Category Archives: DOJ, DC and inside the Beltway

Federalize Policing with Soviet Style Tactics

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Soviet style tactics:

‘Another fundamental change is underway but not such that you would notice unless you understand the conduits of people and activists groups. Law enforcement across the country is subservient to mayors and mayors manage the money flows and rules of engagement in all communities. One must look closely at mayors and their operational playbooks as noted in the case of Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, mayor of Baltimore. She is walking in cadence with Al Sharpton at National Action Network who himself has unfettered access to the White House as he is calling for officially federalizing police.

Then it must be noted that the ACLU is part of the conduit as this week that organization paid for and developed a smart phone app called ‘MOBILE JUSTICE’. “We want to multiply the number of cameras that can be trained on police officers at any time,” said Hector Villagra, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. “They need to know that anything they do could be seen by the entire world.”  Users will have to open the app on their Android or Apple devices before filming, ACLU officials said. When the recording stops, it automatically sends a copy to the ACLU’s server and keeps the video on the phone. A text report will then pop up, allowing users to explain in writing what they saw but allowing them to remain anonymous if desired. ACLU officials said their legal team would screen the reports and review any videos they believed might show problematic activity.

So who would use this smart phone app? Easy answer to the question. Those already part of yet another organization are part of the conduit, ‘WeCopWatch‘, maybe you have seen the t-shirts. It is even more curious that members of this group are also part of yet many others that include those that support the ‘FreePalestine‘ movement and that of Black Intifada.

Blair Anderson
Project Coordinator for Michigan, Ohio, Illinois
Blair is a Black Panther who lived through COINTELPRO era of the Black Power movement of the sixties. Blair is also the head of the WeCopwatch elder council which helps provide guidance for WeCopwatch in matters of organizing, tactics and strategies.

David Whitt
Project Coordinator for St Louis County
Whitt formed the Canfield Watchmen in the neighborhood where Mike Brown was killed. They have been actively copwatching, as well as training and distributing cameras to the public.

Jacob Crawford
Project Coordinator Support.
Crawford is a long time Copwatcher. He is assisting on the back end in supporting Copwatch expansion projects.  Do the posters below look familiar? Same ones the Islamists in America use as well. They also have a tip sheet that explains what to do if the FBI comes to their door.

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They are using GoFundMe to raise money to purchase go-pro cameras, but one should wonder if GoFundMe will take down that account as they often do for patriot requests.

The sad question now is just how will police forces across the country react? They are under siege.

 

Globetrotters: Who Flew With Hillary’s Planes

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Citizens United has filed yet more lawsuits against the U.S. State Department for being non-responsive on Freedom of Information Act requests to determine who rode with Hillary on her planes during her stint as Secretary of State. The passengers would add puzzle pieces giving clues to Foundation donations, lobbying efforts and backroom deals.

The Clintons are powerbrokers and they work with other domestic and foreign power leaders demonstrating more collusion.

Firm Co-Founded By Hillary’s Campaign Chair Lobbies For Russia’s Uranium One

Chalk it up to a small world or to a tangled web, but Uranium One, the Russian-owned uranium mining company at the center of a recent scandal involving the Clintons and a close Canadian business partner, has lobbied the State Department through a firm co-founded by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman.

Senate records show that The Podesta Group has lobbied the State Department on behalf of Uranium One — once in 2012, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, and once in 2015.

Uranium One paid The Podesta Group $40,000 to lobby the State Department, the Senate, the National Park Service and the National Security Council for “international mining projects,” according to a July 20, 2012 filing.

And according to a disclosure filed April 20, Uranium One spent $20,000 lobbying the Senate and State Department on the same issue.

The Podesta Group was founded in 1988 by brothers Tony and John Podesta. Tony Podesta now heads the group while John Podesta, who has not worked for the family business for years but has been involved in plenty of other projects, leads Hillary Clinton toward a Democratic nomination.

Uranium One is significant because it fell under the corporate control of Rosatom, Russia’s atomic energy agency, through a series of transactions approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Rosatom’s acquisition of Uranium One effectively gave Russia control of 20 percent of uranium in the U.S.

How all of that came to pass has fostered questions about how the Clintons operate their charity, the Clinton Foundation.

