TRIGGER WARNINGS REGISTERED: “Kavanaugh, who has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit since 2006, dissented from a 2011 decision in which a three-judge panel upheld the District of Columbia's ban on so-called assault weapons and its requirement that all guns be registered. Kavanaugh disagreed with the majority's use of "intermediate scrutiny," saying an analysis "based on text, history, and tradition" is more consistent with the Supreme Court's Second Amendment precedents.
The D.C. "assault weapon" ban covers a list of specific models as well as guns that meet certain criteria. A semi-automatic rifle that accepts a detachable magazine is illegal, for instance, if it has any of six prohibited features, including an adjustable stock, a pistol grip, or a flash suppressor. "The list appears to be haphazard," Kavanaugh noted. "It bans certain semi-automatic rifles but not others—with no particular explanation or rationale for why some made the list and some did not." In any case, he concluded, the law is inconsistent with the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller.
"In Heller," Kavanaugh noted, "the Supreme Court held that handguns—the vast majority of which today are semi-automatic—are constitutionally protected because they have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens. There is no meaningful or persuasive constitutional distinction between semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles. Semi-automatic rifles, like semi-automatic handguns, have not traditionally been banned and are in common use by law-abiding citizens for self-defense in the home, hunting, and other lawful uses. Moreover, semi-automatic handguns are used in connection with violent crimes far more than semi-automatic rifles are. It follows from Heller's protection of semi-automatic handguns that semi-automatic rifles are also constitutionally protected and that D.C.'s ban on them is unconstitutional."
Although Heller suggested that various "longstanding" gun restrictions would pass constitutional muster, Kavanaugh said, D.C.'s gun registration system does not qualify. "Because the vast majority of states have not traditionally required and even now do not require registration of lawfully possessed guns," he wrote, "D.C.'s registration law—which is the strictest in the Nation and mandates registration of all guns—does not satisfy the history- and tradition-based test set forth in Heller."”
https://reason.com/blog/2018/07/06/scotus-contender-brett-kavanaugh-on-gun
CLOWN DICTATORSHIPWRECK: “If there is one principle that has been true from the dawn of our nation, it is that when our liberty is under assault, Americans rise to defend it. Right now today we see liberty under assault,” Cruz said during the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) annual meeting. “We see our fundamental rights — we see our First Amendment, we see our Second Amendment, all of our fundamental rights — as Americans under assault and it’s a concerted assault.”
“We see the 2020 Democratic primary field — you do have to wonder if it’s a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” he continued. “It’s a clown car and they keep getting crazier clowns one after the other.”
...“The funny thing is, you see, [Democrats] call for [banning semi-automatic weapons] but they don’t even know what a semi-automatic weapon is,” he added. “It’s sort of like their made-up title of ‘assault weapon,’ which when you read the legislation they draft, it really means ‘scary looking guns.'”
...”To come after our gun rights, to use illegal and unconstitutional executive orders to do so””
https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/26/ted-cruz-democrats-nra-snl/
“GUN CONTROL IS POLITICAL CONTROL”: “Seeds are being sown to create a police state in which the politically compliant and complicit will be safe, but the holdouts will be brutally punished... For years, the Democrats have smiled and told us that they have no intention of infringing rights, or taking anything away, or incarcerating their enemies, and we have known every time that they were lying. We have watched them redefine the language to change the foundations which we used to share as a country and have known why they are doing it. We have seen them progressively attack those who obey the laws, protect their families, pay their taxes, and wish to be left in peace...
It has become clear that peace will only come with our surrender or their failure, and even then, failure will be temporary. Eventually, there will be conflict, which brings us to the Second Amendment.
The fate of everything the Left intends depends in the end on whether normal, non-communist Americans have the power to make the price of dictatorship so high that the Left will be unwilling to force it to completion. If Americans can be disarmed and neutralized, they can be imprisoned without trials. If they can be made powerless, they can be shot at without fear that they’ll shoot back. If they can be conquered, they can be subjugated and made to serve their totalitarian masters.
The Second Amendment was always about exactly this scenario. The Founders did not insist on the Second Amendment so that they could hunt in perpetuity but because they feared a large, authoritarian government controlled by unethical and immoral politicians and their mobs.
Socialist/communist critics ridicule supporters of the Second Amendment, correctly noting that AR15s are no match for the firepower of the U.S. military, so resistance is futile and should be abandoned. They are correct as to the first part but misdirecting as to the second. Although the Second Amendment was intended to enable citizens to fight with equal tools against an army of oppression, there is no modern parity. The AR15 is not a “weapon of war,” as no military in the world issues a semi-automatic-only rifle to their combat troops. That description is a lie. However, the second part of the critique, that we would be confronting the U.S. military so should give up now, is not necessarily what will develop. That is, the socialists/communists will not control the military until they have overthrown the current form of government and seized all power, including law enforcement.
Should confrontations occur before then, they will not be with the military, and depending on the politics of law enforcement officers, may not be with the police. Rather, the earliest violent confrontations will be with armed civilian mobs, successors to the ones we see now at the homes of political enemies, calling for their deaths and those of their family members. This is foreseeable in the growing number of “John Brown Gun Clubs” around the country, which cater to fanatical leftists who learn to shoot, and train to varying degrees to serve as the civilian vigilante arm of the left. Unlike normal Americans, who are motivated to defend themselves from irrational lunatics, these gun owners are training as an offensive force for the overthrow of capitalism and democratic republicanism. So, how might this develop?
Democrats will again weaponize information, this time publishing names and addresses of gun owners and urging indoctrinated radicals, backed by complicit politicians, to go to those homes and do whatever they feel is necessary to make the locality “safe.” This will be intended to cause gun owners to question whether gun ownership, and the assault on them and their families, is worth the terror the fascists will cause.
As the Left stokes the cultivated emotionalism of its unstable followers and urges them to greater acts of unpunished violence against innocents, the threshold will eventually be crossed. As the propagandists scream then for even more violence, and more “control,” those who own guns will be reminded why they have them, and their resolve will deepen. The question then will be how far the Left is prepared to go to usher in the next fascist socialist utopia. They know how much easier this will all be if the guns are taken first.
Authoritarians have always understood that gun control is political control, which is why they don’t practice it against their own supporters. Gun control is for political enemies, and both precedes and hastens the eventual purge necessary to dictatorship.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/the_role_of_gun_control_in_dictatorship.html
GUN-GRABBERS FIGHT FOR A CRIMINAL CLASS: “At their third primary debate, nearly all of the Democratic presidential contenders offered full-throated support for gun control. In the very recent past, gun control measures bowed to prudence by respecting the rights and expectations of law-abiding gun owners—even the Clinton “assault weapons ban” grandfathered weapons and magazines manufactured and purchased before the ban took effect. Now, however, the rhetoric has shifted and become even more radical and uncompromising...
In reality, rifles of all kinds are used in comparatively few homicides, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report: 403 of 15,000 killings in 2017, the most recent year of reported statistics. This is a mercifully rare crime, considering that there are at least 8 million so-called assault weapons in circulation. By contrast, handguns were involved in 7,032 homicides and knives in 1,591.
The Democrats’ emphasis on gun control shifts the focus away from other dimensions of violent crime. The vast majority of so-called gun violence is just another type of violence, including the continuous train of atrocities committed primarily by young black men and other minorities in our demoralized inner cities...
