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Tip Sheet on Kamala Harris

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          1. Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India.
          2.  Harris said she believed women who accused Biden of inappropriate touching.’I believe them, and I respect them being able to tell their story and having the courage to do it’.
          4. Harris was the designated pit bull to attack Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing. At one point when he was holding a worn copy of the Constitution that he kept in his coat pocket, she referred to it as THAT BOOK showing her disdain for his fidelity to the Constitution. Read more here.
          5. As both a district attorney and state attorney general, Harris pushed for a new statewide law that lets prosecutors charge parents with misdemeanors if their children are chronically truant.
          6. Harris strongly supports “familial DNA searching,ˮ in which police take DNA samples from crime scenes and compare them to existing databases to look for not just any direct matches in criminal databases, but any familial matches.
          7. In her first speech on the Senate floor, Harris declared, “An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.” She later avowed the belief that illegal immigration is “a civil violation, not a crime.”
          8. In October 2017, Harris declared that she would rather shut down the government than vote for a spending bill that did not address the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and ensure those covered by the program would not be deported. “I will not vote for an end-of-year spending bill until we are clear about what we are going to do to protect and take care of our DACA young people in this country,” she said. And she has kept her word, at least so far. More details here from NR.
          9. Harris did not protect the Catholic Daughters of Charity Health System but rather finessed the sale as a favor to SEIU.
          10. Harris says Americans need to be “educated about the effect of our eating habits on our environment,” and says she would change the dietary guidelines to reduce the amount of red meat you can eat.
          11. Harris will push Congress to provide monthly economic impact payments to qualifying Americans that are recurring.
          12. Harris and her Senate colleagues pushed for the inclusion of a provision that would cancel at least $10,000 of student debt for all borrowers.
          13. Harris insisted that the 2017 tax reform law must be repealed in its entirety.
          14. Harris has a long record of action on climate change including investigating Exxon Mobil XOM in 2016, voting against repeals of methane emissions, and sponsoring the resolution of disapproval for the 2019 rollbacks on power plant carbon pollution limits.
          15. Her plan, by 2045 we will have basically zero emission vehicles only,” but her climate plan calls for 100% of vehicles as soon as 2035.
          16. She lied about smoking pot listening to Snoop and Tupac.

Her sister Maya is a lawyer, public policy advocate, and television commentator. She is a political analyst for MSNBC and in 2015 was appointed as one of three senior policy advisors to lead the development of an agenda for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. She was formerly a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. From 2008 until she took her current position, she was Vice President for Democracy, Rights and Justice at the Ford Foundation. Prior to joining the Ford Foundation, she served as the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California. Swampy huh? Oh and Maya is married to Tony West. West previously served as the Associate Attorney General of the United States, the third highest-ranking official in the United States Department of Justice; and Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Division, the largest litigating division in the Department of Justice.

California Attorney General Kamal Harris marries Douglas Emhof Kamala Harris’ Criminal Justice Policies Blasted After ...

CIA Fought with FBI over Unvetted Steele Dossier

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Except perhaps if you challenge former CIA Director John Brennan.

CIA Director John Brennan: ISIS Could Carry Out More ...

Poor lil John, he is trying to write a book and wants access to some of his CIA files and notes. That request has been denied. His book titled Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad, slated for release in October may not have some citations or chapters in it because he has been denied access to classified material. President Trump and his security clearance was apparently never revoked. Hummm.

Meanwhile, it appears the large share of the RussiaGate operation against Donald Trump is in fact owned by the FBI. There are some CIA operatives however that do need to be explained, beginning with Eric Ciaramella.

The FBI continued to rely on intelligence from Christopher Steele, the former British spy who alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, even after the CIA warned his allegations were “very unvetted,” according to newly declassified documents.

“We would have never included that report in a CIA-only assessment because the source was so indirect. And we made sure we indicated we didn’t use it in our analysis, and if it had been a CIA-only product we wouldn’t have included it at all,” the CIA’s deputy director of analysis told the Senate Intelligence Committee in an April 21 report.

