Tag: doj

Biden’s Justice Department Says Marijuana Consumers Are ‘Unlikely’ To Store Guns Properly In Latest Defense Of Federal Ban

The Biden administration has once again found itself in federal court defending a ban preventing people who use marijuana from buying or possessing firearms, arguing that historical precedent “comfortably” supports the restriction and that cannabis consumers with guns pose a unique danger to society, in part because they’re “unlikely” to store their weapon properly before using marijuana.

In a brief submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on Wednesday, attorneys for the Justice Department responded to a series of prompts from the judges, asserting that the firearm ban for marijuana consumers is justified based on historical analogues to restrictions on the mentally ill and habitually drunk that were imposed during the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification in 1791.

The federal government has repeatedly affirmed that those analogues, which must be demonstrated to maintain firearm restrictions under a recent Supreme Court ruling, provide clear support for limiting gun rights for cannabis users. But several federal courts have separately deemed the marijuana-related ban unconstitutional, leading DOJ to appeal in several ongoing cases.

For the case before the Third Circuit, the government is defending the ban against Erik Matthew Harris, who was convicted of violating the federal statute prohibiting the possession of a firearm by a person “who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.” As the Daily Caller first reported, Harris’s legal representation also submitted a supplemental brief to the court on Wednesday that broadly disputes both the substance of the conviction under the statute, as well as the idea that there are relevant historical analogues to uphold the existing ban.

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It Begins. Biden’s DOJ Starts Arresting Trump Supporters Who Stood Outside the US Capitol and Committed No Violence – Despite Registered Rallies on Capitol Grounds that Day

On October 13, 2022, the FBI testified that they were using geo-tracking data to identify Trump supporters who had gathered near the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

A bombshell report by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) revealed the “vast, secretive” partnership between private companies and the federal government to surveil and track the movements of millions of Americans.

According to the EFF, the intel alphabet agencies, including ICE, the FBI, US Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Defense (DoD), as well as state and local law enforcement, are being funneled hordes of private cell phone location data by private brokers who harvest the information.

This is the same tactic that Gregg Phillips, Catherine Engelbrecht, and True The Vote used for their investigation into the mail-in ballot dropbox fraud during the 2020 election. The cell phone location data collected by this group was used to identify the network of Democrat operatives who committed mass election fraud, as seen in the recently-released documentary “2000 Mules.”

The FBI was alleged to have used this data to identify patriotic protesters who traveled to Washington DC on January 6, 2021, to support President Trump and the US Constitution.

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DOJ ordered Hunter Biden investigators to ‘remove any reference’ to Joe Biden in FARA probe warrant: House GOP

The U.S. Department of Justice ordered FBI and IRS investigators involved in the Hunter Biden probe to “remove any reference” to President Biden in a search warrant related to a Foreign Agents Registration Act probe, new documents released by the House Ways & Means Committee reveal.

Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., led a vote Wednesday to release new documents provided by IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler that “corroborate their initial testimony to the Committee and reinforce their credibility and their high esteem among colleagues.”

“The Biden Administration — including top officials at the Justice Department — lied to the American public and engaged in a cover-up that interfered with federal investigators and protected the Biden family, including President Biden himself,” the committee said.

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DOJ files lawsuit accusing SpaceX of hiring discrimination against refugees, asylum recipients

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Thursday filed a lawsuit against SpaceX accusing the company of discriminating against asylum recipients and refugees in its hiring decisions.

The DOJ alleges that SpaceX “routinely discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them, because of their citizenship status, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).” According to the suit, SpaceX wrongly claimed that federal regulations related to export controls restricted the company to only hiring U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, also known as green card holders.

“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “Our investigation found that SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged asylees and refugees from seeking work opportunities at the company.”

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Biden’s DOJ Removes ‘International Sex Trafficking of Minors’ as an ‘Area of Concern’

The Department of Justice (DOJ), led by Democrat President Joe Biden, has taken child sex trafficking off it’s list of offenses that it regards as “areas of concern.”

The DOJ removed information from their webpage on child sex trafficking in late May.

The section had been added by President Donald Trump’s administration and highlighted that cracking down on the “international sex trafficking of minors” was a top priority for the U.S. government.

The horrible crime is no longer recorded as a “concern” for Biden’s DOJ, it has just been disclosed that the data was erased.

Steve Bannon’s Warroom journalist Natalie Winters revealed the astounding modification.

The shift in strategy comes as criticism of Biden’s ongoing encouragement of mass migration through America’s open southern border grows.

The border is a prime avenue for child sex trafficking, as we at Leading Report have previously reported.

It also coincides with the recent release of the hit anti-child trafficking film “Sound of Freedom.”

On May 12th, 2023, the Department of Justice (DOJ) made significant changes to its homepage detailing what defines child sex trafficking and how the department is combating it, including the removal of the three sections: “International Sex Trafficking of Minors”; “Domestic Sex Trafficking of Minors,” and “Child Victims of Prostitution.”

