Category Archives: U.S. Constitution

Who is Advising Ben Carson Exactly?

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Carson Comms Director Gave Big Bucks To Democrats

By Neff at DailyCaller: A top aide to Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson gave thousands of dollars to Democrats and none to national Republicans in the last few years.

Doug Watts works as Carson’s communications director, and statements from him can be found in countless of stories about the candidate, Politico reports. But in recent years, when Watts gave money to politicians, it has been to California Democrats. He gave $1,000 to Jerry Brown in 2006 when he ran for attorney general, then another $2,210 when he ran for governor in 2010. Also in 2010, he gave $1,000 to help Barbara Boxer defeat Carly Fiorina, now one of Carson’s rivals for the Republican nomination. In 2004, he gave $1,000 to Democratic Rep. Jim Costa.

It’s not simply a case of Watts being a dyed-in-the-wool Dem his whole life, though. Early in his career, he worked extensively in California GOP politics, helping run Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential campaign in the state and also working for Republican Gov. George Deukmejian. In 1998, he gave $250 to the campaign of Republican Al D’Amato, a senator from New York.

Watts’ donations could be identified because donations under that name included his affiliation with Urban Media Group, a company he’s been president of since 2004.

Top Carson Aide Wants Taxpayers To Fund Farrakhan

By: Evan Gahr at Daily Caller:

Ben Carson says a Muslim should not be president.

But his key adviser, Armstrong Williams, has, unbeknownst to the good doctor’s supporters, been praising Louis Farrakhan — even urging Chicago to hire Nation of Islam security guards to fight crime.

Quite the Farrakhan aficionado, Williams had promised to broadcast his radio show live from the hate monger’s 20th anniversary Million Man March last Saturday, recalling to the Washington Times that, “It was a moving experience [in 1995], so I want to be there again.”

In a little-noticed Times column the day after the march, “To Curb Chicago Violence Bring in Nation of Islam,” Williams argued that only NOI toughs can help stem the tide of killings there and temper other inner-city pathologies by fostering greater self-respect among residents.

The Hill published Williams’s piece on October 6 under the headline, “The Nation of Islam Could Be Chicago’s Savior.”

If taxpayers foot the bill, of course.

Williams, apparently a big fan of government contracts since he received $240,000 from the George W. Bush Department of Education to promote “No Child Left Behind,” argued that the “NOI brings to the table things other private security firms and the police don’t — credibility within the community. The NOI is one of the few community-based organizations that actually recruit in prisons and also offer transitional services to ex-offenders.”

Williams opined that starting in the late 1980s NOI guards, known as the “Fruit of Islam,” successfully patrolled housing projects in New York, Chicago and Washington. The Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the Fruit multi-million dollar contracts but they were eventually nixed after a nationwide controversy and congressional hearings in the mid-1990s.

In 1995, “HUD abruptly canceled an NOI-affiliated firm’s contract to secure Baltimore public housing buildings — citing bidding irregularities and other violations that were widely viewed as a smoke screen for a political battle over the group’s anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

Uh, yeah, Armstrong, what about all that hateful NOI rhetoric? Never mind Chicago residents. It seems that journalists, whites and cops are the ones who need guards—to protect against Farrakhan.

The hatemonger famously tried to incite his followers to kill the Washington Post reporter who exposed Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown” slur in the 1980s. More recently, Farrakhan urged blacks to “rise up and kill those who kill us” unless the federal government intercedes on their behalf.

In a rhetorical sleight of hand, Williams writes that, “Extremist elements of the NOI should be sternly and unequivocally condemned.On the other hand, more moderate Muslims have made it a point of standing up for their communities”

OK. Sounds plausible at first. Williams is probably the most deft practitioner of sophistry on the political scene since the US-born Soviet Union spokesman Vladmir Pozner, who famously went on television and made the USSR downing a Korean civilian jetliner with hundreds aboard in 1983 sound justifiable.

And Williams contention, if read quickly, also seems reasonable. Just stay away from the Nation of Islam “extremists elements” and stick with the moderates. But are there any other “elements” in the Nation of Islam besides “extremists?”

For Williams, what counts as non-extremist elements of the Nation of Islam? Do the moderates disagree with the late Farrakhan aide Khalid Muhammad that Jews are “blood suckers?”