The rhetoric of gun control to combat “gun violence” obscures the moral dimension of these crimes by focusing on the tool and averting attention from who is committing crimes and how often. These are not the actions of the average gun owners that Democrats are intent on punishing...
Most guns are owned and used responsibly, because most gun owners are law-abiding, and law-abiding people generally stay law-abiding. The unbalanced focus on the criminal misuse of guns and the demonization of gun owners is only increasing resistance to any plausible measures that might actually reduce violent crime. Instead, the Democrats are inviting noncompliance and violent resistance with their talk of confiscation.
When a consequence is predictable, one must accept some responsibility for those consequences... Gun confiscation would lead to no small amount of violent resistance from gun-owners—certainly much more than the 300-400 homicides that occur now from such weaponry. Setting in motion such consequences is both profoundly irresponsible and completely unnecessary in a country enjoying a much lower homicide rate than 20 or 30 years ago—a country where well less than a fraction of a percent of gun owners ever commit a violent crime...
There is something inherently contradictory in the Democrats’ position on crime and gun control. On the one hand, they claim we are in the midst of a massive crisis with gun violence that can only be addressed by running roughshod over the Constitution and taking guns from law-abiding Americans, come what may. On the other hand, they say we have too many people in prison—particularly “people of color”—and that we need to open up the prisons and can do so without endangering society...
Gun control—whether an assault weapon ban, prohibition on concealed carry, or restrictions on gun shows—is the simulation of a tough-on-crime measure. It is profoundly unserious because it refuses to look at the reality of crime and to make a judgment about criminals themselves. By looking to the hardware of crime, it is akin to the earlier moral confusion in which liberals unironically blamed poverty or “society” for criminal misbehavior.
Gun control lets the Left indulge in its fantasy that evil white men are the real source of crime without confronting the facts about disproportionate minority offending. Resistance to confiscation efforts will reinforce any such narrative by igniting completely avoidable violence along the lines of Waco and Ruby Ridge. Democrats never imagine doing this kind of confiscation effort in the ghetto, where genuinely dangerous “felon in possession” cases are ignored today in Chicago and went down under Obama, lest we indulge in “mass incarceration.”
...By embracing the magical thinking behind gun control, the Democrats remind us that they would rather punish society and label its law-abiding members wrongdoers than confront the criminal class who, not coincidentally, tend to be among their supporters.
While gun control seemingly contradicts the Democrats’ softness on crime, it is in fact an expression of the same relativism that cannot make judgments, defines society itself as an evil to be overcome, and finds itself paralyzed when a member of a preferred victim group also turns out to be a perpetrator deserving of punishment.”
https://www.amgreatness.com/2019/09/17/why-soft-on-crime-democrats-are-tough-on-gun-violence/
GUN GRABBERS’ LOW CALIBER LOGIC COULD INCREASE SHOOTING CASUALTIES: “Presuming you could somehow magically evaporate all semiautomatic rifles in the country, which you can’t, you wouldn’t make mass shootings less deadly anyway. You’d literally be funneling mass shooters into more effective weapons for the horrible thing they’ve decided to do. Casualty rates for mass shootings would go up instead of down, if the gun control people got their way.”
http://freakoutery.com/2019/08/doctors-are-wrong-about-firearm-effectiveness-in-mass-shootings/
CONSTITUTION ON GUN POINT: “The U.S. Supreme Court has twice ruled in the past 11 years that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual pre-political liberty. That is the highest category of liberty recognized in the law. It is akin to the freedoms of thought, speech and personality. That means that the court has recognized that the framers did not bestow this right upon us. Rather, they recognized its pre-existence as an extension of our natural human right to self-defense and they forbade government — state and federal — from infringing upon it.
It would be exquisitely unfair, profoundly unconstitutional and historically un-American for the rights of law-abiding folks — “surrender that rifle you own legally and use safely because some other folks have used that same type of weapon criminally” — to be impaired in the name of public safety.
It would also be irrational. A person willing to kill innocents and be killed by the police while doing so surely would have no qualms about violating a state or federal law that prohibited the general ownership of the weapon he was about to use.
With all of this as background, and the country anguishing over the mass deaths of innocents, the feds and the states face a choice between a knee-jerk but popular restriction of some form of gun ownership, and the rational and sound realization that more guns in the hands of those properly trained means less crime and more safety.
Can the government constitutionally outlaw the types of rifles used by the El Paso and Dayton killers? In a word: No. We know that because in the first Supreme Court opinion upholding the individual right to keep and bear arms, the court addressed what kind of arms the Second Amendment protects. The court ruled that the Second Amendment protects individual ownership of weapons one can carry that are of the same degree of sophistication as the bad guys have — or the government has.
The government? Yes, the government. That’s so because the Second Amendment was not written to protect the right to shoot deer. It was written to protect the right to shoot at tyrants and their agents when they have stolen liberty or property from the people. If you don’t believe me on this, then read the Declaration of Independence. It justifies violence against the British government because of such thefts.
Governments are the greatest mass killers on the planet. Who can take without alarm any of their threats to emasculate our right to defend our personal liberties? In theory, all of this was known by President Donald Trump when he addressed the nation last Monday and attributed the weekend slaughters to mental illness, the freedom to express hateful ideas on the Internet and violent video games. He should have consulted his lawyers before he spoke.
Federal law prohibits records of mental deficiencies, unless they result in involuntary institutionalization, from entering the government’s databases that are consulted in background checks. And the Supreme Court has already ruled that the government cannot censor, ban or punish opinions expressed on the Internet or games played there...
In America, we do not punish a person or deprive anyone of liberty on the basis of a fear of what the person might do. When the Soviets used psychiatric testimony to predict criminal behavior, President Ronald Reagan condemned it. Now, the president wants it here.
The United States is not New Zealand, where a national legislature, animated by fear and provoked by tragedy, can impair fundamental liberties by majority vote. In America, neither Congress nor the states can outlaw whatever handguns or rifles they want to outlaw or infringe upon the right to own them.
The government can no more interfere with Second Amendment rights than it can infringe upon any other rights. If this were not so, then no liberty — speech, press, religion, association, self-defense, privacy, travel, property ownership — would be safe from the reach of a fearful majority.
That’s why we have a Constitution.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/7/few-words-about-guns-and-personal-liberty/
MAKING YOU AN EXAMPLE OF GUN ‘CONTROL’: “If you are going to advocate for the forcible confiscation of an estimated 16 million rifles from lawful American citizens, it is probably best not to do it against the backdrop of one of the most famous incidents of unarmed citizens being shot to death by government forces...”
AN ENTIRE INFRINGEMENT PARTY DEAD-SET ON STEALING AWAY YOUR RIGHTS ANY LYING WAY THEY CAN: “Every Democratic candidate believes banning an entire class of firearms – the modern sporting rifle – is a winning hand...
Candidates offered differing plans to regulate ownership. Former Vice President Joe Biden let it roll on his recently released gun control plan that forces AR-15 owners to sell their rifles to the government or register them under the National Firearms Act, which would require registration, tax stamps, fingerprints and a government tracking for every modern sporting rifle. But wait, there’s more. Biden wants to include magazines too.
Other candidates support a licensing ploy. Call it pay-to-play. Sen. Booker said licenses for guns should be required, just as licenses are for cars, without clarifying bearing arms is a right. Vice President Biden liked the odds, but played the spread on that, saying states should require licenses. Mayor Pete said hunters buy hunting licenses. Gun licenses, then, should follow. Andrew Yang wants to license the “destructive capability,” meaning you should pay more and qualify more based on how he’d classify the lethality of a firearm.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) suggests the way to stop crime (she’s betting she can do that by 80 percent) is by limiting firearms sales to just one per month...
