Showing posts with label Crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crime. Show all posts

Saturday, August 08, 2015

Yes, the FBI’s Investigation of Hillary's Emails is Definitely a 'Criminal Probe'

By Catholic Online

"It's definitely a criminal probe," an unnamed source says in regards to the FBI investigation into whether Hillary Clinton knowingly sent classified information through personal email. "I'm not sure why they're not calling it a criminal probe," the source adds. The Clinton camp, in the meantime, downplays this.

Federal agents are investigating to what extent Clinton used her home server and other private devices to send and store classified documents.

"The DOJ [Department of Justice] and FBI can conduct civil investigations in very limited circumstances," but that is not what this is, the source says. "In this case, a security violation would lead to criminal charges. Maybe DOJ is trying to protect her campaign."

In the meantime, Hillary Clinton is "confident" that she never willfully received or sent any classified information.

But of 40 Clinton emails, randomly reviewed while she served as secretary of state, four contained classified information, the inspector general in charge of the case informed Congress.

Former federal prosecutor Bradley Simon says that if Hillary Clinton knowingly sent, received, or stored classified information in an unauthorized location, she may face "prosecution under the same misdemeanor federal security statute used to prosecute former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus," according to the NY Post.

AMERICA: Founded in Liberty, Descended into Tyranny

By Richard Larsen

“The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period…The United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.” So declared George Washington at the time of our founding as a nation.

It is unique and exceptional that this nation was established according natural law, and declared inalienable individual rights of life, liberty, and property, or the pursuit of happiness. In an era when monarchs, rulers, oligarchs, autocrats and aristocrats governed according to their whims and disposition, having derived their right to rule based on caste or bloodline, a motley collection of men steeped in classical-liberal principles led a revolution and established a nation dedicated to individual freedom.

Those precepts were the foundation to the Declaration of Independence, which states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” There is nothing more exceptional in human history than those two sentences and the nation that resulted from their utterance: a nation that derived its “just” powers from the “consent of the governed.”

A decade later, the structural document creating the governmental framework based on the tenets articulated in the Declaration of Independence was ratified by the colonies. That document, our Constitution, stated specifically as enumerated powers, what our national government could do, and whatever powers were not specified or enumerated, were “reserved to the states respectively or to the people.”

But even at the nascent stages of the American experiment, the author of liberty, Thomas Jefferson, saw how our system would metamorphose into something entirely different. “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

Thursday, August 06, 2015

The 2016 election for dummies

By Lawrence Sellin

The two most important issues of the 2016 election are non-partisan.

(1)    The federal government and the media are, as institutions, hopelessly corrupt.

(2)    The United States has elections, but we no longer have representative government.

None of the problems facing the country can be solved effectively without first confronting those two issues. Without doing so, we are just kicking the can down the road toward national collapse and fragmentation.

Americans are no longer citizens of a republic, but subjects of a reigning oligarchy composed of a self-absorbed permanent political class, which services the interests of wealthy financiers at the expense of the wider population. They maintain their authority by an ever-expanding and increasingly intrusive government and using a compliant media to manipulate public perception and opinion in order to maintain the illusion of democracy.

The federal government is now an industry competing with the private sector, but unconstrained by regulation and the rule of law, which has inevitably led to massive and wide-spread corruption.

From the perspective of the oligarchy, elections are nothing more than an opportunity to redistribute power among select Democrat and Republican elites, who use the legislative process and tax revenues to increase the personal wealth of the ruling class.

There is no clearer example of the absence of representative government than the actions of the Republican Party after the November 2014 election. Despite the fact that the Republicans sailed to victory in one of the biggest election routs of the past century and grew to historic levels in the U.S. House, they never intended to honor their pledges to the voters, caving to Barack Obama and the Democrats on every major issue.

FOR "WOMEN’S HEALTH": Human Fetus Brains Sold to Labs for Transplantation into Rats

By Steve Watson

One thing is clear from the videos and media that have emerged in this recent scandal – we are not dealing with a one dimension “pro-choice/pro-life” debate. Instead, there is a dark organization inside an industrial complex Americans have not dared to contemplate or uncover. Secret scientific research, genetic engineering, synthetic DNA, vaccines made from human fetal cell tissue… and a host of other uses for human organs, limbs, brains and tissue.

The “ethics” behind closed doors, where doctors and clinics are apparently all too willing to break the rules and allow human experimentation, are projected into the medical system collective that we are all being pushed into. Decisions about the value of human life and how far the State can go in deciding what is best for you are being weighed… your will see it in the hidden costs of Obamacare, where life becomes cheap but the bills for services rendered remain sky high.