They just think Jews get too many transfusions? Centrist members of Farrakhan’s quasi-cult disagree with their leader that Hitler was a “great man?” They just think he was an o.k. guy?

In his column, Williams cites as an example of a moderate the Nation of Islam member David Muhammad who received nationwide media attention by filming drug dealers and customers in Chicago. Muhammad could not immediately be reached for comment but there is nothing online to indicate he ever condemned Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism or incitement to violence.

Regardless, any money the Nation of Islam were to receive from contracts would be controlled by Farrakhan, not the so-called moderates.

Williams — who has sparred with this reporter and deemed his description of Carson in a freelance piece for The Daily Beast as “conservatives’ great black hope” highly “offensive” — did not respond to repeated emails. He was asked to provide the names of Nation of Islam moderates and whether Carson supports his proposal to have Farrakhan feed at the public trough.

But Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein called for Carson to disassociate himself from Williams’s proposal and possibly send him packing.

“I am really surprised that somebody as respected as Armstrong Williams would urge the government to use a racist, anti-Semitic and anti-white group for anything”, he told the Washington Gadfly. “Ben Carson should condemn these remarks and say he should say nothing to do with this. Ben Carson should denounce this ludicrous policy and make sure he has nothing to do it. [Carson] should reconsider whether Armstrong has the type of judgment that he wants around him.”

There is yet another matter regarding Ben Carson that where alarm bells should be sounding:

Ben Carson Jumps Shark: Open to Federal Control Over State Elections

By J. Christian Adams, PJMedia: Ben Carson is a good guy. He’d make a great secretary of Health and Human Services.  But after what he told CNN today, no constitutional conservative should support him for president.

For a change Jeb Bush was right and Ben Carson was dead wrong.

Carson told CNN that he is open to reviving federal control over state elections through the Voting Rights Act. CNN:
Ben Carson said Thursday that he wants the Voting Rights Act protected, adding he’d like to hear Jeb Bush explain why he does not support its reauthorization. “Of course I want the Voting Rights Act to be protected. Whether we still need it or not or whether we’ve outgrown the need for it is questionable,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “Maybe we have, maybe we haven’t. But I wouldn’t jeopardize it.”
This is precisely what the racial-interest groups and the Democrats want — giving an attorney general like Eric Holder revived power to block state election laws by edict, as they did to Texas and South Carolina voter ID and citizenship verification in Florida and Georgia.

Carson and Sharpton
To recap, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced 16 states to obtain federal approval for every election law change no matter how big or how small.  When a polling placed moved from a school library to a school gym, Washington, D.C., had to approve.  The Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 ruled that such federal oversight upset the constitutional balance by using  circumstances from 50 years ago to justify federal intrusion into state power, and the Court extinguished the oversight.
Since then, the institutional left has sought to reassert federal power because it helps Democrats win elections.  For example, prior to the 2012 presidential race, the Justice Department stopped Florida from checking for noncitizens on the rolls.  In 2009, the DOJ blocked Kinston, North Carolina, from having non-partisan elections because, as the DOJ said, if the word “Democrat” is not next to the name of the candidate, black voters won’t know for whom to vote.
This is the madness that Carson is open to resurrecting.
Perhaps he doesn’t know that the entire Voting Rights Act is still in force, save for the federal pre-approval rule struck down by the Supreme Court.  I’d wager that Jeb Bush and the other top-tier candidates know that.
Carson was already suspiciously naive about the role and agenda of racial-interest groups regarding electoral issues. Earlier this year Carson appeared at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention.

The National Action Network is a racial-interest group of the first order, routinely stoking racial tensions and dividing Americans along color lines.  Some have indicated that Carson sought to sway minds, but that explanation only exacerbates the questions surrounding Carson’s understanding of these issues.  Anyone familiar with the National Action Network knows how immune it is to being swayed by opposing viewpoints.

Carson said he “has the same goal” as Sharpton.  Really? Either Carson is frightfully naive, or conservatives should be very concerned about Ben Carson.