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) wants to limit magazine sizes...
Julian Castro (D-Texas) threw down on raising the excise tax for ammunition manufacturers to 20 percent. But that’s not all. He’d also require the technologically-impossible microstamping...
Biden thought the smart money was on so-called “smart guns.” He said he’d require user-authorized technology on all firearms, but didn’t explain if that included those used by law enforcement and the military. He believes repealing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is a lock. Yang liked that line and got in on it too. But he took some side action on fining manufacturers up to $10 million for the crimes committed by individuals.”
JUSTICE EXTRA BLINDED: “Would it be valuable for Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan to know the FBI was discussing how to “lock in” charges against [Flynn] in a “formal chargeable way?
Would it be valuable for Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan to consider how Special Counsel Robert Mueller requested DAG Rod Rosenstein to provide leverage against [Mike Flynn Jr] to coerce a plea against Michael Flynn in the second scope memo?
Would it be relevant for the purposes of Judge Emmet Sullivan to consider how former National Security Advisor Susan Rice was portraying Lt. General Flynn, as a target for intelligence community concern, prior to President Trump taking office?
Would it be important for Flynn’s defense to have the full and unredacted text messages of the investigators and accusers against Michael Flynn as they plotted their strategy?
Would it be important to know what “classified briefing material” would be “in the interests of fairness” to Lt. Gen Michael Flynn?
...regardless of support for or against Flynn, it would be fair and in the correct course of justice for all relevant evidence to be known to both the public and defense…. Then ask yourself why isn’t that view held by AG Bill Barr?
Attorney General Bill Barr was granted the power to declassify all five of the examples cited above which directly relate to the prior DOJ and FBI motives in their investigation of Michael Flynn…. there are many, many more. Yet, AG Bill Barr has done nothing to provide that fulsome discovery.
AG Bill Barr doesn’t need a court order to provide the truth. Currently the prosecution of Michael Flynn is directly under Bill Barr’s authority. Heck, the President of the United States has authorized Bill Barr to declassify any/all material that may be needed in the honest search or truth and justice. And Bill Barr has done absolutely nothing.
But it’s actually worse. AG Barr has gone to court to argue he is under no obligation to provide the declassified material to anyone; for anything.”
TECHNOLOGICALLY-ENABLED PERMANENT BUREAUCRATIC THOUGHT CONTROL: “Permanent bureaucracies at the highest levels that have the levers of power -the ability to do damage to you or me - the IRS, the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, some of the top cabinet officials, they are people who transcend elections, they're not elected, or if they are, they participate in an administration, they revolve back and forth, they go back from the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations, to the Treasury Department, to a high office in the CIA.
But the point about it all is they have a particular loyalty as if they're an organic entity - a bacillus, a virus, that they're organic, they exist, and they feel that when an administration comes in they step up. As Lieutenant Colonel Vindman said, Trump was not going by our talking points...
It's the same idea that the state it has superior wisdom and can adjudicate to individuals how they should think how they should behave and how they should reflect the agendas of the state...
Developments in this age of hi-tech seemed to substantiate the singular genius of George Orwell. He's thinking far beyond his own landscape when he said that technology was going to be married with authoritarianism to monitor your daily activity. So what China is doing is the ultimate expression of Silicon Valley...
There's two issues here. One is intrusiveness and one is alteration of reality. China isn't rooting into not just people's behaviors but their thoughts. ‘What did you say to a friend on the phone? What did you imagine? Where did you go to shop? Did you, as you were riding your bike, did you look at a Uighur reeducation camp? Could we see you looking in a particular direction? So it's a thoughtcrime sort of analogous to Donald Trump being guilty of thinking about suspending aid or thinking about firing Robert Mueller, but then now they have the technology to monitor your facial recognition. So when somebody in a conversation talked about the premier of China did you have a scowl on your face? If so did that reflect counter-revolutionary sentiment?
The other thing that scary is the alteration of reality with these sophisticated technologies... the use of this technology in a very perverted way and so that's what I'm scared about is that you can be so intrusive that you can convict people for thinking things, and then you can use these technologies - to alter visual imagery, photoshop, change, edit text, voice synthesization - to make up things, and both of those are occurring right now. The only thing that saves us from being like China or the EU is a US Constitution.”
FLYNN FISA MASK? “The official account of how the intelligence community gained the transcript of incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn talking to Ambassador Sergey Kisliyak on December 29th, 2016, surrounds “incidental collection” as a result of contact with an agent of a foreign power. Meaning the Flynn call was picked up as the U.S. intelligence apparatus was conducting surveillance on Russian Ambassador Kisliyak.
If this version of events is accurate, it falls under FISA-702 collection: the lawful monitoring of a foreign agent who has contact with a U.S. person. In order to review the identity of the U.S. person, a process called ‘unmasking’, a 702 submission must be made. That submission, the unmasking, leaves a paper/electronic trail... who unmasked General Michael Flynn?
...My suspicion is there was never an unmasking request because the collection was not incidental. Because the intercept was not incidental.
There are only three options:
-
Incidental collection = unmasking request.
-
Direct intercept / Legal = Active FISA Title-1 surveillance authority.
-
Direct intercept / Illegal = Active surveillance without Title-1 authority.
2 and #3 above would be explosive developments considering this was active surveillance of an incoming National Security Advisor of the opposing political party. If there was a pre-existing surveillance warrant on General Flynn, that’s a big effen’ deal.
However, of the two possibilities, #3 would bring down everyone involved.
First things first…. Was there an unmasking request? Yes, or No?
Senator Lindsey Graham asked this question two years ago. Graham is now the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee with secondary oversight over the FISA court.”
“The head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.””
...
“One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: “We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason.”
...
““I like to use a cancer analogy,” Kolenda told government interviewers. “Petty corruption is like skin cancer; there are ways to deal with it and you’ll probably be just fine. Corruption within the ministries, higher level, is like colon cancer; it’s worse, but if you catch it in time, you’re probably ok. Kleptocracy, however, is like brain cancer; it’s fatal.””
...
“Our biggest single project, sadly and inadvertently, of course, may have been the development of mass corruption“
...
“No single agency or country was in charge of the Afghan drug strategy for the entirety of the war, so the State Department, the DEA, the U.S. military, NATO allies and the Afghan government butted heads constantly.”
THE ‘INTERAGENCY’ AT WAR: “Every single person, apparently, with knowledge of how this war was conceived and is still — clumsily, defiantly, pointlessly — being prosecuted, is willing to say it’s been in vain. As long as their testimony remained a secret...
When seemingly every single person who talked to SIGAR says they don’t understand the mission or the plan of action or that there is no plan of action or that the numbers show the United States is losing, badly, and the longer we’re there the worse we’re making the problem — post-US invasion, Afghanistan now produces 82 percent of the world’s opium supply — what was the reason?
What is the reason? After $1 trillion spent and thousands of lives lost, why?
The Afghanistan papers read apolitically; extreme frustration and anger are expressed at Bush and Obama, both of whom led administrations that insisted on lying to the American public, on spinning numbers or making them up, on insisting military commanders tell the press that we were winning as we were losing.
McNeill said when he became NATO commander in 2007, “There was no NATO campaign plan . . . I tried to get someone to define what winning meant, even before I went over, and nobody could.”
