Tag: doj

DOJ Drops Probe Into Rep. Matt Gaetz After Leaked Texts Implicate Israeli Govt in $25M Extortion Plot

The Department of Justice officially declined to charge Florida Rep Matt Gaetz in a sex trafficking investigation on Wednesday after leaked texts revealed the Israeli government appeared to be implicated in a $25 million extortion plot targeting Gaetz’s family.

From The Palm Beach Post, “Justice Department drops sex trafficking probe of Rep. Matt Gaetz without charges, lawyers say”:

The Justice Department has formally decided not to charge firebrand Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz in a sex trafficking investigation, the lawmaker’s lawyers said Wednesday.

“We have just spoken with the DOJ and have been informed that they have concluded their investigation into Congressman Gaetz and allegations related to sex trafficking and obstruction of justice, and they have determined not to bring any charges against him,” attorneys Marc Mukasey and Isabelle Kirshner said.

Gaetz’s office also issued a brief statement acknowledging the Justice Department’s contact with the lawmaker’s attorneys.

The department did not immediately comment. The decision was first reported by CNN.

[…] The Gaetz inquiry was launched following the arrest of Joel Greenberg, formerly a Gaetz family friend and Florida tax collector. As part of a plea agreement, Greenberg was sentenced to 11 years in prison for sex trafficking of a minor and other offenses. He pleaded guilty to six federal crimes, including identity theft, stalking, wire fraud and conspiracy to bribe a public official. Prosecutors said he paid at least one girl to have sex with him and other men.

Joel Greenberg, a potential Jeffrey Epstein-esque figure who had worked as a tax collector for Seminole County, Florida, appears to have tried to entrap Gaetz into having sex with a 17-year-old girl for blackmail purposes.

Keep reading

Pelosis Sold Google Stock One Month Before DOJ Announced Antitrust Lawsuit

Democratic California Rep. Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul, unloaded more than $1.5 million in Alphabet stock one month before the Department of Justice announced an antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant.

The Pelosis sold 30,000 shares of Alphabet, the holding company for Google and several other firms, on Dec. 20, 21, and 28. They received between $1.5 million and $3 million for the total sale, netting capital gains of more than $600, according to a financial disclosure form Pelosi, filed on Jan. 12. The DOJ announced its lawsuit against Alphabet on Tuesday.

Pelosi’s office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller’s request for comment on the matter.

Keep reading

DOJ to Charge ABC News Journalist Who “Fell Off the Face of the Earth” After FBI Seized Classified Documents From His Laptop in Home Raid

As previously reported, an Emmy-winning investigative journalist went missing after the FBI raided his Virginia home and seized classified information from his laptop in April.

James Gordon Meek, 52, went missing after the feds raided his Arlington penthouse apartment, the Rolling Stone reported.

Meek produced the Hulu documentary “3212 Unredacted” which detailed the 2017 Pentagon coverup of the deaths of US special forces in Niger.

The “lightning raid” was conducted after a search warrant was approved by a federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court, Rolling Stone reported.

Keep reading

DOJ Probed Tara Reade’s Twitter After She Issued Allegations About Joe Biden’s Sexual Harassment, Docs Show

The Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a subpoena probing Twitter for information on Tara Reade’s accounts in 2020 months after she issued allegations about being sexually assaulted by President Joe Biden in 1993, documents obtained by the Daily Caller show.

The DOJ asked Twitter to testify before a grand jury on Dec. 16 of 2020 and provide “all subscriber information” from Reade’s accounts, according to emails and subpoena documents obtained by the Caller.

The subpoena shows that Twitter was asked to provide information on two of Reade’s Twitter accounts, including @ReadeAlexandra and @TaraMcCabe.

The requested information included the accounts’:

  1. Subscriber name;
  2. Address;
  3. Records of session times and durations, to include attempted/failed/unauthenticated logins;
  4. Length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized;
  5. Telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and
  6. Means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number)

The DOJ, Twitter and Perkins Coie, the law firm representing Twitter for the subpoena, did not respond to the Caller when asked to verify the authenticity of the subpoena.

Reade said she doesn’t “know why” her Twitter accounts were of interest to the FBI.

Keep reading

New Project Veritas Drop Suggests DOJ May Go After “Misinformation” as “Election Crimes”

It’s 2022 but it feels a lot like 1984, doesn’t it?  According to Project Veritas on Truth Social, an FBI whistleblower has leaked a document that suggests “Misinformation” and “Disinformation” are “Election Crimes”.

This colorful document titled “2022 Midterm Elections Social Media Analysis Cheat Sheet” that was leaked to Project Veritas is reminiscent of an exposé The Gateway Pundit published back in August.  The basis of the exposé article was the discovery of contracts from the Department of Homeland Security with an organization called the EI-ISAC not only to secure elections at the county level at the behest of the DHS.  That same non-profit was also subject to a report titled “The Long Fuse” that talks about a portal to allow government officials access to social media conglomerates to censor anything they deem “misinformation” or “disinformation”.

The pamphlet defines “misinformation” as “false or misleading information spread mistakenly or unintentionally” and “disinformation” as “false or inaccurate information intended to mislead others.  Disinformation campaigns on social media are used to deliberately confuse, trick, or upset the public.“

The leaked document from Project Veritas does state “For the following to fall under federal jurisdiction, the following must involve one or more federal candidates on the ballot…”  It is unclear if that means the candidate must be involved, or it could be “mis” or “dis” information involving an election with a federal candidate.

Keep reading

School board members reported mom to employer, DOJ for criticizing COVID school closures

School board members reported a police detective to her employer and the U.S. Department of Justice for showing “disrespect,” making “over dramatic” comments about COVID-19 school policies and threatening to sue the district if it kept interrupting her at board meetings.

According to the lawyer for Michigan’s Chippewa Valley Schools, the elected school board members were just exercising their First Amendment rights as private citizens, and the board had no involvement.

Sandra Hernden filed a First Amendment retaliation lawsuit against the school board and members Frank Bednard and Elizabeth Pyden, seeking to remove qualified immunity from the individual public officials for violating “a clearly defined constitutional right.”

Even if Bednard and Pyden lose legal protection and face personal liability, Hernden won’t seek more than $1 in nominal damages, according to Holly Wetzel, director of public relations for Hernden’s lawyers at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Bednard’s Oct. 5 2021 report to DOJ came a day after Attorney General Merrick Garland promised to prosecute “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school boards, which itself followed a National School Boards Association letter implying that harsh criticism of COVID policies was “domestic terrorism.”

The board president told fellow members and Superintendent Ronald Roberts that he had forwarded to DOJ Hernden’s email, which informed the board of an appeals court ruling prohibiting restrictions on “abusive” and “antagonistic” language at public meetings.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.  

Keep reading