The website, which belongs to the DOJ’s Criminal Division, lists the “subject areas” that the organization’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Services concentrate on.

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DOJ announces multiple indictments against whistleblower who alleged Biden received payments from CCP-affiliated individuals

The Department of Justice has announced multiple indictments against Dr. Gal Luft, the Israeli-American co-director of a Maryland think tank who gained notoriety as the “missing witness” in the investigation into Joe Biden’s corruption. The New York Post recently shared a video of Luft wherein he broke down allegations against Biden and claimed that he had been arrested to prevent him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee with damning evidence against the first family.

Now, long after coming out as a whistleblower, Luft himself has been charged by the Biden DOJ for allegedly engaging in “multiple serious schemes” involving the Chinese and Iranians alongside a “former high-ranking US Government official.” The charges include numerous offenses related to failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, arms trafficking, Iranian sanctions violations, and making false statements to federal agents.

According to the DOJ, Luft allegedly “subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. Government official, acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil, and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement.”

The agency explained that Luft had allegedly conspired with others to “advance the interests of the People’s Republic of China … as agents of China-based principals, without registering as foreign agents as required under US law.”

He supposedly used his position as co-director of the think tank to recruit and pay the aforementioned government official at the behest of Chinese bosses, to “publicly support certain policies with respect to China.”

In the video shared by the Post, Luft alleged that he had provided potentially inciminating evidence against Biden during a meeting with FBI and DOJ officials in 2019, but that his warnings were not heeded, but rather, covered up.

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A Post-Clemency Prosecution Shines a Light on a Broken System

A month before he left office, then-President Donald Trump freed Philip Esformes, a Florida nursing home operator who had served nearly five years of a 20-year sentence for bilking Medicare and Medicaid. Despite that commutation, the Justice Department plans to retry Esformes for the same conduct that sent him to prison in the first place.

Critics of that unprecedented move say it undermines the pardon power and violates the Fifth Amendment’s ban on double jeopardy. As witnesses at a recent congressional hearing emphasized, the case also illustrates the sorry state of the federal clemency system, which in recent decades has become increasingly stingy, inefficient, and haphazard.

Esformes was arrested in 2016 and charged with numerous crimes related to a scheme that prosecutors said involved bribes, kickbacks, and medically unnecessary treatments, all of which helped fund a “lavish lifestyle.” After an eight-week trial in 2019, U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. directed the jury to acquit Esformes of six charges, including two counts of health care fraud, deeming the evidence underlying them insufficient as a matter of law.

The jury convicted Esformes of 20 other charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, money laundering, payment and receipt of kickbacks, and obstruction of justice. But it failed to reach verdicts on six counts, including the central charge of conspiring to commit health care fraud.

Based on the 20 convictions, Right on Crime Executive Director Brett Tolman noted in his congressional testimony, “Mr. Esformes was facing 5 years in prison.” But prosecutors successfully urged Scola to sentence Esformes as if he had been convicted of health care fraud, which “increased Mr. Esformes’ sentence by 15 years.”

Although it defies conventional notions of justice, federal judges are allowed to punish defendants for crimes that have not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In this case, Scola explicitly said he considered the six undecided counts in determining Esformes’ sentence.

The Justice Department nevertheless wants to take another stab at convicting Esformes of those crimes. It argues that the commutation Esformes received does not preclude another prosecution, because it says nothing about the unresolved counts.

Trump explicitly left in place three years of post-release supervision, plus restitution and forfeiture totaling about $44 million. But it is hard to believe he thought he was leaving the door open to a trial that could send Esformes back to prison. That prospect instead seems to be the result of a mistake that could have been avoided if Trump had been better advised.

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Biden’s DOJ Is Pressuring Journalists to Help Build Its Case Against Assange

THE DEPARTMENT OF Justice and FBI are pressuring multiple British journalists to cooperate with the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, using vague threats and pressure tactics in the process. I know because I am one of the British journalists being pressured to cooperate in the case against him, as someone who used to (briefly) work and live with him, and who went on to blow the whistle on WikiLeaks’ own ethical lapses.

Assange is facing extradition to the United States from the U.K., where he is currently in Belmarsh prison in south London, over charges related to dissemination of material leaked by Chelsea Manning and published by WikiLeaks and a coalition of five newspapers through 2010 and 2011. 

That material exposed details of the conditions and deteriorating mental and physical health of Guantanamo Bay’s detainees. And it revealed the details of hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, including shedding new light on the deaths of two Reuters journalists via the shocking Collateral Murder video. 

