Chinese Immigrant and CEO of Konnech, an Election Software Company, was Arrested

Do you think the J6 Committee is even aware of this or will include it in hearings or reports? As the case moves on, do you think there is more to the investigation?

RedState: As we reported on October 4, Eugene Yu, a Chinese immigrant and CEO of Konnech, an election software company, was arrested “as part of an investigation into the possible theft of personal identifying information of [Los Angeles County election] workers,” which officials believed “was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China.”

The other shocking part of the story was that LA County District Attorney George Gascon, who’s not known as being tough on crime, announced the arrest and extradition and that investigators from his office had been working on the case.

One of Konnech’s software offerings is a program called PollChief, which schedules election workers and assists elections officials with supply and logistics procedures. In 2019 LA County entered into a contract with Konnech, and a sole-source contract worth more than $2 million was finalized in 2020. As part of the contract, Konnech was to abide by state and federal law, and to various information security procedures, which an LA County District Attorney’s office investigator described in a complaint supporting the request for a warrant for Yu’s arrest:

  • “[C]ontractor shall screen and conduct background checks on all Contractor personnel contacting County’s Confidential Information, including Personally Identifiable Information, for potential security risks and require all employees and contractors to sign an appropriate written confidentiality non-disclosure agreement.
  • Personally Identifiable Information, and County’s Confidential Information: (i) may only be made available and accessible to those parties explicitly authorized under the Contract or otherwise expressly approved by County in writing.
  • Only Contractor’s staff who are based in the United States and are citizens or lawful permanent residents of the United States shall have access to any County data, including personally identifiable information, hosted in County’s instance of the System Software.

This complaint, which is dated October 13, 2022, contains additional information about what investigators have found – information that does not lead to any type of confidence in the security of our election information.

Despite Eugene Yu’s insistence in a verified court pleading that “all of Konnech’s U.S. customer data is secured and stored exclusively on protected computers located within the United States,” the Los Angeles County DA’s office found that:

“On or about October 10, 2019, through October 4, 2022, Eugene Yu and other employees at Konnech, Inc. were providing these services to Los Angeles County using third-party contractors based in China.

“…Konnech employees known and unknown sent personal identifying information of Los Angeles County election workers to third-party software developers who assisted with creating and fixing Konnech’s internal ‘PollChief’ software.”

So, the personal identifying information of US election workers was intentionally sent not just out of the country, but to China. And to third-party contractors, which is potentially in complete violation of the state’s anti-independent contracting AB5 law.

Criminal Complaint

One Pill Can Kill

Those dying from Fentanyl are not drug addicts, rather they are dying because they think they may be taking regular over the counter medication or simply eating candy. They are being poisoned. This White House has proven it does not care but the Drug Enforcement Agency DOES care.

Do you ever hear from the FBI that reports from the Southern border? How about U.S. Southern Command? How about Space Command? Yes, Space Command….

“We can use our space detection capabilities, optical cameras,” Croft told NBC 6. “We can track things within a couple of hours and see things moving.”

That includes being able to see what’s happening in places like Colombia and Venezuela, where intelligence experts fear drug traffickers and terrorist groups will join forces.

Around the clock, space and intelligence experts are sharing what they find.

Inside a room at Southern Command, there is a big screen that shows where the satellites are located. There is also a host of workstations where space experts can explain what they are seeing to representatives from the military and federal agencies.

“Space Command can provide a perspective to be able to identify and find some of these folks, the ways that they communicate, the ways they move,” said Lt. Col. Bobby Schmitt, who is with the U.S. Space Force and is assigned to coordinate what happens in orbit with Croft’s team. “Space Command provides the ability to see down and find these folks.” More here.

DEA Announces Results of Enforcement Surge to Reduce the Fentanyl Supply Across the United States

As part of the One Pill Can Kill initiative, the DEA and its law enforcement partners seized more than 10.2 million fentanyl pills and approximately 980 pounds of fentanyl powder during the period of May 23 through Sept. 8, 2022. The amount of fentanyl taken off the streets during this surge is equivalent to more than 36 million lethal doses removed from the illegal drug supply. Additionally, 338 weapons were seized, including rifles, shotguns, pistols, and hand grenades.

Read the details here.

Every adult across the country should be talking about this and every school regardless of age should be taking all precautions.

