Category Archives: Presidential campaign

Oh, So Now the Justice Dept. is Mandating PC Training

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Any bets that the FBI does in fact make a criminal referral on Hillary and the Justice Department will not advance the case for prosecution? Anyone? Maybe they will use the ‘implicit bias’ against women as a reason….. Sheesh, read on, ensure your seat belt is securely buckled.

 

Exclusive: Justice Department mandates ‘implicit bias’ training for agents, lawyers

Reuters: The U.S. Justice Department will announce on Monday that more than 33,000 federal agents and prosecutors will receive training aimed at preventing unconscious bias from influencing their law enforcement decisions, department officials told Reuters.

The training will bring Justice Department employees in line with many local police departments across the country that have implemented bias prevention plans following a spate of shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers.

Nationwide protests following those shootings blamed police bias for unnecessary use of force against minorities.

The department had been criticized for not developing its own policies to combat bias after recommending local police do so at the direction of a task force created by President Barack Obama after riots in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.

In a memo to Justice Department employees obtained by Reuters, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said the program targets “implicit biases” – subtle, unconscious stereotypes or characterizations nearly everyone makes about certain groups of people.

“But implicit bias also presents unique challenges to effective law enforcement, because it can alter where investigators and prosecutors look for evidence and how they analyze it without their awareness or ability to compensate,” Yates said in the memo.

The training will be mandatory for all Justice Department agents and prosecutors and will be rolled out over the next year, Yates said.

Arrest data compiled by some police departments have shown that black and Hispanic men are more likely to be stopped by police than others, suggesting officers may be exerting implicit bias in deciding whom to question or apprehend.

The Justice Department will use a model developed by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit organization that provides expertise on policing issues, designed to make people aware of attitudes they may hold about certain races, genders, nationalities and other characteristics.

The Justice Department employs more than 5,800 attorneys and 28,000 law enforcement agents across four agencies: The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the U.S. Marshals Service.

Police departments such as those in Baltimore, New York City, Seattle, New Orleans and Los Angeles have training programs in place that help officers recognize biases they may carry but not be aware of following a national outcry against police bias in minority communities.

Asked why the Justice Department only now has begun such training for its employees, Yates said success in local jurisdictions caused the federal government to consider it as well.

“This program has been so well-received by our state and local counterparts, we thought it was something we should be offering to our federal agents, frankly, to get our own house in order,” Yates said in an interview with Reuters.

Yates and the heads of other Justice Department components will begin their own implicit bias training course on Tuesday. Attorney General Loretta Lynch will announce the initiative in Phoenix on Tuesday when she travels there as part of her community policing tour, said a Justice Department official.

Department of Homeland Security employees, which include 60,000 border patrol officers and agents, will not be subject to the training.

Yates said the Justice Department hopes to serve as a model for other federal agencies that have not yet addressed implicit bias.

**** We already have a bias at Justice, and training for more to the left?

As a former lawyer at the Justice Department noted about Loretta Lynch in her confirmation hearing some factual details about the departments at Main Justice:

