Tag: doj

Biden-Harris DOJ Attacks Programs That Restrict Housing Options for Criminals

Feds threatening to sue local governments, law enforcement agencies across the country that have implemented measures to curb an epidemic of crime, drugs and gang violence in rental properties.

Housing security programs that limit options for criminals are unfair, target minorities, and must be dismantled, according to the Biden-Harris Department of Justice.

Kristen Clarke, the controversial appointee who got into trouble after falsely claiming to the U.S. Senate she never had been arrested, deliberately omitting her record from a domestic disturbance, claims programs that aim to keep crime out of housing developments are wrong.

A report from Judicial Watch explains the Biden-Harris duo is “threatening – and has sued – local governments and law enforcement agencies across the country “that have implemented measures to curb an epidemic of crime, drugs and gang violence in rental properties.”

The programs, Clarke has claimed, penalize communities of color and that’s unfair.

“The popular laws, enacted by thousands of cities nationwide are commonly known as ‘crime-free’ and ‘nuisance’ programs that restrict housing based on criminal and arrest records and punish landlords and tenants with excessive calls to police and emergency services or those engaged in criminal activity,” the report said.

“To improve living conditions in mainly low-income rentals 2,000 cities across 48 states have adopted crime-free and nuisance policies,” the report noted.

But Clarke’s DOJ claims they are “discriminatory.”

“Even when well-intentioned, these programs can disrupt lives, force families into homelessness and result in loss of jobs, schooling and opportunities for people who are disproportionately low-income people of color – all in violation of federal law,” Clarke has claimed.

“These programs can also discourage people with disabilities and their loved ones from seeking help during a mental health crisis and prevent victims of domestic violence from seeking the protection they desperately need.”

She’s promised the federal government, using taxpayer funding, will keep up its fight over such programs

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DOJ IG Finds FBI Systematically Mishandled Classified Info

Talk about irony: The FBI, which was willing to use deadly force over Donald Trump allegedly mishandling classified documents, has been systematically mishandling similar information for years, according to bombshell findings released Thursday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

The DOJ-IG said it discovered the FBI’s mishandling of classified information while auditing a contract related to how the bureau destroys electronics containing “sensitive-but-unclassified” information, as well as classified national security information.

According to Horowitz’s audit, the FBI labels computers that handle such information when it sends them to a facility to be destroyed. However, it does not label internal hard drives extracted from those computers. The FBI also doesn’t properly track thumb drives and disk drives containing information of varying classification levels, according to Horowitz.

Compounding the security risk is the fact that those unmarked internal hard drives, thumb drives and disk drives often end up in a physically unsecured warehouse.

Horowitz said that when his staff visited an FBI “Media Destruction Team” facility last October, they found “non-accountable” hard drives and other electronic storage devices sitting in an open pallet-sized box. Horowitz said he’s not disclosing details about the facility since it’s not secured.

“A [property-turn-in] staff member told us that the pallet for the loose media was unsecured for extended periods, sometimes spanning days or even weeks because PTI would wrap the pallets and move them to the Facility shelves only when the box reached full capacity,” the Inspector General said.

During the same visit last October, Horowitz said his staff also found a container from January 2022 that identified its contents as “non-accountable.”

“Notably, the container’s shrink wrapping was torn, and boxes inside were visibly open and contained hard drives marked Secret,” he said.

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Utah Attorney Catches FBI Deception In OKC Bomb Records Case

Last month, the Justice Department asked a judge to pause a lawsuit seeking records about the FBI’s involvement with the Oklahoma City bombing. But in doing so, the DOJ and the FBI made statements so misleading they merit sanctions, according to the plaintiff in that case, Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue.

The deception spotted by Trentadue stems from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit he filed against the FBI in February, seeking records about Roger Edwin Moore, who was a CIA asset, an FBI informant and a business associate to OKC bomber Tim McVeigh; as well as for records about the Aryan Republican Army, a neo-Nazi bank-robbery gang also involved in the attack.

Trentadue filed the lawsuit after waiting nine years for the FBI to process his FOIA request for those records. Despite that long wait, the FBI then asked a federal judge for another nearly 12 years to release the records he seeks.

Then, last month the bureau represented to a federal judge that many of the records Trentadue wants are already on the FBI’s website. But according to Trentadue, that’s a lie.