Yet in 2008, Bush increased US troops by 10,000, to a total of 31,000. That same year, Barack Obama ran on getting all US troops out of Afghanistan; in his first year as president, Obama increased troop levels by 30,000. When asked why, Obama’s go-to reply was always to “disrupt, dismantle and eventually defeat al Qaeda.”
But as the SIGAR report makes clear, al Qaeda was long gone, and the Taliban had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy SEAL who served as a White House staffer under Bush and Obama, told SIGAR that “no one asked” why this was... every US military and administration official was told to hit one message hard: Progress, progress, progress.
Army Lt. General David Rodriguez, at a press conference in Kabul that year: “We are steadily making deliberate progress.”
Army Gen. David Petraeus, testifying before Congress in 2011: “Important but hard-fought progress.”
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, on the ground in 2012: “Significant progress.” He had just avoided death by suicide bomb.
An official from the National Security Council told SIGAR that there was tremendous pressure from the Obama administration and the Pentagon to produce data that proved the US was succeeding, even though “it was impossible to create good metrics.”
https://nypost.com/2019/12/14/lying-by-bush-and-obama-over-afghanistan-is-this-eras-pentagon-papers/
PRESENTING A SPYGATE MULTIMEDIA MIX FOR BRAIN-FRIED MILLENNIUM MEMBERS OF GEN-X,Y,&Z: Whether you suffer an advanced case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, can’t read anything beyond Twitter #hashtags, become triggered by exposure to your daily media ‘two-minute hate’, or experience reality solely through video-game mediated interactions, your TEAME is here to help you gain a more complete understanding of the most momentous tech-driven scandal in U.S. political history.
Simply press AUTOPLAY LIST at the following link to begin breaking through your conditioning, and press NEXT each time your short attention span becomes overloaded. Soon you will begin to understand and accept your new reality. PLEASE NOTE: PRESENTATION MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO ‘BOOMERS’, ‘NORMIES’ and ‘BASICs’...
THE TRANSMUTATION OF GOOGLE: (CONT 2)
“The Times investigation also noted Google's overall “permissive culture,” in which top executives—including Brin, Schmidt, and chief legal officer David Drummond—had relationships with female employees. Some of the women claimed they were later pushed out of the company...
Google's response followed a familiar cycle: internal opposition and bad press, followed by incremental change. But the Women's Walkout appears to have perturbed executives in a way that the protests against Dragonfly and Maven had not. In the months that followed, pushback seemed to spill over into the organizers' day jobs. In December, Whittaker was told she would have to leave the Google Cloud organization, where she had worked for three years...
That month, Google also tightened the reins on TGIF. Brin and Page stopped showing up. Employees could access video recordings for only a week after the meeting, rather than for years. The company nixed live questions, which Google claimed was more fair to employees in different time zones...
An interview with Cernekee appeared in The Wall Street Journal. He presented himself as a whistle-blower and mainstream Republican who had been bullied and eventually fired for his beliefs. In subsequent interviews with Tucker Carlson and on Fox & Friends, Cernekee said he believed that Google would try to sway the 2020 election—a claim that inspired a tweet name-dropping the engineer from President Trump himself.)
Damore's class-action lawsuit, meanwhile, was still proceeding, albeit without Damore. In October 2018 his claims were moved to arbitration, while claims from two conservatives who allege they were denied positions for political reasons are proceeding in court...
A couple of months later, Pichai was called up to answer questions about Dragonfly at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. “Right now,” he said, “there are no plans for us to launch a search product in China.”
...Within a three-week span in March, Senator Hawley banged the drum on amending laws that granted platforms immunity from liability for moderating their platforms; Democratic senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren published a plan to break up Big Tech; and the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified that Google's effort to court China “indirectly benefits the Chinese military,” even as it snubbed working with the Pentagon...
That spring, many of Google's efforts to stave off scrutiny seemed to hasten its arrival. In March, Google announced that it had formed an AI ethics council composed of external advisers. It included Kay Coles James, president of the Heritage Foundation... Some employees were appalled; an internal petition to remove James quickly gained 2,500 signatures. Breitbart and the Daily Caller posted the names of petition organizers, including Whittaker, and leaked internal messages from a mailing list. One ethics council member quit in the midst of the uproar. When Google learned that another member was planning on defecting, the company disbanded the council—nine days after it launched...
Over the past three years, the structures that once allowed executives and internal activists to hash out tensions had badly eroded. In their place was a new machinery that the company's activists on the left had built up, one that skillfully leveraged media attention and drew on traditional organizing tactics. Dissent was no longer a family affair. And on the right, meanwhile, the pipeline of leaks running through Google's walls was still going as strong as ever.”
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/
THE TRANSMUTATION OF GOOGLE: “The company's history of close ties to the Obama administration left executives feeling especially vulnerable to the reactionary movement—incubated partly on Google's own video platform, YouTube—that had memed, rallied, and voted Trump into office. (It didn't help that Eric Schmidt, then executive chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet, had been an adviser to Hillary Clinton's campaign, or that some 90 percent of political donations by Google employees had gone to Democrats in 2016.)...
According to The Wall Street Journal, members of one mailing list brainstormed whether there might be ways to “leverage” Google's search results to surface ways of helping immigrants; some proposed that the company should intervene in searches for terms like “Islam,” “Muslim,” or “Iran” that were showing “Islamophobic, algorithmically biased results.” (Google says none of those ideas were taken up.)...
The 2016 election and its aftermath set off a backlash against Silicon Valley that seemed to come from all sides. Lawmakers and the media were waking up to the extractive nature of Big Tech's free services. And Google—the company that had casually introduced the internet to consumer surveillance, orderer of the world's information, owner of eight products with more than a billion users each—knew that it would be an inevitable target.
But in many respects, Google's most vexing threats during that period came from inside the company itself. Over the next two and a half years, the company would find itself in the same position over and over again: a nearly $800 billion planetary force seemingly powerless against groups of employees—on the left and the right alike—who could hold the company hostage to its own public image...
Google found itself and its culture deeply maladapted to a new set of political, social, and business imperatives. To invent products like Gmail, Earth, and Translate, you need coddled geniuses free to let their minds run wild. But to lock down lucrative government contracts or expand into coveted foreign markets, as Google increasingly needed to do, you need to be able to issue orders and give clients what they want...
Google's engineers are not unionized, but inside Google, Fong-Jones essentially performed the function of a union rep, translating employee concerns to managers on everything from product decisions to inclusion practices. She had acquired this informal role around the time the company released Google+ to the public in 2011; before launch, she warned executives against requiring people to use their real names on the platform, arguing that anonymity was important for vulnerable groups. When public uproar played out much as Fong-Jones had predicted, she sat across from executives to negotiate a new policy—then explained the necessary compromises to irate employees. After that, managers and employees started coming to her to mediate internal tensions of all sorts.
As part of this internal advocacy work, Fong-Jones had become attuned to the way discussions about diversity on internal forums were beset by men like Cernekee, Damore, and other coworkers who were “just asking questions.” To her mind, Google's management had allowed these dynamics to fester for too long, and now it was time for executives to take a stand. In an internal Google+ post, she wrote that “the only way to deal with all the heads of the medusa is to no-platform all of them.”
...In the past Google had fired an employee for leaking internal memes from Memegen. But when the targeted employees reported harassment, they say, Google's security team told them that the leaking of screenshots might fall under the legal definition of “protected concerted activity”—the same labor right invoked by Cernekee.