Perhaps Carson will walk his comment back about federal control over state elections.  Perhaps he will explain that he didn’t fully understand the issue.  That’s precisely the problem.  Being receptive to empowering bureaucrats to block state election laws is a nonstarter for constitutional conservatives, especially ones who have been paying attention to the abuses of Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

 

 

 

 

Telegram, New Platform for Terrorists to Communicate

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Sitting on the knife’s edge when it comes to protecting people’s communication from investigative agencies like the FBI and the NSA is a slippery and inexact argument. The Director of the FBI, James Comey has begged Congress for some legislation such that some encryption can be broken for terror and other criminal cases to be investigated yet nothing is forthcoming and not likely in the future.

FBI Director James Comey spoke to legal professionals and scholars this week about cyber threats and the FBI’s abilities to counter and investigate those evolving threats.

In remarks at the American Law Institute on Tuesday and at a cyber security summit on Wednesday at Georgetown University Law Center, Comey said the group calling itself the Islamic State, or ISIL, represents the FBI’s most urgent threat. He described the organization’s use of social media to motivate troubled people in the United States to engage in acts of violence—either by traveling to the so-called caliphate or killing where they are. Comey said ISIL reaches out to individuals on Twitter and elsewhere, then moves their more sensitive communications to encrypted platforms.

“The threat we face has morphed,” Comey said on Wednesday. “It’s a chaotic spider web through social media—increasingly invisible to us because the operational communications are happening in an encrypted channel.”

Comey later elaborated on the issue of encryption, which is a process of encoding messages—on mobile phones for example—that only authorized parties can access. While it can be effective at thwarting digital thieves, strong encryption also limits the amount of information—or evidence—that law enforcement can effectively gather from a device.

“Increasingly we’re finding ourselves unable to read what we find, or unable to open a device,” Comey said, “and that is a serious concern.”

The issue of “going dark,” as the Bureau calls it, is worthy of a larger public conversation about the balance between privacy and public safety, Comey said. Momentum toward universal encryption, he explained, may have unintended consequences.

“As all of our lives become digital, the logic of encryption is all of our lives will be covered by strong encryption, and therefore all of our lives—including the lives of criminals and terrorists and spies—will be in a place that is utterly unavailable to court-ordered process,” he said. “And that, I think, to a democracy should be very, very concerning.”

The Director also pointed to provisions of the Patriot Act of 2001 that, if allowed to expire on June 1, could hobble the FBI’s investigative abilities. One of the provisions is Section 215, which authorized the National Security Agency’s database of telephony records and metadata.

Comey said the FBI relies on that provision fewer than 200 times a year—in particular cases to get particular records. “If we lose that authority,” Comey said, “we can’t get information that I think everybody wants us to attain.”

Two other provisions include:

  • Roving wiretaps. The FBI has had authority since the 1980s to use legally authorized roving wiretaps in criminal cases—allowing authorities to follow surveillance targets rather than their phones, which can be easily trashed and replaced. The Patriot Act extended that authority to terrorism and counterintelligence cases.
  • The Lone Wolf provision. In 2004, Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to authorize intelligence gathering on individuals not affiliated with any known terrorist organization.

“These three are going to go away June 1,” Comey said, “and I don’t want them to get lost in the conversation about metadata.”

It was not but a few months ago, the leadership of Islamic State (ISIS) published an edict for the top terror commanders to use an app called ‘Telegram’ and they are.

Now what? How is the conflict of civil liberties resolved?

Director Comey Speaks at Georgetown University Law Center

  

Why Telegram has become the hottest messaging app in the world

Secret messages and advanced cryptography pose a challenge to WhatsApp

When WhatsApp went down for four hours this weekend, nearly 5 million people signed up for messaging service Telegram. The app skyrocketed to the top of the App Store charts, and is now the top free app in 46 countries from Germany to Ecuador. In the US and several other countries, the app is no. 1 in the social networking category, ahead of Facebook, WhatsApp, Kik, and others.

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It’s not immediately clear why Telegram emerged as the alternative of choice following WhatsApp’s downtime. Users could have switched to Kik, or Facebook Messenger, or LINE — all of which have hundreds of millions of users. There’s seemingly something different about Telegram. Its rise isn’t only due to WhatsApp’s acquisition and subsequent downtime. “We have been the no. 1 app in Spanish, Arabic, and several Latin American app stores for several weeks before the Facebook deal happened,” says Telegram’s Markus Ra. “The growth was there — so the WhatsApp acquisition and problems merely multiplied the effect across all affected countries.” According to app analytics site App Annie, Telegram started truly gaining steam on February 17th, days before the WhatsApp news even hit.

