Tag: protests

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.  

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The Worst US Secret Service Failure Since Nov. 1963?

The revelation that the U.S. Secret Service deleted text messages from the day of the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol is raising potential parallels with the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to the Trump White House chief of staff,  testified on June 26 to the congressional committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 that her boss, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, warned her four days in advance that “Things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6th.” She also testified that President Donald Trump was warned about weapons on hand that day. In spite of that, he still wanted his security to scrap the metal detectors at the site of his White House rally.

The accepted wisdom was that Trump had not planned on going to the Capitol to join the thousands of people he had helped summon there.  But Hutchinson testified that Trump had indeed planned on going to the Capitol to join the demonstrators.

She said under oath that she was told he was so intent on going that he tried to grab the steering wheel, and even lunged at Bobby Engel, one of the Secret Service agents in the SUV, to direct the vehicle to the Capitol. Hutchinson testified that she was told that by Tony Ornato, a Secret Service agent who left to become Trump’s deputy chief of staff, only to return to the service as a senior official.

Hutchinson’s testimony is being disputed, however. Senior Secret Service agents are ready  to testify that that did not happen, according to The Guardian. The newspaper reported:

“Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, author of two books on the Trump administration and a history of the Secret Service, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, said: ‘Sources tell me agents dispute that Donald Trump assaulted any agent or tried to grab the steering wheel on Jan 6. They agree Trump was furious about not being able to go to Capitol with his supporters. They offer to testify under oath.’”

Salon reported:

“After her testimony, journalists citing anonymous sources reported that Engel and the driver of Trump’s vehicle were ‘prepared to testify under oath’ to dispute Hutchinson’s account and that Ornato denied telling Hutchinson that Trump ‘grabbed the steering wheel or an agent.’”

But Salon reported Monday that neither Ornato nor Engel have showed up to testify one month later and both have hired private counsel. 

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Conflict Of Interest? Dr. Simone Gold Sentenced To Jail By Judge She Allegedly Turned Down For A Date In College

Dr. Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors and a common Infowars guest, has been sentenced to 60 days in prison by a judge who she says should have recused himself from the case.

A statement Dr. Gold delivered to Julie Kelly on Monday night explains the judge presiding over her case once asked her on a date while they were attending Stanford University Law School, a request she declined.

Upon seeing the judge’s name on her court docket, the doctor said she assumed he’d recuse himself from the case due to their history.

“The government charged me as a criminal defendant due to being present at the Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Dr. Gold wrote.

She continued, “I found out that I was assigned to Judge Christopher Cooper. This did not mean anything to me. I believed he would have recused himself as we knew each other in law school.”

The doctor described interacting with Judge Cooper on “several” occasions during college.

“One was one time when we walked/talked for some time (perhaps two hours) and got some food,” she wrote. “I believe this was second half of first year. My recollection was we walked from the Law School to a common area (on campus). I don’t recall what we ate etc. I recall general conversation – that he was from the south, that he had gone to Yale, that he was ambitious.”

“The conversation was pleasant,” Dr. Gold admitted. “My impression was that he was cute and that he thought similarly of me. We had other brief ‘hello how are you’ pleasantries. The other interaction that stood out was a week, perhaps two weeks later. This was in the (outside) courtyard of the Law School and we were just talking. After about 10-15 minutes Casey asked me out again, this time a formal invitation to a dinner date, following our prior less formal interactions. This I declined. Just because I wasn’t interested.”

Again, the doctor said she assumed Judge Cooper would have recused himself.

During the sentencing, Dr. Gold claimed the judge repeatedly acted with animus toward her, such as stating she ‘showed no remorse for the five people that died’ on Jan. 6th.

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Dutch Farmers Block Highways with Manure and Burning Hay to Protest Globalist Climate Agenda

In an escalation of actions taken in protest against the governments plans to shut down vast swaths of farmlands, Dutch farmers dumped manure on highways across the Netherlands on Wednesday morning.

The Netherlands was left scrambling trying to clear dozens of road blockades, consisting of manure, hay, tyres, and other waste heaped on the roads by supporters of the Dutch farmer protest movement against the globalist government of PM Mark Rutte trying to impose draconian EU-based regulations on nitrogen that could see up to 30 per cent of farms disappear in the country.