To Fong-Jones, the security team's answer was both shocking and instructive; she didn't realize a leaker could be protected. “Everyone thought Google had an absolute right to stop you from talking about anything related to Google,” she says. Yet here Google's hands were apparently tied by labor law...
...In 2006, eager to tap into a growing market, Google opened an office in Beijing and launched a censored version of its search engine in China. Employees saw this as a clear violation of Google's principles; they were supposed to make the world's information universally accessible, not suppress it... in December 2009, Google discovered a sophisticated cyberattack, originating inside China, designed to access the Gmail accounts of dissidents and human rights activists. Brin, who had been extremely reluctant to enter China all along, convinced Page that they should stop complying with China's censorship rules and tell the public about the attack... Schmidt argued that if Google stopped censoring search results, it would never get back into China...
In January 2010, employees at Google's office in Beijing learned from a public blog post that the company was pulling back from China... At the TGIF meeting that week, employees burst into thunderous applause and gave Brin a standing ovation. “The legacy of the China decision was a giant dose of goodwill from Googlers around the world,” Schmidt wrote...
Google's decision to take the moral high road out of China was seeming more and more like a self-isolating move. Across Silicon Valley, tech giants in search of growth were going after China's then-680 million internet users. Apple had been running an app store in China since 2010. Microsoft's search engine, Bing, had served censored search results since 2009. Even LinkedIn was there. Meanwhile, Google watched as Chinese handset manufacturers like Xiaomi sold phones that ran on an unofficial version of Android—which meant no Google Search on the homescreen, no Google app store, and no good way to make money off of millions of devices.
The problem wasn't just that Google was losing a slice of revenue here or there. For Google, these weaknesses in cloud computing and China triggered an existential dread: They meant the company was losing visibility into the way the internet was evolving and what the future would look like.
In 2015, Google embarked on a massive reorganization. Under a new parent company, Alphabet, moon shots and side projects would fall outside of Google, which would be more focused on making money. With Pichai as Google's new CEO, finding a new footing in China and cloud computing were among the company's priorities...
On August 11, 2017—the day after pandemonium at the Googleplex had prompted Pichai to cancel the town hall to discuss Damore—Google's executives entertained an unlikely visitor: secretary of defense James Mattis...
Google was reportedly in the process of bidding for a project that would jump-start this transition. It was called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, otherwise known as Project Maven. The project would involve labeling past drone footage to train a computer vision algorithm so that, once everything was in the cloud, new drone footage could be analyzed automatically...
Maven could put Google on the fast track to receive the security clearances it needed to win more lucrative defense and intelligence agency contracts, like Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), a massive Pentagon cloud contract that was worth some $10 billion...
As Google seemed to close in on winning the contract, executives from the cloud team pondered how a deal with the Pentagon—especially one that could be linked to autonomous weapons—might reflect on Google's non-evil brand. In September, a few weeks after the meeting with Mattis, they discussed spinning up some positive PR that would focus on the “vanilla cloud technology” aspects of the Maven contract. “Avoid at ALL COSTS any mention or implication of AI,” wrote Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor and Google Cloud's chief scientist for AI...
When Google won the Maven contract in late September, the company opted not to say anything at all—even to its own employees. But it wasn't long before Liz Fong-Jones learned about Maven from a group of concerned engineers who had been tapped to lay some of the groundwork for it...
...Damore sat next to Dhillon as she told a smattering of tech reporters and local news affiliates that her client had filed a class-action lawsuit against Google, alleging discrimination against white people, Asians, men, and conservatives, or any combination thereof. “We don't normally file 100-page, 200-page complaints,” Dhillon explained, thumbing through a heavy printout of the complaint laid out in front of her. “I didn't think people were going to believe the outlandish nonsense, so we actually attached screenshots throughout.”...
That month, Fong-Jones made another calculated exception to her usual policy of keeping dissent within the Google family. She and 14 other current employees spoke to WIRED about the “dirty war” that was being waged inside Google over the issue of diversity. Most news coverage of Damore's case amplified its claims that Google was cracking down on conservatives. But the employees argued that something else was going on. HR had become “weaponized,” they said; Googlers on both sides of the battle lines had become adept at working the refs—baiting colleagues into saying things that might violate the company's code of conduct, then going to human resources to report them. But Googlers on the right were going further, broadcasting snippets of the company's uncensored brawls to the world, and setting up their colleagues for harassment.
Google's HR department, for its part, was feeling inundated with policy violations across the spectrum. And according to Fong-Jones and her colleagues, the department was too focused on trying to appear even-handed. Employees had been reprimanded and even fired for criticizing Damore's memo using terms like “white privilege” and “white boy.” “Promoting harmful stereotypes based on race or gender is prohibited,” Google said in a statement about one such termination...
By February, word about Maven began to swirl outside the teams of engineers who had first alerted Fong-Jones to the project. So she decided to post about Maven on her internal Google+ page, sharing grave concerns that Google might be helping the US government carry out drone strikes, according to a copy of the post provided to WIRED by another Google engineer. Shortly afterward, the group of engineers posted an internal statement of their own, explaining that they had been told to build an “air gap”—a security measure favored by the Pentagon that physically separates networks to protect sensitive data—and informing coworkers about their efforts to thwart the project...
There was no consensus on Maven inside Google's fractious workforce, which includes former Defense Department researchers, military veterans, and immigrants from countries under US drone surveillance. Even the employee group for veterans was split on the project. But Maven's opponents were organized in a way that Google hadn't really seen before. Employees fanned out into different groups. Some scoured Google's open databases, where they discovered emails that appeared to contradict Greene's statement about the size of the Pentagon contract; they also found snippets of Python code for computer-vision technology that seemed designed to track human beings and vehicles. Some churned out anti-Maven memes; others kept track of employees who were quitting over the contract. One activist group focused on fact-checking, listing every time they found evidence to contradict the company line. The list got longer and longer.
Greene responded by playing whack-a-mole—locking down mailing lists, deleting documents, or asking employees to redact Google+ posts. Longtime execs were taken aback, and even hurt, by the loss of their employees' trust, which they had come to take for granted...
The anti-Maven organizers had momentum on their side—and support from an outside labor organization called Tech Workers Coalition. They were also galvanized by a powerful realization: They could reliably summon the rapt attention of the media and the public, which were hungrier than ever for the vicarious thrill of watching someone—finally—hold tech companies accountable...
...In early June 2018, Pichai finally published the AI principles that Google had promised its employees. They included a list of four applications of AI that Google would not pursue, including weapons, technologies that gather and use information “for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms,” and technology “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
Two months later, it seemed to many employees that Pichai had already broken those principles. On August 1, a blockbuster story in the Intercept reported that Google was planning to launch a new censored search engine in China. Codenamed Project Dragonfly, the engine would blacklist search terms like “human rights” and “student protest,” and would produce government-controlled results for “air quality.”...
Employee backlash set in. The Chinese government censorship that had so disturbed Google staffers in 2010 had only grown bolder and more sophisticated under President Xi Jinping, who was detaining hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in internment camps and deploying the latest in surveillance technology on citizens. The succession of scandals kept deepening the divide between execs and employee activists. More and more, the latter were questioning the social contract they had lived by. “I went from ‘Oh my god, who leaked that?’ to ‘Oh my god, management did what?!’ ” Fong-Jones says. She started to doubt her past successes with executives. “Perhaps the reason they were willing to listen in the first place was to give up the things that mattered less to them,” she says.