The Uranium One story starts in 2005 when Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra and several business partners came to own a small mining company called UrAsia Energy. Clinton flew with Giustra in September 2005 on a private jet to Kazakhstan. There, the mining tycoon negotiated with that nation’s mining agency, Kazataprom, for rights to three mines. After Clinton appeared publicly in support of Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who had just allegedly won an election with more than 90 percent of the vote, the mining deal was approved.

Months later, Giustra donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation with a pledge of $100 million more.

In 2007, UrAsia Energy, with its access to Kazakhstan’s lucrative mines, merged with South Africa’s Uranium One in a $3.5 billion deal. Giustra sold his stake in the company soon after, pocketing a tidy profit. But other investors and executives with close ties to Giustra maintained their interests and donated millions more to the Clinton group. As money was flowing to the Clinton Foundation, the State Department, which came under the control of Hillary Clinton in January 2009, approved a series of transactions that allowed Russia’s Rosatom to buy up shares in Uranium One. By June 2009, Rosatom had a 51 percent stake in the company.

With that majority hold, the Russian energy company effectively gained control of 20 percent of the uranium in the U.S.

Rosatom has since taken complete control of Uranium One. And while there is little risk that the metal being pulled out of U.S. soil poses a direct threat to U.S. national security, it does give Russian President Vladimir Putin control of a major source of energy amid cooling diplomatic relations.

Though Uranium One’s corporate progression has the appearance of pay-for-play, the Clintons and Giustra have denied doing anything wrong. In his capacity as Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta has gone on the offensive, dismissing the notion that the Clintons have done anything illegal or unethical as a conspiracy theory.

But as evidence of just how complex the Clinton Foundation’s activities are, the website Vox.com published an exhaustive list of 181 Clinton Foundation donors who also lobbied the State Department during Hillary Clinton’s tenure there.

Uranium One is not on the list. Neither is Giustra. Nor is Ian Telfer, one of Giustra’s Canadian associates who is the former chairman of Uranium One. He donated $2.35 million through his Fernwood Foundation to the Canadian wing of the Clinton Foundation, which is set up as a partnership with Giustra.

After it was revealed that the Clinton Foundation had not disclosed some of its foreign donations — such as Telfer’s — the organization announced it would be refiling some of its tax forms.

 

If Obama’s Legal Team Wins, Your Church May Lose

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If you have never been to the Supreme Court to hear cases argued, they are fascinating. This week, there is an case regarding marriage of gays. The oral presentations and responses by the U.S. Solicitor General and his staff would have you shaking your head. So, if you would like to read the transcripts which is for sure suggested, here is the document.

But when it comes to the SCOTUS decision on fundamentally redefining the institution of marriage, it could trickle down to your personal church losing. That fundamental transformation of America is underway, without so much as a whimper for you.

Obama Admin: Religious Organizations Could Lose Tax-Exempt Status If Supreme Court Creates Constitutional Right to Same-Sex Marriage

When arguing before the Supreme Court, a lawyer normally takes pains to convince the Justices that ruling in his or her favor in that particular case would not have dramatic consequences elsewhere. In Hobby Lobby, for example, Paul Clement urged that exempting his clients from part of HHS’s contraceptive mandate would not open the doors to a flood of other exemptions. Or in DC v. Heller, Alan Gura argued that the Court’s recognition of the Second Amendment’s personal right to own ordinary firearms would not entitle people to own “machine guns” or “plastic, undetectable handguns.”

A similar dynamic was seen, sometimes, at yesterday’s oral arguments in the same-sex marriage cases, Obergefell v. Hodges. Lawyers arguing that same-sex couples should have a federal constitutional right to state marriage licenses suggested that establishing such a right would not result in ministers being forced to conduct same-sex marriages. “No clergy is forced to marry any couple that they don’t want to marry,” the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Mary Bonauto told Justice Scalia. “We have those protections” under the First Amendment.

But given that such concerns surround this case — say, for wedding photographers or cake bakers — it was rather stunning to see Solicitor General Verrilli leave open the door to what could be the most significant consequences to eventually flow from the creation of a constitutional right to same sex marriage: namely, that religious organizations could eventually lose their tax-exempt status if they do not embrace the new constitutional right.

