Tag: police state

Special Counsel Jack Smith Sought Info On Anyone Who ‘Favorited Or Retweeted’ Trump Tweets

Special Counsel Jack Smith hunted information on X users who liked or retweeted posts published by former President Donald Trump, according to redacted search warrants and other documents released Monday.

According to the heavily redacted document issued to then-Twitter in January, the court ordered the social media giant to forfeit a bevy of information regarding Trump’s account, including “advertising information, including advertising IDs, ad activity, and ad topic preferences,” as well as IP addresses “used to create, login, and use the account” and privacy and account settings.

The warrant also demanded information such as Trump’s search history, direct messages, and “content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by his account from October 2020 to January 2021.

Though the warrant was first covered in August, it was again released as part of a court order after numerous media organizations filed to obtain the document to shed light on the Smith-led special counsel’s “investigation into Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol,” according to the New York Post. Smith previously indicted Trump in August on several bogus charges related to the former president’s challenging of the 2020 election results in the lead-up to Jan. 6, 2021.

But it wasn’t just Trump’s Twitter account that Smith and his cronies were targeting. The special counsel’s warrant also sought data on Twitter users who interacted with the former president’s account. Among the information Smith sought was a list of every user Trump “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked” during the aforementioned timeframe. Smith similarly demanded that Twitter, which has since rebranded as X, fork over a list of users who took any of the same actions with Trump’s account.

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NYPD PAID OUT $30 MILLION IN MISCONDUCT CASES BEFORE LITIGATION IN FIRST NINE MONTHS OF 2023

THE NEW YORK Police Department has been making headlines for the huge settlements paid out by the city in misconduct cases. In the first half of 2023, New York City paid more than $50 million in lawsuits alleging misconduct by members of the NYPD. 

That figure is on track to exceed $100 million by the end of the year — but even that total doesn’t capture how much the city has to spend in cases where its cops are accused of everything from causing car accidents to beating innocent people.

The $100 million figure does not include lawsuits settled by the city prior to litigation, which reached $30 million in the first nine months of this year, according to data obtained from the office of the New York City Comptroller through a public records request. Pre-litigation settlements from July 2022 through September of this year totaled $50 million — meaning the city’s payouts in such suits since July 2022, including those settled after litigation, rose to a total of around $280 million.

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Maryland Roommates File Lawsuit After Police Shot Their Dog During Alleged Illegal Home Search

“That’s what happens when you don’t answer questions,” a Prince George’s County police officer said as Erica Umana’s dog lay on the ground, paralyzed and bleeding out.

Minutes earlier, on a summer day in 2021, officers had shot Umana’s dog, a boxer mix named Hennessy, during a chaotic confrontation inside Umana’s apartment.

Now Umana and her roommates—Erika Sanchez, Dayri Benitez, and Brandon Cuevas—have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Prince George’s County Police Department and several of its officers, saying the police had no right to enter their apartment, shoot their dog, and detain them. The lawsuit seeks over $16 million for allegedly subjecting them to excessive force, unlawful search and seizure, and false arrest.

“This case is an outrage. It is disgusting, disgraceful, and despicable,” William Murphy, an attorney representing the roommates, said in a press release Monday. “These officers outright abused and mistreated our clients, lied to unlawfully break into their house, manhandled them illegally, and shot their dog. And in utter disregard for the severity of their intolerable behavior, they laughed about it.”

The incident began on June 2, 2021, when Prince George’s County police officers arrived at an apartment complex in Landover Hills in response to a 911 call from a woman claiming two dogs had allegedly jumped on her and bit her.

Prince George’s County Cpl. Jason Ball encountered Sanchez sitting outside of the apartments, but she refused to answer any questions. Ball then threatened to arrest Sanchez for trespassing if she didn’t leave. On body camera footage, Ball said into his radio that he believed Sanchez lived in the apartment complex but that he was about to arrest her anyway because she refused to answer his questions—the first of several retaliatory threats and comments from Ball.

Sanchez walked off, and Ball and his partner went to knock on the door of the apartment where Sanchez, Umana, and the other lawsuit plaintiffs lived. No one answered.

“This would be open by now, by the way, if it wasn’t…,” Ball said to his partner, trailing off and tapping his body camera. “I used to open them all the time.” 

“Times have changed,” Ball’s partner responded.

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Arizona tribal cop is accused of ‘sickening’ cover-up after fatal hit-and-run on Thanksgiving: Mowed down woman, 30, and then returned to the scene to ‘investigate’ – even going to her parents home with other officers to tell them she was dead

An Arizona cop has been accused of ‘sickening’ cover-up after a woman was killed in a fatal hit-and-run – and he allegedly returned to the scene to ‘investigate.’