...In 2013, the paper reported, a woman who worked for Google had accused Android cofounder Andy Rubin of coercing her to perform oral sex in a hotel room. Google, the story reported, had investigated and found the claim credible but sent Rubin off with a $90 million exit package and a fond farewell.
The story didn't stop at Rubin. Another high-performing executive, Amit Singhal, the former head of Google Search, was given a multimillion-dollar exit package after a female employee accused him of groping her at an off-site work event. A third, Richard DeVaul, allegedly told a female job candidate that he was in a polyamorous relationship during her interview and invited her to meet him at Burning Man, where he asked if he could give her a massage. Google denied her the job. DeVaul was still working at Google as director of X, the company's experimental division for ambitious projects.
(CONT)
EXPLOITATION OF WEAPONIZED INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE: “The assembly of government reports and public records now indicates a political exploitation of the NSA database, for weaponized intelligence surveillance of politicians, began mid 2012.
The FISA-702 database extraction process, and utilization of the protections within the smaller intelligence community, became the primary process...
Judge Collyer outlines how the DOJ, which includes the FBI, had an “institutional lack of candor” in responses to the FISA court. In essence, the Obama administration was continually lying to the court about their activity, and the rate of fourth amendment violations for illegal searches and seizures of U.S. persons’ private information for multiple years... complexity also helps the media avoid discussing, and as a result most Americans have no idea the scale and scope of the issues.
...search query results were exported from the NSA database to users who were not authorized to see the material. The FBI contractors were conducting searches and then removing, or ‘exporting’, the results...
Searching the highly classified NSA database is essentially a function of filling out search boxes to identify the user-initiated search parameter and get a return... check “16” as the search parameter the user will get the returns on everything “To and From” that identified phone number for the specific date. Calls, texts, contacts etc. Including results for the inbound and outbound contacts... check “17” as the search parameter the user will get the returns of everything about that phone. Calls, texts, contacts, geolocation (or gps results), account information, user, service provider etc. As a result, 702(17) can actually be used to locate where the phone (and user) was located on a specific date or sequentially over a specific period of time...
And that’s just from a phone number.
Search an ip address “about” and read all data into that server; put in an email address and gain everything about that account. Or use the electronic address of a GPS enabled vehicle (about) and you can withdraw more electronic data and monitor in real time. Search a credit card number and get everything about the account including what was purchased, where, when, etc. Search a bank account number, get everything about transactions and electronic records etc. Just about anything and everything can be electronically searched; everything has an electronic ‘identifier’.
...the raw search returns were being shared with unknown entities without any attempt to “minimize” or redact the results. The person(s) attached to the results were named and obvious. There was no effort to hide their identity or protect their 4th amendment rights of privacy.
But what’s the scale here? This is where the story really lies...
The operators were searching “U.S Persons”. The review of November 1, 2015, to May 1, 2016, showed “eighty-five percent of those queries” were unlawful or “non compliant”... the number of searches were between 1,000 and 9,999 [five digits]. If we take the middle number of 5,000 – that means 4,250 unlawful searches out of 5,000.
The [five digit] amount (more than 1,000, less than 10,000), and 85% error rate, was captured in a six month period, November 2015 to April 2016.
Also notice this very important quote: “many of these non-compliant queries involved the use of the same identifiers over different date ranges.” This tells us the system users were searching the same phone number, email address, electronic “identifier”, or people, repeatedly over different dates.
Specific people were being tracked/monitored...
2012 is an important date in this database abuse because a network of specific interests is assembled that also shows up in 2016/2017:
-Who was 2012 FBI Director? Robert Mueller, who was selected by the FBI group to become special prosecutor in 2017.
-Who was Mueller’ chief-of-staff? Aaron Zebley, who became one of the lead lawyers on the Mueller special counsel.
-Who was 2012 CIA Director? John Brennan (remember the ouster of Gen Petraeus)
-Who was ODNI? James Clapper.
-Remember, the NSA is inside the Pentagon (Defense Dept) command structure. Who was Defense Secretary? Ash Carter
-Who wanted NSA Director Mike Rogers fired? Brennan, Clapper and Carter.
-And finally, who wrote and signed-off-on the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment and then lied about the use of the Steele Dossier? John Brennan, James Clapper.
Tens of thousands of searches over four years (since 2012), and 85% of them are illegal... that’s the stunning scale; but who was involved?
Private contractors with access to “raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to FBI’s requests“...
Contractor access was finally halted on April 18th, 2016. Coincidentally (or not), the wife of Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson, Mary Jacoby, goes to the White House the next day...
The FISA court identified and quantified tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons with contractor access who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw results without redacting the information and shared it with an unknown number of entities...
There is little doubt the FISA-702(16)(17) database system was used by Obama-era officials, from 2012 through April 2016, as a way to spy on their political opposition. Quite simply there is no other intellectually honest explanation for the scale and volume of database abuse that was taking place; and keep in mind these searches were all ruled to be unlawful. Searches for repeated persons over a period time that were not authorized.
When we reconcile what was taking place and who was involved, then the actions of the exact same principle participants take on a jaw-dropping amount of clarity. All of the action taken by CIA Director Brennan, FBI Director Comey, ODNI Clapper and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter make sense. Including their effort to get NSA Director Mike Rogers fired.
Everything after March 9th, 2016, had a dual purpose: (1) done to cover up the weaponization of the FISA database. [Explained Here] Spygate, Russia-Gate, the Steele Dossier, and even the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (drawn from the dossier and signed by the above) were needed to create a cover-story and protect themselves from discovery of this four year weaponization, political surveillance and unlawful spying. Even the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel makes sense; he was FBI Director when this began. (2) They needed to keep surveillance ongoing.
The beginning decision to use FISA(702) as a domestic surveillance and political spy mechanism appears to have started in/around 2012. Perhaps sometime shortly before the 2012 presidential election and before John Brennan left the White House and moved to CIA. However, there was an earlier version of data assembly that preceded this effort.
Political spying 1.0 was actually the weaponization of the IRS. This is where the term “Secret Research Project” originated as a description from the Obama team. It involved the U.S. Department of Justice under Eric Holder and the FBI under Robert Mueller. It never made sense why Eric Holder requested over 1 million tax records via CD ROM, until overlaying the timeline of the FISA abuse...
It would appear the Obama administration learned a lesson from attempting to gather a large opposition research database operation inside a functioning organization large enough to have some good people that might blow the whistle... a few months after realizing the “Secret Research Project” was now worthless (June 2012), they focused more deliberately on a smaller network within the intelligence apparatus and began weaponizing the FBI/NSA database.
As shown in the evidence provided by the FISC, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. The Obama administration already knew everything about the Trump campaign, and were monitoring everything by exploiting the FISA database.
However, after the NSA alerts in/around March 9th, 2016, and particularly after the April 18th shutdown of contractor access, the Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to create a legal albeit ex post facto justification for the pre-existing surveillance and spy operations. Fusion GPS gave them that justification in the Steele Dossier.
That’s why the FBI small group, which later transitioned into the Mueller team, were so strongly committed to and defending the formation of the Steele Dossier and its dubious content.
The Steele Dossier, an outcome of the Fusion contract, contains two purposes: (1) the cover-story and justification for the pre-existing surveillance operation (protect Obama); and (2) facilitate the FBI counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign (assist Clinton).
