Category Archives: Media corruption

MAGA Supporters are the Hunted per the FBI

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In full disclosure, I have followed William Arkin’s work for many years and he has been on my radio show twice, although not recently. But, he did an investigation on domestic violence tapping information from several agencies especially the FBI….MAGA supporters are the hunted.

Perhaps after you read through this summary, you will have some of the same questions I do which include:

  1. why nothing about ANTIFA?
  2. why nothing about BLM?
  3. who exactly does not want to make America great again>
  4. When local, state and the Federal government makes regulations or policy that infringes on our protected liberties, should there be anger, which of course is to say that should never lead to any kind of violence?
  5. I have also watched countless hearings held both in the House and Senate and the Left and President Biden find a way to shame or to expand the pervasive threat of MAGA extremists and just recently Congressman Jamal Bowman went to far as to use Nazi in the description.
  6. Anything about the violence of those weird tree people protesting the police training center in the Atlanta suburb? nah
  7. Anything about the threats to the pro-life centers or of the Supreme Court Justices protests?
  8. why no mention of the climate change activists that block public spaces and roads so people cannot get to work or to a hospital?

But read on…your thoughts and comments are invited.

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Newsweek:

The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump‘s army of MAGA followers.

The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations—even though the vast majority of its current “anti-government” investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.

“The FBI is in an almost impossible position,” says a current FBI official, who requested anonymity to discuss highly sensitive internal matters. The official said that the FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism and any repeat of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the Bureau must also preserve the Constitutional right of all Americans to campaign, speak freely and protest the government. By focusing on former president Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters, the official said, the Bureau runs the risk of provoking the very anti-government activists that the terrorism agencies hope to counter.

“Especially at a time when the White House is facing Congressional Republican opposition claiming that the Biden administration has ‘weaponized’ the Bureau against the right wing, it has to tread very carefully,” says the official.

Newsweek spoke to over a dozen current or former government officials who specialize in terrorism in a three-month investigation to understand the current domestic-security landscape and to evaluate what President Joe Biden‘s administration is doing about what it calls domestic terrorism. Most requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly, were reluctant to stray into partisan politics or feared the repercussions of speaking frankly.

Newsweek has also reviewed secret FBI and Department of Homeland Security data that track incidents, threats, investigations and cases to try to build a better picture. While experts agree that the current partisan environment is charged and uniquely dangerous (with the threat not only of violence but, in the most extreme scenarios, possibly civil war), many also question whether “terrorism” is the most effective way to describe the problem, or that the methods of counterterrorism developed over the past decade in response to Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups constitute the most fruitful way to craft domestic solutions.

“The current political environment is not something that the FBI is necessarily responsible for, nor should it be,” says Brian Michael Jenkins, one of the world’s leading terrorism experts and senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation.

In a statement to Newsweek, the FBI said: “The threat posed by domestic violent extremists is persistent, evolving, and deadly. The FBI’s goal is to detect and stop terrorist attacks, and our focus is on potential criminal violations, violence and threats of violence. Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism is one category of domestic terrorism, as well as one of the FBI’s top threat priorities.” The FBI further said, “We are committed to protecting the safety and constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity, including a person’s political beliefs or affiliations.”

The White House declined to comment. The Trump campaign was given an opportunity to comment but did not do so.

What the FBI Data Shows

From the president down, the Biden administration has presented Trump and MAGA as an existential threat to American democracy and talked up the risk of domestic terrorism and violence associated with the 2024 election campaign.

“Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country,” President Biden tweeted last September, the first time that he explicitly singled out the former president. “MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections but elections being held now and into the future,” Biden said.

Biden’s Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall said: “The use of violence to pursue political ends is a profound threat to our public safety and national security…it is a threat to our national identity, our values, our norms, our rule of law—our democracy.”

For Attorney General Merrick Garland: “Attacks by domestic terrorists are attacks on all of us collectively, aimed at rending the fabric of our democratic society and driving us apart.”

Though the FBI’s data shows a dip in the number of investigations since the slew of January 6 cases ended, FBI Director Christopher Wray still says that the breach of the Capitol building was “not an isolated event” and the threat is “not going away anytime soon.” In a joint report to Congress this June, the Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security say that “Threats from…DVEs [domestic violent extremists] have increased in the last two years, and any further increases in threats likely will correspond to potential flashpoints, such as high-profile elections and campaigns or contentious current events.”