Mom-of-two Iris Billy, 30, was hit and killed on State Route 73 in Arizona by a driver at 3.30am on the morning of Thanksgiving. The person driving the car fled the scene – and police launched their hunt for the driver. 

Police in charge of the investigation quickly realized that the main suspect in the hit-and-run was in fact another officer.  

Josh Anderson, 49, an officer of the White Mountain Apache Police Deptartment, was arrested and is facing a slew of criminal charges. Anderson’s patrol vehicle was found with damage that was ‘consistent with a collision with a pedestrian.’

He was on duty when the crash happened – and he even responded to the scene later on, and then went to Billy’s family home with other officers to inform her family with the news that Billy had died. 

Anderson, a tribal officer who had spent two decades in the force, was charged with assault, aggravated assault, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated assault causing serious physical injury, and criminal negligence.  

He was also charged with reckless driving, interference with an officer, death caused by a vehicle and leaving the scene of a fatality collision. 

The case has been turned over to the FBI – and the sheriff’s office said Anderson resigned following his arrest. 

The Navajo County Sheriff’s Office said: ‘This is an extremely sad time for the family of the victim, the men and women at the White Mountain Apache Police Department, and the White Mountain Apache Tribe. 

‘This event is an isolated incident and is not a reflection of the fine police officers that serve and protect the citizens of the White Mountain Apache Reservation every day.

‘The White Mountain Apache Police Department acted in a swift, transparent, and aggressive manner to find the facts and document the incident. 

‘Their professionalism and vigilance throughout the investigation resulted in the ability to gather evidence and facts surrounding the death of Iris Billy.’

Billy’s sister, Phylene Burnette, said: ‘It is very disturbing, sickening and heartless. 

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January 6 Was A ‘Mostly Peaceful’ Protest

It has been nearly three years since the January 6 Capitol protest. For just as long, Americans have been force-fed a story about the fateful events of that day: even before the smoke cleared, and in many ways, it never did, the shambolic episode was labeled a deadly “insurrection.” The incoming administration was handed an invaluable support: they could now label anyone who doubted the legitimacy of their weak and doddering incumbent a suspect American, an “election denier” and a threat to “our democracy.” The narrative spread like a virus through the state-affiliated mass media, and became, arguably, the defining theme of Biden’s presidency.

In the name of defending democracy, Biden’s Justice Department launched the most ambitious law enforcement crackdown in the nation’s history – one targeting, exclusively, opponents of the party in power. It eventually came to target Donald Trump, the top threat to “our democracy” and, incidentally, or not, Joe Biden’s main political opponent. Prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump is almost a work of plagiarism: it uses the same bombastic language as the January 6 committee, tells the same worn narrative, and takes the same creative leaps in logic, although Smith is less candid with his charges; he is curiously reluctant to use the word “insurrection.” To spare the trouble of proving his audacious case, Smith opts for the imprecise and verbose “events at the Capitol,” a phrase that appears no less than 15 times in a recent filing.

Which “events” are those, exactly? The truth is more banal than the narrative the American people have been told. If January 6 was an insurrection, it was among the most orderly, and uneventful in modern history. The newly released surveillance videos from Speaker Mike Johnson show hundreds of Trump supporters aimlessly meandering through the halls of the Capitol. Many have their smartphones out, taking videos of themselves or their surroundings. Many are dressed casually and move in a lackadaisical fashion, much like tourists. As they are calmly escorted out of the building, there is no sign that these people have any notion that they have been part of an insurrection. They have no idea what is coming – that they are about to become the targets of a nationwide witch hunt.

January 6 committee ringleaders Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have accused the right of attempting to sanitize a “coup” with “cherrypicked” video. Neither Cheney nor Kinzinger allege the new videos are fake. The evidence simply does not conform with their maximalist interpretation of what happened, which is represented by a handful of dramatic clips played on an infinite loop on CNN. The suppressed surveillance tape of the famous “Qanon Shaman” comically ambling through the halls leaves a markedly different impression.

It is laughable to see the charge of historical revisionism levied over an event so recent in time, one so shrouded in political animosities and interests that are still active today. It can be no coincidence that those who have pieced together and promoted the prevailing narrative are hostile to new information coming to light.

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The untimely death of a witness and defendant in govt. spying on me

An historic victory of sorts was had in my case, Attkisson v. DOJ, in the government spying on me, when I received a clerk’s default against one of the defendants: a seedy character named Ryan Dark White. It is the first known such default in a case of the government spying on a journalist.

White had admitted to being part of one of the government surveillance operations against me. He provided us some details, some of which we were able to verify, and then disappeared and refused to respond shortly after we named him as a defendant in the lawsuit.