An insurance policy would be needed. The Steele Dossier becomes the investigative virus the FBI wanted inside the system. To get the virus into official status, they used the FISA application as the delivery method and injected it into Carter Page. The FBI already knew Carter Page; essentially Carter Page was irrelevant, what they needed was the FISA warrant and the Dossier in the system...
Fusion-GPS gave them the justification they needed for a FISA warrant with the Steele Dossier. Ultimately that’s why the Steele Dossier is so important; without it, the DOJ and FBI would be naked with their FISA-702 abuse...
“ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES TRANSPARENCY”: “This is only one document; however, the intransigence of the DOJ and FBI to release the declassified material to the public is based on one objective: protect the institutions and the officials within those institutions from exposure of their corrupt activity.
There is no investigative value in hiding the FISA application from public review. This willful effort to conceal damaging material to the DOJ and FBI is similar to the reason why the DOJ refuses to provide the origination material, scope memos, for the special counsel.
It has been 200 days since President Trump empowered AG Bill Barr to release the original authorizing framework of the Mueller investigation which began on May 17, 2017.
The Mueller investigation concluded nine months ago, and yet we are not allowed to know what the authorizing 2017 framework was?…. Nor the 2nd DOJ scope memo of August 2nd, 2017?… Nor the 3rd DOJ scope memo of October 20th, 2017?…
Yes it is good the FISA investigation report was released December 9th, but if all of the underlying documents are not declassified there is a risk the information therein is subject to interpretation and/or manipulation.
There is a lot of material the public is aware of; and if the DOJ IG doesn’t release the underlying material then what exactly was the purpose of AG Bill Barr asking President Trump for the declassification authority?
Declassification authority is not internal. The purpose of declassifying documents is to allow a public release… Accountability requires transparency.
If you wonder why FBI Director Christopher Wray is still employed… that lack of transparency is exactly why there’s a lack of accountability.”
WHO NOSE WHAT?!: “Hunter waited until age 43 to join the military.
But his stint in the Navy Reserve ended a year later, in 2014, when he tested positive for cocaine, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
And Hunter’s name cropped up in 2015 on a leaked list of users of Ashley Madison, the online dating site for married people.
He denied any connection to the site.
Hunter is currently a partner in a small investment-management firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC, which has offices in New York and Washington.
Joe Biden declined to comment on the divorce on Thursday but told Page Six on Wednesday that the family is “all lucky that Hunter and Hallie found each other as they were putting their lives together again after such sadness.”
As recently as December, as he prepared to leave the vice presidency, Joe Biden, 74, declined to rule out a 2020 presidential bid.
“Four years is a lifetime in American politics,” he told CNN.
“And I think nominees are determined by their parties based mostly on what skill set is most needed at that time.””
https://pagesix.com/2017/03/02/ex-claims-hunter-biden-blew-money-on-hookers-drugs/
THE ‘SHADOW’ KNOWS! “Rudy Giuliani told the president that his trip to Ukraine produced "more than you can imagine" ...as he finds himself in the middle of Congress's ongoing impeachment proceedings... witnesses described Giuliani as running a kind of "shadow diplomacy" in Ukraine.”
‘MOST DANGEROUS’ TO OUR DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS: “In the case of the Obama administration, using investigative agencies as political weapons fits a well-established pattern of behavior.
Under the Obama administration, the IRS abused its powers for political purposes: Conservative nonprofits were targeted for investigation and harassment. So was the National Labor Relations Board. So was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
In fact, this is part of a pattern of behavior among Democrats both inside and outside of the federal government: New York State has just been forced to abandon a political jihad against Exxon, which Democrats attempted to prosecute for indulging wrongthink on global warming, using securities law as a pretext.
Democratic prosecutors have abused their powers to harass and intimidate climate-policy critics including policy nonprofits such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute... New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (later driven from office) organized the campaign and announced his intentions in the New York Times.
The FBI’s actions in the Trump matter were outrageous, with agents going so far as to alter documents included as part of the FISA warrant process.
...The Federal Bureau of Investigation under the Obama administration sought to launch an investigation of the rival party’s presidential campaign in order to spy on it under powers reserved for national-security purposes. (FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.) In order to activate those powers, the FBI had to go to a federal court for permission, which it did — with falsified documents in hand.
...In a free society, there is very little that is as dangerous as a corrupt cop”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/fbi-corruption-how-dirty-cops-spied-on-trump-campaign/
ARTICLES OF LAWLESSNESS: “Both are so vague and open ended that they could be applied in partisan fashion by a majority of the House against almost any president from the opposing party. Both are precisely what the Framers had rejected at their Constitutional Convention. Both raise the “greatest danger,” in the words of Alexander Hamilton, that the decision to impeach will be based on the “comparative strength of parties,” rather than on “innocence or guilt.”
That danger is now coming to pass, as House Democrats seek for the first time in American history to impeach a president without having at least some bipartisan support in Congress. Nor can they find any support in the words of the Constitution, or in the history of its adoption. A majority of the House is simply making it up as they go along in the process, thus placing themselves not only above the law but above the Constitution.”
“THE VERY DEFINITION OF CORRUPTION”: “In reviewing what the agreements uncovered, keep in mind that Cheryl Mills was Secretary Clinton's Chief of Staff at the State Department and then bizarrely, she subsequently served as Clinton’s attorney, representing her in the email scandal. Heather Samuelson worked on Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, and then became a Senior Advisor to her at the State Department, as well as the White House liaison. Somehow, she also became one of Clinton's personal attorneys during the email scandal.
The immunity agreements issued by the government, were crafted so that the agencies could extract information from the parties, despite the fact that this is not necessary because DOJ has the power to require that the information be turned over. Clinton kept classified emails on a private server in violation of Federal law, and the immunity agreements reveal that both Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson were actively involved in the cover-up of these emails as well as in the destruction of evidence...
It is extremely unusual for someone involved in a criminal cover up, who needs an immunity deal to ensure the evasion of jail time, later becomes the attorney representing the other potential criminal or co-conspirator.
The agreements issued were with DOJ and the FBI. They asserted that Mills and Samuelson would turn over the computers to them, but stipulated that they weren't turning over "custody and control". This critical point is a legal and factual bunch of bunk. The FOIA statute applies to information in the agencies' "custody and control". Anything not in their custody or control cannot be FOIA'd. It is impossible to have an agency physically have a computer and not have it in their "custody or control."
Custody and control is not something that suspects have to expressly give over or agree to give over. When they give over the evidence, then obviously, as a matter of fact, they are also giving the agency "custody and control" over that evidence. Suspects cannot withhold "custody and control" by mere words or lack of consent, as consent is not required. In other words, these agreements are extremely flawed and whomever signed off on them should be investigated and perhaps prosecuted. It is clear that the purpose of this clause was to make the arguably illegal activities of Mills and Samuelson out of the reach of FOIA --- in other words, it would be withheld from the public. This is the very definition of corruption.
Additionally, the immunity agreements were broad in scope. There were numerous charges that the agreements gave them immunity from including potential violations of the Federal Records Act, the Classified Information Act and the Espionage Act. According to the ACLJ, nobody has ever gotten immunity from the Espionage Act before. Normally, immunity is for lesser crimes like obstruction of justice, but not espionage. If Mills and Samuelson were charged and convicted of every crime from which they received immunity, they would be potentially subject to twenty-eight years in jail each.
