documents contain incredible exculpatory evidence proving the Department of Justice was aware that a group of Indicted Proud Boys were innocent- yet are prosecuting them anyway.

You can find the entire dump of documents below, which includes hundreds of pages of transcripts of audio-recorded interviews with an Assisting United States Attorney, FBI Agents and their “Confidential Human Source”. The Confidential Human Source, or CHS, infiltrated the Kansas City Proud Boy Group for over a year and a half before the January 6th event and kept the FBI goons informed on the group’s activity.

Our source who is familiar with the FBI informant and has identified him as James Ehren Knowles.

According to the source, Knowles had gained the group’s total trust and was included in all group communications.

This is the link to the report.

The article continues:

The informant told his handlers at the FBI that the Kansas City Proud Boy Group he was infiltrating and accompanied to the Capitol on January 6th “were not involved in, nor did they inspire the breaking of the barriers at the Capitol building. CHS describe the scene as the crowd doing it as a “herd mentality,” and that it was not organized. The crowd was shouting “stop the vote,” as they made their way to the Capitol building…

…There were no overt threats of violence made at that time.”

Not only that, but the informant also testifies to the FBI that Proud Boys planned to come to Washington DC to risk their own safety to protect average Trump Supporters from Antifa attacks so MAGA folk could enjoy the day and “get back to their hotels safely”. Meanwhile, the drinking fraternity, along with the ex-military/law enforcement group the “Oath Keepers”, have become the fall guys along with President Trump for the entire phony “Insurrection.”

Please follow the link to the article to read further details. It is unfortunate  that no one in the Justice Department and only a few in Congress have spoken out about the civil rights violations involved in the imprisonment of the January 6th prisoners. They are political prisoners, and their rights are being violated because those in power think they will never be held accountable.

The Harassment Continues

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On Tuesday, Scott Johnson at Power Line Blog posted an article about Attorney John Eastman. Attorney Eastman has an impressive record as an attorney. He is the founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the conservative think tank Claremont Institute. He is a former professor and dean at the Chapman University School of Law. He is also a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

His phone was recently seized by the FBI as he was leaving a restaurant. He was not shown a warrant for the seizure until after his phone was taken.

On Monday, The Washington Times reported:

Eastman said the agents who approached him identified themselves as from the FBI but appeared to be serving a warrant on behalf of the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, which he contends has no jurisdiction to investigate him since he has never worked for the department. He said the cell phone that was seized contains emails that have been the subject of a months-long dispute between him and the House panel.

“That litigation has received extensive media attention, so it is hard to imagine that the Department of Justice, which apparently submitted the application for the warrant at issue here, was not aware of it,” wrote his lawyers, Charles Burnham and Joseph Gribble. 

There is little doubt that Attorney Eastman’s phone was seized because of his work on behalf of President Trump to investigate election fraud.

The article at Power Line Blog concludes:

The AP covers the story here. Orin Kerr takes up the legality of the search and seizure in a Twitter thread here. We remain to be illuminated on the criminal law for which the FBI claims it has probable cause against Eastman. Late in the thread he notes that the warrant does not extend beyond the seizure of John’s phone (i.e., it covers seizure only).

Eastman’s close encounter with the FBI last week was obviously coordinated with the close encounters of Trump Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark and Nevada GOP chairman Michael McDonald. The FBI appears to have taken up the role of the ruling party’s enforcement arm.

We are rapidly approaching banana-republic status if we have not reached it already.

 

 

Is Anyone Surprised?

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On Tuesday, NewsMax reported that a federal jury in Washington, D.C. has found Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann not guilty of lying to the FBI.

As I noted on May 22nd:

JONATHAN TURLEY: Durham faces a lot of challenges in this trial. The judge in the trial has hit the prosecution with limiting orders. This jury pool is a nightmare for the prosecutors. There are three Clinton donors on the jury. In the last 24 hours, the judge turned down a motion to dismiss a juror whose daughter is actually playing on the same team with the daughter of Sussmann. So I think for the prosecutors, it seems like the only thing that is missing on the jury is Chelsea Clinton. A jury of your peers is not supposed to mean other Clinton people. And so, I think that the prosecutors have quite a challenge with this pool.

Unfortunately we have reached the place as a country where equal justice under the law is a myth. Considering the people involved in his wrongdoing, there was no way Michael Sussman was going to be found guilty.

The article at NewsMax reports:

The trial focused on whether Sussmann, a cybersecurity attorney and former federal prosecutor, concealed from the FBI that he was representing Clinton’s campaign when he presented computer data that he said showed a possible secret backchannel between Russia-based Alfa Bank and Trump’s business company, the Trump Organization. The FBI investigated but quickly determined that there was no suspicious contact.

The bureau’s then-general counsel and the government’s star witness, James Baker, testified that he was “100% confident” that Sussmann had told him that he was not representing any client during the meeting. Prosecutors say he was actually acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and another client, and that he hid that information so as to make it seem more credible and to boost the chances of getting the FBI to investigate.

Lawyers for Sussmann deny that he lied, saying that it was impossible to know with certainty what he told Baker since they were the only participants in the meeting and neither of them took notes.

They argued that if Sussmann said he wasn’t acting on the Clinton campaign’s behalf that that was technically accurate since he didn’t ask the FBI to take any particular action. And they said that even if he did make a false statement, it was ultimately irrelevant since the FBI was already investigating Russia and the Trump campaign and would have looked into the Alfa Bank data no matter the source.

