THE LAWYER-INFESTED BIDEN REGIME IS A LAWLESS OPERATION NO DIFFERENT THAN THE OBAMA BANKSTER REGIME!
TELL FUKHEAD BIDEN THE JUDICIAL, F.B.I., D.O.J., AND D.H.S., ARE NOT HIS FUKING AGENCIES!
Ben Carson Warns Of 'An Entirely New Threat To Our Country'
A Cabal of Sociopaths (MOST LAWYERS ARE SOCIOPATHS - Google it!)
If we learned anything this week, we’ve learned that the continued life of this Constitutional Republic is in grave danger from the cabal of sociopaths in critical positions of power, and that it is because scaremongers and a supine press and judiciary have permitted enactment of dangerous legislation and illegal conduct to go on and on unpunished. Worse, the perpetrators are being richly rewarded for their violation of law and public trust.
FISA
Friday the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ) released a report that was written and kept under seal since last year.
It found that:
The FBI continued to abuse a powerful digital surveillance tool even after the Bureau promised reforms following its Trump-era abuses, according to a newly-unsealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court document.
The FBI misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) more than 278,000 times, the Washington Post reported, “including against crime victims, January 6 riot suspects, and people arrested at protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.” In one particularly egregious case, they reportedly relied on Section 702 to spy on 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate.
Section 702 is a provision of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that “permits the government to conduct targeted surveillance of foreign persons located outside the United States, with the compelled assistance of electronic communication service providers, to acquire foreign intelligence information.”
The law, created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, allows National Security Agency and FBI employees a to search a vast database of electronic communications and other information. The FBI is authorized to search the Section 702 database “only when agents have reason to believe such a search will produce information relevant to foreign intelligence purposes, or evidence of crimes,” according to the Post.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees Section 702, stated in the memorandum opinion that the FBI has shown “a pattern of conducting broad, suspicionless queries that violate the requirement that its queries of unminimized Section 702 information be reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information.
The FBI had earlier promised to fix the problems. It clearly did not. The Act which the FBI has continually violated comes up for reauthorization in the next congressional session and should be allowed to expire.
In another context -- the COVID-19 responses of the government and judiciary -- Justice Neil Gorsuch makes a compelling case on how fearmongering has led to great intrusions on civil liberties:
The FISA is another example, in my opinion.
Mark Wauck makes a strong case that in the absence of jailing FBI violators or repealing the Act we should just refuse to reauthorize it.
I agree with the late Judge Robert Bork that FISA is almost certainly unconstitutional. Repeal of FISA will only return the situation to the constitutional status quo, which always allowed for warrantless domestic spying based on appeals to “national security” -- regardless of what “principled constitutional conservatives” may mistakenly believe. That position has never been rejected in court. Warrantless national security surveillance was not illegal before FISA and will not be illegal if FISA is repealed. What is illegal is intentional violation of civil rights.
The crazy idea that by passing a law we can alter fundamental human behavior is as foolish as the idea that by adopting a written constitution we can institute a system of governance that will be impervious to human flaws and will be self-executing. Consider -- whatever happened to the war making power that has been, as far as I can tell, completely usurped by the ruling oligarchy. The only remedy for abuses of government authority is active and informed public participation in the electoral process, coupled with aggressive legislative oversight. The effect of a law like FISA, as Judge Bork presciently pointed out, is:
It provides an excuse for our elected representatives to look the other way most of the time;
It provides a platform upon which our elected representatives can grandstand and signal their own virtue to the general public -- that was largely what FISA was all about in the first place, and Congress left themselves a convenient loophole for emergency surveillance;
It offers the perpetrators of the abuses a ready excuse and ensures that they will, ultimately, remain unpunished and free to continue as before, based on the plea of ignorance and incompetence;
The result will always be the bandaid approach that leads to a repetition of all the above.
Retaliation Against Whistleblowers
Hearings this week revealed the Agency took draconian measures against three agents who, as the law permits them to do without retaliation, were brutally treated by the FBI for protected reporting of misconduct.
The FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) pressured a field office in Boston, Massachusetts, to open investigations on 138 individuals who traveled to Washington, D.C., to exercise their First Amendment rights on January 6, 2021, with no specific indication that these people were involved in any way in criminal activity. The only basis for investigating these people was that they shared buses to Washington with two individuals who entered restricted areas of the Capitol that day. Rather than limiting the investigation to just the two people who entered restricted areas, the WFO instructed the Boston Field Office to open investigations on all 140 individuals who attended the political rally.
