FBI Accused of Misleading Judge in Warrant Request, Unlawfully Seizing $86 Million in Private Assets

Recently unsealed court documents appear to show that the FBI misled a U.S. magistrate judge in its request for a warrant to seize assets from a privately owned safe deposit box store in Beverly Hills, California.

The FBI began investigating U.S. Private Vaults—a store housing more than 1,000 private safe-deposit boxes—after its agents and local law enforcement observed suspected drug dealers and buyers in the vicinity. On March 22, 2021, FBI raided the vault, armed with a warrant by U.S. Magistrate Judge Steve Kim, which granted them the right to seize properties belonging to the firm as part of the investigation, according to a Los Angeles Times report.

The agency seized $86 million worth of cash, gold, silver, expensive jewelry, and other assets.

Pages 84 and 85 of the government’s affidavit requesting multiple warrants contained an assurance that the federal agency would respect the rights of safety deposit box customers.

Written by Andrew Brown, an assistant U.S. attorney and driving force of the investigation, that section of the affidavit makes it clear that warrants only authorize “seizure of the nests of the boxes themselves, not their contents,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

However, by the time Kim got the warrant request, the FBI had allegedly made preparations to seize the contents inside the deposit boxes.

In the summer of 2020, Matthew Moon, a high-ranking FBI agent from Los Angeles, asked Jessie Murray, chief of the FBI’s asset forfeiture unit in Los Angeles, whether Murray’s team was “capable of handling a possible large-scale seizure” of safety deposit boxes of U.S. Private Vault, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Murray said yes. In late 2020 and early 2021, Murray joined a conference call to plan the seizure operation. A memo was issued by FBI agent Lynne Zellhart to fellow agents describing the procedures for carrying out the raid.

The memo, which was approved by Moon, asked agents to assign ID numbers to “all cash” found inside the deposit boxes to be catalogued in the Consolidated Asset Tracking System, which the agency uses to organize forfeitures.

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Greenwald: ‘Democratic politics is about criminalizing opposition’

Journalist Glenn Greenwald is criticized the Democratic Party, calling members authoritarians trying to criminalize their opposition. 

After The Prospect managing editor Ryan Cooper complained about Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz not being indicted with in a sex-trafficking probe, Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept,  responded with his criticism. 

“Chickens*** club,” Cooper tweeted.

Greenwald replied in a retweet: “This is a perfect illustration of how authoritarian so many Democrats are. 

“This Democrat doesn’t know or care why career DOJ prosecutors decided the evidence was insufficient to prosecute Matt Gaetz. What he knows is that Gaetz supports Trump and thus wants him imprisoned:

“I can’t stress this enough: at its core, Democratic politics is about criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology. Dissenting ideas are ‘disinformation’ and must be censored by Big Tech. Trump voters are inherently criminal (‘insurrectionists’) and should be imprisoned.”

He also wrote that October 2021 he and others produced a video to assemble the “mountain of polling data and other quantifiable evidence demonstrating how Democratic Party loyalists and liberal activists are now classic authoritarians.”

Greenwald is now an independent journalist following his departure from The Intercept.

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Barack Obama’s Secret Service SUV parked in handicapped space for TWO HOURS while he enjoyed dinner with daughters Sasha and Malia at swanky LA sushi restaurant

Former President Barack Obama‘s Secret Service SUV was spotted parked in a handicapped spot for two hours as he dined at a swanky West Los Angeles sushi restaurant with his two daughters. 

The black SUV stayed in a spot marked for handicap parking as it waited for the Obamas to finish eating at the pricey Hamasaku restaurant, where eight-piece sushi rolls cost $50 and specialty rolls go for more than $20 each. 

The former president was pictured in all white as he stepped out of the restaurant alone while being escorted by secret service agents. His daughters, Malia and Sasha, left separately. 

Obama could be seen waving goodbye to the restaurant staffers and turning down their offer of free ice cream dessert before the agents warned them to stand back as they made their exit. 

Obama was enjoying dinner with his daughters on Saturday night while former First Lady Michelle was in Seneca Falls, New York, being inducted in the National Women’s Hall of Fame. 

The family chose to dine at Hamasaku, a trendy restaurant located on Santa Monica Boulevard, in West LA. 

Hamasaku boasts a fusion of traditional Japanese sushi with a taste of California, and features a plethora of dishes containing salmon, lobster, crab, tuna, yellowtail and other tasty sealife. 

While the restaurant also has several high-end desserts on the menu, including a berrie cheesecake and sake-filled tiramisu, the former president appeared to have wanted a simple batch of ice cream, which he left without.  

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Flesh-eating drug ‘tranq’ meant for animals now linked to thousands of heroin, fentanyl ODs

The flesh-eating animal tranquilizer xylazine has been linked to thousands of drug overdoses across the country as it inundates heroin and fentanyl supplies in places such as Philadelphia, Delaware and Michigan, reports say.

