(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) The “dirty cops” and congressional Democrats involved in the Russian collusion hoax slammed the Justice Department’s decision on Thursday to drop its criminal case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The DOJ said in a court filing this week that it would no longer pursue the prosecution of Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to a FBI agent, citing recent evidence that proved FBI officials attempted to lead Flynn into a perjury trap during an interrogation.
Former FBI Director James Comey, who headed the FBI during its interrogation of Flynn as well as its subsequent investigation into allegations of collusion between Trump and Russia, claimed that this development is proof that “the DOJ has lost its way.”
The DOJ has lost its way. But, career people: please stay because America needs you. The country is hungry for honest, competent leadership.
Similarly, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said in a statement that Flynn’s guilt is obvious and that the decision not to pursue a case against him is “pure politics designed to please the president.”
“[Flynn’s] lies added to our concerns about his relationship with the Russian government,” McCabe said. “Today’s move by the Justice Department has nothing to do with the facts or the law.”
Flynn’s guilty plea was a key piece of evidence that Comey, McCabe, and other Democratic associates used to justify their investigation into the debunked RussiaGate hoax. This plea was, in essence, the only real proof found by special counsel Robert Mueller that Trump had secondhand connections to Russian associates, though Mueller did eventually conclude that there was no evidence that could prove Trump colluded with these associates.
But now that Flynn’s case has been tossed out, the entire Russia hoax has fallen apart, prompting condemnation from congressional Democrats who spent years pushing it.
“Overruling the Special Counsel is without precedent and without respect for the rule of law,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on Thursday. “Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators in the face of overwhelming evidence – but now, Attorney General Barr’s Justice Department is dropping the case to continue to cover up for the President.”
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., called the DOJ’s decision “outrageous” and vowed to summon Attorney General Bill Barr to Congress for an “immediate explanation.”
This is outrageous!
Flynn PLEADED GUILTY to lying to investigators. The evidence against him is overwhelming. Now, a politicized DOJ is dropping the case.
The decision to overrule the special counsel is without precedent and warrants an immediate explanation.
DOJ prosecutors explained in their court filing Thursday that Flynn pleaded guilty “without full awareness of the circumstances of the newly discovered, disclosed, or declassified information as to the FBI’s investigation of him.”
This new information shows FBI officials discussing how they could get Flynn to lie to them, which raises important questions about “the agency investigating him,” rather than of Flynn’s “course of conduct,” the filing states.
Trump defended the DOJ’s decision and said the “dirty cops” involved in Flynn’s guilty plea should “pay a big price” for targeting an “innocent man.”
“He is a great gentleman. He was targeted by the Obama administration and he was targeted in order to try and take down a president, and what they’ve done is a disgrace, and I hope a big price is going to be paid,” Trump told reporters on Thursday.
‘Obama’s unexpectedly intimate knowledge of the details of Flynn’s calls … raised eyebrows because of his own history with Flynn…’
Barack Obama and James Comey / IMAGE: The Guardian via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In its motion to dismiss the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn on Thursday, the Justice Department released more evidence, with some accounts indicating that former President Barack Obama knew of the conspiracy to entrap Flynn well before it happened.
A lifelong Democrat, Flynn had served briefly in the Obama administration heading the Defense Intelligence Agency. But his out-of-the-box management style clashed with the Obama deep-state, and the president considered him to be “insubordinate,” according to Fox News.
Obama made clear to anyone who would listen that he was “not a fan” of Flynn—including a stern warning to incoming President Donald Trump, who disregarded the admonition by appointing Flynn national security adviser.
The newly released documents relay that while Obama was still in the White House, in January 2017, he met with several of his high-level intelligence operatives to consult about the allegations of Russian interference.
By that point, Obama already had made the decision to expel Russian diplomats and threaten sanctions retroactively over their supposed role in helping Trump win the 2016 election.
After dismissing most of his advisers, Obama asked a few to remain and acknowledged knowing about Flynn’s December 2016 communications with Russian diplomat Sergey Kislyak.
In one of the phone calls, intercepted by the FBI as part of its existing operations to spy on the Trump campaign, Flynn sought to reassure the Kremlin that the lame-duck sanctions would not be extended by the Trump administration.
Surprisingly, during that early meeting, Obama already had all the details.
A Score to Settle
Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates—who herself was dismissed by the Trump administration for insubordination—was present when Obama and then-FBI Director James Comey first discussed the possibility of prosecuting Flynn under the obscure Logan Act.