In response to the WFO’s pressure to open investigations into all 140 individuals, the Boston Field Office asked the WFO for more evidence, including video from the Capitol, to properly predicate the investigations. The WFO provided pictures of the two individuals inside the Capitol; however, the WFO refused to provide video evidence from the Capitol out of fear it would disclose undercover officers or confidential human sources inside the Capitol.
Shortly after the events of January 6, 2021, Bank of America (BoA) provided the FBI with confidential customer data -- voluntarily and without any legal process. BoA gave WFO a list of individuals who had made transactions in the Washington, D.C. area using a BoA product between January 5 and January 7, 2021. Individuals who had previously purchased a firearm with a BoA product were reportedly elevated to the top of the list. [snip]
FBI leadership pressured agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism (DVE), and even manufactured DVE cases where they may not otherwise exist, while manipulating its case categorization system to create the perception that DVE is organically rising around the country.
The FBI dispenses cash bonuses to local field office leadership for meeting certain arbitrary metrics and performance goals. This bonus structure creates perverse incentives for the FBI to utilize law-enforcement tools and resources where they may not be needed or appropriate in order for FBI leadership to benefit financially.
These FBI employees have come forward to blow the whistle at great personal and professional risk. Each of these whistleblowers described retaliatory conduct that they have faced after making protected disclosures about what they believed in good faith to be wrong conduct. A recurring theme is that the FBI has violated federal whistleblower protection laws and abused its security clearance review process to hamstring the brave agents who exercise their right to make protected disclosures to Congress or who dared to question agency leadership. For example:
Special Agent [Garret] O’Boyle made protected disclosures to his Supervisory Special Agent about potentially illegal activity, and the FBI transferred him to a new unit that required him to move his family across-country. When O’Boyle arrived for his first day, the FBI placed him on unpaid, indefinite suspension, effectively rendering his “family homeless” and leaving them without any personal effects -- including his young children’s clothing -- because these items were in FBI storage.
Likewise, in Special Agent [Steve] Friend’s case, the FBI suspended his security clearance after making protected disclosures. This suspension rendered Friend unable to fulfill his duties as a special agent -- thus, the FBI suspended him indefinitely. While on suspension, the FBI refused to allow Friend to obtain outside employment, leaving his family without income.
In Staff Operations Specialist Allen’s case, the FBI suspended his security clearance for simply performing duties of his job -- conducting case-related research using open-source news articles and videos and sending his search results to his task force colleagues.
The FBI leadership’s trend toward political partisanship in recent years has disturbed the ranks of front-line FBI agents like O’Boyle, Friend, and [George] Hill. In the words of one whistleblower, the current state of the FBI is “cancerous” as the Bureau has “let itself become enveloped in this politicization and weaponization.” This testimony supplements earlier disclosures from whistleblowers, highlighted in the Committee’s November 2022 report, in which whistleblowers described the FBI’s Washington leadership as “rotted at its core” and having a “systemic culture of unaccountability.”
This only underscores the observations about the likelihood of unpunished violations of citizens’ rights expressed above by Judge Bork and Mark Wauck. The Congress has ceded too much power to the Agency, repeated legal violations go unpunished, and the violations only become more egregious as a result.
The Durham Report
The Durham Report is a damning indictment of the Mueller report which preceded it. It “makes clear that the collusion probe failed to investigate how the collusion probe began as a dirty trick by the Clinton campaign and how the FBI went along for the ride.”
“The report includes evidence that those engaged in the FBI’s initial Crossfire Hurricane probe and Democratic attorneys used their positions on the Mueller investigating team to cover up the FBI mess… Mueller hired for his team FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI analyst Brian Auten, and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, the very people who were main figures in the Crossfire fiasco.”
The Wall Street Journal uses as an example the fact that the Mueller team never were allowed to interview Democrat Charles Dolan, reportedly a source for the Steele dossier, an unfounded document that supposedly was a predicate for the investigation of “collusion.” Durham found that the Russians may have compromised Steele’s sources even before he began to write and peddle to Democratic press lackeys the preposterous dossier.
That was not all: Durham found that the FBI knowingly relied on Igor Danchenko. Danchenko had been undercover as a possible Russian spy yet he was hired to investigate whether Trump colluded with Russia. The notion that Mueller was compromised, drunk, or demented when he headed this investigation is hard to dismiss.
