DOJ, Civil Rights Division on Ferguson, Baltimore etc.

Posted on September 21, 2016September 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

DOJ Civil Rights Chief Links Local Distrust of Police to ‘Unconstitutional’ Tactics

Law: The chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division told more than 200 lawyers and community activists at an Atlanta symposium Tuesday at Georgia State University that she and her Justice Department colleagues in Washington and across the nation “see a very clear link” between the criminalization of poverty by law enforcement authorities and the growing distrust of police and the government by the public.

Civil rights chief Vanita Gupta’s comments on law enforcement tactics came just hours before unrest erupted in Charlotte over the latest police shooting of an African-American man, Keith Lamont Scott. A second African-American man, Terence Crutcher, was also shot by police, in Tulsa, on Friday.

“Unconstitutional policing undermines community trust,” Gupta said. “Blanket assumptions and stereotypes about certain neighborhoods and certain communities can lead residents to see the justice system as illegitimate and authorities as corrupt. Those perceptions can drive resentment. And resentment can prevent the type of effective policing needed to keep communities and officers safe.”

Gupta noted that in Baltimore, the city’s African-American residents, concentrated in two small districts that accounted for just 11 percent of the city’s population, represented an estimated 44 percent of police stops. There, as well as in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed 16-year-old African-American teen in 2014, Gupta said Justice Department staff saw a trend toward criminalizing the poor coupled with a focus on policing in order to generate revenue. That strategy, Gupta said, “resulted in a system where the police department and municipal court advanced policies that broke the law.”

Gupta said at the symposium that more than 60 percent of all inmates in county jails across the nation are defendants awaiting trial. Many of them, she said, “have committed nonviolent offenses and are there because they cannot pay bail.” Those practices “translate into devastating consequences—for individuals, communities and society as a whole,” she said. For people living on the financial edge, an arrest or a fine can cost a defendant his or her job, family, children, home and health care, trapping “the most vulnerable among us in perpetual cycles of poverty, debt and incarceration,” Gupta said. That, in turn, “undermines the legitimacy of our justice system,” she added. “It threatens the integrity of our democracy.”

She said the division also found when people living in poverty could not pay the court’s fines and fees, “they were subjected to multiple arrests, jail time and payments that far exceeded the cost of the original ticket.”

The seminar was sponsored by the Southern Center for Human Rights, which has filed lawsuits across Georgia challenging practices by counties and municipalities, and the private probation companies many of them have retained, that incarcerate misdemeanor defendants because they have no money to pay their fines or post a bond.

The Civil Rights Division has brought its considerable weight to two of those Georgia cases. Last month, Gupta joined with the U.S. attorney in Atlanta and the American Bar Association to ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to affirm a trial court ruling on behalf of indigent misdemeanor defendants who had faced jail because they could not afford to post a bond.

Seems Gupta is traveling the country hosted several seminar essentially broadcasting variations of a DoJ mission as noted here: DOJ Official: Slavery to Blame for Riots in Ferguson and Baltimore

Need more on Gupta and Loretta Lynch at the DoJ?

CJR: Top Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch, have worked with an organization dedicated to interfering with law enforcement efforts to monitor activities at the most radical mosques.

Lynch and DOJ Civil Rights Division head Vanita Gupta have appeared at gala events for an organization called Muslim Advocates. The George Soros-funded charity has badgered the New York City Police Department away from monitoring the most radical mosques in the city.

Civil Rights Division head Gupta appeared at the sold-out annual gala event for Muslim Advocates in Millbrae, California. Muslim Advocates lobbies the administration heavily to oppose any link between terrorist acts and radical Islam, and opposes monitoring of radical mosques. Gupta told the crowd:

To anyone who feels afraid, targeted, or discriminated against because of which religion you practice or where you worship, I want to say this — we see you. We hear you. And we stand with you. If you ever feel that somehow you don’t belong, or don’t fit in, here in America, let me reassure you you belong.

Muslim Advocates also conducts recruitment and training for lawyers designed to help FBI terrorist targets and interviewees navigate the interviews. Their annual report states:

Throughout the year we grew our internal volunteer referral list for FBI interviews. Today, the list is over 130 lawyers nationwide who are ready and able to assist community members contacted by the FBI.