As of this reporting there has been no police action taken, despite several of the piles of hay or other blockades being set on fire. According to public broadcaster Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS), a police spokesman said that it would be difficult to ascertain who exactly left the manure or other waste on the highways and that the ministry for public works would be responsible for clearing the roads, so therefore no police action would be taken.

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Secret Service finds record of deleted text messages from around January 6 on the phones of at least TEN agents as Department of Homeland Security continues criminal probe of agency

Before it was instructed to halt its investigation last week, the United States Secret Service found records of deleted text messages on or around January 6, 2021, stored on the phones of at least 10 agents.

Secret Service investigators discovered metadata showing that text messages were sent and received on at least 10 agents’ phones in the days surrounding the Capitol riot – but have since been deleted, according to CNN. 

Investigators were then working to determine whether the content of these texts contained information about the attempted  insurrection, and whether they should have been preserved amid an ongoing House investigation into the riot, two unnamed sources told the network.

Among the text records the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General requested were those of the heads of the detail for both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence: Bobby Engel and Tim Giebels, respectively.

It’s unclear whether they are included among the 10 personnel whose phones contained metadata showing records of deleted texts.

But among the 24 Secret Service members that were originally under scrutiny by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, sources told CNN, 10 other members had no text messages around that time and three others only had personal messages.

The deletion of the messages has raised the prospect of lost evidence that could shed further light on then-President Donald Trump’s actions during the insurrection, particularly after testimony about his confrontation with security as he tried to join supporters at the Capitol. 

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Here Are Just Some Of The Uprisings Over Government Incompetence Happening Around The World

Protests in wealthy and developing countries throughout the globe have sprung up in recent weeks over economic grievances and “ill-advised” government policies.

Countries are struggling with inflation and exorbitant fuel costs, while the war in Ukraine has cut off major sources of food and fertilizer that experts warn may cause a global food catastrophe. Facing lower standards of living and poverty, people in many countries are demonstrating against what they perceive as their governments’ poor handling of economic challenges.

“The primary underlying cause of the protests are the Western sanctions being imposed on Russia,” Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University and former Reagan adviser, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “They have totally disrupted the international oil market, market for grains, cooking oil and a host of other basic commodities.”

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SECRET SERVICE DELETED JAN. 6 TEXT MESSAGES AFTER OVERSIGHT OFFICIALS REQUESTED THEM

THE SECRET SERVICE erased text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021, according to a letter given to the January 6 committee and reviewed by The Intercept. The letter was originally sent by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General to the House and Senate homeland security committees. Though the Secret Service maintains that the text messages were lost as a result of a “device-replacement program,” the letter says the erasure took place shortly after oversight officials requested the agency’s electronic communications.

The Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept. In a statement to the Washington Post, Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi disputed the timeline, saying that some electronic communications had been deleted in January, while the Inspector General made its request in February.

The Secret Service has emerged as a key player in the explosive congressional hearings on former President Donald Trump’s role in the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent the 2020 election results from being certified. That day, then-Vice President Mike Pence was at the Capitol to certify the results. When rioters entered the building, the Secret Service tried to whisk Pence away from the scene.

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Here’s Why The Media Don’t Want You To Know About The Massive Protests Going On Around The Globe

If you skim the front pages of major corporate news outlets, you’ll find no mention of the economic protests raging in Spain, Morocco, Greece, and the United Kingdom.

On The Washington Post homepage these days, you’ll find headlines such as, “How To Deal With A Chatty Coworker Who Won’t Get Out Of Your Office,” but you won’t find mention of the more than 100,000 people protesting in Madrid. You’ll find the story of a gay union entitled, “What’s Two ‘Yentas’ Plus One Senator? A Lifetime Together” at The New York Times, but you won’t see a single heading on the more than 10,000 protesters in Athens. Corporate media has largely glossed over the tens of thousands of farmers in the Netherlands who clogged up roadways and distributions centers by holding Canadian-trucker-convoy-style demonstrations to protest radical climate policies.

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which records protests worldwide, 11 countries are currently seeing protests of more than 1,000 people in response to the rising cost of living and other economic woes in 2022. As of July 5, Carnegie had recorded protests of more than 120,000 people in France, 100,000 in Spain, 10,000 in Greece, 10,000 in Kazakhstan, 10,000 in Sri Lanka, 10,000 in India, 5,000 in Iran, 5,000 in Peru, 1,000 people in Argentina, 1,000 in Morocco, and 1,000 in the U.K.

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