Rainbow fentanyl close up photo

As part of the One Pill Can Kill initiative, the DEA and its law enforcement partners seized more than 10.2 million fentanyl pills and approximately 980 pounds of fentanyl powder during the period of May 23 through Sept. 8, 2022. The amount of fentanyl taken off the streets during this surge is equivalent to more than 36 million lethal doses removed from the illegal drug supply. Additionally, 338 weapons were seized, including rifles, shotguns, pistols, and hand grenades.

Of the 390 cases investigated during this period, 51 cases are linked to overdose poisonings and 35 cases link directly to one or both of the primary Mexican cartels responsible for the majority of fentanyl in the United States – the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). In addition, 129 investigations are linked to social media platforms, including Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and TikTok. These results build upon the One Pill Can Kill Phase II

results announced by DEA Administrator Anne Milgram in December 2021.

“Across the country, fentanyl is devastating families and communities, and we know that violent, criminal drug cartels bear responsibility for this crisis,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “The Justice Department, including the extraordinary professionals of the DEA, is working to disrupt and dismantle the operations of these cartels, remove deadly fentanyl from our communities, and save Americans’ lives.”

“For the past year, confronting the fentanyl crisis has been the top priority for DEA. The most urgent threat to our communities, our kids, and our families are the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG who are mass producing and supplying the fentanyl that is poisoning and killing Americans,” said DEA Administrator Anne Milgram. “The Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG are ruthless, criminal organizations that use deception and treachery to drive addiction with complete disregard for human life. To save American lives, the DEA is relentlessly focused on defeating the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG by degrading their operations to make it impossible for them to do business.”

Fentanyl remains the deadliest drug threat facing this nation. In 2021, a record number of Americans – 107,622 – died from a drug poisoning or overdose. Sixty-six percent of those deaths can be attributed to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

Drug traffickers have expanded their inventory to sell fentanyl in a variety of bright colors, shapes, and sizes

. Rainbow fentanyl was first reported to DEA in February 2022, and it has now been seized in 21 states.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin. Just two milligrams of fentanyl, or the amount that could fit on the tip of a pencil, is considered a potentially lethal dose.

As part of DEA’s ongoing efforts to educate the public and encourage parents and caregivers to talk to teens and young adults about the dangers of fake pills and illicit drugs, DEA has also created a new resource, “What Every Parent and Caregiver Needs to Know About Fake Pills.”

In September 2021, DEA launched the One Pill Can Kill enforcement effort and public awareness campaign to combat the fake pill threat and educate the public about the dangers of fentanyl pills being disguised and sold as prescription medications, despite these pills not containing any of the actual medications advertised. The only safe medications are ones prescribed by a trusted medical professional and dispensed by a licensed pharmacist. All other pills are unsafe and potentially deadly.

Additional resources for parents and the community can be found on DEA’s Fentanyl Awareness page.

 

Procedures for Continuity in Government due to Nuclear Armageddon

It remains unclear whether President Biden revealed information that may have been part of a classified White House briefing when he spoke of nuclear Armageddon at a fundraising event in New York several days ago. However, to even mention the words should spin up lots of meetings at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, much less discussions with other world leaders. Even more meaningful would be to be having rehearsals and conversations with all associated American military across the world to ensure readiness and procedures. Instead, we have a White House and president that is traveling talking about mid-term elections, abortion law, climate change and eating ice cream.

But read on….

Site R - Raven Rock Command Center Raven Rock

The following essay is an adapted excerpt from William Doyle’s new book, Titan of the Senate: Orrin Hatch and the Once and Future Golden Age of Bipartisanship, published by Center Street Books.

Newsweek: Suddenly, in the wake of Russian threats to use tactical nuclear weapons, the world faces the possibility of a nuclear war that President Biden has alarmingly but accurately said threatens Armageddon. Tensions have not been this high since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

It is worth remembering that when we talk about nuclear war, we are talking about the violent deaths of millions—perhaps billions—of people, and possibly the end of most life on the planet. President Dwight Eisenhower once said that if a nuclear war happens, “there just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the street.”

Experts have long feared that a single nuclear detonation, even a small one, would instantly trigger an irreversible chain reaction leading to the widespread firing of nuclear weapons. As Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev put it in 1978, “The first time one of those things is fired in anger, everything is lost. The warring nations would never be able to put things back together.”

The precise choreography of launching nuclear weapons is veiled in secrecy, but speculative glimpses can be obtained through open-source accounts and interviews with nuclear experts. If an American president learns of an imminent nuclear attack, he or she would turn to the nearby military officer who carries a bulging briefcase nicknamed the “nuclear football,” the most powerful instrument of mass murder that humankind has ever created. It contains the codes and communications equipment that would enable the president to authorize the launch of nuclear weapons from submarines, land-based missile silos, cruise missiles, aircraft and other platforms.

