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Illinois Policy Golf Outing June 5th
Rand Paul demands to know whether Obama spied on him
Rand Paul demands to know whether Obama spied on him
Following a report backing up President Donald Trump’s claims that he and other Americans were the subject of Obama administration spying during the 2016 election, Sen. Rand Paul is demanding any documents the administration may have compiled on him.
The Kentucky Republican announced via Twitter Friday that he has formally requested that the White House and government Intelligence Committees turn over any information they have on whether the senator was a surveillance subject during Obama’s tenure.
Paul asked in a tweet: “Did the Obama admin go after presidential candidates, members of Congress, journalists, clergy, lawyers, fed judges?”
The lawmaker was referencing a report out this week from Circa which revealed that after loosening rules concerning access to NSA information, surveillance activity within the highest levels of government increased.
From the report:
In all, government officials conducted 30,355 searches in 2016 seeking information about Americans in NSA intercept metadata, which include telephone numbers and email addresses. The activity amounted to a 27.5 percent increase over the prior year and more than triple the 9,500 such searches that occurred in 2013, the first year such data was kept.
The government in 2016 also scoured the actual contents of NSA intercepted calls and emails for 5,288 Americans, an increase of 13 percent over the prior year and a massive spike from the 198 names searched in 2013.
Paul says he wrote the White House asking for answers back in April after “an anonymous source recently alleged to me that my name, as well as the names of other Members of Congress, were unmasked, queried or both, in intelligence reports of intercepts during the prior administration.”
The senator supported President Trump’s claims about the previous administration’s election spying and “unmasking” procedures even as Obama officials categorically denied carrying out any such surveillance activity.
Paul in April said that former Obama national Security adviser Susan Rice is the central figure in the controversy.
“I believe Susan Rice abused the system and she did it for political purposes. She needs to be brought in and questioned under oath,” he said, adding, “This was a witch hunt that began with the Obama administration, sour grapes on the way out the door. They were going to use the intelligence apparatus to attack Trump, and I think they did.”
Deep state openly wars with Trump administration
Deep state openly wars with Trump administration
Reports indicate that government bureaucrats are using the security clearance process to block key members of the Trump administration from accessing sensitive national security information. The politicization of the security process is a signal that unelected government insiders, not the appointees chosen by the elected Trump government, are ultimately in charge of the nation’s military.
Earlier this year in The Washington Times, intelligence expert Angelo Codevilla wrote that the CIA was insulting the president by blocking security credentials for Trump appointees.
From his piece:
The CIA has denied a security clearance to Trump National Security Council (NSC) official Robin Townley without any allegation, much less evidence of disloyalty to the United States. Quite simply, it is because the CIA disapproves of Mr. Townley’s attitude toward the agency, and this is unprecedented. President Trump appointed Mr. Townley to coordinate Africa policy at the NSC. The CIA did not want to deal with him. Hence, it used the power to grant security clearances to tell the president to choose someone acceptable to the agency, though not so much to him. This opens a larger issue: Since no one can take part in the formulation or execution of foreign or defense policy without a high-level security clearance, vetoing the president’s people by denying them clearances trumps the president.
Hence, if Mr. Trump does not fire forthwith the persons who thus took for themselves the prerogative that the American people had entrusted to him at the ballot box, chances are 100 percent that they will use that prerogative ever more frequently with regard to anyone else whom they regard as standing in the way of their preferred policies, as a threat to their reputation, or simply as partisan opponents. If Mr. Trump lets this happen, he will have undermined nothing less than the self-evident heart of the Constitution’s Article II: The president is the executive branch. All of its employees draw their powers from him and answer to him, not the other way around.
Evidently, the president didn’t get rid of those responsible.
The Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday that officials within the intelligence machine have again made a decision about security clearance based not on the nation’s best interest but on bureaucrats’ desire to damage the president’s ability to lead effectively.
From the piece:
Adam S. Lovinger, a 12-year strategic affairs analyst with the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), has been on loan to the NSC since January when he was picked for the position by then-National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn.
Lovinger was notified in a letter from the Pentagon on Monday that his Top-Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS-SCI) clearance had been suspended and that he had to return to the Pentagon.
The letter cited unspecified outside activities by Lovinger. The notice said the suspension was approved by Kevin Sweeney, chief of staff for Defense Secretary James Mattis.
One official said Lovinger was targeted by Trump opponents because of his conservative views and ties to Flynn, specifically his past association with the Flynn Intel Group, Inc., a consulting business.