The report, declassified on Tuesday, shows that the FBI successfully pushed to include Steele’s information in a January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election after a “bitter argument” with the CIA.

While multiple claims by Steele have since been debunked by investigators, the bureau had also used Steele’s intelligence to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Then- FBI director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe argued that Steele’s information was relevant to the question of Russian interference in the 2016 election and lobbied the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to include Steele’s dossier in the January 7, 2017 ICA.

On Dec. 20, 2016, Comey had tried to include Steele’s information in the body of the ICA but John Brennan, then- CIA director, “pushed back,” saying he was “very concerned about polluting the ICA with this material.” The agency eventually agreed to add the information in a two-page annex to the ICA on Dec. 29, 2016.

An assistant director for an intelligence agency supported the annex’s information regarding Russia’s election-related efforts, but warned allegations of collusion involving members of the Trump campaign was uncorroborated, according to the report.

“I can tell you that there is no information coming from [redacted] sources that would corroborate any of that,” the official told the Senate panel, adding that Steele’s Trump-related information was “very unvetted.”

Brennan told the committee that someone in the British government had called him to clarify that they were not involved in creating the dossier.

“He wanted to make sure that I understood and that others in the senior officialdom of the U.S. government understood that that officer, Steele, had been a former [redacted] but had no current relationship with [redacted] and that dossier was not put together in any way with [redacted] support,” Brennan said. “So he wanted to make sure there was a separation there.”

Norm Eisen Partnered with Nadler on all things Impeachment

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WaPo

When Democrats took back the House of Representatives in 2018, the Judiciary Committee hired Norm Eisen to be special counsel.

He’d been a White House ethics czar and a U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic during the Obama administration. And when he showed up to work for Congress, he started preparing for the possibility that the House might impeach President Trump.

Less than a year later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an official impeachment inquiry. Eisen’s new book, A Case for the American People: The United States v. Donald J. Trump, describes this moment in time through the House vote to impeach Trump and the Senate trial, which ended in acquittal.

The book reveals that Eisen had drafted 10 articles of impeachment a month before Pelosi’s announcement. More here from NPR.

The Former White House Ethics Lawyer Umpiring Trump’s ... source

While we all seem to rely on leaks and alleged leaks for unknown truths or some access to an inside track, perhaps just reading Norm Eisen’s book is a must to understand the real workings in Washington DC.

Sure, it will make Republicans and conservatives angry but consider reading it to understand more and context as well as the opportunity to think more strategically when it comes to politics in DC.

“A Case for the American People,” by Norm Eisen — an architect of the House Democrats’ impeachment strategy —isn’t shy about its conclusions: Eisen believes in his bones that Trump is a recidivist criminal who must be ousted to save the republic. He also believes the Democrats who engineered Trump’s impeachment are heroes on par with the founders. The book is, at bottom, an effort to convey those conclusions — and Eisen’s centrality to the impeachment effort — to the wider world.

But Eisen’s 280-page chronicle of the impeachment era, replete with his inside-the-room knowledge of how the process unfolded, juxtaposes lawmakers’ lofty pronouncements about protecting democracy with the often provincial tensions and messy House politics that drove decisions of national significance.

Eisen, who signed up as a House Judiciary Committee attorney in early 2019 with an eye toward impeachment, also describes the hail of early “f— you’s” he delivered to House Intelligence Committee aide Daniel Goldman, who he said had accused him of treading on the panel’s turf. (They would later get past the initial tension, Eisen says). He describes how internal Democratic politics led him to shave a planned 10 articles of impeachment — encompassing a sweeping range of allegations such as “collusion” and “hush money payments” down to three, and then two, after vulnerable Democrats rejected charging Trump with obstruction of justice.

Eisen reveals the sometimes painful conflicts between House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) — in Eisen’s eyes, the unsung hero of impeachment — and House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who often resisted Nadler’s lead-foot on the impeachment accelerator. Nadler drew Pelosi’s ire throughout the process by leaning into calls for impeachment faster than the rest of the House was ready for, and Eisen said Nadler had accepted that it would take time to restore his “former level personal warmth” with the speaker.