Built by the pioneering Durov brothers behind Russia’s largest social network, VKontakte (also known as VK), Telegram is a messaging service combining the speed of WhatsApp with Snapchat’s ephemerality and advanced new security measures. WhatsApp might have heralded the first time we heard of Telegram, but it certainly won’t be the last.

Telegram feels in many ways like a straight-up clone of WhatsApp, from its green double-checkmark read receipts to its cartoonish wallpapers. There’s also the usual gamut of messaging app features including the ability to see a friend’s online status and attach photos, videos, your location, contacts, and documents to messages. But where it lacks originality, Telegram makes up for it in speed and security features. “Telegram is the fastest and most secure mass market messaging system in the world,” the company claims, which it attributes in part to Nikolai Durov’s open-sourced MTProto protocol. Telegram was in fact built as a testing bed for MTProto, Reuters reported when the app launched back in August. The company is so confident in the security of MTProto that it’s offering $200,000 to anyone who can crack it. It’s not unusual for companies to offer bug bounties, but bounties of this size are generally only reserved for critical bugs in widely used apps like Windows.

“The no. 1 reason for me to support and help launch Telegram was to build a means of communication that can’t be accessed by the Russian security agencies,” Durov told TechCrunch. Durov built in a feature that lets you start a “Secret Chat” with any of your friends. According to Telegram, Secret Chats offer end-to-end encryption, leave no trace on the company’s servers, and let you set Snapchat-esque self-destruct timers on messages that range from two seconds to one week. There’s also the ability to check the security of your Secret Chats using an image that serves as an encryption key. By comparing your encryption key to a friend’s, you can effectively verify that your conversation is secure and less vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, the company says. But despite Telegram’s alleged sophistication, no cryptographic method is infallible. The company has, in fact, already doled out $100,000 to one developer for finding a critical bug, TechCrunch reports.

“The no. 1 reason for me to [help launch] Telegram was to build a means of communication that can’t be accessed by the Russian security agencies.”

Telegram is interesting not just because of its stringent security standards, but also because it allows any developer to build a Telegram client of their own, and even for desktop computers. Most new messaging services today, including WhatsApp, build one-size-fits-all messaging apps and lock out third-party developers. It’s hard to blame them, since maintaining one federated language and security paradigm across dozens of apps is difficult. Also, making money off of a platform takes more thought than making money off a simple paid app. Yet, the Durovs’ VKontakte found a lot of success letting developers build alternate versions of its site. More importantly, Telegram operates as a non-profit organization, and doesn’t plan to charge for its services.

“Telegram is not intended to bring revenue, it will never sell ads or accept outside investment. It also cannot be sold,” the company writes in its FAQ. “We’re not building a ‘user base,’ we are building a messenger for the people.” If Telegram ever “runs out” of the money supplied by the Durov brothers, the company says, it will ask for donations from its users. Telegram’s noble goals echo the sentiments of many bright-eyed startup founders, but with the Durovs’ pocketbook in hand and the service’s open API available to third-party developers, it may actually have a chance at fulfilling its goals. Telegram isn’t a CryptoCat for the masses, considering it uses your phone number, of all things, as an identifier — but it’s an important step towards finding a highly encrypted messaging platform that’s accessible to anyone.

“Telegram is not intended to bring revenue, it will never sell ads.”

Championing an ostensibly noble goal, free services, and the experience of VKontakte’s creators, Telegram would seem like a great alternative to any of the leading messages apps out there. After WhatsApp’s acquisition news and downtime, the app is spiking at the right time. The company incentivized several million new users into switching over, but keeping those users will be a continuous challenge. “The switching cost for users on a phone number-based messaging services is at or near zero,” argues Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger in a blog post, but that’s only half the story. A network is only as strong as the number of friends you have using it, and convincing all of your friends to switch is no easy task. If Facebook thought that WhatsApp users were liable to switch at a moment’s notice, it wouldn’t have paid $19 billion for the company.