Read that last paragraph again. Then consider what would happen to an ordinary citizen if he lied to the FBI. The defense is saying that even if he lied to the FBI, it really isn’t important.

Has America become a banana republic where justice is determined by political affiliation?

If You Believe This…

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On Tuesday, The Washington Times posted an article ‘explaining’ how a “typo” in an email led investigators in 2016 to believe that false allegations linking former President Trump to Russia’s Alfa Bank came from the Department of Justice rather than from Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann.

The article quotes testimony from the trial of Michael Sussmann.

FBI Agent Curtis Heide, who along with agent Allison Sands authored the internal communication, said the inaccuracy, sent out just weeks before the 2016 election, was simply a mistake.

“We may have conflated the Office of the General Counsel and the Justice Department,” Mr. Heide said on the witness stand. “I don’t know how that information got in there.”

On Monday, jurors in the criminal trial of Mr. Sussmann were shown the electronic communication sent in September 2016 by top bureau officials to field agents marking the opening of the case. The communication said the investigation was based on a “referral” from the Justice Department, rather than a tip from Mr. Sussmann.

On Tuesday, John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog reported the following:

I was skeptical that the Sussman prosecution would tell us much that is new, but some significant nuggets have come out. Like this one: “FBI brass were ‘fired up’ about now-debunked Trump-Russia ties.”

FBI leaders, including then-Director James Comey, were “fired up” about a potential connection between the Trump campaign and Russia — which ultimately was proven false, text messages and court testimony revealed Tuesday.

On Sept. 21, 2016, two days after Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann gave then-FBI General Counsel James Baker info about a supposed digital back channel between the Trump Organization and Moscow-based Alfa Bank, agent Joe Pientka texted colleague Curtis Heide: “People on 7th floor to include Director are fired up about this server.”

So there was zero evidence of any connection between presidential candidate Donald Trump and the Alfa Bank, or any other Russians of note, and all one of Hillary Clinton’s lawyers had to do was waltz into the Bureau with some fabricated “data” and FBI Director James Comey and others were “fired up.” The lust to defeat the interloper Trump and elect Hillary Clinton is palpable.

It’s a shame that they were not nearly so ‘fired up’ over the security problems involved in Hillary Clinton’s secret server.

Big Brother Doesn’t Need A Warrant

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On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported the following:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation performed potentially millions of searches of American electronic data last year without a warrant, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday, a revelation likely to stoke longstanding concerns in Congress about government surveillance and privacy.

An annual report published Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of U.S. data that had been previously collected by the National Security Agency.

Senior Biden administration officials said the actual number of searches is likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign data from U.S. data. It couldn’t be learned from the report how many Americans’ data was examined by the FBI under the program, though officials said it was also almost certainly a much smaller number.

The report doesn’t allege the FBI was routinely searching American data improperly or illegally.

The disclosure of the searches marks the first time a U.S. intelligence agency has published an accounting, however imprecise, of the FBI’s grabs of American data through a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that governs some foreign intelligence gathering. The section of FISA that authorizes the FBI’s activity, known as Section 702, is due to expire next year.

I think the Republicans need to be very careful about any law they pass that involves searching records, electronic or otherwise. This section of the FISA law needs to be allowed to expire next year. The fuse that began the use of government agencies for political purposes is found in the Patriot Act.

On Thursday, The Conservative Treehouse noted:

After the Patriot Act was triggered, not coincidentally only six weeks after 9/11, a slow and dangerous fuse was lit that ends with the intelligence apparatus being granted a massive amount of power. The problem with assembled power is always what happens when a Machiavellian network takes control over that power and begins the process to weaponize the tools for their own malicious benefit. That is exactly what Barack Obama was all about.

The Obama network took pre-assembled intelligence weapons we should never have allowed to be created, and turned those weapons into tools for his radical and fundamental change. The target was the essential fabric of our nation. Ultimately, this corrupt political process gave power to create the Fourth Branch of Government, the Intelligence Branch. From that perspective the fundamental change was successful.

The Wall Street Journal article concludes:

“For anyone outside the U.S. government, the astronomical number of FBI searches of Americans’ communications is either highly alarming or entirely meaningless,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), a privacy advocate, said. “Somewhere in all that overcounting are real numbers of FBI searches, for content and for nonconsent—numbers that Congress and the American people need before Section 702 is reauthorized.”

At a conference later Friday, Matt Olsen, the chief of the Justice Department’s national security division, said agencies were discussing what they could declassify about the use of Section 702 to demonstrate its value. He added that he expected to be able to share more information in the coming months.

The FBI has previously faced scrutiny for its oversight of how authorities plumb Section 702 data, including a rebuke from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2018 that found some searches violated the constitutional privacy rights of Americans.

In response, the FBI has imposed new safeguards meant to better ensure compliance. Those include a requirement that all searches involving 100 or more query terms get additional approvals and that analysts actively opt in to search Section 702 data, rather than passively allowing it.

Friday’s report also revealed four instances last year in which the FBI, due to specific factual considerations about a search of data, should have sought approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before performing a search and looking at the content of U.S. communications that were produced.

The FBI has never sought approval from the court since the requirement was adopted in 2018, officials said.

Please follow the links above to read both articles. Big brother is watching all of us.