Eisen writes. [Nadler chief of staff Amy Rutkin] and I furiously worked our Rolodexes, as did the entire staff.”

Among their successes? Eisen writes that he persuaded anti-Trump conservative Bill Kristol to rescind support for a select committee and that Rutkin persuaded progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) to retweet Kristol’s reversal, adding her own note of urgency to leave the process with the Judiciary Committee. Eisen — a former ambassador to the Czech Republic and Obama White House’s ethics czar — regales readers with his decades-old entanglements with many of the figures involved in Trump’s trial, from Trump’s trial lawyers to even the State Department’s impeachment witnesses, like former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, whom he describes as “my friend and former colleague.” Read more here from Politico.

Chinese Embassy in San Francisco Still Open, Why?

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Primer: The Chinese consulate in San Francisco is harboring a biology researcher who falsely denied connections to the Chinese military to obtain a visa and gain access to the country, according to court documents filed by the FBI.

The filing came as part of a document that cited a slew of other episodes in which Chinese nationals allegedly lied on their visa applications by hiding their military connections. More details.

FBI Arrests Chinese Researcher for Visa Fraud After She ... source

Axios: 

Every country spies. And many countries — including the U.S. — use their diplomatic outposts to do it. But for years, China has used its embassies and consulates to do far more than that.

Why it matters: The Trump administration’s recent hardline stance against China’s illicit consular activities is a public acknowledgment of real problems, but it comes at a time when U.S.-China relations are already dangerously tense.

Driving the news: Last week, the U.S. demanded that China close its Houston consulate in order to “protect American intellectual property and Americans’ private information,” White House National Security Council spokesperson John Ullyot said in a statement.

  • In response, the Chinese government ordered the closure of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, a facility nestled in China’s more remote inland region that served primarily as a visa-issuing office for Chinese hoping to visit the U.S., and was not a major hub for U.S. intelligence activity.

Yes, but: The Houston consulate wasn’t China’s most important espionage hub.

  • “San Francisco is the real gem but the U.S. won’t close it,” a former U.S. intelligence official told Axios.
  • It indicates the Trump administration is likely making an example of the Houston consulate in a bid to achieve its goal of a reduction in Chinese espionage activities without taking an even harsher measure, such as closing the San Francisco or New York consulates.

The Chinese government has long used its embassy and consulates in the U.S. to exert control over student groups, collect information on Uighurs and Chinese dissident groups, and coordinate local and state level political influence activities.

Surveilling Uighurs: Leaked classified Chinese government documents have revealed that Chinese embassies and consulates are complicit in the ongoing cultural and demographic genocide against Uighurs.

  • The CCP has sought to track down Uighurs who have left China and force them to return, with orders to place them in mass internment camps “the moment they cross the border.”
  • China’s embassies and consulates have also collected information on Uighurs abroad and submitted that information to Xinjiang police.
  • Consular officials have frequently refused to renew Uighur passports, telling them they must return to China in order to obtain new documents — only to be disappeared into camps as soon as they do.

Controlling Chinese students: The Chinese embassy and consulates keep close tabs on Chinese students in the U.S., occasionally sending them political directives and quietly organizing demonstrations.

  • The Chinese embassy and consulates have paid students to demonstrate in support of visiting Chinese leaders, instructing them to crowd out anti-CCP protesters. They have also asked Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSA) presidents to hold study sessions on party thought and to send back photos of the sessions to ensure compliance.
  • “I feel like the tendency is that the consulate tries to control CSSAs more and more,” one CSSA president told me in 2018.

Supporting United Front organizations: Chinese diplomatic officials regularly meet with leaders of U.S.-based organizations tied to the United Front Work Department, the political influence arm of the CCP, and preside over the ceremonies and banquets held by these organizations.

  • One such organization, the National Association for China’s Peaceful Unification, has branches in more than 30 U.S. cities. Its members issue statements in support of China’s official foreign policy positions, and the Chinese embassy and consular officials encourage them to engage in local U.S. politics.