Facebook paid for WhatsApp’s user base, but also for its brand — a brand that spent years solving a very important problem: that it costs a fortune to text across borders. Perhaps the next messaging problem to solve is personal security, considering WhatsApp’s alleged cryptographic weaknesses and the NSA’s data collection policies. WhatsApp became synonymous with texting. Perhaps for Telegram to succeed, it will need to become synonymous with security.

Even More Unknown Email Addresses on THAT server

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Mentioned more than once on this blog were questions about how many email addresses were on that server and who they belonged to. Further, how many additional email addresses were uniquely assigned exclusively to mobile devices?
For the Gowdy Benghazi commission to get immediate and full cooperation has been a Herculean task and all parties involved including the State Department has been anything but cooperative under John Kerry, but he does have an agency full of employees to protect and likely some connectivity goes to the White House itself.
Keep popcorn handy for Friday and next week but fair warning some of the hearings are behind closed doors.
A previously unknown e-mail address used by Huma Abedin was discovered on Thursday, just hours before the top Hillary Clinton aide prepares to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Conservative watchdog group Citizens United discovered the address in an e-mail exchange that shows Clinton Foundation CEO Robert Harrison forwarding a speaking invitation for then-Secretary of State Clinton to both Abedin’s State Department account and an unfamiliar Abedin address on November 6, 2012. “I tried to send this to your ‘clintonemail.com’ address, but it bounced back as undeliverable, so here it is again,” Harrison wrote.
The new address begins with “humamabedin,” and appears to be a private e-mail account. The State Department redacted the account’s domain name, citing a personal-privacy exemption. A spokesman for the Benghazi Committee did not immediately respond when asked if the committee was aware of the e-mail account, and if it is under investigation for possibly containing official or classified government information. In August, the State Department admitted to a federal judge that Abedin and others close to Clinton used private accounts to conduct government business, and that they were unable to search those accounts for official records.
Technical issues seemed to plague Clinton’s private e-mail server at times, driving State Department aides and Clinton Foundation employees to use government or private accounts to reach Clinton and her top staff. “Is your e-mail working?” Abedin wrote to Clinton Foundation executive director Stephanie Streett on October 10, 2012. “Mine has been down [since] last night.” Abedin later added that she “can’t even get into my Clinton e-mail.”
The news of an unknown e-mail account and new technical troubles will likely factor in to Abedin’s closed-door testimony before the Benghazi Committee on Friday. In Abedin’s first appearance before the committee, lawmakers are expected to focus on work she did for the private, Clinton-connected consulting firm Teneo while she was still employed at the State Department. Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA) has expressed concern that Abedin acted as a conduit between Clinton and well-heeled Teneo clients. In one spring 2012 e-mail highlighted by the senator, Teneo’s president asked Abedin to convince Clinton to back Judith Rodin, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation and a Teneo client, for an Obama administration appointment.

Strong Cities Network or Global Police?

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What’s the Goal of DOJ’s Strong Cities Network?

by Johanna Markind
American Thinker
October 8, 2015

On September 29, 2015, with the endorsement of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a group called the Strong Cities Network was launched at the United Nations.

According to its website, Strong Cities “aims to connect cities and other local authorities on an international basis, to enhance local level approaches to prevent violent extremism; including facilitating information sharing, mutual learning and creation of new and innovative local practices.”

Reportedly, the “network will conduct workshops and training, will offer online documents of best practices, and will offer grants for innovative initiatives. The US State Department will provide funds through 2016, at which time charities are expected to take over funding.” A summit is scheduled to take place next spring in Paris.

The group includes 23 cities, including four from the US: Minneapolis, New York, Denver, and Atlanta. Minneapolis is also one of three US cities – the other two being Boston and Los Angeles – the Obama Administration selected to participate in its Countering Violent Extremism pilot program.

The Strong Cities Program has been criticized by the New York Civil Liberties Union and by American Muslim activists fearful it will target Muslims. Similar criticisms have been leveled against the Department of Justice Countering Violent Extremism program, notably by the Islamist-posing-as-civil-rights group Council on American-Islamic Relations. New York groups like the NYCLU, Association of Muslim American Lawyers and the Justice League NYC expressed concern New York would eventually become active with the Justice Department’s “Countering Violent Extremism,” or CVE, programs, which they say “overwhelmingly” target Muslim communities.