Such concerns are based on the Supreme Court’s approach in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983), where the Court held that the IRS could strip two private religious schools of their tax-exempt status because the schools maintained racially discriminatory policies abhorrent under the Fourteenth Amendment. Bob Jones University, for example, prohibited its students from inter-racial dating.

“Entitlement to tax exemption depends on meeting certain common-law standards of charity,” wrote the Court; “namely, that an institution seeking tax-exempt status must serve a public purpose and not be contrary to established public policy.” To receive a tax exemption, the institution must “demonstrably serve and be in harmony with the public interest.” And because, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education thirty years earlier, America had adopted “a firm national policy to prohibit racial segregation and discrimination in public education,” neither the Tax Code nor the First Amendment allowed the schools to receive tax benefits while maintaining their repugnant racist policies. The Court’s analysis was correct in that case, given how well-established and widely respected the constitutional right against racial discrimination was. But how would the IRS and courts apply such themes in other cases, involving other constitutional rights?

To that end, in recent years some have asked whether the Supreme Court’s recognition of same-sex marriage as a fundamental constitutional right could have similar impacts on religious organizations that refuse to participate in or otherwise support same-sex marriage.

Liberal proponents of same-sex marriage rights have tried to downplay those concerns. Writing in Slate two years ago, Emily Bazelon argued that States’ recognition of same-sex marriages would not affect religious organizations’ tax-exempt status, at least not until “we’re as united about the pernicious nature of anti-gay discrimination as we are about racial discrimination.” (“Maybe we should be there,” she added, “But I don’t need to tell you we’re not.” Not yet.)

But that is, of course, the core theme in favor of same-sex marriage rights: that a constitutional right to same-sex marriage is no less fundamental than a right to inter-racial marriage. It has been at the heart of same-sex marriage litigation for years.

Surely the question of IRS tax exemptions came up at the “moot court” practice sessions preparing the Solicitor General for yesterday’s oral argument. If the Administration wanted to assure the Justices that the IRS — either its current leadership, or under a future Administration — would not strip, say, Catholic charities of their tax-exempt status, then the Solicitor General would have a well-rehearsed answer. Especially in light of the Obama administration’s treatment of conservative groups seeking tax exemptions, not to mention the Administration’s efforts — rejected unanimously by the Court — to use federal regulations to trump religious’ schools doctrinal authority.

But when Justice Alito posed this obvious question to the Solicitor General, Mr. Verrilli offered no reassurances:

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax-exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same-sex marriage?

GENERAL VERRILLI: You know, I — I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. I — I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is — it is going to be an issue.

Wait, the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations is “certainly going to be an issue?”

One would have preferred that the administration could have sorted this “issue” out ahead of time. If the scenario really were as far-fetched as Bazelon and others suggest, then it would have been easy for the Obama administration to simply say so.

And so it will fall to the Justices to grapple with the issue before announcing any broad new constitutional right. They took such pains in Hobby Lobby, in Heller, and in other such cases. We can only hope they’ll do it again here.

 

Iran’s Free Pass on Hijacking Cargo Ships

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Members of the U.S. Congress insist on reviewing any agreement with Iran before it takes effect, largely over Israeli concerns shared by many in Congress over Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

Zarif said Tehran does not want “to get bogged down into the domestic procedures of the United States” and was negotiating with the government.

He also said Iran was committed to maintaining freedom of navigation in the Gulf in the aftermath of the seizure of a commercial ship by Iranian forces on Tuesday. “For us, freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf is a must,” he said. More here.

A few days ago, Iran seized a cargo ship. The U.S. has no plan nor responsibility to free the ship as told by the U.S. State Department. The ship is owned by the United States by flies a Marshall Island flag. There is more intrigue.

Here’s Why Iran’s Seizure of a Cargo Ship Is So Odd, and Disturbing

While Revolutionary Guard boats often harass passing vessels, the capture of the MV Maersk Tigris appears to be something new:

No one knows why Iranian military forces seized a 52,000-ton container ship in the Strait of Hormuz, and that’s worrying. Nor is it clear what the U.S. Navy or anyone else can do about it.

The strait is one of the world’s great maritime chokepoints; among other cargo, nearly 20 percent of the world’s annual supply of crude oil passes through its 6-mile-wide shipping channel. From time to time, Iran threatens to close the strait to shipping, though any such move would be vigorously contested by the United States and other countries, and it’s doubtful that the passage would remain closed for long. Still, news about maritime threats in the strait can send tremors through global markets.