The bottom line: Dealing with bad behavior by diplomats is a highly sensitive geopolitical issue that can easily result in damaged relations.

Go deeper … Mapped: Where U.S. and Chinese embassies and consulates are located

***

In part, how big a problem does the U.S. have regarding Chinese spies around the nation?

Economic Espionage

To achieve its goals and surpass America, China recognizes it needs to make leaps in cutting-edge technologies. But the sad fact is that instead of engaging in the hard slog of innovation, China often steals American intellectual property and then uses it to compete against the very American companies it victimized—in effect, cheating twice over. They’re targeting research on everything from military equipment to wind turbines to rice and corn seeds.

Through its talent recruitment programs, like the so-called Thousand Talents Program, the Chinese government tries to entice scientists to secretly bring our knowledge and innovation back to China—even if that means stealing proprietary information or violating our export controls and conflict-of-interest rules.

Take the case of scientist Hongjin Tan, for example, a Chinese national and American lawful permanent resident. He applied to China’s Thousand Talents Program and stole more than $1 billion—that’s with a “b”—worth of trade secrets from his former employer, an Oklahoma-based petroleum company, and got caught. A few months ago, he was convicted and sent to prison.

Or there’s the case of Shan Shi, a Texas-based scientist, also sentenced to prison earlier this year. Shi stole trade secrets regarding syntactic foam, an important naval technology used in submarines. Shi, too, had applied to China’s Thousand Talents Program, and specifically pledged to “digest” and “absorb” the relevant technology in the United States. He did this on behalf of Chinese state-owned enterprises, which ultimately planned to put the American company out of business and take over the market.

In one of the more galling and egregious aspects of the scheme, the conspirators actually patented in China the very manufacturing process they’d stolen, and then offered their victim American company a joint venture using its own stolen technology. We’re talking about an American company that spent years and millions of dollars developing that technology, and China couldn’t replicate it—so, instead, it paid to have it stolen.

And just two weeks ago, Hao Zhang was convicted of economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and conspiracy for stealing proprietary information about wireless devices from two U.S. companies. One of those companies had spent over 20 years developing the technology Zhang stole.

These cases were among more than a thousand investigations the FBI has into China’s actual and attempted theft of American technology—which is to say nothing of over a thousand more ongoing counterintelligence investigations of other kinds related to China. We’re conducting these kinds of investigations in all 56 of our field offices. And over the past decade, we’ve seen economic espionage cases with a link to China increase by approximately 1,300 percent.

The stakes could not be higher, and the potential economic harm to American businesses and the economy as a whole almost defies calculation. More details here.

 

Re. Gaetz Files Criminal Referral Against CEO Zuckerberg

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Washington, D.C. — Today, U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (FL-01) filed a criminal referral against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for making materially false statements to Congress while under oath during two joint hearings in Congress on April 10th, 2018 and April 11th, 2018.

During a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and also a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly and categorically denied his company engaged in bias against conservative speech, persons, policies, or politics and also denied that Facebook censored and suppressed content supportive of President Donald Trump and other conservatives.

In June of 2020 however, Project Veritas published the results of an undercover investigation featuring two whistleblowers who worked as Facebook’s “content moderators,” revealing that the overwhelming majority of content filtered by Facebook’s AI program was content in support of President Donald Trump, Republican candidates for office, or conservatism in general.

“Oversight is an essential part of Congress’ constitutional authority,” Congressman Gaetz states in the letter. “As a member of this body, I question Mr. Zuckerberg’s veracity, and challenge his willingness to cooperate with our oversight authority, diverting congressional resources during time-sensitive investigations, and materially impeding our work. Such misrepresentations are not only unfair, they are potentially illegal and fraudulent.”

The letter refers Mr. Zuckerberg to the Department of Justice for an investigation into the false statements made to Congress while under oath.

Full text of the letter sent to Attorney General William Barr may be found PDF iconHERE and below.