While the Planned Parenthood harvesting scandal rumbles on, fewer news items have actually focused on what those who procure aborted fetal tissue and organs are actually doing with it.

Pro life website LifeNews.com sheds some light on this today with a piece that reveals the brains of aborted babies are being transplanted into mice.

The article notes that a recent commentary piece in The Scientist, entitled “When Does a Smart Mouse Become Human?” highlights how researchers at the University of Rochester injected lab mice with glial cells from human fetuses, and discusses the ethical issue of transplanting human cells into animals.

The article states:

Wednesday, August 05, 2015

DHS Says ‘Path To Citizenship’ Will Help Fight Homegrown Terror

By Rachel Stoltzfoos

The top U.S. immigration agency told a Senate subcommittee it is working to blunt homegrown terrorism by marketing U.S. citizenship to immigrants.

“In furtherance of DHS’s mission to safeguard the homeland, [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] is committed to fostering integration and community cohesion,” the agency recently told the Immigration and the National Interest Subcommittee in records obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“USCIS engages and supports partners to welcome immigrants, promote English language learning and education on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and encourage U.S. citizenship.”

The subcommittee had pointed to the arrest of Six Somali men on terror-related charges in Minnesota — where a large population of Somali refugees was resettled — as evidence of the threat and then asked whether USCIS can guarantee other communities won’t face similar threats from the thousands of Syrian war refugees that have been settled stateside.

Referring to its efforts to promote citizenship, officials from USCIS made an appeal to nationalism: “These efforts emphasize the role that shared citizenship rights and responsibilities play to unify all Americans.”

The For the Record Questions with USCIS followed an April hearing on the Obama Administration’s plan to grant Central American minors related to illegal immigrants in the U.S. refugee or parole status, and fly them into the country.

Terror Victims’ Lawsuit Seeks to Block Obama’s Gift of $150 Billion to Iran

By Investigative Project on Terrorism

A deal to provide Iran with as much as $150 billion in sanctions relief over its nuclear weapons program should be blocked until the Islamic Republic pays court-awarded damages to American victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism, a lawsuit filed Wednesday in New York federal court said.

The plaintiffs, victims of attacks by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, have judgments worth $152 million that they have been unable to collect. Similar lawsuits in U.S. courts have generated billions of dollars more in damages. Iran, the lawsuit said, should not see a dime of sanctions relief until those victims are compensated.

By law, the lawsuit said, Iran should not be granted any relief until there is "a certification by the President that Iran is no longer a financier and sponsor of terror. That terrorism condition has not been satisfied."

Even the White House admits that Iran continues to sponsor international terrorism.

The lawsuit, facilitated by Shurat Hadin, or Israel Law Center, names the departments of State and Treasury, along with their respective secretaries, John Kerry and Jacob Lew. The two departments are responsible for enacting and enforcing the sanctions against Iran.

Releasing the frozen Iranian assets strips victims of "their last remaining opportunity to pressure Iran to satisfy their judgments,' the lawsuit said. And it violates terms of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, passed by Congress in 2002. The law aimed to help victims enforce their judgments by pursuing blocked assets belonging to terror sponsors. It contains the phrase "Notwithstanding any other provision of law," which should prevail over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the formal name of the Iran deal, negotiated by the U.S. and the P5+1 allies, the lawsuit said.

Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Today’s Hillarious Hillary Highlights

Collected from the real-time news portal you may know as BadBlue News. You're welcome, America.

Data point 1:

Uh-Oh: Hillary Losing White Women.. and Every Other Demographic

The Wall Street Journal is sounding the alarm for Team Hillary after the results of a new WSJ/NBC News poll show her losing white women voters and, well, basically every other demographic...

But WSJ notes that that's not the only "worrisome trend" for the Democratic presidential frontrunner. She's also lost many Independents, whose opinion of her has plummeted from an "evenly split" perception earlier this year to now being underwater 27/52. The opinion of Clinton among African-Americans also dropped in the last few months, falling from 81/3 to 66/15.
Data point 2:

All That’s Wrong With Washington in One Picture

By Against Crony Capitalism

I’ve gotten some criticism over the last couple of days for not being hard enough on the Republicans. Trust me: the crony Republicans are full on targets for sure. Long time readers know this. Saying that, here’s a good one from one of the generally good guys in Washington, who happens to be a Republican.

On the other hand it could be worse.