Bias in Hiring:
A devastating report by the Department of Justice inspector general in 2013 found deep polarization, mismanagement, and harassment of conservative employees as well as a litmus test imposed in hiring attorneys in the Civil Rights Division — namely, experience with liberal civil-rights organizations, which translates to experience working for the institutional Left. In short, only ideological allies need apply. As a result, the inspector general’s report found that the Civil Rights Division “passed over candidates who had stellar academic credentials and litigation experience with some of the best law firms in the country” and recommended that this litmus test be abolished. Former assistant attorney general Tom Perez specifically rejected reforms to end the biases in Civil Rights Division hiring. Will Lynch commit to implementing the recommendations made by the DOJ inspector general for more equitable and non-partisan attorney hiring? What will she do to stop the harassment of career employees not considered “liberal enough” that is outlined in the IG report? Free Speech Over the last six years, the Justice Department has brought a series of flimsy civil cases against peaceful abortion-clinic protesters under the Federal Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE). Case after case has been thrown out by federal courts, often after a scolding by the judge that the case lacked merit. These cases squelched the First Amendment rights of anti-abortion protesters, who may have been the victims of political targeting. In one case, the court assessed sanctions that the DOJ didn’t even appeal. What will Lynch do to fix this problem? Will she commit to requiring higher evidentiary findings in any recommendation for new prosecutions against religiously motivated abortion protesters?
Department Misconduct:
Two individuals remain employed in important positions at the Justice Department despite findings that they engaged in gross prosecutorial misconduct or outright perjury. One is Karla Dobinski. Dobinski is a lawyer who was involved in a prosecution against New Orleans police officers for civil-rights violations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Dobinski was tasked with serving as head of the “taint team” to protect the defendant police officers’ constitutional rights. A scathing opinion by federal judge Kurt Engelhardt points out that a number of DOJ lawyers, including Dobinski, engaged in a secret blogging campaign during the course of the trial to leak evidence about the case, as well as to bolster or weaken the credibility of trial witnesses. Yet Dobinski still is employed by DOJ. She even works in the component currently investigating other police departments. Will Lynch agree to review the matter for possible disciplinary action against Dobinski? Another Justice Department employee, Stephanie Celandine Gyamfi, was found to have engaged in perjury during the course of the DOJ inspector general’s 2013 investigation. This wasn’t any ordinary perjury, since it involved the integrity of American elections. According to the IG report, Gyamfi, who works in the Voting Section, was asked about confidential internal legal memoranda leaked to the Washington Post. She denied any knowledge of the leaks until she was confronted with documents showing her participation. The IG report says she told IG investigators that she “did not regret posting comments online, except to the extent that it resulted in questioning from the OIG.” Yet she still works in the very same Voting Section and has been neither disciplined nor terminated. Will Lynch agree to review the matter for possible disciplinary action against Gyamfi? When judges accuse DOJ lawyers of prosecutorial abuse or other such misbehavior, as has happened in numerous cases over the past six years, what actions will Lynch take to discipline or terminate those employees?
Funding Democratic Political Databases:
The Justice Department has been moving tax money toward a voter database used by Democratic candidates. Catalist is a massive database containing voter files used by left-wing organizations that is so inaccurate that an organization using its database was the subject of numerous complaints in Virginia in 2012 for sending voter-registration applications to “dead relatives, children, family members in other states, non–U.S. citizens . . . and residents’ cats and dogs.” The Justice Department has been funding experts and political-science professors in its litigation who used Catalist in various ways. Will Lynch agree to stop using Catalist data? Racialist Assaults on Voter-ID Laws The Justice Department has hired expert witnesses to attack election-integrity laws who have testified that blacks are “less sophisticated” than whites and therefore less able to “figure out” how to register, comply with voter-ID requirements, or get to the polls to vote. The DOJ has paid these professors hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide this offensive testimony. Does Lynch agree with this testimony, or will she terminate the contracts of experts who have such a patronizing view of black voters? Does she believe, as Eric Holder does, that voter-ID laws are racist, and does she disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision upholding such laws in 2008 in Crawford v. Marion County? Most important, the 2013 IG report makes it clear that Eric Holder and others in the leadership of the Civil Rights Division demoted the head of the Voting Section, Christopher Coates, because Holder did not want Coates to pursue cases where whites were being discriminated against and because Coates was asking attorney applicants whether “they would be capable of enforcing the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral manner.” In other words, it seems that Holder did not believe in the race-neutral enforcement of federal anti-discrimination laws such as the Voting Rights Act. Lynch should be asked if she shares this view that the Voting Rights Act protects only blacks and other minority groups from discrimination. Such a view should disqualify anyone from being attorney general.
The Death Penalty and Racial Bias in the Justice System:
Lynch said in 2002 that the application of the death penalty against blacks and Hispanics evidenced a systematic disregard for minority citizens. Lynch would not apply the death penalty even if it could be applied perfectly, according to a 2002 Vera Institute of Justice report, simply because of its supposed disparate impact on minorities. “You can be as fair as possible in a particular case, but the reality is that the federal death penalty is going to hit harder on certain groups,” she said. Although the death penalty is less common in federal prosecutions, if Lynch is confirmed, she will likely face death-penalty decisions, particularly in terrorism prosecutions. Given her race-based opposition, Lynch should be asked whether she will refuse to authorize her prosecutors to seek the death penalty because of the race of the accused or whether she will recuse herself from such decisions.
In April 2014, Lynch participated in a conference in New York City organized by the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. The DOJ report on the conference had a list of “action items” that included the statement that “racial bias is pervasive” in our society, a claim that most Americans would disagree with and for which the evidence is, at best, equivocal. It is critical for members of the Senate to determine whether Lynch shares the view that racial bias is pervasive and, if so, how that will affect her decision-making as attorney general. Immigration Enforcement and Prosecutorial DiscretionEric Holder and President Obama have stretched the concept of prosecutorial discretion beyond recognition in order to avoid enforcing federal statutes they disagree with on policy grounds. Lynch must be asked whether she believes that the president’s immigration policy is constitutional and whether she believes that, as attorney general, she can refuse to enforce a federal statute against whole categories of offenders. This includes refusing to enforce federal drug laws in states that have decriminalized or legalized marijuana. This last question is particularly important, because it is also related to other issues, such as the refusal of DOJ to present the contempt citations of Eric Holder and Lois Lerner to a federal grand jury. Federal law (2 U.S.C. §194) requires the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, currently Ronald Machen, to bring such a contempt citation before a federal grand jury for action.
Machen has refused to do so. Does Lynch believe it is appropriate for the U.S. Attorney not to comply with this federal statute? Under Eric Holder’s leadership, the department where we formerly worked has been politicized to an unprecedented extent. These confirmation hearings are vital to finding out whether Loretta Lynch will continue policies that have damaged the administration of justice and the reputation of the Justice Department, or whether she will put the department back on the path toward being a highly professional, objective law-enforcement agency dedicated to the rule of law. Read the full article here from National Review. 