The FBI and DHS report concludes: “Sociopolitical developments—such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence—will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence.”

The threats listed in that paragraph are all clearly associated with America’s right and in particular with Trump’s MAGA supporters. Right after January 6, the FBI co-authored a restricted report (“Domestic Violent Extremists Emboldened in Aftermath of Capitol Breach, Elevated Domestic Terrorism Threat of Violence Likely Amid Political Transitions and Beyond”) in which it shifted the definition of AGAAVE (“anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism”) from “furtherance of ideological agendas” to “furtherance of political and/or social agendas.” For the first time, such groups could be so labeled because of their politics.

It was a subtle change, little noticed, but a gigantic departure for the Bureau. Trump and his army of supporters were acknowledged as a distinct category of domestic violent extremists, even as the FBI was saying publicly that political views were never part of its criteria to investigate or prevent domestic terrorism. Where the FBI sees threats is also plain from the way it categorizes them—a system which on the surface is designed to appear nonpartisan. This shifted subtly days after the events of January 6 when it comes to what the Bureau calls AGAAVE.

“We cannot and do not investigate ideology,” a senior FBI official reassured the press after January 6. “We focus on individuals who commit or intend to commit violence or criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security.”

But the FBI went further in October 2022 when it created a new subcategory—”AGAAVE-Other”—of those who were a threat but do not fit into its anarchist, militia or Sovereign Citizen groups. Introduced without any announcement, and reported here for the first time, the new classification is officially defined as “domestic violent extremists who cite anti-government or anti-authority motivations for violence or criminal activity not otherwise defined, such as individuals motivated by a desire to commit violence against those with a real or perceived association with a specific political party or faction of a specific political party.”

Though Trump and MAGA are never mentioned in the official description of AGAAVE-Other, government insiders acknowledge that it applies to political violence ascribed to the former president’s supporters.

“What other name could we use?” asks one FBI officer who spoke with Newsweek, and who defends what he says is merely a record-keeping change in response to Congressional pressure to track things better. “Obviously if Democratic Party supporters resort to violence, it [AGAAVE-Other] would apply to them as well. It doesn’t matter that there is a low likelihood of that. So yes, in practical terms, it refers to MAGA, though the carefully constructed language is wholly nonpartisan.”

In its statement to Newsweek, the FBI said that the AGAAVE threat “includes anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and other violent extremists—some of whom are motivated by a desire to harm those with a real or perceived association with a political party or faction.”

Another senior intelligence official who requested anonymity told Newsweek, “We’ve crossed the Rubicon.” In emailed responses to questions, he said, “Trump’s army constitutes the greatest threat of violence domestically…politically…that’s the reality and the problem set. That’s what the FBI, as a law enforcement agency, has to deal with. But whether Trump and his supporters are a threat to national security, to the country, whether they represent a threat of civil war? That’s a trickier question. And that’s for the country to deal with, not the FBI.”

The revelations that some Trump supporters are being specifically targeted by the FBI fits with accusations from among them that the Bureau has them in its sights and is the political tool of a repressive deep state in Washington, D.C., bent on preserving the hold of the political establishment at the cost of democracy.

Such views are not only from the furthest fringe. Some of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress have called for the FBI to be defunded over such accusations and the prosecution of Trump supporters over the January 6 attack. The fight over the FBI is in itself helping to stoke the political temperature ahead of the 2024 election.

“For perhaps the first time in our history, the FBI’s counterterrorism operational tempo remains high for international terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism and domestic terrorism, simultaneously,” FBI director Wray declared at Texas A&M University this summer.

A senior intelligence official who works at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says it is hard to digest all the evidence. “When you are used to hearing that the sky is falling every day, when that’s the nature of the cable news and Twitter worlds we live where everything is overstated, there’s a lot of room for doubt,” he says.

“But I say this as a citizen as much as a government analyst,” the senior official says. “We are in a unique moment and the numbers are daunting.”

The FBI official says that those who are charged with upholding the law see numbers that are worrying but that there is also a struggle to characterize the specific threat to America—and whether it really should be called terrorism—as well as the proper response.

“This is not media hype. But it’s also not easily quantifiable,” the FBI official says. “Are we talking just a few thousand Proud Boy types or are we talking 30 percent of the country that are core Trump voters? Are we talking extremists bent on political violence or just a lot of disgruntled and frustrated citizens? I don’t know the answer, and I can assure you the answer isn’t in any secret intelligence that the government possesses.”