“Yates had no idea what the president was talking about, but figured it out based on the conversation,” Fox News reported.
Accounts indicate that former Vice President Joe Biden and then-national security adviser Susan Rice were also present, but it seems Comey did most of the talking.
The January 5, 2017 meeting in which Sally Yates said she learned of Flynn-Kislyak call from President Obama himself–Susan Rice and VP Joe Biden were in that meeting, too, per Rice’s famous memo-to-self. pic.twitter.com/6Wpdvkte0y
Yates said she was surprised her at the time that Obama already knew of the phone calls—but as the picture continues to come more into focus, it seems Obama’s personal grudge against Flynn played a big role in the actions that followed.
His tacit assent may have persuaded the corrupt FBI to embark upon their “Crossfire Razor” sting operation against Flynn, the newly appointed NSA chief, even after Obama had already left the White House.
“Obama’s unexpectedly intimate knowledge of the details of Flynn’s calls, which the FBI acknowledged at the time were not criminal or even improper, raised eyebrows because of his own history with Flynn,” wrote Fox News, “and because top FBI officials secretly discussed whether their goal was to ‘get [Flynn] fired’ when they interviewed him in the White House on January 24, 2017.”
The president’s meeting with Comey and Yates may have been where such an idea was planted.
“Yates recalled Comey mentioning the Logan Act, but can’t recall if he specified there was an ‘investigation,'” Fox News reported. “Comey did not talk about prosecution in the meeting.”
Plausible Deniability
Michael Flynn, the incoming national security adviser, poses with his Obama administration predecessor, Susan Rice, who may have been complicit in Flynn’s framing by the FBI. / IMAGE: Fox Business via YouTube
Although Obama evidently approved of the outrageous suggestion to try to railroad Flynn using the 1799 Logan Act—a law that had never led to a successful prosecution—the former president also seemed concerned about getting his hands dirty.
Obama “specified that he did not want any additional information on the matter, but was seeking information on whether the White House should be treating Flynn any differently, given the information,”reported Fox News.
Comey has acknowledged that many of his interactions with Obama involved unspoken, dog-whistle signals, effectively allowing plausible deniability for the politically accountable president.
In another meeting at the time, when he and Obama and CIA Director John Brennan met to discuss whether to tell Trump about the Steele Dossier, they decided to do so because “one of the ways you undermine an adversary is to tell them you know all about it.”
Comey—who later admitted running his own counterintelligence operation during the Trump Tower meeting— said he knew the task would fall to him simply by the expression on Obama’s face.
In their plot against Flynn, though, the unspoken consensus seemed to be that the information must be withheld not only from the accused, but also from Trump.
Yates claimed that she offered her dissenting opinion that Trump should be notified, signaling something of a rift between the legal assessment and the intelligence outlook—which was often the case in Comey’s FBI.
That may have left Obama with the deciding vote on whether to withhold the information, which they ultimately did.
Unlike with the Steele Dossier decision, where revealing the false information to gauge his reaction helped them to undermine Trump, in this case the withholding of the information allowed them to attempt to catch Flynn off guard.
John Durham / PHOTO: U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Connecticut via Facebook
As the case unravels, with Justice Department special prosecutor John Durham pursuing likely criminal charges against some of the key figures, Yates’s disavowal could be a telling indicator that some of Obama’s flunkies are starting to break rank to save their own hides.
It is widely speculated that former FBI General Counsel James Baker is cooperating with the Durham probe.
Not long after Durham announced last year his investigation had moved into a criminal phase, one top-level Obama intelligence hack was quick to throw the ex-president under the bus.
“The message I’m getting from all this is, apparently what we were supposed to have done was to ignore the Russian interference, ignore the Russian meddling and the threat that it poses to us,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told CNN in an October interview about the decision to spy on the Trump campaign.
“And oh, by the way, blown off what the then commander in chief, President Obama, told us to do, which was to assemble all the reporting that we could that we had available to us,” Clapper added.
‘The Ninth Circuit’s radical transformation of this case goes well beyond the pale…’
Photo by ThatMattWade (CC)
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) The San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is known for left-wing judicial activism, but a recent immigration decision was so far outside the bounds of acceptable jurisprudence that the four liberal justices at the U.S. Supreme Court joined the conservative majority to unanimously slap down the Circuit’s legal malfeasance.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, arguably the Court’s most liberal justice, wrote the opinion and accused the appeals court of abusing its power when it effectively issued an immigration ruling based on arguments that were never made.