Given this sort of challenge, and the Obama Administration‘s own predilections, it is unsurprising that the program avoids connecting its target to radical Islam. Its stated goals include addressing “violent extremism in all of its forms” without associating violent extremism “with any particular religion, nationality or ethnic group.” It emphasizes inclusiveness, collaboration, and non-discrimination “in compliance with international human rights standards.”

The Attorney General’s remarks likewise avoided referring to any specific religion. The closest she came was to refer vaguely to “groups like ISIL,” and ecumenically to “fanatics motivated by hatred against religious or ethnic factions,” and explained, “all are antithetical to the shared vision and common cause that joins us.”

Similarly, in his remarks at the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law’s “More Effective Responses to the Foreign Terrorist Fighter Threat” event the day before the Strong Cities launch, Assistant Attorney General John Carlin managed to avoid all references to Islam, and all reference to Muslims save to describe ISIL as “a group that beheads and kills Muslims and non-Muslims with the same impunity,” and to focus on the need to broadcast “the damage they [ISIL] are doing to Muslim communities.”

The refusal to identify radical Islam as the focus of the Strong Cities Network – indeed, Mayor DeBlasio‘s insistence that it would not focus on any one type of extremism and references to the shooting of African-American churchgoers in Charleston and the past attacks on Planned Parenthood clinics – has in turn stoked fears that it will target conservative groups and criticism of its close cooperation with the United Nations. (Regarding the latter, it is difficult to take seriously an organization that puts Saudi Arabia in charge of its Human Rights Commission; the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Saudi Prince Zeid Ra’ad Hussein, was scheduled to be present at the launch.)

Are Lynch’s remarks, and the Strong Cities Network’s self-description, necessary diplomatic niceties for a program designed to deal with violent Islamism? Or will the program blunt its utility by taking on too many tasks? For example, how many resources will it devote to combating right-wing extremism?

The refusal of the program, and of Lynch and Carlin, to speak plainly about violent Islamism and the need to defeat it, does not bode well for its chances of success at that task. To quote former US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, “You can’t defeat an enemy that you don’t admit exists.”

*** Deeper layer peeled back:

From John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford Institute
Now, with Strong Cities Network, U.S. cities will be cooperating and “sharing resources” with foreign governments around the world. Local police are already training with FBI, DHS and even the military. Obama’s new program lays the groundwork for them to train with foreign police units under the banner of the U.N.

“With the Strong Cities program we see the goal is to have global police, so it’s going to be very hard to rein in global cops,” Whitehead said. “Cops who were trained locally are going by the wayside, dealing solely with local cops is going to be a thing of the past. It’s sort of in your face, it’s saying the U.N. is going to be a global police force, working in this country one way or the other. New York City, L.A., Chicago are going to lead the way. Americans better get ready for this because what it means is, our Constitution is being replaced, and the constitutional protections we have eventually will be gone.”

Among the first steps taken will involve merging some of the law-enforcement capacities within regions, with U.S. cops cooperating more closely with those of Mexico and Canada, Whitehead said. Click here for Whitehead’s summary and warning from 2010.

EPA Hires Thunderclap….Huh?

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Armed EPA Agents? The Truth Is Way Out There

The EPA’s armed war on alien polluters.

AmericanSpectator: Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the FBI agents on Fox’s The X-Files, have been known to draw weapons on aliens, poltergeists, and phantoms. But they have an excuse — they’re fictional characters in a network TV drama, coming back on-the-air soon after a long hiatus. Not so the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPAs) own, real-life agents. They are packing pistols and even heavier firepower to catch the nation’s contributors to global warming and other, mythical phenomena. Truth is stranger than science fiction in today’s Washington, D.C., and the truth is way out there.

According to a report released last week by a watchdog group called Open the Books, the EPA has spent millions of dollars recently on guns, ammo, body armor, camouflage equipment, and even night-vision goggles to arm its agents in the war on polluters.

The Illinois-based investigative group examined thousands of checks totaling more than $93 billion from 2000 to 2014 by the EPA, and its auditors indicate that about $75 million is authorized each year for “criminal enforcement” of America’s clean air and water laws. This includes cash for a cadre of 200 “special agents” that engage in SWAT-style ops.