No Consequences
Professor Jonathan Turley likens the Durham findings to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express: They all did it -- “the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the media… It was a plot that required everyone to take a hand in derailing a duly elected president and effectively shutting down his administration for three years of investigations and prosecutions. In this conspiracy there were dozens of key participants in the campaign, the government, and the media.”
Durham’s operation, however, was not without its flaws. Hired as a prosecutor, he prosecuted only one member of the cabal. He never even subpoenaed key figures like Comey, McCabe, and Strzok. (I suspect because he knows the courts and jurors in the District of Columbia operate as another branch of the Democratic party -- recall that the Ken Starr team announced they believed Hillary Clinton had committed perjury but declined to indict her because they believed no D.C. jury would convict her.) Former attorney general William Barr praised the report, saying that Durham was not charged to prosecute the wrongdoers, only to investigate and find the truth, which he did.
Not only were the cabalists not prosecuted, they’ve grown rich thanks to their roles in this outrage from book deals, academic slots, and back pay from the government.
The 8th Amendment comes out in favor of Trump
On February 16, 2024, a judge in New York State imposed fines totaling just over $360 million on former president Donald J. Trump, The Trump Organization, and several related Trump companies and trusts in the civil case brought by the New York attorney general. President Trump’s sons Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump were fined just over $4 million each. The court imposed additional sanctions, including injunctions against former president Trump; Donald Trump, Jr.; and Eric Trump from serving as officers or directors in New York corporations for specified numbers of years, among other sanctions.
The media reporting on the court’s decision has been massive since the decision was rendered. However, little or no reporting focused on the constitutionality of the fines under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. President Trump and his co-defendants all have substantial 8th Amendment “excessive fine” challenges to raise. In fact, a review of the facts and applicable law reveal that this decision is simply more election interference.
Background about the Case
The fines stem from a civil suit filed by New York attorney general Letitia James in 2022, claiming that former president Trump and his companies used falsely inflated asset valuations and misleading financial statements in dealings with lenders. The suit alleges various different claims, chief among them the New York State Executive Law Section 63(12) “fraudulent or illegal acts” claims.
Importantly, the Trump case involved no victims. The court could not order any lender to be paid back or made whole, because the lenders not only were paid back, but all made money on the loans made to Trump. Since the case did not present any victims, the New York judge ordered what is known as disgorgement — that is, to give up “profits.” In this case, the court relied on expert testimony submitted by the State of New York to claim that the Trumps’ “profits” were lower interest rates on various loans.
The court ordered Trump and his companies to cough up $168 million on supposedly “ill-gotten interest savings” on multiple loans involving several different commercial properties. On this issue, the court simply fails to acknowledge the fact that “recourse” loans, like those involved in the Trump case, entitle the borrower to lower interest rates. A good discussion of the court’s error in this regard may be found here.
The court also fined former president Trump over $126,000,000 based on his profit from the sale of the “Old Post Office” in Washington, D.C. Trump purchased the Old Post Office in 2012, and, after remodeling it and turning it into a hotel, the Trump Organization sold its interest in it in 2022 for $375 million. Again, the court ordered “disgorgement” of the profits, finding that the original $170-million loan obtained by the Trump Organization to finance the purchase and renovation of the property was obtained using false financial statements.
Finally, the court ordered “disgorgement” of some $60 million in profits obtained by Trump on the assignment or sale of a contract on a public golf course in the Bronx called Ferry Point for the same reasons.
The Eighth Amendment Problem
The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.”
The New York court’s ruling ordering the Trumps to pay over $360 million under New York State law likely violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on “excessive fines.”
First, in 2019, The United States Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibition on “excessive fines” applies to states, not just to actions by the federal government. Thus, New York State fines are subject to the Eighth Amendment. Next, while the fines imposed by the New York Court in the Trump case are characterized as “disgorgement,” the United States Supreme Court and federal appellate decisions confirm that “disgorgements” are penalties or fines for purposes of federal law. Thus, the New York Court’s “disgorgement” penalties are subject to an “excessive fine” challenge under the Eighth Amendment.
The United States Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Bajakajian adopted the standard of “gross disproportionality” in excessive fines determinations. If the amount of the fine or forfeiture is “grossly disproportional to the gravity of the defendant’s offense, it is unconstitutional.” Importantly, an excessive fines challenge is reviewed de novo by the reviewing court. This means the higher court reviews this question without any deference to the lower court’s decision and is free to substitute its judgment for that of the lower court.
