Tag: riots

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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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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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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AOC Claims ‘Inside’ Government Actors Helped January 6 Protesters, Building Is Still Unsafe

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claimed Wednesday evening that U.S. Capitol Police officers or other actors working inside the Capitol building assisted protesters during the January 6 riot as they breached the facility in an effort to stop the certification of the Electoral College vote.

The congresswoman also said that, because the issue is unresolved, she has “never felt safe” at the Capitol. Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks came just hours after a comedian crudely trolled her while she was entering the building.

In a video posted by Pablo Manríquez, a correspondent for Latino Rebels, AOC is heard sounding off to the camera, “…And that there were actual officers working with this? And we never got to the bottom of that, and we never got any answers about that? And to this day, we’re just supposed to pretend that that never happened? I have no idea what happened to the people on the inside, who were very clearly sympathetic with what was going on and opening doors wide open for that, and I’m supposed to sit here and pretend like none of that ever happened?”

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January 6 Committee Credibility Implodes After Hutchinson Testimony

The January 6 Committee’s credibility suffered a serious blow on Tuesday when reports surfaced that the lead Secret Service agent in charge of former President Trump’s security detail that day would contradict testimony delivered from star witness Cassidy Hutchinson.

On Tuesday, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that former President Trump literally tried to commandeer the presidential suburban during the January 6 riot and became borderline violent when Bobby Engel tried to stop him. Hutchinson said she learned of the story from Tony Ornato, the then-White House deputy chief of staff. Hours later, Peter Alexander of NBC News said that a source close to the Secret Service indicated that agent Bobby Engel will testify “under oath that neither man was assaulted and that Mr. Trump never lunged for the steering wheel.”

Conservatives and Trump allies immediately pounced on the report, saying it completely destroys any credibility the January 6 show trial had hoped to retain.

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Senate Sergeant-At-Arms During Jan. 6 Found Dead; Had Suggested ‘Professional Agitators’ Were To Blame

The man who served as sergeant-at-arms for the U.S. Senate during the January 6 riot and later suggested that “professional agitators” might be to blame for the incident has been found dead, according to reports

Michael Stenger’s death comes amid the House of Representatives’ investigation of the riot at the U.S. Capitol last year. No cause of death was given for Stenger, a 35-year veteran of the Secret Service and a former U.S. Marine.

“Fox confirms that Michael Stenger, the Senate Sergeant at Arms who was in charge of Senate security the day of the Capitol riot, has died,” tweeted Fox News Channel’s Chad Pergram.

Despite a lack of details, speculation swirled on social media, in part due to Stenger’s proximity to the ongoing probe. Stenger, 71, was faulted along with former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund in a report by the Senate Rules Committee for not requesting aid from the National Guard. Soon-to-be-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) vowed to fire Stenger, who had held the post since 2018, if he was not ousted by January 20, 2021.

Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “requested and received the resignation” of Stenger on Jan. 7, 2021.

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FBI Raids Home of Retired Texas Couple Who Attended Jan. 6 Capitol Rally

A retired Texas couple said FBI agents busted through the gate of their rural home, threw flashbangs, handcuffed them, and trained lasers on them before searching their home for evidence connected to the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol.

Lora DeWolfe and Darrel Kennemer, who live on seven acres near San Marcos, Texas, told The Epoch Times they attended the Jan. 6 rally at the Capitol but did nothing wrong. They believe the FBI mistakenly identified Kennemer as someone else.

The FBI didn’t arrest them, they said. Agents eventually produced a search warrant saying Kennemer was suspected of “assaulting, resisting or impeding” officers and “entering restricted building or grounds.”

Both said they went no further than the Capitol steps on Jan. 6 and did not harm anyone or damage anything. They said the allegation of assault was false, and the FBI kept showing Kennemer a blurry photo of a man who looked similar but wasn’t Kennemer.

“I vacillate between feeling mad and helpless,” DeWolfe said. “I was really sad. We just wanted an honest election.”

“They’re corrupt, and they’re trying to scare us,” Kennemer said, adding he feels the FBI targeted him for just being at the rally.

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