The Covert Russian Influence, Targets Europe/USA

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What if Russia does have Hillary’s emails? When the KGB/FSB hacked into the DNC, the Kremlin does have an army of people cultivating and assessing all American politics moving ahead for the next 4 years. That is a trove of data for political warfare and coupled with Europe, Putin’s sights on global expansion is becoming a simple game of checkers.

Russian intelligence and security services have been waging a campaign of harassment and intimidation against U.S. diplomats, embassy staff and their families in Moscow and several other European capitals that has rattled ambassadors and prompted Secretary of State John F. Kerry to ask Vladimir Putin to put a stop to it.

At a recent meeting of U.S. ambassadors from Russia and Europe in Washington, U.S. ambassadors to several European countries complained that Russian intelligence officials were constantly perpetrating acts of harassment against their diplomatic staff that ranged from the weird to the downright scary. Some of the intimidation has been routine: following diplomats or their family members, showing up at their social events uninvited or paying reporters to write negative stories about them.

But many of the recent acts of intimidation by Russian security services have crossed the line into apparent criminality. In a series of secret memos sent back to Washington, described to me by several current and former U.S. officials who have written or read them, diplomats reported that Russian intruders had broken into their homes late at night, only to rearrange the furniture or turn on all the lights and televisions, and then leave. One diplomat reported that an intruder had defecated on his living room carpet. A real terrifying set of Russian aggressions explained more in detail here. It has been going on for some time, where now diplomats are being trained to handle Russian aggression.  More here from the Washington Post.

Let’s examine some other symptoms and facts:

Primer #1, 1948: Preventive Direct Action in Free Countries.

Purpose: Only in cases of critical necessity, to resort to direct action to prevent vital installations, other material, or personnel from being (1) sabotaged or liquidated or (2) captured intact by Kremlin agents or agencies. 

Description: This covert operation involves, for example, (1) control over anti-sabotage activities in the  Venezuelan oil fields, (2) American sabotage of Near Eastern oil installations on the verge of Soviet capture, and (3) designation of key individuals threatened by the Kremlin who should be protected or removed elsewhere. 

It would seem that the time is now fully ripe for the creation of a covert political warfare operations directorate within the Government. If we are to engage in such operations, they must be under unified direction. One man must be boss. And he must, as those responsible for the overt phases of political warfare, be answerable to the Secretary of State, who directs the whole in coordination. (More from Political Warfare, in the Gray Zone)

Primer #2: (2014)When Central and Eastern Europe threw off the Communist yoke and the Soviet Union collapsed, Europe and the United States transformed their Soviet policy of isolation and containment to one of political and economic integration with the Russian Federation.

This approach had been largely successful over the past 25 years. Russia joined the Group of Eight (G8) in 1998, the World Trade Organization in 2012, and was considered for membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In the past 10 years alone, the value of Russia’s global trade has nearly quadrupled from $210 billion in 2003 to $802 billion in 2013. Last year, Russia’s trade with the EU represented 48.5 percent of its total. Although U.S.-Russian trade ties remained subdued by comparison, the two former superpowers developed a measurable degree of economic interdependence, as evidenced by the International Space Station and Russian-made titanium for Boeing’s 787 fleet. This transatlantic policy of integration came to an abrupt halt on March 18, 2014. (More here from Heather Conley)

Political warfare is cheap and effective when dupes are willing accomplices.

