Left boot, right boot…what’s the difference?
Tag: doj
DOJ Opposes Release Of Underlying Affidavit For FBI Mar-A-Lago Raid
The Department of Justice has opposed the release of the underlying FBI affidavit used to justify last week’s raid on Mar-a-Lago because they claim “it would serve as a roadmap to the government’s ongoing investigation, providing specific details about its direction and likely course, in a manner that is highly likely to compromise future investigative steps,” according to Politico‘s Kyle Cheney.
“The fact that this investigation implicates highly classified materials further underscores the need to protect the integrity of the investigation,” the DOJ said in a Monday court filing.
Trump and other Republicans stepped up calls on Sunday for the release of the affidavit after a search warrant released last week indicated that Trump had 11 sets of classified documents at his home – which he told journalist John Solomon were declassified before they were taken out of the White House. The DOJ convinced a judge that they had probable cause to conduct the search due to potential violations of the Espionage Act – which have nothing to do with classification issues.
That said, the DOJ says it intends to unseal additional documents related to the raid.
Whatever you say, guy…
The Justice Department Delegitimizes Itself
The ideal of justice is a blindfolded woman poised and still and holding slowly balancing scales. At the Department of Justice over the last several years, the practice of justice is more like an inflatable flailing tube man.
In the lead-up to the 2016 election, everyone thought that federal prosecutors would decide whether to charge Hillary Clinton based on whether she knowingly violated a law that bars mishandling of classified material. It turned out that then-FBI Director James Comey would decide on the basis of what he thought was “reasonable.” After initially letting Clinton off, the tube man flailed right and Comey, breaking procedure against commenting on a pending investigation, announced that the Clinton probe was on again.
The Justice Department only got worse from there. Comey told the country that one reason not to charge Clinton was that the government had never before charged someone for conduct similar to hers. Yet after Comey, the Department went on to spend years investigating Donald Trump, not only for conduct never before charged, but for crimes no one even knew were crimes—including rude tweets. A dusty old law chiefly prohibiting cheating the federal government out of money would be stapled to Trump’s tweets and taped to an obstruction-of-justice charge and then the president was going to be marched off to prison for conspiracy to steal an election—or so the Department led the country’s credulous Left to believe for years.
Gone are the days of Comey’s somewhat evenhanded blundering. The flailing man’s hands are now in an unmistakable search for the necks of its political opponents. Consider the unruly Capitol protest following the 2020 election. For the protesters, the Department has dusted off the charge of “seditious conspiracy.”
The last time the department pursued seditious conspiracy charges, in 2010, it went after a group of Christian nationalists. The charges were thrown out of court. The last time the department made the charge stick was about 30 years ago—against Islamic terrorists who plotted to blow up the FBI and United Nations headquarters. In that case, seditious conspiracy was icing atop an already well-baked cake of indisputable crime.
But for the Capitol protesters, the charge is the essential means by which the government hopes to turn a protest into Pearl Harbor. Without seditious conspiracy, all the department can serve its political masters for dessert are uncoordinated offenses against the public peace, mostly misdemeanors like trespass, in a protest otherwise well within the guarantee of the First Amendment.
Mystery solved: DOJ secretly thwarted release of Russia documents declassified by Trump
In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, and the agency then defied a subsequent order to release the materials after redactions were made, according to interviews and documents.
The previously untold story of how highly anticipated declassified material never became public is contained in a memo obtained by Just the News from the National Archives that was written by then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just hours before Trump left office on noon of Jan. 20, 2021.
Meadows’ memo confirmed prior reporting by Just the News that Trump on Jan. 19, 2021 declassified a binder of hundreds of pages of sensitive FBI documents that show how the bureau used informants and FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and misled both a federal court and Congress about flaws in the evidence they offered to get approval for the investigation.
The declassified documents included transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
FOIAs Reveal Progressive Money Fueling FBI, DOJ, Leftist Activist and Election Official Coordination
A strange constellation has emerged through public records requests of coordination between progressive funders, federal authorities, corporations, state election officials, and leftist organizations.
Freedom of information requests have uncovered oddball and opaque relationships between some state election officials, federal officials, corporations, progressive activists, and those trying to influence the conduct of those same election officials. These relationships extend to junkets that include baseball games, travel, and even data exchanges between state officials and outside progressive groups.
The story begins with a series of freedom of information act requests aimed at a number of states to see if any election officials are tempted to apply for now-illegal money from the Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Technology and Civic Life. Such grants and the wild expenditures of these funds altered the course of the 2020 election. (Read The Real Kraken, What Really Happened to Donald Trump in the 2020 Election at PJ Media.)
The FOIAs were submitted by the Public Interest Legal Foundation—with which I am associated—and were aimed broadly at election officials across the United States.
While no election official in a state that now prohibits private funding of elections has applied for new funding, something stranger, and more dangerous has emerged from the public information requests.
In one email, we find that the Democracy Fund—a hyper-funded progressive money source—is organizing state officials and third parties to discuss election administration.
DOJ blocks GOP effort to get answers on Hunter Biden investigation
Republican senators appear to have been blocked by the Department of Justice from getting answers about the Hunter Biden investigation from the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware.
After repeatedly being stonewalled by DOJ headquarters in Washington D.C., Sens. Chuck Grassley (IA) and Ron Johnson (WI) sent a May letter to U.S. attorney David Weiss, who is handling the Biden criminal case.