The purported non-partisan tax exempt 501(c)(3) charity is conducting a campaign against corporations like Coca-Cola to hector them into not sponsoring the Republican convention in Cleveland.

Muslim Advocates gave Vanita Gupta their Thurgood Marshall Award “for her commitment to criminal justice reform and to holding perpetrators of anti-Muslim hate accountable” at the California gala. Read more here.

Sheik Anwar and Yaafghankid78, the NY/NJ Bomber

Posted on September 21, 2016September 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

The full criminal complaint by the FBI on Federal charges for Ahmad Khan Rahami is here.

Ahmad kept a journal and it was on his body when he was wounded in a shooting exchange with police near his home.

Much of the references in this journal are to Anwar al Alawki who was an American born cleric and major target for the Obama administration to begin the defeat of al Qaeda. He was in fact killed in a drone strike in Yemen. Major Nadal Hassan, the Ft. Hood killer was also a devoted follower of al Alawki.

This journal does have a very small reference to Islamic State, however Rahami was radicalized during one of his last trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan where the Taliban and al Qaeda maintain a foothold of power. Islamic State on the days of the bombings in New York and New Jersey did not claim any connection however they did to the knife attack in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

There was immediate chatter and concern that there was a functioning terror cell in that does appear to be the case in some form. Rahami did not act alone. The FBI has published a wanted poster for 2 other individuals.

Rahami’s father brought the family to the United States under asylum conditions and there have been several legal cases with members of the family with law enforcement. Ahmad has a first wife (Dominican) and a daughter and he is known to have married a second wife in Afghanistan and has a child with her. The second wife was returning to the United States and was detained by the FBI in the United Arab Emrites. Ahmad’s father wanted his 8 children to remain loyal to their heritage and such has been the case at least for some. One son moved back to the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the father in fact himself was part of the mujahedeen as a fighter against the Soviets as did Usama bin Ladin.

Not only has the father travel back to Afghanistan but the son, Ahmad did so more than once.

Rahami, 28, spent several weeks in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Quetta, Pakistan, in 2011, according to a law enforcement official who reviewed his travel and immigration record.

Two years later, in April 2013, he went to Pakistan and remained there until March 2014 before returning to the US, official said.

So, how did the FBI and DHS miss all the signals?

In part from Vocativ: The [FBI] should have launched a formal surveillance investigation as Rahami clearly followed a path towards radicalization and mobilization over the past two years,” said Nicholas Glavin, a senior research associate at the U.S. Naval War College.

Tracking all potential terror threats, however, is not easy. The FBI claims it already has more than 1,000 active Islamic State probes alone, which does not include investigations related to other Islamist groups. And Rahami is by no means the only terror suspect to avoid detection. Analysts who spoke with Vocativ noted that Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, the man who killed four marines at a pair of Tennessee military sites in July 2015, had not been monitored by the FBI. Neither had Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the husband and wife who carried out the ISIS-inspired slaughter in San Bernardino, California, last year.

Even those known to law enforcement as would-be jihadists manage to conduct horrific attacks. The FBI had investigated Omar Mateen on two separate occasions before the Florida man executed 49 people and wounded 53 others during a shooting massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando this summer.

“The U.S. has the most robust counterterrorism apparatus [in the world], yet it is already stretched thin,” Glavin said. FBI Director James Comey previously admitted that his agency has struggled to keep up with surveillance demands.

Experts also concede that there’s no predictable path toward radicalization, making it a persistent challenge to suss out extremists. Some studies have argued that a uniform profile of a “lone-wolf” terrorist does not exist. Peter Bergen, who has researched more than 300 jihadist terrorism cases in the U.S. since 9/11, told Vocativ that they lead largely normal lives.

Bergen’s data shows that four-fifths of these homegrown jihadists are U.S. citizens. They are no more likely to have criminal backgrounds than other Americans and are less likely to suffer from mental illness. Many of them attended college and are married.

“The big takeaway is that they’re ordinary Americans,” Bergen, who published the book The United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorist earlier this year, told Vocativ. Like most, Rahami was not a foreigner, a refugee or a recent immigrant.

Which presents a daunting challenge of its own.