So, in 2016 we are seeing the following:

 Putin and Ortega

The Russian government is building an electronic intelligence-gathering facility in Nicaragua as part of Moscow’s efforts to increase military and intelligence activities in the Western Hemisphere.

The signals intelligence site is part of a recent deal between Moscow and Managua involving the sale of 50 T-72 Russian tanks, said defense officials familiar with reports of the arrangement.

The tank deal and spy base have raised concerns among some officials in the Pentagon and nations in the region about a military buildup under leftist Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega.

Disclosure of the Russia-Nicaraguan spy base comes as three U.S. officials were expelled from Nicaragua last week. The three Department of Homeland Security officials were picked up by Nicaraguan authorities, driven to the airport, and sent to the United States without any belongings.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the expulsion took place June 14 and was “unwarranted and inconsistent with the positive and constructive agenda that we seek with the government of Nicaragua.”

“Such treatment has the potential to negatively impact U.S. and Nicaraguan bilateral relations, particularly trade,” he said.

The action is an indication that President Obama’s recent diplomatic overture to Cuba has not led to better U.S. ties to leftist governments in the region. More here.  

*****

Silicon Valley’s hostility to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement reached a new low last week when Twitter rejected the Central Intelligence Agency as a customer for data based on its tweets—while continuing to serve an entity controlled by Vladimir Putin.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news that Twitter decided U.S. intelligence services could no longer buy services from Dataminr, which has a unique relationship with Twitter. (More from the WSJ)

Russia accused of clandestine funding of European parties as US conducts major review of Vladimir Putin’s strategy
Exclusive: UK warns of “new Cold War” as Kremlin seeks to divide and rule in Europe

Telegraph: American intelligence agencies are to conduct a major investigation into how the Kremlin is infiltrating political parties in Europe, it can be revealed.

James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence, has been instructed by the US Congress to conduct a major review into Russian clandestine funding of European parties over the last decade.

The review reflects mounting concerns in Washington over Moscow’s determination to exploit European disunity in order to undermine Nato, block US missile defence programmes and revoke the punitive economic sanctions regime imposed after the annexation of Crimea.

The US move came as senior British government officials told The Telegraph of growing fears that “a new cold war” was now unfolding in Europe, with Russian meddling taking on a breadth, range and depth far greater than previously thought.

“It really is a new Cold War out there,” the source said, “Right across the EU we are seeing alarming evidence of Russian efforts to unpick the fabric of European unity on a whole range of vital strategic issues.”

A dossier of “Russian influence activity” seen by The Sunday Telegraph identified Russian influence operations running in France, the Netherlands, Hungary as well as Austria and the Czech Republic, which has been identified by Russian agents as an entry-point into the Schengen free movement zone.

The US intelligence review will examine whether Russian security services are funding parties and charities with the intent of “undermining political cohesion”, fostering agitation against the Nato missile defence programme and undermining attempts to find alternatives to Russian energy.

Officials declined to say which parties could come into the probe but it is thought likely to include far-right groups including Jobbik in Hungary, Golden Dawn in Greece, the Northern League in Italy and France’s Front National which received a 9m euro (£6.9m) loan from a Russian bank in 2014.

Other cases of possible Moscow-backed destabilisation being monitored by diplomats includes extensive links in Austria, including a visit by Austrian MPs to Crimea to endorse its annexation, as well as cases of Russian spies discovered using Austrian papers.

 

Missing Hillary Communications Surfacing

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Investigators are performing remarkable but tedious work to uncover papertrails and to located items that are missing. Facts, details, dates, times and names are pesky things, while the process is slow, a question remains, how much is actually complete such that details are leaking out?

 

Clinton’s State Dept. calendar missing scores of entries

CLINTON CALENDAR

WASHINGTON (AP)— An Associated Press review of the official calendar Hillary Clinton kept as secretary of state identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded or omitted the names of those she met. The fuller details of those meetings were included in files the State Department turned over to AP after it sued the government in federal court.

The missing entries raise new questions about how Clinton and her inner circle handled government records documenting her State Department tenure — in this case, why the official chronology of her four-year term does not closely mirror the other, more detailed records of her daily meetings.

At a time when Clinton’s private email system is under scrutiny by an FBI criminal investigation, the calendar omissions reinforce concerns that she sought to eliminate the “risk of the personal being accessible” — as she wrote in an email exchange that she failed to turn over to the government but was subsequently uncovered in a top aide’s inbox.