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DOJ Doubles Down On Claim That Medical Marijuana Patients ‘Endanger Public Safety’ If They Own Guns

The Justice Department is doubling down on its position that medical marijuana patients who possess firearms “endanger public safety,” “pose a greater risk of suicide” and are more likely to commit crimes “to fund their drug habit”—justifying, in the government’s eyes, a federal ban on gun ownership by cannabis consumers.

Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month that upheld the constitutionality of governments setting certain gun restrictions in a case centered around domestic violence-related prohibitions, the justices remanded a pending cannabis and Second Amendment rights case back to the lower court for reconsideration.

Late last week, plaintiffs and DOJ submitted briefs in a separate case that responded to the potential implications of the high court’s latest decision for the federal statute barring gun ownership by cannabis consumers.

In the filings submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, DOJ urged the panel to affirm an initial district court ruling that deemed the cannabis and firearms ban to be constitutional, while appellants are requesting a reversal of the order.

This is the latest development in the two-year case, with a group of Florida medical cannabis patients arguing that their Second Amendment rights are being violated because they cannot lawfully buy firearms so long as they are using cannabis as medicine, despite acting in compliance with state law.

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Newly Unearthed Email Shows Letitia James’ Office Corresponding with Biden DOJ Hatchet Man Matthew Colangelo About Plan to Get Trump

The House Judiciary Committee, led by Chairman Jim Jordan, unveiled a report on Tuesday titled “Lawfare: How the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and a New York State Judge Violated the Constitutional and Legal Rights of President Donald J. Trump.”

The report scrutinizes DA Alvin Bragg’s 34-count criminal indictment against Trump, which was announced on April 4, 2023.

The House Judiciary Committee also obtained a December 2022 email conversation between Biden’s DOJ hatchet man Matthew Colangelo and NY AG Letitia James’ office.

“Matthew-glad to see you are back in NYC. Sounds like you and Mr. Trump’s paths will continue to intersect,” James Sheehan wrote to Matthew Colangelo on December 7, 2022.

Bragg’s top prosecutor Matthew Colangelo previously worked in the Justice Department (Biden appointee) and is a lifelong left-wing activist.

Biden sent Matthew Colangelo to New York to convict his main political opponent on non-crimes.

Why would Matthew Colangelo go from a senior position at the Justice Department to working for the Manhattan DA’s office?

It was obviously a political move to take out Biden’s main political rival Donald Trump.

In May a jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts after crooked judge Juan Merchan rigged the Stormy Daniels ‘hush money’ trial and allowed jurors to choose among three predicate crimes Trump committed.

We still don’t know what crimes Trump committed.

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Claudia Tenney calls for DOJ investigation of Hunter Biden laptop signers for election interference

Conservative New York Rep. Claudia Tenney announced Monday that she was sending a letter to the Justice Department that requests an investigation into the 51 signers of a letter that labeled reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop as a potential “Russian information operation.”

Dozens of former intelligence officials warned in the letter, which was published one month before the 2020 presidential election, that the emails from the laptop bore the markings of a Russian influenced operation that was trying to sway the election in favor of former President Donald Trump.

Just the News recently reported that two of the signers were CIA contractors and that agency officials knew about the letter ahead of its publication.

Tenney said the Justice Department needs to investigate whether the signers put out a false statement regarding the letter in 2019, because the laptop was later proven as authentic when used as evidence in the first son’s federal gun trial. 

“I’ve written a letter [that] will come out either today or tomorrow, asking for a referral and an investigation into the criminality and the wrongfulness of these agents and Anthony Blinken, in trying to interfere with our election and making a false statement back in 2020,” Tenney said on the “Just The News, No Noise” television show.

The congresswoman also urged them to consider whether the letter violates the Hatch Act.

“This is a violation because you’re engaging in political interference with an election as a member of the executive branch and as a federal employee,” Tenney said.

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US Air Force Veteran Charged With Disclosing Classified Military Information

A U.S. Air Force veteran was arrested on June 27 for allegedly disclosing classified information on military aircraft and weapons to unauthorized people, according to an unsealed indictment.

Paul J. Freeman, of Niceville, Florida, was indicted by a federal grand jury for unauthorized possession and transmission of classified national defense information following his initial appearance in federal court, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a release.