The senators asked about possible conflicts of interest and the existence of recusals within the Justice Department, raised concerns about the president’s son’s claims of judicial influence in Delaware, pressed the federal prosecutor on whether he was being properly supported by Main Justice, and inquired about what steps he had taken during his investigation.
DOJ headquarters was clearly alerted to the letter, because it was it, not Weiss, that responded to Grassley and Johnson, denying their requests for information.
“This responds to your letter to the Department of Justice, dated May 9, 2022, regarding the employment of certain Department employees and regarding certain actions that may or may not have been taken by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware,” acting Assistant Attorney General Peter Hyun said in a letter last week to Grassley and Johnson, with the official saying DOJ had responded in February 2021, March 2021, July 2021, and February 2022 to similar letters.
Hyun told the senators: “Department attorneys receive ethics and professional responsibility training as appropriate, sign a pledge to maintain public trust in government, and are subject to the Department’s scrupulous ethics and recusal protocols” and that “it will not be able to provide you with any further information regarding Department officials’ employment or specific recusal decisions.”
Dem Legislation Could End Gun Sales to All Current Firearm Owners Forever, Require DOJ License
Do you want Merrick Garland to decide if you’re eligible to own a gun every time you acquire a new firearm?
Senate Democrats are pushing gun control in the run-up to the midterms, in the form of a bill introduced on Thursday.
They’re using the Buffalo mass shooting as a political tool, even though the gunman easily bypassed New York’s gun control laws to attack unarmed grocery shoppers.
Democratic Sens. Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal and Bob Menendez are introducing the Federal Firearms Licensing Act, according to Politico.
The law would fundamentally revise gun ownership from a right enjoyed by American citizens to a privilege bestowed by the government at its own discretion.
Acquiring or buying a new gun would require a lengthy licensing process through the Department of Justice — every time you purchase a new firearm.
Buying a gun from a licensed firearms dealer already requires a NICS background check. Existing law prevents felons from buying or owning guns.
Booker’s bill would give the Attorney General discretion to approve or deny a federal firearms license, even if you’ve never been convicted of a crime.
The Attorney General would be able to deny a firearms license if they determined that the prospective gun owner “poses a significant danger of bodily injury to self or others” by owning a firearm.
DOJ announces new office to enforce laws around climate crisis, toxic pollution
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Thursday that the Justice Department is opening a new office aimed at addressing the department’s environmental justice efforts.
Low-income communities and communities of color face larger risks from pollution and the impacts of the climate crisis, scientists and health experts have reported. More than 40% of Americans live in areas with unhealthy air quality, according to the American Lung Association, and people of color are the most harmed by it.
The DOJ’s Office of Environmental Justice is part of the Biden administration’s strategy to prioritize environmental justice — specifically as it relates to the climate crisis — after the issue was largely ignored during the Trump administration.
Garland said the OEJ “will serve as the central hub for our efforts to advance our comprehensive environmental justice enforcement strategy,” with the office working alongside a number of other intradepartmental agencies, including the Civil Rights Division and United States Attorneys’ offices, to “prioritize meaningful and constructive engagement with the communities most affected by environmental crime and injustice.”
Researchers: Garland Should Reopen OKC Bombing Case He Helped Prosecute
During the tenure of Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into threats of violence against school board members, pushed for severe sentences against Jan. 6 defendants, and created a new domestic counterterrorism office—all with the stated aim of combatting white supremacy and domestic extremism.
But if Garland really wants to combat violent racists, according to researchers of the subject, then he should reopen the case he worked on 27 years ago and find the accomplices of Oklahoma City bomber and avowed white supremacist Timothy McVeigh.
“Garland can kick off any effort to curtail white supremacists by finishing his work on the OKC bombing case,” OKC researcher Richard Booth wrote last year when Garland took the helm at DOJ. “And he can finish by apologizing to the American people for letting dangerous still-unidentified white supremacists get away with being accessories to murder for the last 25 years.”
Booth provided records to The Epoch Times for this story—which marks the 27th anniversary of the April 19, 1995, domestic terrorism attack—and he’s far from alone in arguing that the case should be reexamined. Others include Kathy Sanders, who spent decades looking for answers after her two grandchildren died in the attack; Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue, who’s procured thousands of FBI records via lawsuits against the U.S. government; historian Wendy Painting, who wrote her doctoral thesis on McVeigh; and the late investigator Roger Charles.
These researchers have spent untold thousands of hours documenting the connections between McVeigh, the criminal underground of the white supremacist movement, and undercover federal informants—making the case that this tangled web has shielded some of those culpable for murdering 168 people, including 19 children, in the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in this country’s history. They have also chronicled the dozens of witnesses who reportedly saw one or more unidentified co-conspirators in the days and hours leading up to the attack.
And the researchers aren’t alone in calling for another investigation. Retired FBI agents Danny Coulson and Danny Defenbaugh, who both worked on the case, have publicly supported reopening the matter.
Garland should be aware of these matters, having discussed McVeigh’s enigmatic accomplice, “John Doe 2,” court transcripts show.
Additionally, The Epoch Times received previously unpublished White House visitor logs showing the attorney general’s apparent visit to “FLOTUS” the day before he led the prosecution at McVeigh’s preliminary hearing—raising questions about why he’d be meeting with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton before jetting 1,300 miles west to Oklahoma.
The researchers and former law enforcement officials have offered varying opinions about Garland. However, they mostly share doubt in his assertion that the DOJ and FBI “did everything we could possibly do to find every person who was involved” with the attack.
Hellbound and Down 
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