The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page calendar with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day’s events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show.

*****

Clinton failed to hand over key email to State Department

FNC: WASHINGTON –  Former Secretary Hillary Clinton failed to turn over a copy of a key message involving problems caused by her use of a private homebrew email server, the State Department confirmed Thursday. The disclosure makes it unclear what other work-related emails may have been deleted by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

The email was included within messages exchanged Nov. 13, 2010, between Clinton and one of her closest aides, Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin. At the time, emails sent from Clinton’s BlackBerry device and routed through her private clintonemail.com server in the basement of her New York home were being blocked by the State Department’s spam filter. A suggested remedy was for Clinton to obtain a state.gov email account.

“Let’s get separate address or device but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible,” Clinton responded to Abedin.

Clinton never used a government account that was set up for her, instead continuing to rely on her private server until leaving office.

The email was not among the tens of thousands of emails Clinton turned over to the agency in response to public records lawsuits seeking copies of her official correspondence. Abedin, who also used a private account on Clinton’s server, provided a copy from her own inbox after the State Department asked her to return any work-related emails. That copy of the email was publicly cited last month in a blistering audit by the State Department’s inspector general that concluded Clinton and her team ignored clear internal guidance that her email setup violated federal standards and could have left sensitive material vulnerable to hackers.

“While this exchange was not part of the approximately 55,000 pages provided to the State Department by former Secretary Clinton, the exchange was included within the set of documents Ms. Abedin provided the department in response to our March 2015 request,” State Department spokesman John Kirby told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said she provided “all potentially work-related emails” that were still in her possession when she received the 2014 request from the State Department.

“Secretary Clinton had some emails with Huma that Huma did not have, and Huma had some emails with Secretary Clinton that Secretary Clinton did not have,” Fallon said.

Fallon declined to say whether Clinton deleted any work-related emails before they were reviewed by her legal team. Clinton’s lead lawyer, David Kendall, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

The November 2010 email was among documents released under court order Wednesday to the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch, which has sued the State Department over access to public records related to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s service as the nation’s top diplomat between 2009 and 2013. The case is one of about three dozen lawsuits over access to records related to Clinton, including one filed by the AP.

Before turning over her emails to the department for review and potential public release, Clinton and her lawyers withheld thousands of additional emails she said were clearly personal, such as those involving what she described as “planning Chelsea’s wedding or my mother’s funeral arrangements, condolence notes to friends as well as yoga routines, family vacations.”

Clinton has never outlined in detail what criteria she and her lawyers used to determine which emails to release and which to delete, but her 2010 email with Abedin appears clearly work-related under the State Department’s own criteria for agency records under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

Dozens of the emails sent or received by Clinton through her private server were later determined to contain classified material. The FBI has been investigating for months whether Clinton’s use of the private email server imperiled government secrets. Agents recently interviewed several of Clinton’s top aides, including Abedin.

As part of the probe, Clinton turned over the hard drive from her email server to the FBI. It had been wiped clean, and Clinton has said she did not keep copies of the emails she choose to withhold.

On Wednesday, lawyers from Judicial Watch, a conservative legal organization, questioned under oath Bryan Pagliano, the computer technician who set up Clinton’s private server. A transcript released Thursday shows Pagliano repeatedly responded to detailed questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, as he did last year before a congressional committee.

Dozens of questions Pagiliano declined to answer included who paid for the system, whether there was technical help to support its users and who else at the State Department used email accounts on it. Pagliano also would not answer whether he discussed setting up a home server with Clinton prior to her tenure as secretary of state, according to the transcript.

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said the November 2010 email cited in the inspector general audit was one of more than a dozen work-related emails that his group identified that Clinton sent or received but later failed to turn over the State Department.

“Contrary to her statement under oath suggesting otherwise, Mrs. Clinton did not return all her government emails to the State Department,” Fitton said. “Our goal is to find out what other emails Mrs. Clinton and the State Department are hiding.”

The LEAVE Vote Won, What Brexit Means Now

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Populism and Elitism finally lost…the people have spoken and the battle for independence is long and hard but ultimately sweet. Citizens are disgusted with being ruled by Belgium.

Related reading: Brexit spreads across Europe: Italy, France, Holland and Denmark ALL call for referendums

The dynamics have not been determined and are impossible to predicts.

Given the drop in the value of the UK currency, the U.S dollar has risen however, the markets are going to be volatile for several days. France and Germany are in precarious positions and France has become the 7th largest economy by the drop in the value of the pound.