In a nuclear crisis, the president can be flown by helicopter to the “backup Pentagon,” known as Raven Rock, or Site R, a small-city-size complex carved deep inside a mountain near Blue Ridge Summit on the Pennsylvania-Maryland state line and about seven miles north of the presidential retreat at Camp David.

Raven Rock is believed to serve as a fully equipped alternative to the Pentagon “war room,” or National Military Command Center, and it is believed to have been used by Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Author James Bamford described Raven Rock as “a secret world of five buildings, each three-stories tall, computer-filled caverns, and a subterranean water reservoir,” all underground and accessible by a helipad and a giant tunnel. According to author Garrett Graff, the site has “power stations, underground water reservoirs, a small chapel, clusters of three-story buildings set within vast caverns, and enough beds to accommodate two thousand high-ranking officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council.” Graff added, “You can add to that list police and fire departments, a cafeteria, and everything else you would find in a normal small city.”

Through the football and other available communications tools, the president would be linked by voice and video to the Department of Defense’s National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, known as the “war room,” and to Strategic Command headquarters, or STRATCOM, at Offutt Air Force Base south of Omaha, Nebraska, which commands the nation’s arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons. If the secretary of defense, national security adviser, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could be reached, they and other high military officials would be patched into the call, but the decision to launch nuclear weapons would be the president’s alone, presumably in consultation with one or more of top military leaders. According to the late Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman missile launch control officer and nuclear weapons historian at Princeton University, if missiles were confirmed to be on their way toward the United States, the president could have “as little as six minutes” to decide on a course of action, including ordering the launch of hundreds of long-range strategic nuclear warheads that are immediately available to fire.

If the president decides to order a nuclear launch, he and his military aide would quickly review the options listed in a briefing book inside the football. The American version of the football is not believed to contain a “red button” or to consist primarily of elaborate computer-style gear—unlike Russian president Vladimir Putin‘s nuclear football, the Cheget, which is believed to consist mainly of a high-tech laptop device—but communications equipment and simplified charts illustrating the various options and targets to select from the latest U.S. nuclear war plan.

The military aide would reach into the football and produce a small object resembling a credit card, nicknamed the “Biscuit,” upon which is written the “Gold Code,” a sequence of alphanumeric symbols that the president would read aloud to authenticate his identity as commander-in-chief. This would be the final step to launch nuclear weapons, making the Biscuit the most dangerous object on the planet. But at least two American presidents have apparently managed to lose track of theirs. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Gold Codes were kept on a Biscuit card that the chief executive usually carried on his own person rather than inside the football, Jimmy Carter is believed to have misplaced his Biscuit when his suit was sent to the dry cleaners. In 1981, Ronald Reagan’s copy was sealed away for five days by the FBI after George Washington University Hospital emergency room staff cut off Reagan’s thousand-dollar business suit and put the card in a medical bag in the wake of his attempted assassination.

President Bill Clinton kept his Biscuit and his credit cards wrapped up with a rubber band, but, incredibly, he managed to lose it for a substantial length of time, according to a top military official. “The codes were actually missing for months,” wrote General Hugh Shelton, Clinton’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001. “That’s a big deal—a gargantuan deal.”

Within three or four minutes of the president’s order, missiles would shoot out of their silos in the American Midwest, then about 10 minutes later the submarines would start firing missiles out of their tubes one at a time every 15 seconds. The ICBMs would fly high above the earth’s atmosphere and travel at speeds of 14,000 mph, descending on targets in, for example, Russia, China, or North Korea, in about 25 minutes. The submarine-launched missiles, fired from waters closer to their aim points, could have flight times of as little as 12 minutes. None of the missiles could be recalled. Given the poor performance of the Russian military in Ukraine, there is every reason to expect that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s missiles could misfire, malfunction, fly off course and strike unintended targets.

Not that it would matter much. If even a portion of the alert U.S. and Russian strategic missile forces is fired, large parts of the earth would plunge quickly into hell. Untold millions of people would be smashed, blasted, crushed, vaporized, and burned to death. The initial blasts would create radiation-filled shock waves of outward pressure that would topple skyscrapers, shred people with flying glass and debris, and hurl them across cities. Electromagnetic pulses from air bursts would decapitate the nervous systems of the world’s economy by blowing out fiber-optic lines, power grids, cell phones and electrical circuits, banking systems, and air traffic control networks.