As the United States Supreme Court’s decisions instruct, the focus of the “grossly disproportional” inquiry is on the following factors:
(1) the degree of the defendant’s reprehensibility or culpability
(2) the relationship between the penalty and the harm to the victim caused by the defendant’s actions
(3) the sanctions imposed in other cases for comparable misconduct
Applying these factors to the New York court’s decision reveals that the fines are clearly excessive. There are no victims in the Trump case. No one was harmed. Each and every financial institution involved was fully repaid and made money on its loans. Further, a review of case law in New York demonstrates that there simply are no cases ordering a defendant to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in disgorgement without any victim being deprived of anything. Finally, just how “reprehensible” is it to obtain loans and credit facilities and then pay the lenders back, in full, on time, in compliance with the agreement? The answer is, not very.
Once again, a court in New York issued yet another political decision masquerading as justice. The fines imposed by this New York court on former President Trump and his sons and businesses are grossly and unconstitutionally excessive. While President Trump and his co-defendants undoubtedly have many defenses to the claims to raise on appeal, chief among them should be a constitutional challenge to these grossly excessive fines.
Daniel R. Street is an attorney with over 25 years of litigation experience. He is the author of the Fake News Exposed about Trump book series. Links to his free Substack and to his books, social media, and more may be found at his website, danielrstreet.com.
Image via Raw Pixel.
Watch — Bishop Joseph Strickland: Catholics Were Targeted by FBI Because They Are Pro-Life
The FBI’s targeting of Catholics sounds “much more like Nazi Germany or communist Russia than the United States,” Bishop Joseph Strickland said.
Breitbart News’s Matthew Perdie interviewed Strickland on Thursday at CPAC 2024 in National Harbor, Maryland, about the FBI’s investigation into traditional Catholic churches.
As Breitbart News reported, a leaked memo last year from the FBI’s Richmond office stated that violent extremists’ “interest” in “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology was growing and that it therefore presented an opportunity for the FBI to engage with certain churches in an attempt to goad the churches’ leadership into serving as FBI “tripwires,” who would operate like unofficial informants to the FBI. House Republicans have since discovered that multiple field offices appeared to be involved in crafting the memo and that the FBI allegedly interviewed a priest and a church choir director.
Perdie asked Strickland — a fierce Pope Francis critic who has been “relieved” by the Vatican for “undermining the faith” — why he thinks the FBI decided to investigate Catholic Latin mass goers.
“Well, I really don’t claim to have the answer for why they would do this, but I do see it as a sad symptom of a society that sounds too much more like Nazi Germany or communist Russia than the United States,” Strickland said.
Phil Thiltrickett, an opponent of an abortion, holds a rosary as he prays outside a Planned Parenthood Clinic. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, file)
“Freedom of speech, freedom of religion — all of those freedom issues seem to be bound up in this … I think the FBI has been weaponized to go after people who simply believe deeply in the message of Jesus Christ and believe in the truth that He’s revealed,” he continued. “And sadly, in the nation and really in the world, even in the Catholic Church, we’re having a lot of people not so sure about this truth that God has revealed through his Son Jesus Christ.”
Strickland added that the FBI’s actions are a “symptom” of a “nation that is losing its way.”
“She can always come back, but we’ve got to listen to the truth that God has revealed to us and come back to those foundation stones and not use government agencies to attack people for living the truth,” he said. “If we’re afraid of the truth, then we’ve got more to fear than any individual who may be standing for that truth.”
Perdie also asked Strickland if he thinks the FBI targeted traditional Catholics, in part, because of their more conservative pro-life and pro-family values.
“Oh, absolutely,” Strickland replied.
“The Catholic Church is, and should be, totally opposed to this woke agenda … The Catholic Church should reject [the woke agenda] because it’s a rejection of God. It’s a rejection of who we are: created in the image and likeness of God,” he said.
Strickland added that tyrannical leaders are “threatened by those who stand for the truth and won’t budge.”
“So their mission is to try to get rid of those who stand for the truth,” he said. “It won’t be accomplished any more than in Nazi Germany. They tried to eliminate [people] and have one pristine Aryan race. Did it work? No, because it was based on false ideals of a broken humanity.”
“The same thing with communism — any of these ideologies that ignore God,” he continued.
Strickland concluded by encouraging Americans to stand for the truth in a sea of lies.
“I think it’s natural that those standing for that truth are going to be seen as a threat to this agenda,” he said. “Just as we look to Nazi Germany or to the communist state of Stalin: how many people died because they said no to those despotic regimes? The same thing is going to happen here, but we have to speak against the false messages — no matter how many hearts and minds the false message captures.”