“We’ve created political culture where we want 100 percent success in stopping them,” Bergen said. “Unfortunately, that is not a realistic expectation.”

How Obama Admin Hid the Cash Transfers to Iran

Posted on September 19, 2016September 19, 2016 by Denise Simon

The U.S. government wired about $848,000 to Iran in July 2015 in order to settle a dispute over fossils and architectural drawings that are now in Iranian possession, a spokesman from the Treasury Department said. This April, the U.S. also wired roughly $9 million to Iran in exchange for 32 tons of its excess heavy water, which could be used to make a plutonium bomb. Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Naqdi, commander of Iran’s Basij militia, said in January that the $400 million payment “was returned for the freedom of the US spy and it was not related to the [nuclear] negotiations.” More here in further detail.

(The heavy water was delivered to Oak Ridge Laboratories in August for domestic use and for sale to other customers including Spellation Neutron Source which is an accelerator operation. The total published cost to purchase Iran’s extra heavy water from the Iranian Arak facility is $8.6 million. It is unclear out of what agency budget this money was paid, including the Department of Defense or the Department of Energy.

Obama Admin ‘Laundered’ U.S. Cash to Iran Via N.Y. Fed, Euro Banks

Congressman: ‘Administration laundered this money in order to circumvent U.S. law’

FreeBeacon: A member of the House Intelligence Committee is accusing the Obama administration of laundering some $1.7 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars to Iran through a complicated network that included the New York Federal Reserve and several European banks, according to conversations with sources and new information obtained by the lawmaker and viewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

New disclosures made by the Treasury Department to Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.), a House Intelligence Committee member, show that an initial $400 million cash payment to Iran was wired to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) and then converted from U.S. dollars into Swiss francs and moved to an account at the Swiss National Bank, according to a copy of communication obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon.

Once the money was transferred to the Swiss Bank, the “FRBNY withdrew the funds from its account as Swiss franc banknotes and the U.S. Government physically transported them to Geneva” before personally overseeing the handover to an agent of Iran’s central bank, according to the documents.

These disclosures shine new light on how the Obama administration moved millions of dollars from U.S. accounts to European banks in order to facilitate three separate cash payments to Iran totaling $1.7 billion.

The latest information is adding fuel to accusations the Obama administration arranged the payment in this fashion to skirt U.S. sanctions laws and give Iran the money for the release of U.S. hostages, in what many have called a ransom.

Congress has been investigating the circumstances surrounding the payment for months and said the administration is blocking certain requests for more detailed information about the cash transaction with Iran.

“By withholding critical details and stonewalling congressional inquiries, President Obama seems to be hiding whether or not he and others broke U.S. law by sending $1.7 billion in cash to Iran,” Pompeo told the Free Beacon. “But Americans can plainly see that the Obama administration laundered this money in order to circumvent U.S. law and appease the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

As new details emerge, congressional critics such as Pompeo and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) are beginning to suspect the U.S. government laundered the money in order to provide Tehran with immediate access.

“Think about this timeline: the U.S. withdraws $400 million in cash from the Swiss National Bank and then physically transports it to another city to hand-off to Iranian officials—three days before Iran releases four American hostages,” Pompeo said. “But it gets worse: less than a week after this, the U.S. again sends hordes of cash to Iran. As we speak, Iran is still holding three more Americans hostage and I fear what precedent this administration has set.”

The initial $400 million payment to Iran was initiated on Jan. 14, 2016, according to information sent by the Treasury Department to Pompeo.

“For the first settlement payment in January, Treasury assisted the Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) in crafting a wire instruction to transfer the $400 million in principal from the Iran FMS [Foreign Military Sales program] account on January 14, 2016,” the document states.

“Treasury worked with DFAS and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), which was acting as Treasury’s financial agent, so that the funds were converted from dollars to Swiss francs and credited to a FRBNY account at the Swiss National Bank (SNB), which is the central bank of the Switzerland [sic],” it adds.

The U.S. hostages were released shortly after Iran received this initial cash payment.

The additional $1.3 billion cash payment was facilitated by the Dutch Central Bank, which helped the United States transfer the money to an account before it was converted into euros.