The fireballs would transform into mushroom clouds of condensed water and debris that would rise high into the stratosphere, expand to 50-mile diameters, and shower the earth with radioactive fallout for decades to come. By the end of the first day, hospitals would be overwhelmed, mass fires would rage, and cities and suburbs would be consumed with riots, chaos, and attempted mass migrations. Nations would be in full-scale collapse, and hundreds of millions of people would be dead inside of a week.

This is what we are talking about when we talk about nuclear war.

And this is why total nuclear disarmament must be the most urgent priority of every government on Earth.

William Doyle is a New York Times bestselling, award-winning author and TV producer. His books include An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962 (Doubleday, 2002); Navy SEALs: Their Untold Story (co-authored with former U.S. Navy SEAL Dick Couch, HarperCollins, 2014); PT 109: An American Epic of War, Survival and the Destiny of John F. Kennedy (HarperCollins, 2015) Let the Children Play (co-authored with Pasi Sahlberg, Oxford University Press, 2019) and many others.

The United States Submission to China

Scott Pelly of 60 Minutes aired an interview with President Biden and National Review noted this in part:

PELLEY: It’s the highest inflation rate, Mr. President, in 40 years.

BIDEN: I got that. But guess what we are. We’re in a position where for the last several months it hasn’t spiked. It has just barely, it’s been basically even, and in the meantime, we’ve created all these jobs, and prices have gone up, but they’ve been down for energy. The fact is that we’ve created 10 million new jobs, we’re in, since we came to office, we’re in a situation where we, the unemployment rate is up at 3.7 percent, one of the lowest in history, we’re in a situation where manufacturing is coming back to the United States in a big way, and look down the road, we have massive investments being made in computer chips and employment, so I, look, this is a process, this is a process.

Inflation is the top political concern for voters right now, and according to a recent poll, 59 percent of voters who name inflation as their top concern plan to vote Republican in November. “This is a process” is not likely to persuade them out of that choice.

***

Is it a process to allow China to have access to limitless investment in the United States in the form of real estate, technology, education and social media to list a few? Seems so –>

***

What's Pushing China's Tech Sector So Far Ahead? - Knowledge at Wharton citation

Wharton summarizes it much the same way. In part:

Knowledge at Wharton: How has the tech sector in China been able to develop so quickly?

Fannin: Some of it has to do with venture capital investment. And some of that venture capital investment has come from Sand Hill Road [Silicon Valley], funded by our pension funds, our universities, our endowments, our family offices. But I also think a lot of it has to do with China’s own entrepreneurial culture. It’s innovating very fast. It’s moving very swiftly. They are working nonstop. China’s entrepreneurs and the tech sector are just very ambitious. It’s unstoppable.

Knowledge at Wharton: “Social” seems to be a key word when talking about the Chinese economy. Are e-commerce and social media playing big roles in China’s becoming such an influential global player?

Fannin: Social commerce is all about online shopping and sharing and prizes and games. It’s a business model that we really don’t have in the U.S. Social commerce has come on very strong. There is a [group-buying platform] called Pinduoduo, which went public in New York last year and has gone on to become one of these tech giants in just three years’ time. They are already China’s second-largest e-commerce player, and they’ve developed this whole new business model around social commerce.

WSJ: Chinese investment in U.S. venture-capital funds is flowing, demonstrating that economic ties between Silicon Valley and China remain deep despite political and national security risks, according to investors, government officials and a new report.

Chinese investment is on pace to reach about $880 million this year, the second-highest level in at least a dozen years, according to the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. The report, a novel effort to quantify the opaque flow of money from China to U.S. venture-capital firms, shows Chinese government entities, funds, private individuals and corporations have invested at least $4 billion into U.S. venture firms since 2010, with at least another $3.5 billion going to U.S. private-equity firms.

Silicon Valley investors and national security analysts say Chinese capital continues to back U.S. venture-capital firms large and small, sometimes accounting for a fraction of a venture fund and at times much more. U.S. government officials say their primary concerns have less to do with the amount invested, but are more about the investors’ personal and business relationships in Beijing, ability to access technical information and influence at the venture-capital firm.

The issue, said government officials, is that the Chinese can use their roles as investors to gain know-how for launching a startup or scaling a technology company. Such insights can inform how Beijing funds and develops technology in areas strategically important to the U.S., such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence, according to the think tank report.