The FBI and the other intelligence agencies responsible for domestic matters track the number of terrorist-related disruptions, arrests and investigations, based on its caseloads and its various characterizations. According to the FBI, the number of domestic terrorism-related open cases grew by 357 percent from 1,981 in fiscal year 2013 to 9,049 in fiscal year 2021, a number that has been widely quoted in the media as evidence of a widespread domestic terror threat. The FBI also says the number of FBI domestic violent extremism and domestic terrorism investigations has more than doubled since the spring of 2020—to approximately 2,700 investigations at the end of fiscal year 2022, another marker that’s been widely quoted.

Though Trump and MAGA are never mentioned in the official description of AGAAVE-Other, government insiders acknowledge that it applies to political violence ascribed to the former president’s supporters.

“What other name could we use?” asks one FBI officer who spoke with Newsweek, and who defends what he says is merely a record-keeping change in response to Congressional pressure to track things better. “Obviously if Democratic Party supporters resort to violence, it [AGAAVE-Other] would apply to them as well. It doesn’t matter that there is a low likelihood of that. So yes, in practical terms, it refers to MAGA, though the carefully constructed language is wholly nonpartisan.”

In its statement to Newsweek, the FBI said that the AGAAVE threat “includes anarchist violent extremists, militia violent extremists, sovereign citizen violent extremists, and other violent extremists—some of whom are motivated by a desire to harm those with a real or perceived association with a political party or faction.

This is hardly the end of the article…so for consumption of the wh0le piece, click here. 

Hunter is also in Violation of the Mann Act

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Primer: The Mann Act (also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910) is a federal law that criminalizes the transportation of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” More here.

Hunter also used the prostitution expenses as deductions on his income tax filings…when EVER they got filed, if they did in the first place.

Primer #2: Chateau Marmont is a members only hotel

Chateau Marmont says 70% of its clientele are repeat guests.  Chateau Marmont says 70% of its clientele are repeat guests. Photo Credit: 4kclips/Shutterstock source

WT:

Hunter Biden once denied putting “a [expletive] hole in any wall” at the Chateau Marmont, a swanky California hotel where he was alleged to have been banned for drug-fueled antics.

An IRS agent said investigators retrieved the photos showing “the destruction” Mr. Biden wrought on the rooms.

Agents said they also obtained, through a search warrant, WhatsApp messages from Mr. Biden’s iCloud account. Among them is a striking instance in which he uses his father as a threat to a Chinese Communist Party member and business associate.

Agents said they interviewed prostitutes whom the younger Mr. Biden hired and flew out, sometimes paying for first-class tickets, to meet him and engage in sex — and then wrote off the payments as business expenses. Agents talked with the owner of a sex club to which Mr. Biden paid $10,000, which he then wrote off on his taxes as a golf club membership.

For a Washington that is often burned by too-good-to-be-true stories such as the Steele dossier, the revelations about Hunter Biden by two IRS criminal investigators may seem, well, too good to be true.

IRS Special Agent Gary Shapley and another agent, known in congressional committee documents as “Mr. X,” testified for hours, under oath, that they had the goods to back up what they were saying.

In some cases, they have already provided it to Congress, either in documents or by reading messages into the transcript of the testimony they delivered.

They spent years building a case against Hunter Biden on tax law violations. They said they interviewed 60 witnesses, issued subpoenas and followed the trail of his income, businesses and expenses, particularly those he tried to write off on his taxes.

That was why they were interested in the Chateau Marmont in the first place.

“So he deducted a lot for the Chateau Marmont, and he actually was blacklisted and thrown out of the Chateau Marmont. We actually have videos — or we have photos of the rooms and the destruction that was done to the rooms,” Mr. X told the House Ways and Means Committee on June 1.

Mr. Shapley said they were investigating Mr. Biden’s 2018 tax return, which he didn’t file until 2020, in which he was writing off business expenses such as $25,000 to a girlfriend and $10,000 for a “golf membership.”

“We’ve talked to the person that owned that sex club, and they confirmed that he was there,” said Mr. X. “And the guy has to pay $10,000, and the girl — whoever is referring him there doesn’t have to pay anything. So that was deducted on the tax return.”

One woman whom Mr. Biden labeled as his West Coast assistant was part of the sex club situation, the agent said.