The effect was an obvious attempt to institute immigration policy, rather than preside over a case brought by disputing parties.
The issue involved a federal law commonly called the anti-harboring statue, which outlaws encouraging illegal aliens to remain in the country unlawfully.
The defendant, Evelyn Sineneng-Smith, ran an immigration consulting company in direct violation of the law and made millions of dollars in fees from illegal aliens for filing meritless legalization petitions on their behalf.
In 2013, a jury convicted her of violating the anti-harboring statute, which required the high bar of proving that she was “knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.”
Sineneng-Smith appealed the conviction on the grounds that the anti-harboring statute violated her First Amendment rights to free speech.
The Ninth Circuit ruled in her favor — but with a twist. Instead of limiting the decision to the immigration activist’s case, the court invalidated the entire law when Sineneng-Smith never sought such an outcome.
“As earlier observed, a court is not hidebound by the precise arguments of counsel, but the Ninth Circuit’s radical transformation of this case goes well beyond the pale,” Ginsburg wrote.
The Immigration Law Reform Institute, a pro-legal immigration legal group, had filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court against the Ninth Circuit.
Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of the organization, applauded the Supreme Court’s unanimous finding on Thursday and said he’s ready to defend the anti-harboring law from anyone who might take up the Ninth Circuit’s rationale and directly file a lawsuit to overturn it.
“When and if the [anti-harboring] overbreadth issue is brought up properly by a defendant in the future, we will be there,” he said.
‘The bad news, which Kansas City must still remedy, is the continued unconstitutional treatment of churches … compared to other secular gatherings…’
Quinton Lucas / IMAGE: 41 Action News via YouTube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) After facing backlash, the mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, amended an order that would have forced churches to report the names of congregants who attend in-person services during the coronavirus pandemic.
Under Mayor Quinton Lucas’s original “10-10-10” reopening plan, Kansas City businesses and religious institutions would have had to rerecord “lists” of customers or congregants who step foot on the business’s or church’s premises.
Lucas defended the requirement on Tuesday, but he later walked back his decision to enforce the rule after facing the threat of a legal challenge, according to Liberty Counsel.
Lucas claimed that the purpose of the recorded lists was to contact-trace those potentially infected with COVID-19 to prevent it from spreading.
“If you are a salon that keeps appointments, you should hang on to those,” Lucas said, according to KSHB.
“If you’re a restaurant that keeps reservations, when you open in a few weeks, hang on to those,” he continued. “And … if you’re an event, a religious institution that has people check in and sign in all the time, you should keep those.”
Now, however, this “contact tracing” is a “voluntary requirement,” Lucas said. If a church or business doesn’t feel comfortable recording that kind of information, the city will not pursue action against, he said.
“But at the same time, we think it’s going to be important because we’ll be living with COVID for some time and contact tracing and is one of the primary ways that we try to limit it,” Lucas added.
However, the amended executive order still imposes a 50-person limit on religious gatherings—a limit it does not impose on secular gatherings, Liberty Counsel noted.
“The requirement to record names and contact information of anyone who attends a religious gathering was a gross violation of the First Amendment,” said Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel.
“Due to the overwhelming public outcry, the Kansas City Mayor reversed course and removed this unconstitutional provision,” he said. “The bad news which Kansas City must still remedy is the continued unconstitutional treatment of churches and houses of worship compared to other secular gatherings.”
Staver told the Todd Starnes Show earlier this week that the Justice Department is looking at Lucas’s order and will consider siding with Liberty Counsel if it decides to take Lucas to court.
“These attacks on churches cannot stand,” Staver added, according to Fox News. “We will fight these cases all the way to the Supreme Court if we must.”
‘We recognize that participating in the knowledge transfer process is difficult for many of you, but we are counting on your continued professionalism…’
Tennessee Valley Authority / IMAGE: Youtube
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Private-sector globalist corporations have been outsourcing American jobs and using crony visa programs to undercut domestic workers for decades.
Now, the federal government is doing the same.
While unemployment skyrockets due to the Wuhan virus pandemic, the Tennessee Valley Authority has announced plans to outsource 20 percent of its high-skilled tech workforce to Capgemini, CGI and Accenture—global mega-companies based in France, Canada and Ireland.