Monday, August 03, 2015

FUNNIEST CHART O' THE DAY: Breakdown of Where Bill and Hillary Clinton’s "Charitable" Donations Went

According to their tax returns, it turns out that essentially all of the Clinton family's "charitable donations" were directed back to their own "charities".

As TaxProf notes, the family’s charitable giving from 2007 onward has been a case study in moving money around. Since 2007, the Clintons “made $15 million (10.8 percent of their AGI) of charitable contributions, $14.9 million of which went to the Clinton Family Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative.”

That leaves $100,000 for charitable uses that don’t directly involve the Clinton family and their globalist friends.

As a reminder, in April I created a chart illustrating where the Clinton Global Graft Initiative's various expenditures went. It's equally amusing.

Little wonder Hillary's email server "disappeared".


Hat tip: BadBlue News.
 

WELFARE STATE SUCCESS STORY #8,091: More Kids Living In Poverty Now Than During Great Recession

By Nick Sorrentino

A picture from an Indian reservation in South Dakota. American Indians have gotten the rawest deal in America as a group, and the US government has managed their affairs to a large degree since conquering them. So what does that tell you?
This is what happens when government layers regulations on top of regulations. When it makes it very difficult to start businesses. When it encourages government dependence for electoral reasons. (It does. I hate that it does, but it does.) When government rewards companies which partner with politicians with taxpayer money and favors.This is what happens when the people running the show in Washington abandon the spirit of free enterprise, the spirit of freedom, and instead embrace the languid mediocrity of the welfare state.

No child should be hungry. But the welfare state is not the way to keep bellies full. Non-profits need to be empowered, and government and the dependence it creates must be reduced in a real way. (This must be done over time but with tangible and verifiable milestones. Corporate dependence needs to be cut tomorrow however.)

Cue this story in USA Today:

Sunday, August 02, 2015

NEW COMIC STRIP: The Hilarious Hijinx of Hillary

Illustrated by our summer intern, @BiffSpackle:

Biff's entire, awesome comic collection can be viewed here. You're welcome.

Saturday, August 01, 2015

Obama Hiding Text of Iran Nuclear Deals And Unclassified Documents From the American People and... Congress

By The Investigative Project on Terrorism

Crucial aspects of the Iran nuclear deal remain hidden from the public, and in some instances, from the American government, Bloomberg reports.

In a closed-door session with House members Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry revealed that two side deals between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were reached. Kerry said he neither read nor possesses the secret agreements.

According to U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., a member of the House Intelligence Committee who attended the closed-door session, Congress also is in the dark on these agreements.

"Kerry told me directly that he has not read the secret side deals. He told us the State Department does not have possession of these documents," Pompeo told Bloomberg View columnists Josh Rogin and Eli Lake.

Furthermore, other secret agreements kept from the public were presented to Congress on Monday – part of 18 documents the White House were required to disclose – including secret letters of understanding between the U.S., France, Germany , and the United Kingdom that outline some of the ambiguous aspects of the nuclear deal.

Seventeen of these documents are unclassified, yet they are stored in ultra-secure facilities intended for top-secret information, the Daily Beast reports. These extraordinary precautions indicate that the Obama administration is seeking to keep unclassified documents from reaching the public.

*CRUNCH* THIS POPCORN IS GETTING GOOD! Federal Judge Slaps Hillary and Huma With Full Disclosure Demands

By Judicial Watch

(31 July 2015, Washington DC) – Today U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the U.S. State Department to request that Hillary Clinton and her top aides confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all government records in their possession, return any other government records immediately, and describe their use of Hillary Clinton’s email server to conduct government business. The court issued the ruling late today after holding a status hearing in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information lawsuit that sought records about Huma Abedin, the former Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)). The lawsuit reopened last month because of revelations about Hillary Clinton’s email records.

The text of Judge Sullivan’s minute order, which was issued at 5:46 pm:

As agreed by the parties at the July 31, 2015 status hearing, the Government shall produce a copy of the letters sent by the State Department to Mrs. Hillary Clinton, Ms. Huma Abedin and Ms. Cheryl Mills regarding the collection of government records in their possession. These communications shall be posted on the docket forthwith. The Government has also agreed to share with Plaintiff’s counsel the responses sent by Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills. These communications shall also be posted on the docket forthwith. In addition, as related to Judicial Watch’s FOIA requests in this case, the Government is HEREBY ORDERED to:

Friday, July 31, 2015

Here is the Ironclad Case for Impeaching IRS Head John Koskinen

By Logan Albright

Key members of the House Freedom Caucus are demanding that IRS Commissioner John Koskinen be removed from office. In an op-ed written for the Wall Street Journal, Reps. Jim Jordan and Ron DeSantis told President Obama that if the Commissioner is not removed, they will begin the proceedings to impeach him.