“Some ended up being his girlfriends. So they all kind of morphed and changed. So I want to be accurate in how I represent them. But there were a lot of females that I believe he was having sexual relationships with that I ended up interviewing,” said Mr. X, adding that the women were being paid for sex.

He said the Justice Department had been compiling data on cases in which Mr. Biden had prostitutes cross state lines in violation of a federal law known as the Mann Act.

“I know there was an effort at some point to compile them, but I don’t know what ultimately happened with them,” Mr. X said.

The write-offs weren’t mistakes, the agents said. They saw Mr. Biden’s highlighting of his bank statements where he was picking what exactly he wanted to deduct and what he wouldn’t deduct.

It was so bad that his accountants, as if to distance themselves from the factual claims on the forms, made him sign a representation letter, in which he tells his tax preparers that all the income and deductions he is reporting are accurate.

“I’ve never seen that in my career,” Mr. X told Congress.

The IRS agents, in addition to the iCloud account, also gained access to QuickBooks accounts and a Dropbox account and retrieved data from the laptop that Mr. Biden left at a Delaware repair shop.

The agents revealed that the laptop was actually three pieces — a laptop, a hard drive and another external hard drive. They were in the FBI’s hands in 2019, and the bureau had verified that the data was Mr. Biden’s by November that year.

That was nearly a year before high-level former intelligence officials, some from the FBI, along with Hunter’s father during a presidential debate, dismissed the laptop as Russian misinformation amid the heat of the 2020 campaign.

iPhone messages were on the hard drive, but they were encrypted. It wasn’t until agents found a business card with the password that they were able to gain access, Mr. Shapley said in a set of Oct. 22, 2020, notes detailing the timeline of the laptop.

The notes were entered into the committee’s transcript of his testimony.

After the testimony was taken by the committee but before its public release, Mr. Biden agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanors and the prosecution agreed not to ask for prison time. Another charge, a gun felony, will be resolved with a diversion, which means that if Mr. Biden keeps his nose clean while on probation, the charge will be dropped.

The agents’ work can’t definitively answer whether Hunter Biden should be facing more serious criminal charges, but it does give the public an unparalleled look at some of the evidence prosecutors had in hand when they cut the deal.

Hunter Biden has a court date scheduled for late next month, when a federal judge will decide whether to bless the deal.

Dean Zerbe, a leading IRS whistleblower lawyer who is serving as Mr. X’s attorney and who used to serve as tax counsel for the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said it was striking to have two career agents with years of experience testify to essentially the same pattern of facts.

“We never had anyone of this stature coming forward from the IRS to speak to us about problems,” he said, citing his years on Capitol Hill. “That alone sets these guys apart.”

The testimony was released Thursday and set social media afire. President Biden’s defenders blasted the two agents for delivering a “fairy tale” or a fabrication. Some questioned the existence of the emails that the agents, under oath, had read to the committee.

Former MSNBC host turned podcaster Keith Olbermann opined that the agents had “no evidence” to back up their claim that Attorney General Merrick Garland hamstrung the investigation.

Christopher Clark, Mr. Biden’s attorney, issued a statement saying there were “serious questions” about the WhatsApp message where Hunter Biden used his father’s goodwill as a bargaining chip with a Chinese business associate.

The WhatsApp message may be the most explosive part of the testimony the Ways and Means Committee released last week. It suggests that Hunter Biden made a practice of using his father, at the time the former vice president was pondering his own presidential bid, as a threat.

Mr. Shapley said agents obtained it through a search warrant against Hunter Biden’s iCloud account.

The White House didn’t address whether President Biden was present when Hunter Biden sent the message but insisted he was not involved in his son’s transaction with Henry Zhang, the Chinese business associate.

“The president was not in business with his son,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

Mr. Biden, asked Monday by reporters whether he had lied about any business dealings with his son, replied “No.”

Mr. X said Hunter Biden had tax issues dating to the early part of the century, including filing late and owing massive bills.

He said his investigation, which began in 2018, covered 2014 through 2019. He said charges should have been brought for each year. Those included failure to timely file or to pay taxes in 2016, 2017 and 2019; failure to timely pay in 2015; filing a false return and evasion of tax assessment in 2014; and failure to timely file and pay tax, filing a false return and evasion of tax assessment in 2018.

The 2014 and 2018 charges rose to the level of felonies, Mr. X said.