The report comes on the heels of a Monday revelation from the outlet that politics are increasingly playing a role in the intelligence community’s decision making process.
Free Beacon reported:
The blocking of security clearances under Trump contrasts with the handling of clearances during the Obama administration when a key liberal adviser with a questionable security background was given a high-level clearance.
Ben Rhodes, the White House deputy national security adviser for strategic communications under Obama, was denied an interim TS/SCI clearance by the FBI in October 2008, according to an email obtained from John Podesta last year.
The email stated that Rhodes was the only White House official out of 187 prospective White House aides to be denied the interim TS/SCI clearance.
Yet, despite the denial, Rhodes would later be granted access to some of the most secret U.S. intelligence information and emerge as one Obama’s closest aides who boasted of a “mind-meld” with the president on various issues.
Rhodes became one of the most active originators and shapers of key American foreign and national security policies under Obama.
The push-back Trump is openly getting from intelligence insiders helps to explain his total reversal on many foreign policy promises since the election.
DEEP STATE TOOK DOWN NIXON, PLANS SAME FOR TRUMP
DEEP STATE TOOK DOWN NIXON, PLANS SAME FOR TRUMP
Pat Buchanan: Probably no 2 presidents have faced such hostility, hatred from media
For two years, this writer has been consumed by two subjects.
First, the presidency of Richard Nixon, in whose White House I served from its first day to its last, covered in my new book, “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
The second has been the astonishing campaign of Donald Trump and his first 100-plus days as president.
In many ways, the two men could not have been more different.
Trump is a showman, a performer, a real estate deal-maker, born to wealth, who revels in the material blessings his success has brought. Nixon, born to poverty, was studious, reserved, steeped in history, consumed with politics and policy, and among the most prepared men ever to assume the presidency.
Yet the “mess” Trump inherited bears striking similarities to Nixon’s world in 1969.
Both took office in a nation deeply divided.
Nixon was elected in a year marked by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, race riots in 100 cities, and street battles between cops and radicals at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
By the fall of 1969, Nixon had buses surrounding his White House and U.S. Airborne troops in the basement of his Executive Office Building.
Trump’s campaign and presidency have also been marked by huge and hostile demonstrations.
Both men had their elections challenged by the toxic charge that they colluded with foreign powers to influence the outcome.
Nixon’s aides were accused of conspiring with Saigon to torpedo Lyndon Johnson’s Paris peace talks. Trump aides were charged with collusion with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to disseminate stolen emails of the Democratic National Committee. The U.S. establishment, no stranger to the big lie, could not and cannot accept that the nation preferred these outsiders.
Nixon took office with 525,000 troops tied down in Vietnam. Trump inherited Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history, and wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen.
Nixon pledged to end the Vietnam War with honor and begin an era of negotiations – and did. Trump promised to keep us out of new Mideast wars and to reach an accommodation with Russia.
Nixon and Trump both committed to remake the Supreme Court. Having pledged to select a Southerner, Nixon saw two of them, Judges Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell, savaged by the Senate.
While Nixon was the first president since Zachary Taylor to take office without his party’s having won either house of Congress, Trump took office with his party in control of both. Thus, Trump’s nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, made it.
Probably no two presidents have ever faced such hostility and hatred from the media. After his 1969 “Silent Majority” speech on Vietnam was trashed, Nixon declared war, authorizing an attack on the three networks by Vice President Spiro Agnew.
Trump has not stopped bashing the media since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower to declare his candidacy.
In Trump’s first major victory on Capitol Hill, the House voted narrowly to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Only with a tie-breaking vote by Agnew in August 1969 did Nixon win his first big victory – Senate approval of a strategic missile defense.
Though Nixon had backed every civil rights law of the 1950s and ’60s, he was charged with pursuing a racist “Southern strategy” to capture the South from Dixiecrats, whose ilk had ruled it for a century.
Trump was also slandered for running a “racist” campaign.
Trump and Nixon were supported by the same loyalists – “forgotten Americans,” “Middle Americans,” “blue-collar Democrats” – and opposed and detested by the same enemy, a political-media-intellectual-cultural establishment. And this establishment is as determined to break and bring down Trump as it was to break and bring down Nixon.
Yet though Trump and Nixon ran up similar Electoral College victories, Nixon at the end of 1969 was at 68 percent approval and only 19 percent disapproval. Trump, a third of the way through his first year, is underwater in Gallup.