 

VIA ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION

The Honorable William Barr

Attorney General of the United States

United States Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20530

 

Dear Attorney General Barr:

 

I write to urge you to investigate the conduct of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, Inc., before the United States Congress.

On April 10, 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg testified in a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. The next day, Mr. Zuckerberg testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. On both occasions, members of Congress asked Mr. Zuckerberg about allegations that Facebook censored and suppressed content supportive of President Donald Trump and other conservatives. In his responses, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly and categorically denied any bias against conservative speech, persons, policies, or politics. Mr. Zuckerberg also dismissed the suggestion that Facebook exercises any form of editorial manipulation. However, recent reports from Project Veritas, featuring whistleblowers who worked as Facebook’s “content moderators,” have shown ample evidence of such bias and manipulation.

Two content moderators, Zach McElroy and Ryan Hartwig, both worked on the Facebook content review flow generated by Facebook’s artificial intelligence (AI) program for flagging questionable content. McElroy worked at the Facebook-Cognizant facility in Tampa, Florida and Hartwig worked at the Facebook-Cognizant facility in Phoenix, Arizona.

On June 23, 2020, Project Veritas published the results of an undercover investigation featuring the aforementioned whistleblowers. Their report revealed that the overwhelming majority of content filtered by Facebook’s AI program was content in support of President Donald Trump, Republican candidates for office, or conservatism in general. This alone is already an indication of bias within the platform.

Once flagged by Facebook’s AI, moderators reviewed the filtered content, and adjudicated whether it qualified as removable. According to the Veritas report and undercover footage, the adjudicators were outspoken about their political bias against Republicans, and actively chose to eliminate otherwise-allowable content from the platform and from public view simply due to its political orientation. This arbitrary and capricious behavior is not done in good faith, and falls outside of the express intent of §230 of the Communications Decency Act, which affords Facebook liability protection as long as the platform moderates content in “good faith.”

Additionally, these facts are in direct contrast to Mr. Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress where he stated under oath that Facebook is a politically-neutral platform, and that he personally is working to root out any employees who are restricting speech based on Silicon Valley’s overwhelmingly leftist culture.

Project Veritas’ undercover footage shows that a great deal of “political speech” supporting the President was labeled “hate speech,” or was considered in violation Facebook’s “Community Standards.” At the same time, speech promoting violence against the President and his supporters was labeled as merely “political,” and was thus allowed to stay on the platform. For example, McElroy captured a shot of a Facebook corporate ruling that an illustration of a hand holding a knife slashing the throat of the President, captioned by “Fuck Trump,” would be allowed as political speech, despite being in clear violation of Facebook’s guidelines. In this case, the guidance to content moderators instructed them to watch for hostility directed at the gallery that posted the image.

Facebook’s AI screening content is not politically neutral. Neither are the moderators hired to review content flagged by the AI program. This stands in opposition to Mr. Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony, and violates the “good faith” provision of Section 230(c)(2)(A) of the Communications Decency Act.

Accordingly, I respectfully refer Mr. Zuckerberg to the Department for an investigation of potential violations of 18 U.S.C. §§1001, 1505, and 1621 for materially false statements made to Congress while testifying under oath.

Oversight is an essential part of Congress’ constitutional authority. Customarily, Congress is grateful to citizens who come forward with relevant information in good faith, as the aforementioned whistleblowers have done. As a member of this body, I question Mr. Zuckerberg’s veracity, and challenge his willingness to cooperate with our oversight authority, diverting congressional resources during time-sensitive investigations, and materially impeding our work. Such misrepresentations are not only unfair, they are potentially illegal and fraudulent.

 

I hope you will give this referral full and proper consideration. If you need further clarification, please contact my chief of staff, Jillian Lane-Wyant..

 

Sincerely,

 

Matt Gaetz

Member of Congress

*** Reference: Project Veritas has a history of hidden camera “stings” that use deceptively-edited video to fuel outrage against YouTube executives, CNN, George Soros and other liberal boogeyman. (Notably, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges in 2010 after being arrested for trying to tamper with a Senator’s phone.) More here