Known on the street as “tranq,” the sedative is now found in 91% of Philly’s heroin and fentanyl supplies, according to a report earlier this month in the peer-reviewed journal Science Direct.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that its prevalence is also soaring in President Biden’s home state of Delaware, it was reported last week.

In Michigan, deaths from the drug, which is often used on horses as a muscle relaxant and anesthetic, increased 86.8% between 2019 and 2020 before dropping off slightly in 2021, the Detroit Free Press reported Friday. In the past two years, it was detected in half the opioid deaths in the Ann Arbor region, accelerating fears of its westward proliferation, the paper said.

Xylazine also was involved in 19% of all drug overdose deaths in Maryland in 2021 and 10% of those in Connecticut the year before, according to federal officials.

Xylazine causes wounds and sores on users’ bodies, resulting in a significant increase of soft-tissue infections, bone disease and amputations in places such as Philadelphia, substance-abuse field epidemiologist Jen Shinefeld told Vice in March.

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Ukrainian Army War Crimes Include Shelling of Ambulences, Firetrucks, and Rescue Workers in the Donbass Republics—Similar to Israelis and U.S. Backed Terrorists in Syria

In the more than eight years of bombing the civilians of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, Ukraine has committed untold numbers of war crimes. These include bombing residential areas, markets, hospitals, schools, parks—including with prohibited heavy weapons and banned cluster munitions—and, since late July, raining banned “Petal” mines down on populated civilian areas, including the very center of Donetsk, including as recently as September 7.

A lesser-known war crime is Ukraine’s routine targeting of ambulances, fire trucks, medics and rescuers, and their headquarters and stations. Many of the times Ukraine bombs such heroic rescuers, it is when they are on the way, or already on site, to help civilians often themselves just bombed by Ukraine.

On August 21, Ukrainian shelling of the DPR’s Gorlovka wounded twelve, including five firefighters.

The day prior, Ukrainian shelling targeted an ambulance station in the LPR’s Lysychansk, wounding several and damaging some of the ambulances.

On June 23, the Kievskiy District of Donetsk came under repeated shelling over the course of the two hours I was visiting the Emergency Services headquarters there. On the grounds, I saw the remnants of a “Hurricane” missile from a previous Ukrainian attack.

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New Zealand expands surveillance network that was used to hunt down three Covid-positive women

The surveillance networks that New Zealand police used to hunt down three Covid-infected women are being rolled out in other parts of the country.

Police have taken advantage of tapping into a surveillance system run by two private companies, allowing them to access thousands of cameras that are constantly scanning and documenting car number plates, even when they don’t own the cameras.

Police issued new rules about the use of automated number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras last week.

We obtained a copy of the rules for you here.

New Zealand police have spent years pushing for the development of a second privately-owned network of almost 5000 CCTV cameras owned by businesses, local governments, and more – all that is accessible by police officers through the use of a simple app.

The approach, similar to new proposals in San Francisco, joins the public law enforcement tools with private surveillance and raises extensive privacy concerns.

Further, the new law that allows this also shields police from liability for data breaches.

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THE DANCING ISRAELIS: FBI DOCS SHED LIGHT ON APPARENT MOSSAD FOREKNOWLEDGE OF 9/11 ATTACKS

NEW YORK — For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Shortly after 8:46 a.m. on the day of the attacks, just minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, five men — later revealed to be Israeli nationals — had positioned themselves in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers and “high fiving” each other. At least one eyewitness interviewed by the FBI had seen the Israelis’ van in the parking lot as early as 8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the attack. The story received coverage in U.S. mainstream media at the time but has since been largely forgotten.

The men — Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari — were subsequently apprehended by law enforcement and claimed to be Israeli tourists on a “working holiday” in the United States where they were employed by a moving company, Urban Moving Systems. Upon his arrest, Sivan Kurzberg told the arresting officer, “We are Israeli; we are not your problem. Your problems are our problems, The Palestinians are the problem.”

For years, the official story has been that these individuals, while they had engaged in “immature” behavior by celebrating and being “visibly happy” in their documenting of the attacks, had no prior knowledge of the attack. However, newly released FBI copies of the photos taken by the five Israelis strongly suggest that these individuals had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. The copies of the photos were obtained via a FOIA request made by a private citizen.

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GOP senators block bill requiring dark money groups to disclose donors

Senate Republicans on Thursday blocked a Democrat-led measure to require so-called dark money groups disclose the identities of donors who contribute more than $10,000 during an election cycle.

The vote in the 100-member chamber was 49-49 with every present Republican voting against the bill and every present Democrat voting for it.

The bill is not new, however. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) first introduced the legislation in 2010 and it has been reintroduced every Congress since.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told Insider that he is concerned the donors would be harassed.

“I don’t want to see them doxxed, and hassled, and harried, and harmed, and that’s what this bill is about,” he said.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) cited a 1958 Supreme Court decision that determined that the state of Alabama, which at the time was largely controlled by segregationist Democrats, could not force the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to disclose its members.

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