After Clinton illegally sent classified emails on a private server and cell phones (and by the way, people have gone to jail for this even when they did so accidentally because it's that serious), and after Mills and Samuelson purposely worked to cover up and conceal both the emails and the destruction of evidence, and after they were given a sweetheart deal that nobody in history has ever gotten, they became the attorneys for Clinton, representing her in the email case. This shouldn't be allowed because it is a conflict of interests, and not only gives the appearance of impropriety, but indeed, constitutes actual impropriety.
Subsequently, Mills and Samuelson finally gave the computers over to the FBI, which per their agreements, limited the FBI’s investigation. The FBI agreed to limit a) the method by which the emails investigated would be obtained; b) the scope of files which would be investigated, and c) the timeframe parameters for investigated emails. In other words, the FBI agreed in the immunity contracts not to do a full investigation on the Clinton emails. To make matters worse, again, per the immunity agreements, the FBI agreed to destroy the computers that had the back-up emails. As Congressman Jim Jordan referenced during the Mueller hearings recently, the FBI used bleachBit to purge the server so the information could never be accessed in the future and used hammers to smash the cell phones involved. In other words, the FBI and DOJ participated in the destruction of the evidence. In effect, this constitutes is a conspiracy between the Obama DOJ (under Loretta Lynch) and the Comey-led FBI to cover up Clinton’s crimes.
Shortly thereafter, Comey came out publicly and held a press conference exonerating Clinton from any criminal activity, knowing full well that she was never thoroughly investigated, and that his own agency had participated in the destruction of evidence.
To reiterate Comey’s assertions, he stated that Clinton had been "extremely careless" in her handling of classified and sensitive information, but not "grossly negligent", even though the definition of grossly negligent is extremely careless. Gross negligence is the language in the statute necessary to prosecute someone who does this and Comey inaccurately professed that no prosecutor would pursue a case based on these facts, even though those with lesser evidence have indeed been charged.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274484/new-evidence-unveils-disturbing-facts-about-deborah-weiss
GROSS INCOMPETENCE, NEGLIGENCE, INEXPLICABLE CONDUCT: “‘The activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this FISA’ - The congressional testimony by Justice Department Inspector General (IG) Michael Horowitz on Dec. 11, 2019, proved to be almost universally damning of the actions taken by the FBI, and... demolished the argument that the FBI engaged in proper conduct during its investigation of the Trump campaign.
When asked if he would have submitted the Page FISA renewal applications using the information that the FBI employed, Horowitz responded, “I would not have submitted the one they put in. No doubt about it. It had no business going in.”
...Horowitz had noted in his report that the threshold for predication was “low” and specifically noted his concern that “Department and FBI policies do not require that a senior [Justice] Department official be notified prior to the opening of a particularly sensitive case such as this one.”
However, Horowitz directly contradicted Democrat assertions regarding his conclusion of FBI exoneration, noting, “It’s unclear what the motivations [of the FBI] were. On the one hand, gross incompetence, negligence? On the other hand, intentionality, and where in between? We weren’t in a position—with the evidence we had—to make that conclusion. But I’m not ruling it out.”
...the FBI was able to open its investigation into the Trump campaign because the rules, oversight, and governance of the FBI are ludicrously lax. And, as Horowitz noted in his report, these issues need to be immediately addressed...
Horowitz was asked by Crapo about intentional versus grossly negligent conduct by the FBI. Crapo noted that it’s “mind-numbing to consider that it could be just accidental.” Horowitz responded that he found much of the FBI’s conduct inexplicable and stated he failed to receive satisfactory answers for many of the FBI’s actions:
“There is such a range of conduct here that is inexplicable,” he said, “and the answers we got were not satisfactory, that we’re left trying to understand how could all these errors have occurred over a nine month period or so, among three teams—hand-picked—the highest profile case in the FBI, going to the very top of the organization, involving a presidential campaign.”
The IG report also noted that spying on the Trump campaign did not begin when the FBI opened its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016, but had in fact begun much earlier.
This fact was highlighted in Footnote 193... This same footnote also noted that the Inspector General was unable to interview former FBI Director James Comey in relation to “classified details” because “Comey chose not to have his security clearances reinstated for our interview.”
...The Steele dossier was effectively the only evidence the FBI had that Page was somehow “an agent of a foreign power.” And this evidence compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele ran contrary to the documented work that Page had done for another governmental agency... Clinesmith “altered the liaison’s email by inserting the words ‘not a source’ into it, thus making it appear that the liaison said that Page was ‘not a source’ for the other agency.” As the IG Report notes, “Relying upon this altered email, SSA 2 signed the third renewal application that again failed to disclose Page’s past relationship with the other agency.”
...The inability of Horowitz to review the conduct of attorneys is particularly shocking given that Horowitz is the Inspector General for the Department of Justice and FBI—a government division that has an overabundance of lawyers within its employ...
Horowitz was also asked by Graham if former FBI Director Comey was vindicated by the IG report as Comey had publicly claimed earlier. Horowitz responded succinctly: “The activities we found here don’t vindicate anybody who touched this FISA.”
During the conclusion of Horowitz’s opening remarks, he noted that as a result of his findings, he was referring multiple senior FBI officials for their significant performance failures:
“Our final recommendation was to refer the entire chain of command that we outline here to the FBI and the Department for consideration of how to assess and address their performance failures.”
Howorowitz also announced that there would be an ongoing compliance audit and oversight process from the Office of Inspector General:
“We have today initiated an OIG audit that will further examine the FBI’s compliance with the Woods Procedures in FISA applications that target U.S. persons in both counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations.””
CRUMBLING THE ‘COLLECTIVE RIGHT’ SECOND AMENDMENT ARGUMENTS: “According to progressives, that first phrase, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,” indicates that the purpose of the amendment is to establish and maintain a regulated militia whose purpose is to defend the state. On this interpretation, the amendment does not secure the right of individuals to own weapons as individuals.
There are two counters to this claim that demonstrate how facile it is. The first argument is simply a matter of understanding the grammar of the actual text of the Second Amendment. The first phrase is under proper grammar, and as confirmed by the United States Supreme Court, a prefatory phrase. It is not a statement of the sole purpose of the right to bear arms, but is an understanding of the way in which the right would be used in the defense of the state.
Furthermore, the Second Amendment clearly identifies right as belonging to ‘the people.’ This identification clearly shows to whom the right belongs. As Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out in one of his most magisterial opinions: “Nowhere else in the Constitution does a ‘right’ attributed to ‘the people’ refer to anything other than an individual right. What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention ‘the people,’ the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset.”
If “the people” does not apply to all the individual citizens in the Second Amendment, then how can it do so for those other amendments? The meaning of the statement is clear, despite the obfuscation of progressive activism. The second counterargument relies on examining what the framers of the Constitution meant. Fortunately for supporters of the right to bear arms, and unfortunately for their opponents, many of the people who wrote the Constitution wrote elsewhere about its meaning. Many of the founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Samuel Adams all explicitly endorsed individual ownership of arms. Even Alexander Hamilton, the founder most in favor of big government and a standing army, agreed that private citizens ought to be allowed to own weapons.
The founders were also clear about what they meant by the term militia. Richard Henry Lee stated it very succinctly: “A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves… and include all men capable of bearing arms.” In other words, whether a militia is the proper holder of arms or the people is irrelevant, because they are one and the same. Only by ignoring the words of the founders, as well as the basic rules of grammar, can the progressives’ case even appear valid. Once the ignorance is cured, their case crumbles to dust.”
http://blog.heartland.org/2014/06/the-militia-myth-understanding-the-language-of-the-2nd-amendment/