Chinese capital is found in large global funds Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, and smaller Silicon Valley firms including Playground Global, GSR Ventures, Foothill Ventures and 11.2 Capital, according to the report and investors at those firms.

“I think the Chinese are as aggressive as ever” in targeting U.S. startups, said Michael Brown, outgoing director of the Defense Department’s Silicon Valley Defense Innovation Unit and author of a 2017 report that drew national attention to the role of Chinese capital in U.S. startups.

Foothill Ventures said Chinese investors contributed 1.59% of its current assets under management, and GSR Ventures said less than 5% of its U.S. fund came from China. Chinese investors are contributors to Lightspeed’s China fund only, and Sequoia’s China unit operates independently, spokeswomen for the firms said. The other firms declined to comment.

The think tank report’s findings highlight an area of resilience in the U.S.-China relationship as the two countries decouple their economies and U.S. policies aim to limit Chinese investment in U.S. technology sectors. According to the report, Chinese investment this year is set to be around nine times greater than a decade ago and come in below only 2020, when more than $1.2 billion flowed to American venture-capital funds.

Tracking Chinese investment in the U.S. is challenging because the limited partners who fund venture-capital firms often don’t make public disclosures, sometimes use labyrinthine structures to shroud investments and frequently ask firms in which they have invested to keep their identities secret. The report’s authors said the dollar figures undercount the actual total.

“Limited partner capital flows are grossly underestimated for their strategic value and effect,” said Nathan Picarsic, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who co-wrote the report, called “The Weaponization of Capital,” along with his colleague Emily de La Bruyère. “Their influence shapes how the venture capitalist thinks, because the limited partners are the venture capitalist’s customers.”

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies is a Washington-based nonprofit with conservative leanings; its work advocates an aggressive U.S. response to challenges posed by China.

“China is always opposed to the U.S. generalizing the concept of national security and strengthening unreasonable investment review,” said Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington. He said the U.S. has used national security arguments to “put obstacles in the way of normal investment.”

nvolvement by Chinese investors varies. Many are seeking a financial return and don’t have or want access to nonpublic information about individual startups, venture investors said. Other limited partners request introductions to startup founders or presentations from them, and get quarterly updates on startups’ progress and insights into technology sector trends, they said.

In a 2020 lawsuit, former partners at Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Hone Capital allege that the firm’s Chinese investor, China Science and Merchants Investment Management Group Co., Ltd., directed them to bring around 20 startups each quarter to China to pursue partnerships, joint ventures and additional investment. The lawsuit, which is ongoing, alleges the demands were problematic because of “legal issues regarding sharing sensitive technology with China.”

“They leveraged the system in the U.S. to gain access to more than 300 companies,” said Purvi Gandhi, a former Hone Capital partner.

The Border Czar is Cass Sunstein NOT Kamala

Stop blaming Kamala, blame Biden himself. The president has filled his administration with militants and radicals. There is no denial. It was 14 years ago that Glenn Beck did they work and declared on this point that Cass Sunstein was the most dangerous man in government.

“There is a reason that I have called Cass Sunstein the most dangerous man in America,” Glenn said on radio this morning.

ProgressivesToday.com, the website co-founded by Kyle Olsen, the co-author of Glenn’s latest book Conform: Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education, was the first to draw attention to the spooky article from the Nudge author.

Sunstein begins the article wondering what would happen if a government began a program with the explicit goal of indoctrination students:

Suppose that an authoritarian government decides to embark on a program of curricular reform, with the explicit goal of indoctrinating the nation’s high school students. Suppose that it wants to change the curriculum to teach students that their government is good and trustworthy, that their system is democratic and committed to the rule of law, and that free markets are a big problem.

Will such a government succeed? Or will high school students simply roll their eyes?

Questions of this kind have long been debated, but without the benefit of reliable evidence. New research, from Davide Cantoni of the University of Munich and several co-authors, shows that recent curricular reforms in China, explicitly designed to transform students’ political views, have mostly worked. The findings offer remarkable evidence about the potential influence of the high school curriculum on what students end up thinking — and they give us some important insights into contemporary China as well.

He goes on to explain that the indoctrination program began in 2001 when the country made “significant changes in the textbooks used by students in grades 10, 11 and 12.” Ultimately, Sunstein questions whether such a program could produce similar outcomes in a non-authoritarian country.

At the time, Sunstein was the regulatory czar…now….today he is at DHS and in charge of destroying the sovereignty of the United States as the real border czar. Obviously more dangerous today for reasons too long to list but certainly Biden has accepted the Sunstein doctrine to collapse control of immigration.