The MV Maersk Tigris — a brand-new cargo ship built to carry more than 5,400 standard shipping containers — was heading westward through the strait in Iranian territorial waters on Tuesday, according to Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren. It was approached by several patrol vessels of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, or IRGCN, the maritime arm of the paramilitary unit that is generally tasked with “preserving the Islamic revolution.”

So far, nothing terribly unusual. The IRGCN, assigned to patrol the Gulf, routinely sends boats to shadow — some say “harass” — vessels of other nationalities as they transit the strait. Just three days ago, CNN reported, four IRGCN boats surrounded the U.S.-flagged Maersk Kensington in the Strait of Hormuz and followed it closely for some time. The U.S. Fifth Fleet subsequently issued a notice to mariners.

What happened next to the MV Maersk Tigris, however, was quite out of the ordinary.

“The master was contacted and directed to proceed further into Iranian territorial waters,” said Warren. “He declined and one of the IRGCN craft fired shots across the bridge of the Maersk Tigris. The master complied with the Iranian demand and proceeded into Iranian waters in the vicinity of Larak Island.”

William Watson, a maritime consultant based in Washington, D.C., called the situation “very strange and peculiar.”

Iran, which claims the entire strait as its territorial waters, might legally board a vessel if it deviated substantially toward the Iranian coast, Watson said. But ships moving normally through the strait have the right of innocent passage, a right routinely and firmly asserted by U.S. warships, among thousands of other vessels.

Via its Fars News Agency, the Iranian government said, “The ship is a trade vessel and has been seized by the Iranian navy at the request of Iran’s Ports and Maritime Organization…The ship was seized after a relevant court order was issued for its confiscation.” The article said the IPMO had monetary differences with the ship owner.

Watson found this mystifying. If someone has a financial claim against a vessel’s owners, the claimant can “arrest” the vessel, or hold it until the dispute is resolved. But he added that in his decades of watching the world’s maritime trade, he’d never heard of such a thing done on the high seas. Arrests happen in port or at anchor, he said.

Soon after the container ship encountered the IRGCN boats, it sent a distress signal. The U.S. Navy responded by dispatching a guided missile destroyer, the USS Farragut, to have a look. As well, it sent a maritime patrol aircraft (the Navy has two kinds, the propellor-driven P-3 Orion and the jet-powered P-8 Poseidon).

It’s unclear what the Navy might do from here. The U.S. can act forcefully to protect ships under U.S. flag, and generally must lay off when a vessel is sailing under some other country’s banner. The Maersk Tigris is a bit in the middle; it flies the flag of the Marshall Islands, which in the wake of World War II placed itself under the military protection of the United States.

“NAVCENT [U.S. Naval Forces, Central Command] is communicating with representatives of the shipping company and we continue to monitor the situation,” Warren said. “According to information received from the vessel’s operators, there are no Americans aboard.”

The incident comes just days after the U.S. Navy dispatched an aircraft carrier and escort to ward off Iranian ships headed for the civil-war-wracked country of Yemen, and amid tense and ongoing negotiations surrounding the framework nuclear deal between Iran and other nations. It is also part of a long history of naval confrontations between the U.S. and Iranian forces; most dramatically, the daylong naval battle in 1988 in which the U.S. retaliated for the mining of the USS Samuel B. Roberts by sinking two Iranian warships and damaging other assets.

Update (4/29): The day after the seizure, Maersk officials told Reuters they still did not know why their ship had been taken, and that they were working with Danish diplomats to learn more. The world’s largest shipping company, Maersk is based in Copenhagen.

Update 2 (4/29): Via the government’s IRNA news agency, Iran added a bit to its explanation for the seizure, saying that “the decree was issued upon a complaint lodged by a private company named ‘Pars-Talaeeyeh Oil Products Company’ against MAERSK Shipping Line. The case passed its legal proceedings and finally MAERSK was sentenced to pay financial damages….The [Navigation and Ports Organization] underlined that the issue is merely a legal case and has nothing to do with political issues.”

Update 3 (4/29): The website MarineTraffic produced this video showing the course of the MV Maersk Tigris before, during, and after its interception.