Modern Americans view impeachment with a sort of awe and reverence. To most, it seems like an inconceivably drastic thing to do. But it was not always this way, nor was it the intention of the founders. Impeachment has always been a practical tool for getting rid of bad actors in government and, given the amount of government corruption we see today, a tool that should be used with much greater frequency.

If there is any doubt that Koskinen is a worthy target for impeachment, let’s run down a few of his misdeeds since he assumed the office in 2013.

First, the IRS targeting scandal. In 2013, it emerged that the IRS had been targeting conservative non-profit groups, delaying their applications, demanding ridiculous amounts of paperwork including highly invasive personal questions, and general obstructing conservative grassroots activities. The American Enterprise Institute estimated that this depressed Republican voter turnout in the 2012 elections, and could have even made the difference between Barack Obama winning or losing.

Of course, this was all before Koskinen became commissioner, so what does it have to do with him? Koskinen assumed office in December 2013, during the ongoing investigation into the scandal. Any serious public servant would have done everything possible to clean up the agency and get to the bottom of the wrongdoing. Koskinen instead chose to obstruct. Koskinen responded to subpoenas for emails regarding the scandal with the unbelievable claim that all the emails from the specified time period had suddenly gone missing.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

DEMOCRAT POLICIES WORK! Which country is out of food, pays doctors $15 a month, and has no beer?

By Daniel Greenfield

Venezuela used to have oil literally coming out of the ground. Then the Socialists took over and under Hugo Chavez made it a model for the world... to run away from. Here's what's going on in Venezuela now.

Universal Health Care - Venezuela's widely praised government health care system is doing great. Doctors are being paid $15 a month

In some hospitals, they had less than a third of the medical supplies they require. Almost every patient told me they had to buy at least some of their drugs on the street.

Oncologists said that people who were diagnosed with breast cancer sometimes had to wait more than 18 months for treatment, while surgeons said that other patients often die while waiting for operations.

It's not just a lack of medicines that is making life difficult. Spiralling inflation, which topped 600 percent in July 2015, has meant that doctors' salaries are now worth less than £10 per month.

That's about $15 a month. But even that may be optimistic because Venezuelan currency is monopoly money. Obama had to bail out Cuba because Venezuela couldn't keep carrying Castro.

 It’s taken what, no more than a couple of decades, to turn an oil rich middle income country into something worse than most sub-Saharan economic wastelands (the minimum manufacturing wage in Ethiopia is currently $21 a month or so).

Minimum wage in Venezuela is now about $11 a month. But that's okay because there's no food to buy so the government is just confiscating it from farmers, Bolshevik style.

Sanctuary Cities Represent Naked Crimes against the American people

Testimony of Jessica M. Vaughan before Congress:

Thank you for the opportunity to testify on the public safety problems created when local governments adopt policies that obstruct immigration enforcement, commonly known as sanctuary policies. According to ICE records, as of October 2014 there were 276 such jurisdictions in the United States. Over an eight-month period in 2014, more than 8,100 criminal aliens who were the subject of detainers were instead released back to the streets as a result of local non-cooperation policies. Approximately two-thirds of these individuals had a serious criminal history at the time of their release. Nearly 1,900 have subsequently re-offended. Only 28 percent have been re-apprehended by ICE.

Sanctuary policies do nothing to build trust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement. They do not improve access to law enforcement services for immigrants; nor have they been shown to increase the likelihood that more immigrant crime victims will report crimes. On the contrary, they destroy the trust of the community at large that the laws will be faithfully enforced to preserve the quality of life for all.

Despite widespread public outrage at the San Francisco Sheriff’s policies that caused the release of a man with five prior deportations and seven felony convictions, and who was the subject of an ICE detainer, who then went on to kill Kathryn Steinle, it is clear that some jurisdictions will not budge from their criminal alien sanctuary policies. To make matters worse, the Obama administration’s new Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) explicitly allows local jurisdictions to obstruct ICE – and also establishes the entire country as a sanctuary for nearly all illegal aliens by further narrowing enforcement priorities and severely restricting the ability of ICE officers to deport removable aliens, including many with criminal records. Therefore, Congress must step in to correct the situation by a) clarifying in the law that local law enforcement agencies are expected to comply with ICE detainers; b) establishing that local law enforcement agencies will have qualified immunity when cooperating in good faith; c) implementing sanctions for those jurisdictions that continue to refuse to obstruct enforcement; and d) reversing the Obama administration’s non-enforcement policies.

