Tag: police state

Feds accused of seizing $85 million from safe deposit boxes without ‘any legal basis’

Hundreds of people storing valuables in safe deposit boxes in Los Angeles may never see their cash, precious metals and heirlooms again, unless a federal judge intervenes in the next week.

Several are suing the government for seizing the contents of about 800 boxes as part of a March raid of the storage provider, U.S. Private Vaults (USPV), which was indicted for conspiracy to sell drugs and launder money. 

The Institute for Justice (IJ) is seeking class-action status for a May lawsuit by several owners alleging “shocking, unconscionable, and unconstitutional” behavior by the government. IJ attorney Robert Frommer accused the feds of an “$85 million cash grab” from people who were not accused of wrongdoing.

The civil forfeiture notices “do not identify any legal basis,” namely the “specific offense,” to justify each forfeiture, and thus violate due process rights, the public interest law firm said in an amended complaint filed last week. “Box holders thus do not know whether the government is accusing them of drug crimes, money laundering, structuring” or any crime at all.

“While this case is similar to many of our other forfeiture actions, it is also bigger because the government is trying to forfeit hundreds of safe deposit boxes all at one go,” IJ senior attorney Rob Johnson told Just the News. 

It’s also unusual for the government to keep fighting “tooth and nail” after innocent people contest the forfeitures, he wrote in an email. The feds appear intent to “make all these box holders prove their own innocence to get their property back” with no evidence of a crime. 

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Florida Supreme Court rejects ‘grow your own’ marijuana legalization initiative

The Florida Supreme Court has rejected a prospective citizen’s initiative to place a proposed constitutional amendment before voters in 2022 to legalize adult recreational marijuana and allow Floridians to “grow their own.”

In a 5-2 ruling Thursday, the court determined the prospective amendment’s ballot summary is “affirmatively misleading,” the second time since April the state’s highest court has issued that verdict to knock a marijuana legalization measure off the 2022 ballot.

Tampa-based Sensible Florida submitted its proposed amendment, Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol to Establish Age, Licensing, and Other Restrictions, to the Division of Elections on March 17, 2016.

The summary reads: “Regulates marijuana (hereinafter “cannabis”) for limited use and growing by persons 21 years of age or older. State shall adopt regulations to issue, renew, suspend, and revoke licenses for cannabis cultivation, product manufacturing, testing and retail facilities. Local governments may regulate facilities’ time, place and manner and, if state fails to timely act, may license facilities. Does not affect compassionate use of low-THC cannabis, nor immunize federal law violations.”

The proposed amendment would permit people to grow “six mature flowering cannabis plants per household member 21 years of age or older” and possess “the harvest therefrom, provided the growing takes place indoors or in a locked greenhouse and the cannabis grown is not made available for sale.”

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Judge says state can force Christian to violate religious beliefs

A Colorado judge has stunningly ruled that an artist’s creations are not speech at all and the state is allowed to force a baker to violate his own religious beliefs in order to submit to the demands of a transgender activist.

The ruling from A. Bruce Jones, a judge in the state’s Second Judicial District, came in a lawsuit brought by Autumn Scardina, a lawyer who was born a man and now lives as a woman.

He demanded a cake from Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop in the Denver suburban area. He wanted it pink and blue to mark his “transition” to a woman.

Phillips is the baker who earlier was attacked under Colorado’s anti-discrimination law for declining to provide a wedding cake for a same-sex duo. A state commission publicly excoriated him for his faith and likened him to Nazis, an act that ultimately brought a rebuke from the U.S. Supreme Court for being hostile to faith. The court decided that case in Phillips’ favor. 7-2.

Critical to that decision was the fact that evidence revealed that when homosexual bakers in Colorado were asked to create a cake condemning homosexuality, they refused on the grounds it was a message they couldn’t support. The state supported their refusal yet required Phillips to undergo re-indoctrination because he wanted the same control over his messages.

Jones’ opinion was that the Colorado law – and its demands on an artist’s speech – “does not infringe on defendants’ religious exercise.”

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NSA Reveals in FOIA Response that the FBI Involved in “Improper Surveillance” of 16,000 Americans

Then on January 6, after one million Trump supporters rallied with President Trump at the Ellipse outside the White House, some 900 individuals went inside the US Capitol. Over 400 have since been arrested, including those who were waved into the US Capitol by the police standing at the exits.