Now there are talks with the Marshall Islands about future interceptions. Officials from the United States and the Marshall Islands are discussing “the way ahead” after Iranian patrol boats forcibly diverted a cargo ship flying a Marshall Islands flag into an anchorage in Iranian waters, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

A US Navy destroyer, the Farragut, and three coastal patrol ships, the Thunderbolt, Firebolt and Typhoon, were operating in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz conducting maritime security operations following the detention of the cargo ship, the MV Maersk Tigris, the Pentagon said.

 

Veterans Caught in the Middle of DC Politics

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FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. — A year after Americans recoiled at new revelations that sick veterans were getting sicker while languishing on waiting lists – and months after the Department of Veterans Affairs instituted major reforms – government data shows that the number of patients facing long waits at VA facilities has not dropped at all.

No one expected that the VA mess could be fixed overnight. But The Associated Press has found that since the summer, the number of medical appointments delayed 30 to 90 days has largely stayed flat. The number of appointments that take longer than 90 days to complete has nearly doubled. *** Last month, Veterans Affairs Secretary Bob McDonald on Friday released the names of members serving on a new panel intended to improve VA services and help in long-range reform planning.

The committee members bring together a range of experiences and specialties from the private sector, state government, health care, academia and veterans organizations.

“The collective wisdom of our committee members is invaluable and each of them understands that VA must improve customer service and focus the Department on the needs of our Veterans. They are dedicated to that mission and I am grateful for their principled service to our Veterans,” McDonald said.

*** Simply put, there is no improvement at the VA and to date there are no viable solutions except to throw money at it each year, where discretionary spending appears to go without oversight. That spending is also in the billions. The VA budget in 2014 was $153 billion, in 2015 it is $140 billion and the requested budget for 2016 is $168 billion with $70.2 in discretionary funds. All the while the number of overdue claims still hovers at 600,000. Navigating the Veterans Administration for a veteran is a Herculean task and for the most part impossible.

So, the normal Congressional process is to take political postured footing and then hear Barack Obama put in his ever so common veto threat. Sadly, the veterans are as always caught in the middle. Having a real accounting of spent funds, wasted funds and lost funds is a prudent objective which would be forced with smart budget planning.

House Dems bolster Obama veto threat

Bolstering a White House veto threat, House Democrats on Wednesday began lining up against a Republican bill funding the Veterans Affairs Department next year.

“I won’t support it,” Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus, said Wednesday, “and I don’t believe our Caucus will support that, either.” Addressing the Democrats at a closed-door caucus meeting in the Capitol Wednesday, VA Secretary Robert McDonald warned the lawmakers that the GOP’s $77 billion bill funding the department and military construction projects in fiscal 2016 falls short of the resources needed to provide health and other services to the nation’s veterans.

Relaying McDonald’s message, Rep. Xavier Becerra (Calif.), chairman of the Democratic Caucus, said the GOP’s bill would scale back health benefits for roughly 70,000 veterans, while also denying funds for medical research, education and veterans’ cemeteries.

“The secretary came and sent a very strong message, something we rarely hear: ‘Please don’t let this funding bill become law, if you care about our veterans. We must do better for them,'” Becerra said.

Passed with bipartisan support by the House Appropriations Committee last week, the bill provides a 5.6 percent increase for the VA over 2015 levels, but falls more than $1 billion shy of the figure President Obama had included in his 2016 budget request.

Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) hailed the measure as “a balanced, thorough bill that will help improve the quality of life … [and] address the current and future needs of our veterans.”

The Democratic leaders see it differently, accusing the Republicans of adhering to spending levels dictated by the “incoherent” sequester law at the expense of veterans.

“We should not use the excuse — anyone in Congress — that sequester made you do this,” Becerra said. “If we divest in the Veterans Administration for something as incoherent as a bad law … then we’re doing injustice and disservice to our veterans.”

Scheduled for a floor vote Wednesday evening, the VA funding bill is expected to pass with overwhelming Republican support.

But the White House on Tuesday issued a statement threatening to veto the measure, saying it “fails” to fund building upgrades on military bases and expansions to medical facilities used by veterans.

The staunch opposition from leading Democrats suggests the president’s House allies would be able to sustain a veto if GOP leaders passed the bill and attempted to override the president.