The Dutch Bank “then disbursed the funds as euro banknotes in the Netherlands to an official from the Central Bank of Iran.”

The payment was broken down into two separate transactions that occurred on Jan. 22 and Feb. 5.

Senior administration officials maintain that the transaction was completely legal and not paid out as part of a ransom to Iran. These officials have said that cash was the “most reliable” method to ensure Iran received immediate access to the funds, as its banking system is still under sanctions.

Officials from the Treasury and Justice Departments would not respond to Free Beacon requests for comment about the exact type of legal approval given prior to the cash payment.

One congressional adviser who works closely on the Iran issue told the Free Beacon that the Obama administration appears to have involved multiple branches of the government in order to help conceal the cash payment to Iran.

“It looks as if the White House made just about every corner of the executive branch complicit in covering up the extent of its payments to Iran,” the source said. “Congress was already aggressively looking into payments involving the State, Treasury, and Energy Departments. Now it’s the Justice Department, too. We already know that top officials from Justice objected strongly to the ransom deal, but were overruled. Congress wants to know what happened and why.”

A senior congressional aide familiar with investigations regarding the matter told the Free Beacon that the administration continues to hide information from lawmakers about the cash payment.

“The American public and Members of Congress understand psychology—if the administration is hiding something, there is a reason. President Obama, Secretary Kerry and others would like to pretend that their months of evasiveness and stonewalling regarding Iran are normal, but their behavior indicates otherwise” the source said. “Refusing to answer basic questions about millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars paid to the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism only invites more questions.”

Recent reports have raised questions about how much of this money may be spent to fund Iran’s international terror operations and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Lawmakers examining who in Iran assumed control of the money have told the Free Beacon that at least part of the cash was likely spent to fund the IRGC’s operations.

Ineligible Individuals Have Been Granted U.S. Citizenship

Posted on September 19, 2016September 19, 2016 by Denise Simon

Sheesh….fingerprints eh? And those migrants, refugees and asylees don’t have any reference database for fingerprint history much less any travel documents applications.

As citizens they can vote, seek and hold sensitive jobs and more. Don’t you just wonder what DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson has to say on this? Oh wait….more money from Congress will solve it all.

Summary of the Inspector General’s report:

USCIS granted U.S. citizenship to at least 858 individuals ordered deported or removed under another identity when, during the naturalization process, their digital fingerprint records were not available. The digital records were not available because although USCIS procedures require checking applicants’ fingerprints against both the Department of Homeland Security’s and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) digital fingerprint repositories, neither contains all old fingerprint records. Not all old records were included in the DHS repository when it was being developed. Further, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has identified, about 148,000 older fingerprint records that have not been digitized of aliens with final deportation orders or who are criminals or fugitives. The FBI repository is also missing records because, in the past, not all records taken during immigration encounters were forwarded to the FBI. As long as the older fingerprint records have not been digitized and included in the repositories, USCIS risks making naturalization decisions without complete information and, as a result, naturalizing additional individuals who may be ineligible for citizenship or who may be trying to obtain U.S. citizenship fraudulently.

As naturalized citizens, these individuals retain many of the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship, including serving in law enforcement, obtaining a security clearance, and sponsoring other aliens’ entry into the United States. ICE has investigated few of these naturalized citizens to determine whether they should be denaturalized, but is now taking steps to increase the number of cases to be investigated, particularly those who hold positions of public trust and who have security clearances.

****

In July 2014,^{3 OPS provided the Office of Inspector General (OIG) with the names of individuals it had identified as coming from special interest countries or neighboring countries with high rates of immigration fraud, had final deportation orders under another identity, and had become naturalized U.S. citizens. OIG’s review of the list of names revealed some were duplicates, which resulted in a final number of 1,029 individuals. Of the 1,029 individuals reported, 858 did not have a digital fingerprint record available in the DHS fingerprint repository at the time U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was reviewing and adjudicating their applications for U.S. citizenship.}

USCIS checks applicants’ fingerprint records throughout the naturalization process. By searching the DHS digital fingerprint repository, the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) digital fingerprint repository, the Next Generation Identification (NGI) system,^{5 USCIS can gather information about an applicant’s other identities (if any), criminal arrests and convictions, immigration violations and deportations, and links to terrorism. When there is a matching record, USCIS researches the circumstances underlying the record to determine whether the applicant is still eligible for naturalized citizenship.}

If USCIS confirms that an applicant received a final deportation order under a different identity, and there are no other circumstances to provide eligibility, USCIS policy requires denial of naturalization. Also, USCIS may refer the applicant’s case to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for investigation. Likewise, if a naturalized citizen is discovered to have been ineligible for citizenship, ICE may investigate the circumstances and refer the case to the Department of Justice for revocation of citizenship. Read the complete report here.