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Nixon’s achievements in his first term were extraordinary.
He went to Beijing and opened up Mao Zedong’s China to the world, negotiated with Moscow the greatest arms limitation agreement since the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 and withdrew all U.S. forces from South Vietnam.
He desegregated the South, ended the draft, gave the vote to all 18-year-olds, indexed Social Security against inflation, created the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, named four justices to the Supreme Court, presided over six moon landings, declared a “war on cancer,” proposed a guaranteed annual income, created revenue sharing with the states, took America off the gold standard and let the dollar float.
He then won a 49-state landslide in 1972, creating a “New Majority,” and setting the stage for Republican control of the presidency for 16 of the next 20 years.
But in June 1972, a bungled bugging at the DNC, which Nixon briefly sought to contain and then discussed as the White House tapes were rolling, gave his enemies the sword they needed to run him through.
The same deep state enemies await a similar opening to do to Trump what they did to Nixon. Rely upon it.
http://www.wnd.com/2017/05/deep-state-took-down-nixon-plans-same-for-trump/#0oqIu5dP7FBKqQ8d.99
Homer 33C Sixth-graders learn about weather, navigation from United Express pilot
Trump News May 9, 2017
WHITE HOUSE MEMO
With yesterday’s nominations, President Donald J. Trump continues delivering on his promises to the American people by filling judicial vacancies with jurists who are committed to upholding the Constitution and defending the rule of law, not advancing their personal political agenda.
MORNING:
- 10:00AM: President Trump meets with National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster
OVAL OFFICE HIGHLIGHTS
President Trump Announces Judicial Candidate Nominations.
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President Trump calls President-Elect Emmanuel Macron of France.
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WHITE HOUSE UPDATES
Photo of the Day:
Vice President Mike Pence participates in an honor flight reception in the Indian Treaty Room. (Official White House Photo by D. Myles Cullen).
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Republicans just took a major step toward rescuing Americans from Obamacare.
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Vice President Pence honors Public Service Recognition Week and National Military Appreciation Month.
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PRESS ROOM
Watch yesterday’s press briefing with Sean Spicer:
Today, a press briefing will be held at 1:30PM ET in the White House Briefing Room with Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Watch it LIVE here.
NEWS REPORTS
- The Hill: Business coalition: Trump tax plan ‘will spark an economic boom’
Read More - Washington Examiner: Manufacturing openings, hires rise to highest levels of the recovery
Read More - Daily Signal: Younger Judicial Nominees Give Trump Chance for Legacy in Courts
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What’s is Glass-Steagall
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Scotus rejects guilty until proven innocent
Scotus rejects guilty until proven innocent
There are numerous unbelievable ways in America that federal, state and local authorities can seize your property and convert it to the various levels of government. This is a revenue raising measure under the color of law.
The concept of forfeiture is a very old concept of English Common Law which the United States and 60 other countries inherited. This concept, which now pervades U.S. law, is known as civil forfeiture.
My study of this suggests to me that this has become an attractive incentive to steal property legally under legal pretenses. And it has been done many times.
For example, if someone plants marijuana on your land, even if without your knowledge, your property can be seized and taken as a civil forfeiture.
Yes, there are many cases where property was manipulated into seizure and forfeiture.
You may have heard of the famous California case of Donald Scott who in 1992 was shot down inside his home without provocation. The “legal” pretense used for the raid by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Drug Enforcement Agency, California Bureau of Narcotics, the California National Guard and the National Park Services, was that Scott was growing marijuana on his 200-acre estate. But no marijuana or drugs of any kind were found. Of course, an “investigation” by the LEOs (legally entitled to oppress) found no wrongdoing by the badge-wearing assailants on the scene.
An investigation by Ventura County District Attorney Michael Bradbury revealed:
“The statement of Probable Cause upon which the warrant was based includes a number of statements which could be considered false… In addition, there are a number of facts that could be considered material omissions… We find no reason why law enforcement officers who were investigating suspected narcotics violations would have any interest in the value of (Scott’s ranch) or the value of the property sold in the same area other than if they had a motive to forfeit that property.”
Based on the investigative profile, the Scotts were deemed “promising” targets for property seizure. Mr. Scott’s holdings had high value, making them valuable for seizure and forfeiture.
Scott’s home burned to the ground a year later in a wildfire. After many years of legal wrangling, Los Angeles County and the federal government agreed to a $5 million settlement with Scott’s wife, heirs and estate.