“We were shocked ourselves to find these kinds of pervasive expenditures at an agency that is supposed to be involved in clean air and clean water,” said Open the Books’ founder, Adam Andrzejewski, a former candidate for governor of Illinois. “Some of these weapons are for full-scale military operations.”

Some of these military operations have been reported in the media. Two years ago, the EPA was involved in an armed raid at a small town in Alaska where miners were accused of polluting local waters, as Fox News reported that EPA “armed agents in full body armor participated.”

The EPA’s own website describes the activities and mission of the criminal enforcement division as “investigating cases, collecting evidence, conducting forensic analyses and providing legal guidance to assist in the prosecution of criminal conduct that threatens people’s health and the environment.”

Don’t blame President Obama for this alone. The EPA was first given police powers in 1988 during the Reagan era. These days, EPA also conducts joint projects with the Department of Homeland Security as it engages in what a media report calls “environmental crime-fighting.”

“For more than 30 years,” according to the EPA website, “there has been broad, bipartisan agreement about the importance of an armed, fully-equipped team of EPA agents working with state and federal partners to uphold the law and protect Americans.”

But that’s not all that the Open the Books investigators found. Backing up these armed environmental crusaders are scores of highly paid lawyers and other professionals.

The report showed that seven of 10 EPA workers earn more than $100,000 a year, and EPA’s $8 billion budget also finances the salaries of 1,000 attorneys, making the agency one of the biggest law firms in the U.S.

The EPA is hardly going solo in this armed adventure against America, however. The agency has collaborated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and a recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice indicates that more than 40 federal agencies, with 100,000 officers, carry guns and make arrests.

How far will EPA agents go to enforce the law as they interpret it? The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday issued a temporary stay on the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Clean Water Rule that regulates “waters of the U.S.” The court decided the EPA’’s Rule that originally became effective on August 28, 2015 requires “further judicial analysis.” The new Clean Water Rule defined navigable waters to include tributaries and wetlands, and even puddles caused by rainstorms. The rule defines which waterways would be protected by the Clean Water Act of 1972. A total of 18 states are challenging the new rule. Perhaps the new water rules will be enforced at gunpoint by armed agents if President Obama and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy decide that “environmental justice” requires it.

*** Gina likes Thunderclap, so she hired them for crowd-sourcing positive responses.

Join a Thunderclap for Clean Water 

EPA is planning to use a new social media application called Thunderclap to provide a way for people to show their support for clean water and the agency’s proposal to protect it. Here’s how it works: you agree to let Thunderclap post a one-time message on your social networks (Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr) on Monday, September 29 at 2:00 pm EDT.  The message will be posted on everyone’s walls and feeds at the same time.
Here’s the message: “Clean water is important to me. I want EPA to protect it for my health, my family, and my community. www.epa.gov/USwaters”

 

Sign up to join the Thunderclap for Clean Water: http://thndr.it/1rUOiaB

 

Read about the Thunderclap.

EPA Publishes Final 2012 and Preliminary 2014 Effluent Guidelines Program Plans

Under Clean Water Act section 304(m), EPA develops biennial plans for issuing new regulations or revising existing regulations to control industrial wastewater discharges. While EPA’s final 2012 plan and preliminary 2014 plan do not propose any new effluent guidelines for industry, EPA is announcing initiation of detailed studies of the petroleum refining industry and centralized waste treatment facilities, and continuation of its preliminary review of the metal finishing industry. EPA will accept public comments on the preliminary 2014 plan through November 17, 2014. Learn more.

Section 319 Success Story: Ionine Creek, Oklahoma

Ionine Creek in Grady County runs through an area of high cattle, wheat, and hog production. An assessment of the creek’s fish community in 2004 revealed a poor biological condition, prompting Oklahoma to add the creek to the state’s Clean Water Act section 303(d) list of impaired waters for biological impairment. Implementation of best management practices to reduce runoff from grazing land and cropland and to improve wildlife habitat decreased sediment and nutrient contributions to the creek and provided better in-stream habitat. As a result, Oklahoma removed Ionine Creek from Oklahoma’s list for fishes bioassessment. Ionine Creek now fully attains its fish and wildlife propagation designated use. The complete success story can be found here.