The Bank of England is working earnestly to calm markets across the globe.

Watch Scotland:

How Could Scotland Protect its EU Links After Brexit? 

It is often presumed that Scotland will continue to be part of the EU, either through a UK-wide vote to remain in the EU referendum or by joining the EU after a successful second independence referendum, writes Kirsty Hughes. She argues, however, that it is possible that Scotland could find itself outside the EU following a vote to leave, and that it should consider how to develop a differentiated relationship with the EU distinct from England.

At issue going forward is Article 50:

1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.

2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.

3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.

4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or Council or in decisions concerning it.

A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49.

Prime Minister, David Cameron has resigned and will leave office by October. Cameron is expected to notify the EU this morning that the U.K. is invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, under which the two sides will have an initial two years to agree how their relations will look in future.

Markets were generally unprepared for “Brexit” after the last opinion polls, and more important Britain’s widely watched bookies, before the vote had pointed to a victory for the Remain camp. The Bank of England, the IMF, and OECD, as well as the Fed’s Janet Yellen, have all warned of a severe bout of volatility after a “Brexit” vote, with longer-lasting damage to the economy as a result of higher uncertainty, lower investment and more obstacles to trade. More here from Forbes.

 

Victory: Supreme Court Votes 4-4 on DACA, Obama Angry

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The lower court decision stands. Obama said many times he did not have the authority and in the end, used executive action anyway. The Supreme Court, well 4 Justices stood with the Constitution and rule his action was not within his authority.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott had this response:

The Solicitor General, representing the Government in this case is Donald Verilli. As an aside, he resigned on June 2, and his last day is June 24th.

Now comes Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson on the Supreme Court decision:

Statement by Secretary Johnson on Today’s Supreme Court Decision

Release Date:
June 23, 2016

 

DHS: Like the President, I am disappointed by the Supreme Court’s 4-4 vote today in United States v. Texas.  The case concerns Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) and the expansion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).  The 4-4 impasse leaves the court of appeals ruling in place and effectively prohibits us from implementing these important initiatives.

It is important to emphasize that this ruling does not affect the existing DACA policy, which was not challenged.  Eligible individuals may continue to come forward and request initial grants or renewals of DACA, pursuant to the guidelines established in 2012.

We are also moving forward on the other executive actions the President and I announced in November 2014 to reform our immigration system.  This includes our changes to the Department’s immigration enforcement priorities.  Through these priorities, we are more sharply focused on the removal of convicted criminals, threats to public safety and national security, and border security.  We have ended the controversial Secure Communities program.  We are expanding policies designed to help family members of U.S. citizens and permanent residents stay together when removal would result in extreme hardship.  And we have taken several actions to make it easier for international students, entrepreneurs, and high-skilled immigrants to contribute to the U.S. economy.

The President and I remain committed to fixing our broken immigration system.  We are disappointed by the 4-4 vote in the Supreme Court today, and the gridlock in Congress that has stood in the way of more lasting, comprehensive immigration reform.

 

*****

FNC: The judgment could have significant political and legal consequences in a presidential election year highlighted by competing rhetoric over immigration. As the ruling was announced, pro-immigration activists filled the sidewalk in front of the court, some crying as the ruling became public. Critics of the policy touted the decision as a strong statement against “executive abuses.”

“The Constitution is clear: The president is not permitted to write laws—only Congress is. This is another major victory in our fight to restore the separation of powers,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement, adding that the ruling rendered Obama’s actions “null and void.”

Obama, though, said the decision “takes us further from the country that we aspire to be.”

He stressed that earlier changes his administration made to immigration policy are not affected, but acknowledged his most recent 2014 changes cannot go forward and additional executive actions are unlikely.

While Obama accepted the ruling, he also made his own full-court press, saying the split decision underscores the importance of the current court vacancy and the appointment of a successor to the late Justice Antonin Scalia, to “break this tie.” So far, Senate Republicans have not considered Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland.

Meanwhile:

As Cubans rush through Texas, immigration policy questioned

From February to May, about 4,000 Cubans crossed over the Rio Grande River into Texas’ westernmost city. The number of Cubans coming to the U.S. has increased dramatically in the last few years. And it continues to rise, with about 77,000 Cubans entering between October 2014 and April 2016. Many are forgoing the typical route across the Florida Straits by boat to Miami and are traveling by foot, bus, boat and plane through Central America and Mexico to the Southwest border. More here.