Until 1978, civil forfeiture was used primarily to seize property involved in customs offenses, but in that year Congress expanded its scope to permit confiscation of the proceeds of drug transactions.
This was a revolutionary change, as it marked the evolution of civil forfeiture into punishment, without any of the safeguards due a defendant in a criminal proceeding. Forfeiture can be pursued criminally and civilly at the same time.
An even larger expansion of civil forfeiture authority came with the 1986 money laundering statute. The Act provided for civil forfeiture of all property representing the proceeds of, involved in or facilitating a “specified unlawful activity.”
Such activities now include more than 200 federal crimes. The Act, in effect, expands the scope of civil forfeiture from customs and narcotics violations to any criminal offense that involves money.
Modern civil forfeiture laws provide the government with several unique advantages.
A seizure or asset freeze is authorized in an “ex parte” hearing (without the defendant or defendant’s lawyer being present) before a judge, magistrate or administrator. Except when real property is involved, the property owner need not be informed of this hearing, and thus may not attend it, much less contest the seizure.
The very important point here about civil forfeiture is the potential for totally innocent owners to be deprived of their property. Studies have shown that in 80 percent or more of civil forfeiture cases, the owners of the seized property were completely innocent of any wrongdoing.
And yet another lash against private property via civil forfeiture was that government is permitted to use hearsay evidence to establish probable cause to seize property. This made it possible for civil forfeitures based on tips from confidential informants whose claims that the property was linked to criminal activity could not be challenged. The informants do not have to confront the property owner or be identified. Once the government establishes probable cause, the burden shifts to the owner to demonstrate that the property was in fact not linked to criminal activity.
This smacks to me of the old Star Chamber proceeding where an accused was forced to confess and then hanged or put on the rack for his confession.
This should suggest to everyone that seizures and forfeiture under obscure laws that require no evidence of illegal activity for their enforcement is tyranny by any definition.
Over the years the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the innocence of a property owner is no defense to forfeiture.
But a ruling by the SCOTUS this week may help reverse the tide.
In a 7-1 decision (new Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch was not involved in the proceedings), SCOTUS struck down a Colorado law that forced criminal defendants to prove their innocence when their convictions were overturned. While the case – which involved fines and restitution paid before the conviction was overturned on appeal — didn’t involve civil forfeiture per say, the majority opinion stated the defendants were entitled to the presumption of innocence and “should not be saddled with any proof burden” to regain what is rightfully theirs.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing for the majority, rejected Colorado’s argument that “[t]he presumption of innocence applies only at criminal trials,” and not to civil claims, as under the Exoneration Act: “Colorado may not presume a person, adjudged guilty of no crime, nonetheless guilty enough for monetary exactions.”
As Nick Sibilla of the Institute for Justice writes for Forbes:
Armed with this ruling, the Nelson decision may set an important precedent to rein in another abusive civil proceeding: civil forfeiture. The parallels are striking. Through civil forfeiture, law enforcement can confiscate and keep cash, cars and real estate without securing a criminal conviction or filing charges against the owner. Perversely, under civil forfeiture, even those found not guilty in criminal court can still forfeit their property in civil court, since the latter has a lower standard of proof.
Curiously, Justice Clarence Thomas – who has argued vociferously against asset forfeiture for many years — was the lone dissenter in the case, claiming, in essence, the majority decision was not based on any state or federal law and the plaintiffs did not argue their case correctly.
So rather than issuing the wrong ruling for the wrong reasons – which is the usual practice of SCOTUS – the Supreme Court may have issued the right ruling for the wrong reasons in this case.
Judicial Watch Tipsheet May 8, 2017
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Trump News May 8, 2017
WHITE HOUSE MEMO
President Donald J. Trump has made it clear that American companies that fire their workers and ship their operations out of the country will not be able to sell their products back into the United States without paying a penalty. Those days are over. America First means the interests of American workers must come first.
MORNING:
- 10:00AM: President Trump meets with National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster
AFTERNOON:
- 12:00PM: President Trump has lunch with Vice President Mike Pence
- 2:00PM: President Trump meets with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP
OVAL OFFICE HIGHLIGHTS
President Trump signs H.R. 244 into law.
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Read President Trump’s Statement
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PRESS ROOM
Watch Friday’s press briefing with Principal Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders:
Today, a press briefing will be held at 1:30PM ET in the White House Briefing Room with Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Watch it LIVE here.