Hunter Biden did begin making $10,000 monthly payments on his delinquent taxes in 2017, in what the IRS investigators called an arrangement with his tax team. He stopped making the payments on March 5, 2018.

“There’s an actual email where he asked how long he can go without paying his taxes,” said Mr. X said, pointing out that Hunter Biden earned $2.4 million from Hudson West III, a firm with connections to Chinese money, but he “can’t make the $10,000 payment he was making on his taxes.”

The Hunter Case was Titled ‘Sportsman’

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(this is long and complicated but keep going…)

FNC: The House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday released testimony from two IRS whistleblowers who said the Justice Department, FBI and IRS interfered with the investigation of the tax evasion case against Hunter Biden.

According to Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., that testimony “outlines misconduct and government abuse at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the investigation of Hunter Biden.”

“The allegations point to a steady campaign of: unequal treatment of enforcing tax law; Department of Justice interference in the form of delays, divulgences, and denials, into the investigation of tax crimes that may have been committed by the President’s son; and finally, retaliation against IRS employees who blew the whistle on the misconduct,” the committee said Thursday.

“Whistleblowers describe how the Biden Justice Department intervened and overstepped in a campaign to protect the son of Joe Biden by delaying, divulging, and denying an ongoing investigation into Hunter Biden’s alleged tax crimes,” Smith said.

According to testimony released by the committee, one whistleblower, IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley Jr., said decisions in the case seemed to be “influenced by politics.”

“Whatever the motivations, at every stage decisions were made that had the effect of benefiting the subject of the investigation,” Shapley said.

“These decisions included slow-walking investigative steps, now allowing enforcement actions to be executed, limiting investigators’ line of questioning for witnesses, misleading investigators on charging authority, delaying any and all actions months before elections to ensure the investigation did not go overt well before policy memorandum mandated the pause. These are just only a few examples,” he added.

Shapley, who oversaw the IRS probe into the president’s son, said the IRS obtained a WhatsApp message dated July 30th, 2017, from Hunter Biden to Henry Zhao, who the New York Post previously reported is a Chinese Communist Party official and CEO of Harvest Fund Management.

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight” Biden wrote. “And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”

Shapley testified that communications like that message “made it clear we needed to search the guest house at the Bidens’ Delaware residence where Hunter Biden stayed for a time.”

However, Shapley testified that Assistant United States Attorney in Delaware, Lesley Wolf, told him “optics were a driving factor in the decision on whether to execute a search warrant.” Read more here.

There is also the New York Post item that includes:

*The first son was given the code name “Sportsman” by investigators.

*Delaware US Attorney David Weiss sought to bring federal charges against Hunter, 53, in the Central District of California and in Washington, DC, last year and was denied both times by Biden-appointed US attorneys Martin Estrada and Matthew Graves, respectively.

*According to the second whistleblower, who has remained anonymous, the investigation covered the years 2014 through 2019, during which Hunter and his “associates” received approximately $17.3 million from Ukraine, Romania and China — with the first son alone scooping $8.3 million. Keep reading here. 

But how about a storage unit?

 

Hey Merrick Garland, the American people are holding on line 3 asking why you lied…

The 1023 Redactions Show 17 Audio Tapes of Joe and Burisma

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Primer:Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma, was the “foreign national” involved in the alleged “criminal bribery scheme” detailed in the FBI form, and Zlochevsky referred to Joe Biden as the “big guy” during a conversation several years before the June 2020 date of the bureau document, according to sources familiar with the FBI record who described its contents to the Washington Examiner.

Hoorah again for Senator Grassley. The Director of the FBI continues to remember that Senator Grassley has seen the whole 1023 form, yes the un-redacted version. So, it appears the Republicans are going on the offense and Grassley took to the Senate floor to announce for the official record the 17 tapes that were used by the top executive at Burisma as an insurance policy. What kind of policy is unclear but for sure there was a lack of trust from the outset.

But read on…

JTN:

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley on Monday announced that the foreign national who allegedly bribed then-former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter kept recordings of his conversations with each as an “insurance policy.”

“The 1023 produced to that House Committee redacted reference that the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them. Seventeen total recordings,” Grassley said on the Senate floor. Fifteen audio recordings include conversations between him and Hunter Biden while two include conversations between him and Joe Biden.

“These recordings were allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot. The 1023 also indicates that then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden,” he continued.