The 68-year-old allegedly disclosed sensitive information on U.S. Air Force aircraft and weapons to unauthorized people between November 2020 and March 2021, the DOJ said.

According to the indictment, the information that Mr. Freeman possessed and disclosed pertained to the “vulnerabilities” of military aircraft and weapons systems.

Prosecutors argued that Mr. Freeman “had reason to believe [the information] could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

The indictment states that in February 2021 Mr. Freeman allegedly “willfully communicated, delivered, and transmitted” the information to “persons not entitled to receive it.”

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‘Colossal public interest’: Mainstream media, conservative groups fire back at DOJ rationale for withholding audiotapes of President Biden’s special counsel interview

As a fight to obtain audiotapes of Joe Biden’s five-hour interview with special counsel Robert Hur carries on in court, both a coalition of mainstream media organizations and conservative groups agree that the 46th president should not be able to hide behind executive privilege and worries of “deepfakes” to avoid disclosure in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case.

The Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and the media coalition, composed of CNN, ABC, The Associated Press, CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, NBC, Reuters, and more, separately filed documents Friday opposing the motion for summary judgment that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s DOJ filed in late May.

The Heritage Foundation, calling this a “simple case despite the efforts of the Government to complicate it,” offered counterpoints to DOJ assertions that the public’s access to the transcripts of Hur’s Biden interview is more than sufficient in light of foreseeable “privacy harms.”

“While the transcript discloses spoken words (the ‘lexical’ portion of the interview), the audio recording is the only source of the ‘non-lexical’ portion that depicts the tone, tenor, cadence, pauses, hesitations, and other demeanor evidence of the interview,” wrote attorney Samuel E. Dewey. “As any junior trial lawyer can attest, a witness’s live recording speaks volumes more than a cold transcript of the same testimony.”

“Special Counsel Hur testified to Congress that he relied upon this ‘demeanor’ evidence to reach his controversial decision to recommend against criminal charges,” the filing continued.

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Biden’s DOJ refuses to prosecute Merrick Garland for contempt of Congress

The Department of Justice on Friday said that it would not prosecute Attorney General Merrick Garland after the House voted to hold him in contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking the audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur in the classified documents investigation. 

The DOJ stated in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson that it has a “longstanding” position of not prosecuting executive branch officials who withhold information from Congress that is subject to executive privilege.  

According to CNN, the letter from the department’s top congressional liaison, said, “Consistent with this longstanding position and uniform practice, the Department has determined that the responses by Attorney General Garland to the subpoenas issued by the Committees did not constitute a crime, and accordingly the Department will not bring the congressional contempt citation before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute the Attorney General.” 

The decision comes after an internal DOJ memo was revealed, stating that “Consistent with this longstanding position, no US Attorney has pursued criminal contempt charges against an Executive Branch official asserting the President’s claim of executive privilege.”

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Attorney General Garland Targets “Conspiracy Theories” After Launching “Election Threats Task Force” with FBI, Sparking Censorship Concerns

Some might see US Attorney General Merrick Garland getting quite involved in campaigning ahead of the November election – albeit indirectly so, as a public servant whose primary concern is supposedly how to keep Department of Justice (DoJ) staff “safe.”

And, in the process, he brings up “conspiracy theorists” branding them as undermining the judicial process in the US – because they dare question the validity of a particular judicial process that aimed at former President Trump.

In an opinion piece published by the Washington Post, Garland used one instance that saw a man convicted for threatening a local FBI office to draw blanket and dramatic conclusions that DoJ staff have never operated in a more dangerous environment, where “threats of violence have become routine.”

It all circles back to the election, and Garland makes little effort to present himself as neutral. Other than “conspiracy theories,” his definition of a threat are calls to defund the department that was responsible for going after the former president.

Ironically, while the tone of his op-ed and the topics and examples he chooses to demonstrate his own bias, Garland goes after those who claim that DoJ is politicized with the goal of influencing the election.

The attorney general goes on to quote “media reports” – he doesn’t say which, but one can assume those following the same political line – which are essentially (not his words) hyping up their audiences to expect more “threats.”

“Media reports indicate there is an ongoing effort to ramp up these attacks against the Justice Department, its work and its employees,” is how Garland put it.

And he pledged that, “we will not be intimidated” by these by-and-large nebulous “threats,” with the rhetoric at that point in the article ramped up to refer to this as, “attacks.”

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