White said the rogue group he worked with under then-US Attorney Rod Rosenstein spied on “hundreds” of US citizens. I just happened to have sources who helped me prove it, in part by unearthing unique government IP addresses in my computer used as part of the surveillance. White said the group included then-Secret Service agent, Shaun Bridges, who was later convicted and sent to prison in a separate government corruption case.

With the government refusing to hold its own agents accountable, the Dept. of Justice has fought my lawsuit every step of the way, and provided private attorneys to defend Bridges– funded by your tax money, of course.

I learned throughout the years that the courts don’t necessarily care that we have forensic proof of the government intrusions. I once thought that such irrefutable evidence sealed the deal. Case closed. Instead, they require that you, in advance of a trial and discovery, point to who, specifically, knew what and when, and provide evidence of that. Assuming the guilty parties aren’t going to tell on themselves and turn over damning documents, the only real way to get the information the court requires is through the process of “discovery.” But the only way to get discovery is to first obtain the information the court wants. But the only way to get it is through discovery. It’s a senseless loop.

The Dept. of Justice is fighting discovery, instead of cooperating. One could ask why they would spend tax money and all these years fighting… if their agents were innocent? If they would simply provide the necessary documents, we’d see that we’re barking up the wrong tree– if that were the case.

With the government withholding documents, interviews, and information that we need; and the court requiring us to have it in order to proceed, it puts us in a tough place.

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Jabar Walker Exonerated After 25 Years of Wrongful Conviction in Manhattan Double Homicide

Jabar Walker was exonerated today in Manhattan after more than a quarter century of wrongful conviction and incarceration for a double homicide he did not commit. The exoneration came after a joint reinvestigation by the Innocence Project and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s Post-Conviction Justice Unit revealed new evidence of Mr. Walker’s innocence.

Mr. Walker was convicted in the 1995 murders of Ismael De La Cruz and William Santana Guzman on 148th Street in Manhattan, following an investigation by officers from New York Police Department’s 30th Precinct. The precinct was known at the time as the “Dirty 30” due to widespread corruption amongst its officers.  

Misconduct in the precinct was so rampant that an investigation by the Mollen Commission, formed by New York City to investigate allegations of NYPD corruption, resulted in the arrest of 33 officers  — a staggering one-sixth of the precinct — in the 1990s. The Mollen Commission found that officers in the “Dirty 30” routinely engaged in perjury, record falsification, thefts during searches and seizures, and distribution of narcotics.

The Innocence Project and Post-Conviction Justice Unit’s joint re-investigation revealed police from the precinct pressured a witness, John Mobley, to incriminate Mr. Walker by falsely saying that Mr. Walker had admitted to the crime. Police questioned Mr. Mobley, showing him photos of other crime scenes and implied that they would charge him with those homicides if he did not cooperate. On the day of Mr. Walker’s sentencing in 1998, Mr. Mobley went to Mr. Walker’s attorney’s office seeking to recant that testimony — and has recanted his testimony under oath a number of times since. 

Further new evidence of Mr. Walker’s innocence includes the fact that the prosecution’s sole eyewitness to identify Mr. Walker as the assailant, Vanessa Vigo, misidentified another innocent man in a different neighborhood shooting and received monetary benefits in connection with her testimony against Mr. Walker. Ms. Vigo’s account of the shooting was riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and key facts in her account changed from the time of her first conversation with police to the trial. Another eyewitness to the shooting who was familiar with Mr. Walker is adamant that he is not the person he saw committing the crime. 

“We thank DA Bragg’s Post-Conviction Justice Unit for a truly collaborative and transparent joint-reinvestigation, which stands as a model for how post-conviction innocence claims can and should be investigated in a non-adversarial process. The joint re-investigation, guided by a commitment to transparency and the ascertainment of truth, revealed a myriad of ways where the system failed Mr. Walker, and uncovered pervasive misconduct that led to his wrongful conviction and new evidence of what he has stated all along — he is innocent. He has now spent more than half of his life in prison for a crime he did not do,” said Vanessa Potkin, Innocence Project’s director of special litigation.

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Ex-White House Official Sheds More Light on Fate of Researcher Who May Have Caused COVID Pandemic

Dr. Robert Kadlec, who served as an official in the biodefense and epidemic response departments during the pandemic, said Chinese military scientist Zhou Yusen was conducting research on live animals at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019, and filed a patent for a COVID vaccine in February 2020 — barely one month after China put Wuhan into a lockdown due to the first outbreak.

Three months later, Dr. Yusen died when he allegedly fell from the roof of the Wuhan Institute.

“It looked like he was censored as a consequence of whatever happened,” Kadlec told Australia’s Sky News.