Judge Blasts State Dept on Hillary Email Production, then this!

Posted on September 19, 2016September 19, 2016 by Denise Simon

Judge blasts State Dept for slow-walking Hillary emails

WashingtonTimes: A federal judge blasted the Obama administration for slow-walking the release of some of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, saying in court Monday that the government appears to be withholding information from voters ahead of the election.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the State Department in not “being all that cooperative,” and told the Justice Department lawyers to get the State Department to shape up and do its duty.

“Get with the program, so to speak, so that the people of this country can have the information they need,” he ordered. “The State Department needs to start cooperating to the fullest extent possible. They are not perceived to be doing that.”

Judge Leon, who has earned a reputation as a funny but caustic jurist, particularly when he finds government bungling, said the Justice Department, by not forcing the State Department to cooperate better, is risking its own storied reputation.

He specifically called out the federal programs branch that acts as the lawyer for the rest of the government, and the head of that division, Marcia Berman. Ms. Berman wasn’t in the courtroom Monday, but has been a frequent figure at the courthouse over the last year as the administration has had to defend its handling of Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Mondays’s case, filed by the Daily Caller News Foundation, concerned documents detailing Mrs. Clinton’s access to top secret programs. The State Department said it has found more than 1,000 documents dealing with the subject, but said it would take nearly a month to process 450 unclassified documents, and couldn’t say how long it would take to process the classified ones.

The case is one of dozens pending where the department has been accused of slow-walking, keeping information out of public view for far longer than is allowed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The State Department says it is overwhelmed by the requests and its own limited budget and manpower. Officials also say the Clinton emails are complicated because they involved classified information that requires a stricter, more time consuming process to clear for the public.

But the government has also been reluctant to divulge important details. At one point on Monday the government lawyer on the case, Jason Lee, said he didn’t know how many pages were in the documents, sparking the judge’s ire.

Judge Leon ordered a faster production of the 450, and when Mr. Lee said they would do their best, Judge Leon pounced.

“Do better than your best. Do it,” he ordered, then proceeded to scold the government for its bungling, and said it was something other judges at the courthouse had noticed.

“You have a client that, to say the least, is not impressing the judges on is court … at being all that cooperative,” he said. “This way of doing business needs to stop.”

He said this was the first open-records case he’d seen where time was so much of the essence, given Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy for the White House, and said the administration needed to realize that.

SMOKING GUN: “BleachBit” Paul Combetta ASKED TO STRIP OR REPLACE VIP’s EMAIL ADDRESS! https://redd.it/2bmm4l #MAGA

The electronic exchange as noted here.

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Just because you have the messages available in multiple formats and locations doesn’t change that it’s an attribute of the envelope not meant to be rewritten. The functionality is just not built into any tool I know of. Having that functionality would create the ability to screw with discovery (I mean, there could be mitigation with versioning, but that would need other configuration)

While it may not be a read-only part of the envelope(I’m not actually sure), the only tool that MIGHT be able to do what you want is MFCMapi, and I don’t think you want to play with that for this job. The chance of getting it wrong would be pretty high I think and it is not a particularly friendly tool. I’m not sure it could be scripted with it either.

My recommendation would be what /u/borismkv said. Making a mailbox for VIP and telling them to use that. Forwarding to VIPs mailbox would be ripe for them to just respond directly instead of responding through his relay mailbox.

As for your existing messages, if the current users absolutely cannot see the existing messages, you’ll need to do a search and export and just forcibly remove the messages from their mailboxes. It’s not clean and not advised by me, but if they don’t want VIPs address out there it will need to be removed. I would do a search with his email address as the query with -LogOnly -LogLevel Full and see what kind of results you get.