Where Have All the Bullets Gone?

By James Simpson

Since the day President Obama was elected, gun owners have been on an unprecedented buying spree, purchasing everything from .22 ammunition to every kind of semi-automatic firearm available.

Their fears are not unwarranted — especially because, for a while, the federal government seemed to be racing private owners to buy the ammo first.

Closer examination shows that some fears of federal activity on this front are overblown. Others, though, are deeply rooted in legitimate concerns.

While Obama claims to support “common-sense” gun laws, he has made high-profile public announcements telegraphing his anti-gun intentions and engaged in behind-the-scenes gun control — tweaking government regulations to deny gun rights to veterans, seeking the same for Social Security recipients, and using the ATF to ban certain types of popular ammo. Calling guns more dangerous than terrorism, Obama recently indicated he’ll devote the rest of his time as president to gun control.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

THUNDER: Federal Judge Threatens to Hold IRS Chief and DOJ Attorneys in Contempt of Court Over Lerner Cover-Up

By Judicial Watch

U.S District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan today threatened to hold the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department attorneys in contempt of court after the IRS failed to produce status reports and newly recovered emails of Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the IRS, as he had ordered on July 1, 2015.

During the a status hearing today, Sullivan warned that the failure to follow his order was serious and the IRS and Justice Department’s excuses for not following his July 1 order were “indefensible, ridiculous, and absurd.” He asked the IRS’ Justice Department lawyer Geoffrey Klimas, “Why didn’t the IRS comply” with his court order and “why shouldn’t the Court hold the Commissioner of the IRS in contempt.” Judge Sullivan referenced his contempt findings against Justice Department prosecutors in the prosecution of late Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) and reminded the Justice Department attorney he had the ability to detain him for contempt. Warning he would tolerate no further disregard of his orders, Judge Sullivan said, “I will haul into court the IRS Commissioner to hold him personally into contempt.”

After the hearing, Judge Sullivan issued the following “minute order”:

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

MARTIN PERETZ: The Democrat Party is on the Edge of the Abyss

By Martin Peretz, Editor-in-chief of The New Republic, 1974-2013

How the party of FDR and JFK deals with the Iran agreement will determine its credibility on foreign policy for decades to come.

Two of the most powerful members of the Democratic Party, former and current senators from New York, now hold the fate of the putative deal with Iran in their hands. Because they alone can overturn it, this means that presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and presumptive Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer carry a heavy burden that will deeply affect their personal reputations and, most probably, the trustworthiness of the Democrats in foreign policy for at least a generation.

Their former senatorial colleagues Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Kerry already own their decision, though their logic still remains unclear to both the most diligent and the most casual observer. The president asserts that his piece of paper will prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, presuming both the honesty of a regime that has displayed mendacity and hostility for 35 years as well as the existence of a wide-ranging verification capability that his own agreement has fatally compromised. And then, of course, there is the sunset provision that enables Iran to acquire nuclear weapons anyway. As they congratulate themselves on the hard work that produced this bizarre document—Bloomberg News related that “[a]ll present were in a kind of awe”—have these former Solons stopped to wonder why Iran negotiated in the first place when their leaders still insist on claiming they don’t want nuclear weapons? The entire process is built on lies. If the Iranians didn’t want nukes, then why would they want a time limit?

Of course the Iranians are dissimulating—they want the funds that come from sanctions relief, the legitimacy that comes from press conferences with great powers in central Europe, and, finally, an eased path to nuclear weapons. They have managed to achieve all three, without having to pause their “Death to America” street rallies, return their American hostages, curb their aggression in the Middle East, or release their defrauded presidential candidates from house arrest. (Nor has the U.S. President seen fit to even mention these ongoing depredations.) On the U.S. side, the assertion is that Iran will modify its irredentist behavior, even as its last demand (to which Obama and Kerry shamefully caved) was to lift the arms and ballistic missile embargos. Not exactly evidence-based decision-making when you consider the Ayatollah Khamenei’s comment just this weekend: “Our policies toward the arrogant government of the United States will not be changed at all.”

More "Deleted" Lois Lerner Emails Revealed...

No, not by the feckless boobs John Boehner and Darrell Issa.

But by Judicial Watch, again. There's copy of the dump here.

It's long past time to impeach John Koskinen.