“Our evidence would suggest that something happened while he was doing his work, which we believe was when the virus first emerged,” he said.

“And whether he was held accountable through some formal proceeding or not, he was certainly dead by July [2020].”

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Signs of Civil Disobedience in Illinois Gun Registration Efforts

There’s just a little more than a month left before Illinois gun owners must register their so-called assault weapons with the state police or risk the possibility of criminal charges if they’re caught with their modern sporting rifle, and so far it looks like many gun owners are willing to run that risk. As of November 21st, fewer than 3,500 gun owners have registered some 6,600 newly banned firearms with the state police; about 0.001 percent of the state’s 2.4 million legal gun owners.

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So far state officials are downplaying the lack of compliance, suggesting there’ll be a flood of new registrations as we get closer to the January 1 deadline.

On Oct. 31, when about 2,000 people had registered their grandfathered-in assault weapons about a month into the policy being in effect, Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly said the registration process had been “slow but steady.”

“We’ll just see how the process continues to work and we’ll share the data as we continue on a daily basis to do so,” Kelly said during an unrelated event in Springfield.

Two days later in Lake Forest, Gov. J.B. Pritzker downplayed any suggestion that not enough people owning the prohibited guns were registering them, saying it was too early to make such an assessment and suggesting registration would pick up closer to Jan. 1.

“I can tell you, at least for me, that I think all of us take our time sometimes when we know the deadline is two-and-a-half months (away), that we’ll find the time eventually to go online, which is what they need to do and to register as they’re required to do,” Pritzker said.

Maybe Pritzker’s right, but if I were him I wouldn’t bet his billion-dollar fortune on his assumption that gun owners are just waiting for the last minute to comply with the state’s mandate. Sure, some folks may be holding off in the hopes that the federal courts will put a halt to the Illinois law before the reporting requirements kick in, but with scores of county sheriffs and even some prosecutors saying that they don’t plan on proactively enforcing the “assault weapons” ban my guess is that when the deadline rolls around there are still going to be an awful lot of gun owners who haven’t informed the state that they possess a now-banned rifle, pistol, or shotgun.

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After Pritzker signed the gun ban into law, an estimated 90 of Illinois’ 102 county sheriffs issued letters stating they “believe that (the new gun law) is a clear violation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution” and that they wouldn’t enforce it.

At public hearings in Springfield and Chicago earlier this month, state police heard concerns about the ban and its registration requirement from several gun rights advocates. One Republican lawmaker predicted that “hundreds of thousands” people would “absolutely not comply” with registering their weapons.

“We know this public hearing is taking place because (of) the governor and his radical-left agenda,” state Rep. Brad Halbrook, a Shelbyville Republican who is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group composed of his chamber’s most conservative legislators, testified before the state police. “He and his Democrat legislators passed this bill and then laid it at your feet to have to deal with it.”

So far Halbrook’s prediction looks to be pretty accurate. The number of registered guns will undoubtedly go up, of course, but I’d still be shocked if there was a big surge in the days before the mandate takes effect. When New York mandated a similar registration of “assault weapons” as part of the SAFE Act in 2013, we saw “massive noncompliance” on the part of gun owners more than two years after the deadline passed. Attorney Paloma Capanna had to sue the state police to get the numbers, and learned that just 44,000 guns out of an estimated 1 million “assault weapons” had been registered with the state police.

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Chilling and familiar: suspected govt spying on a journalist

As my lawsuit against the government for its forensically-proven spying on me continues, the spying surely continues. Undoubtedly I wasn’t the first journalist surveilled by the government and, since nobody was held accountable, I certainly wasn’t the last. Below, you can read a familiar-sounding account from journalist Breanna Morello, who has been covering the January 6 pro-Trump demonstrations and riots at the US Capitol.

It’s worth mentioning that one government agent who admitted being part of the surveillance against me (who recently turned up dead) said that the rogue unit he was part of under then-US Attorney Rod Rosenstein at the US Attorney’s office in Baltimore was spying on “hundreds” of US citizens–not just me and not just other journalists. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed improper surveillance by our government on a massive scale. Nobody was ever punished. (Except for the whistleblower, Snowden.)

And there have been numerous documented cases of our intel agencies spying on members of Congress and their staff.

There was a time when any single instance of this type of unconstitutional activity by our government would have generated international headlines and outrage. Today, it’s become normalized.

Spying on Trump and other political opponents? Well, they deserve it.

Spying on journalists? Who cares? I’m not a journalist.

Spying on innocent US citizens? So what, if they have nothing to hide?

The complacency surrounding my case and others likely means there are dozens if not hundreds of government units and operations conducting illegal surveillance with impunity.

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