A source familiar with the matter told Just the News that the FD-1023 memorializes the conversation between the Burisma executive and the FBI’s confidential human source in which he told the source he was in possession of the recordings. Those recordings are not included in the record, however.

In his remarks, Grassley pointed to the FD-1023 form that members of the House Oversight Committee were recently permitted to view by the FBI, but noted that the bureau still redacted parts of the unclassified document.

“More than that, the FBI made Congress review a redacted unclassified document in a classified facility. That goes to show you the disrespect the FBI has for Congress,” he added (emphasis original).

The FD-1023 includes allegations from a confidential human source that the head of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, hired Hunter Biden to serve on its board in order to use his father’s influence to stifle an investigation from then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin into the firm. Shokin was removed from his post in 2016 and the FD-1023 indicates that two Biden family members received $5 million each for their trouble.

***

The contents of the form last week, the FD-1023 form, dated June 30, 2020, is the FBI’s interview with a “highly credible” confidential source who detailed multiple meetings and conversations he or she had with a top Burisma executive over the course of several years, starting in 2015. (Obama knew since Biden was tasked with the Ukraine portfolio)

Grassley said the recordings were “allegedly kept as a sort of insurance policy for the foreign national in case he got into a tight spot.”

“The 1023 also indicates that then-Vice President Joe Biden may have been involved in Burisma employing Hunter Biden,” Grassley said.

Grassley demanded answers on “what, if anything has the Justice Department and FBI done to investigate?”

“The Justice Department and FBI must show their work,” Grassley said. “They no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt.”

The FBI brought the document to Capitol Hill last week after House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer subpoenaed it last month. The FBI briefed Comer and committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., on the form in a SCIF on Capitol Hill, but did not turn over the document. Comer threatened to hold FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress.

SPLC adds Parental Rights Groups to Their List of Hate

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The Southern Poverty Law Center has no shame and these tactics have been going on since the Obama administration. The mainstream media takes queues from the SPLC as does social media such as Facebook but worse, the Department of Justice does too. Democrats certainly celebrate all things Southern Poverty Law Center:

Prominent Democratic legislators congratulated the Southern Poverty Law Center on its 50th anniversary on Thursday, without once mentioning the leftist organization’s 2019 scandal involving claims of sexual harassment, racial discrimination and a deceptive fundraising scheme based on “hate” labeling. They also did not mention the attempted terrorist attack at the Family Research Council in 2012, in which a shooter used the SPLC’s “hate map” to target a conservative Christian nonprofit.

Sens. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., along with Reps. Judy Chu, D-Calif., Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., joined with former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in congratulating the SPLC on its anniversary. They appeared in a video streaming event to commemorate the anniversary.

“Congratulations to the Southern Poverty Law Center on your 50th anniversary, 50 years of defending the rights of the vulnerable, of speaking up for the marginalized, of protecting the disadvantaged,” Abrams said. “We appreciate everything you’ve done.” More here.

***

…with liberty and justice for all…. according to the SPLC not so much…

From the Daily Signal:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, added a slew of parental rights organizations to that “hate map” for 2022 and labeled them “antigovernment groups.”

“Schools, especially, have been on the receiving end of ramped-up and coordinated hard-right attacks, frequently through the guise of ‘parents’ rights’ groups,” the SPLC’s “Year in Hate and Extremism” report claims.

“These groups were, in part, spurred by the right-wing backlash to COVID-19 public safety measures in schools,” the SPLC report says. “But they have grown into an anti-student inclusion movement that targets any inclusive curriculum that contains discussions of race, discrimination and LGBTQ identities.”

“At the forefront of this mobilization is Moms for Liberty, a Florida-based group with vast connections to the GOP that this year the SPLC designated as an extremist group,” the report notes. “They can be spotted at school board meetings across the country wearing shirts and carrying signs that declare, ‘We do NOT CO-PARENT with the GOVERNMENT.’”

The SPLC report does not once mention the Left’s aggressive promotion of sexualized material for children in schools and at other venues. It does not mention the “Drag Queen Story Hour” movement or the fact that many of the books which parents demand removed from school libraries include pornographic content. It does not mention how many on the Left champion the idea that children should be able to identify with a gender opposite their biological sex, hide that identity from their parents, and even obtain life-altering drugs without parental consent. Instead, it acts as though the parental rights movement emerged in a vacuum, or worse, is motivated by hatred.