It was in 2021 that the following was published by Bloomberg:

Harvard’s Sunstein Joins Biden’s DHS to Shape Immigration Rules

  • Progressive groups had raised concern about Sunstein’s record
  • His wife is Biden nominee for international development agency

In part:

Former Obama administration official Cass Sunstein on Monday joined the Department of Homeland Security, where President Joe Biden is moving rapidly to roll back Donald Trump’s immigration policy priorities.

Sunstein is a senior counselor who will be responsible for making sure that the rules put forward by the department and its agencies are based on evidence and consistent with the law, an administration official said.

In 2018, Sunstein received the Holberg Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities, from Norway’s government. He also worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Carter and Reagan administrations.

Sunstein’s wife, Samantha Power, is Biden’s nominee for administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Power’s financial disclosures showed Sunstein earning consulting fees from Apple Inc. and Global Asset Capital LLC, as well as advisory fees and stock options from Humu Inc. He also reported royalties from dozens of book publications. More here.

***

This past January, Bloomberg also reported:

The impasse over President Joe Biden’s immigration wish list on Capitol Hill has increased pressure on a Department of Homeland Security official working to overhaul the system through regulation.

The administration last year tapped Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein to advise on DHS regulations. The legal scholar is best known for his role as the Obama White House’s rulemaking czar and his writings on behavioral economics and regulation — not the finer points of homeland security.

Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wanted someone equipped for the regulatory challenges the agency faces on immigration, as well as disaster response, aviation security, and other DHS matters, Sunstein said in an interview.

“The first obligation is to do it right,” he said.

The immigration proposals in the works at DHS are critical to meeting at least part of Biden’s ambitious campaign pledge to create a path to citizenship for millions, end long-term detention, and revamp the legal immigration system. The congressional stalemate has made DHS-led efforts more urgent.

DHS first unwound several of former President Donald Trump’s policies, from restricting entry to the U.S. and expanding enforcement. Next, the agency is focused on reducing backlogs in the asylum system and reinforcing protections for immigrants brought to the U.S. as children without authorization.

Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
Cass Sunstein speaks at an event at AOL Studios on May 31, 2016, in New York City.

Sunstein is shepherding those efforts. Officially, he is senior counselor to the secretary and co-chair of the agency’s climate change action group. Unofficially, he’s the wonk tasked with restoring order in a department battered by public criticism and leadership gaps during the Trump administration.

“I sensed that there was a real appetite for, let’s say, good order,” Sunstein said of the DHS regulatory team’s attitude when he joined the agency almost a year ago.

Sunstein is working on regulations and internal processes across the department’s portfolio, but immigration has taken center stage.

The agency is attempting to cement protections in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which launched via an Obama-era memorandum and has never been reinforced in an official rulemaking. The proposed rule already faces headwinds after a federal court questioned the department’s authority to offer such status.

Another proposal would revamp the asylum process for border crossers, letting U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers adjudicate claims instead of funneling them to backlogged immigration courts.

The approach would streamline the process “so that people who don’t deserve asylum can get that answer in short order and they won’t live in Dante’s purgatory,” Sunstein said. “People who deserve asylum will get that answer in shorter order,” he added.

DHS is also working on a rule that would clarify who’s eligible for asylum. The department will likely release a draft this year, Sunstein said.

“Neither of these is on the backburner,” he said of the asylum measures. The Biden administration on Thursday finalized an increase in visas for temporary nonagricultural workers.

“With Congress not making any major changes in the immigration space right now, regulations are often the best way to make lasting change in the way the laws are interpreted within the department,” American Immigration Council policy counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said.

Bolstering Rules

At the same time, Republicans have taken up border security as a cudgel against Democrats in the lead-up to the midterm elections, and GOP-led states are taking the fight to federal courts — with frequent success so far.

That gives Sunstein the critical job of anticipating possible critiques and making sure the agency’s actions can withstand them. His placement in DHS shows the Biden administration recognizes the legal hazards that lie ahead, former agency official Theresa Cardinal Brown said.

Sunstein “knows the process probably better than just about anybody else you could find right now,” said Brown, now managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “He literally has written books on this.” Read more here.

I'd consider a White House job offer in a heartbeat' - Dublin-born former  advisor to Barack Obama - Independent.ie source and adjacent article here

At the very least, czars should be defunded and let the FOIA requests begin.