Since January, the Deep State and Democrats will not release videotapes to Republican lawmakers from January 6th inside or outside the US Capitol.

Earlier this week Revolver News published an important piece on the “unindicted co-conspirators” in the Jan. 6 attack who were never charged by the DOJ or FBI for their part in the violence on Jan. 6.

The “unindicted co-conspirators” were frequently the most violent and leaders of the assault on the US Capitol. They are also likely FBI informants.

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How Long Has the FBI Been in the Terror Biz?

In light of the revelations by Revolver about the likely infiltration by the FBI of the groups involved in the events of Jan. 6 as well as the FBI’s confirmed infiltration in the ludicrous plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, it might pay to revisit the 2016 plot to bomb a Kansan mosque and apartment complex.

In the way of background, in February 2015 CNN reported on an intelligence assessment, circulated by the Department of Homeland Security.

The report argued that the domestic terror threat from “sovereign citizen groups” was “equal to – and in some cases greater than – the threat from foreign Islamic terror groups, such as ISIS.”

Later that same year, without FBI assistance, a pair of Islamic terrorists killed or seriously injured 36 people in an attack on a San Bernardino Christmas party.

Six months after that attack, in June 2016, another Islamic terrorist shot more than 100 people, killing 49 of them, at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

As the 2016 election approached, one suspects that certain elements within DHS hoped to shift media attention back to the real threat, what CNN called “right-wing sovereign citizen extremists.” The media had not yet rediscovered the “white supremacist” label. That would come in time.

Over the spring and summer of 2016, a splinter group from the Three Percenters – one of the groups involved in the events of Jan. 6 – began to contemplate a “plan” to deal with the Somalis imported to western Kansas to work in the packing plants.

A surprisingly fair December 2017 article in New York Magazine by Jessica Pressler details how the plan progressed from something that was mostly barroom BS to a bomb plot for which three men were sentenced in a federal court to prison terms of up to 30 years.

“These defendants planned to ruthlessly bomb an apartment complex and kill innocent people, simply because of who they are and how they worship,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray upon their sentencing in January 2019.

“Today, together with our law enforcement partners, we reaffirm our commitment to protecting all people in our communities from those who seek to terrorize and do harm.”

In her conversations with one of the men convicted, a predictably troubled soul named Patrick Stein, Pressler sheds some useful light on how the events played out in Kansas and how they may well have played out on Jan. 6.

In the conventional retelling of the story, the hero was one of the plotters, a fellow named Dan Day.

In an Associated Press story, tellingly headlined, “Trial begins for alleged bomb plotters who wanted more Trump voters on jury,” the reader is told, “Dan Day knew the plan would go forward and innocent people would die.”

Here the AP paraphrases prosecutor Risa Berkower who claimed that Day “struggled with what to do, prayed about what to do. And then he contacted the FBI, and later agreed to wear a wire.”

Reportedly, it was not until a hearing at the federal courthouse in Wichita that the conspirators realized it was Dan Day who set them up.

“He’s the one who fed us all the information, showed us how bad they were, doing this and that and the other,” Stein told Pressler. “He was working for the feds the entire time. It was all a setup.”

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White House ‘Domestic Extremism’ Report Puts Target On Democrats’ Political Opponents

The Biden administration just released a “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” It calls for abuses of state power to combine elements of totalitarian government with social and cultural engineering. They decided the Constitution and those pesky old individual liberties won’t stop them from making America the Wokest Place on Earth.

It is such an obvious attempt to try to crush political dissent, you wonder if they thought no one was paying attention. If you aren’t, you need to be, because this is marching orders for a whole-of-government approach to crushing Democrats’ political enemies. They are banking on the natural instinct of most Americans to oppose terrorism by branding some constitutionally protected practices “domestic terror.”

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WTH? Joe Biden Tells Swiss Audience “We Yield Our Rights to a Government” – Huh?

At least he didn’t start quoting Stalin, Mao or Hitler.

Joe Biden told a Swiss audience on Wednesday that Americans yield their rights to the government.
Democrats wish that were true!

Joe made the comments during his press briefing where he screamed at some woman and took time out to lay his jacket on the ground.

Joe Biden: You heard me say this before, again and again. I’m going to keep saying it. What’s that idea. We don’t derive our rights from the government. We possess them because we’re born. Period. And we yield them to a government.

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