The SPLC long has demonized conservative Christian groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom as “anti-LGBT hate groups,” national security groups such as the Center for Security Policy as “anti-Muslim hate groups,” and immigration groups such as the Center for Immigration Studies as “anti-immigrant hate groups.”

The SPLC’s 2022 report—released Tuesday—includes a new designation: the “antigovernment movement.”

A red map of the United States plotting organizations branded

“Hate and antigovernment groups make up the extreme edge of America’s hard right, an inherently antidemocratic movement that rejects pluralism and equity,” the SPLC report states. “The movement instead strives to build a society dominated by hierarchy, where people whom far rightists deem lesser or threatening—women, Black and Brown people, LGBTQ people, non-Christians and others—are socially and politically subjugated. The hard right has the advantage of building on already existing structural white supremacy, as well as its persistent and regular manifestations in everyday life and in politics.”

The SPLC report includes 523 “hate groups” and 702 “antigovernment extremist groups,” for a total of 1,225 organizations.

The list of “hate groups” names numerous parental rights organizations, including 230 chapters of Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education (based in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania), 12 chapters of Parental Rights in Education, and many state-based chapters of Parents Involved in Education.

Virginia, the state in which Glenn Youngkin won a gubernatorial election by running on parental involvement in education, includes many such groups. Parents Against Critical Race Theory in Ashburn; Parents Defending Education in Arlington; Virginia Moms for America; and Virginia Parents Involved in Education all appear on the SPLC’s new list of “antigovernment extremist groups.”

Militia organizations such as III Percenters also appear in the same SPLC category, as do many chapters of Eagle Forum, a conservative women’s group headquarted in Alton, Illinois.

The SPLC revealed a focus on parental rights groups in April, when the organization’s Maya Henson Carey compared parental rights advocates to the “Uptown Klans” of white Southerners trying to maintain segregation after the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

Writing in “State of Black America,” an annual report from the National Urban League, Carey warned that “groups like Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, and Parents Against CRT work diligently with politicians, right-wing celebrities, and extremist groups to spread their messages of hate, lobbying for anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ legislation and making sweeping changes by influencing school boards to fire superintendents, constrain diverse curricula and ban books.”

Notably, the SPLC kept many organizations on its “hate group” list, including Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the Foundation for American Immigration Reform.

As I explain in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC’s accusation against the Family Research Council inspired a terrorist attack in 2012. A shooter targeted the council’s Washington, D.C., office, using the “hate map.” He intended to kill everyone in the building, but a brave security guard prevented him. The shooter is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.

The SPLC also kept the Dustin Inman Society on the list. The society’s founder and president, D.A. King, filed a defamation lawsuit against the SPLC, specifically challenging its “hate group” accusation. His lawsuit became the first such lawsuit to reach the discovery stage earlier this year. D. James Kennedy Ministries, a Christian nonprofit that previously sued the SPLC for defamation and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, also remains on the list.

The SPLC has faced numerous scandals and hits to its credibility. In 2019, it fired its co-founder, Morris Dees, amid accusations of racial discrimination and sexual harassment tracing back decades. Amid that scandal, a former employee came forward as having been “part of the con.” He wrote that the SPLC’s hate accusations are a “highly profitable scam.”

Parental rights groups slammed the SPLC attack in comments to The Daily Signal.

Parents Defending Education President Nicole Neily called the SPLC attacks “as malicious as they are ridiculous.”

“At PDE, we have fought alongside parents of every background to end government-sponsored segregation programs, because no student should be treated differently because of his or her skin color or ethnicity,” Neily told The Daily Signal. “SPLC and its designations are as malicious as they are ridiculous. No partisan PR stunt from a dishonest scam group like SPLC will impede our important work for America’s students.”

“Two-thirds of Americans think the public education system is on the wrong track today,” Moms for Liberty Co-Founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich told The Daily Signal. “That is why our organization is devoted to empowering parents to be a part of their child’s public school education.”

“That is our fundamental goal, which began just two years ago when teacher’s unions locked students out of schools during the pandemic,” Justice and Descovich added. “Empowering parents continues to be our mission today and that has fueled our organization’s growth – like wildfire to now 45 states in the country.”

“Name-calling parents who want to be a part of their child’s education as ‘hate groups’ or ‘bigoted’ just further exposes what this battle is all about: Who fundamentally gets to decide what is taught to our kids in school – parents or government employees? We believe that parental rights do not stop at the classroom door and no amount of hate from groups like this is going to stop that,” they concluded.