Under Barack Obama, the DOJ decided it could not prosecute Assange without threatening U.S. journalists and their First Amendment protections — given that the 2010 charges relate to the handling and publication of classified documents in conjunction with reporters and organizations including The New York Times and other major outlets. But first under Donald Trump and then Joe Biden, the department has reversed itself.

The first approach to get me to cooperate with the Assange prosecution came via London’s Metropolitan Police in December 2021. On legal advice, I had stayed quiet about these attempts at the time. But now more journalists have told me that police have turned up on their doorsteps, too, in the last month. Those approached are former Guardian investigations editor David Leigh, transparency campaigner Heather Brooke, and the writer Andrew O’Hagan.

The prosecution of Julian Assange is already a threat to the free media, even before his first day in a U.S. courtroom. Law enforcement trying to coerce journalists into aiding that prosecution makes matters even worse. So I’ve decided to speak out. 

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Justice Department Finds ‘Deeply Disturbing’ and Illegal Policing in Minneapolis

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced today that a Justice Department investigation found that the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) engaged in “deeply disturbing” and illegal policing that violated the constitutional rights of residents.

A report by the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division concluded that the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) used unreasonable and excessive force, discriminated against black and Native American residents, and retaliated against reporters and citizens who recorded the police, violating their First Amendment rights.

The investigation was launched in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and Garland said it uncovered the systemic problems that led to Floyd’s murder.

“George Floyd’s death had an irrevocable impact on his family, on the Minneapolis community, on our country, and on the world,” Garland said in a press conference. “The patterns and practices of conduct the Justice Department observed during our investigation are deeply disturbing. They erode the community’s trust in law enforcement. And they made what happened to George Floyd possible.”

The City of Minneapolis cooperated with the Justice Department, and the report notes that it has already taken several steps to reform its practices. City officials and the Justice Department have reached a tentative agreement to enter into a court-enforced settlement, known as a “consent decree,” to fix remaining issues.

Still, the report offers withering criticism of MPD’s use-of-force practices, finding that officers unreasonably and gratuitously used bodily force, Tasers, pepper spray, and firearms, including on minors and suspects who were compliant or handcuffed.

In one instance, an MPD officer tased a man who was filming him while a DOJ investigator was riding along in the squad car. The report also notes a 2017 incident where an officer fatally shot a woman who approached his squad car and “spooked” him. The woman had called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in a nearby alley.

The report found MPD also routinely violated the First Amendment rights of people who criticized, protested, or recorded them, including credentialed media.

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DOJ Mysteriously and Dramatically Downgrades Charges Against ‘White Supremacist’ Who Rammed White House Barricade

On Tuesday, a U-Haul crashed into a barricade outside the White House grounds. Immediately, speculation that the driver was a “white supremacist” after a Nazi flag was allegedly pulled from the wreck. In fact, the flag was spread out and displayed for reporters by the FBI agents on the scene.

Why did they do that? Someone will have to ask them, but the narrative became a lot more complicated after the driver was identified as Sai Varshith Kandula. Needless to say, he didn’t exactly fit the “white supremacist” profile.

Now, in a move that is sure to spark much speculation, the DOJ has suddenly downgraded the charges involved. The original charges were as follows.

While authorities have not provided specific details on the alleged threat, the US Park Police said the man faces the charge of threatening to kill, kidnap or inflict harm on a President, vice president or family member.

The driver also was also arrested on charges of assault with a dangerous weapon, reckless operation of a motor vehicle, destruction of federal property and trespassing, according to the Park Police.

According to a new report (The New York Post), those charges have all been wiped away, and Kandula only faces a single count of depredation of property of the United States.

He had allegedly planned the attack for six months, with his goal to “get to the White House, seize power, and be put in charge of the nation,” records show.

Kandula was accused of threatening to “Kill the President If that’s what I have to do,” and praised Nazism and Hitler.

He was originally charged with threatening to kill, kidnap or inflict harm on a president, vice president or family member, as well as assault with a dangerous weapon, reckless operation of a motor vehicle, trespassing and destruction of federal property, US Park Police said.

His federal charges have since been downgraded to a single count of depredation of property of the United States in excess of $1,000.

Prosecutors told the court Kandula is not a US citizen, according to Fox News.

The first thing that jumps out when reading that excerpt is that Kandula is clearly mentally ill. To the extent that he has any actual ideology, it’s overshadowed by the fact that no sane person would think they could seize the White House and be installed as the nation’s leader. That makes the media’s rush to paint this as some kind of right-wing “white supremacist” attack appear rather silly in retrospect. There was no plan here, and I’m pretty sure a guy named Sai Varshith Kandula isn’t actually a white supremacist. Whether he’s a real proponent of nazism at all is even in doubt.

The other thing to note is that Kandula is not a US citizen. Given that, it sure does feel like the federal government is just looking to sweep all this under the rug, after the preferred narrative collapsed in on itself. Of course, I’m speculating, but why else would they go so soft on the charges after the fact?

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