The TVA is a storied “New Deal” project that was originally intended to create jobs and supply electricity to the economically impoverished South during the Great Depression. It’s thrived for nearly a century and is now the nation’s largest government-owned power provider.
But at least 120 employees have been notified that they will be terminated in the coming months, and another 100 workers are expected to be let go to make room for more foreign workers.
Worse, the TVA employees—many of whom are engineers and technology professionals—will be expected to train their replacements before being fired.
“We recognize that participating in the knowledge transfer process is difficult for many of you, but we are counting on your continued professionalism to make the transition to our new operating model a successful one for TVA,” wrote Jeremy Fisher, TVA’s vice president and chief information officer in an email to staff on April 21.
The layoffs aren’t an issue of competence, according to TVA spokesman Jim Hopson.
“Our workers absolutely can do the work, can do it well, and we’ve all been trained in it,” he told the Intercept website on Wednesday. “It’s not an issue of qualification, it’s not an issue of quality of the work.”
Saving money isn’t the “primary reason,” either, Hopson said. Rather, the decision was based on a desire to “increase opportunity for innovation and expertise.”
Gay Henson, a TVA worker of 35 years, said the explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense.
“They’ve told us this is not about saving the money, but ‘leveraging the market,’” she said.
TVA asserts that the traditional notion of outsourcing jobs doesn’t apply given the jobs will remain in the U.S. and that the government-owned utility’s new globalist partners have subsidiary companies inside the country.
But that may be splitting hairs since the TVA’s foreign partners employ a substantial amount of cheap foreign workers both inside and outside the U.S., effectively circumventing American workers both at home and abroad.
The TVA signed a $15 million contract with Capgemini in September to revamp its software systems, which involves replacing longtime TVA employees. Capgemini also employs 100,000 workers based in India.
CGI and Accenture have similar business models and signed large contracts with TVA in April.
The scenario is not unique. In California, Pacific Gas and Electric laid off hundreds of workers in 2017, with foreign workers filling the positions at the California utility and in India. Disney has also laid off hundreds of high-skilled tech workers and replaced them with foreign guest workers on H-1B visas.
Conveniently, TVA recently increased its use of H-1B visas, which allows American companies to replace workers with foreign nationals with salaries starting at $60,000 a year.
Replacing high-skilled American workers with foreign non-citizens and using crony government visa programs to do it, is widely viewed as an affront to hard-working Americans. But until recently, the ruthless practice has been confined to the private sector.
Notably, TVA head Jeff Lyash is the highest-paid federal employee in the country at $8 million a year. President Donald Trump recently threatened to cut his salary.
‘Thousands of people relied on that promise. They moved to other cities. They gave up school, jobs, and job opportunities. They uprooted their lives…’
Michael Bloomberg / IMAGE: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert via YouTube
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is the proud owner of a recently purchased 4,600-acre luxury ranch in Colorado.
But the failed Democratic presidential candidate still has yet to make good on payment promises he made to campaign workers.
The former New York City mayor—now a western ranch owner—has a net worth of $56.2 billion, making him the 16th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.
Why he’s stiffing his loyal former workers is a question that remains unanswered. It’s also curious given his progressive political bent and the Democratic party’s affinity for class warfare and supposed workers’ rights.
Bloomberg, a financial services magnate, bought the ranch from Henry Kravis, co-founder of the New York City-based private equity giant KKR.
Kravis purchased the “Westlands” ranch for $5.5 million in 1991. He sold it to Bloomberg for $44.79 million six weeks after Bloomberg dropped out of the Democratic primary race—and roughly one month after Colorado’s billionaire progressive governor Jared Polis issued a stay-at-home executive order.
Bloomberg’s presidential aspirations exploded in his face during a nationally televised Democratic primary debate when Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., confronted him for his alleged mistreatment of female employees.
Warren accused Bloomberg of calling female workers “fat broads” and “horse-faced lesbians.” His subsequent Super Tuesday election performance was so pathetic he quit shortly after.
Since dropping out, Bloomberg has faced a series of lawsuits for failing to pay health care benefits and salaries through the November general election as promised to all campaign workers upon employment.
After two months of haggling, he finally resolved the health care issue last week, albeit diminished COBRA plans. By then, he’d already purchased his Colorado ranch.
“But the Bloomberg campaign must keep all of the promises it made to induce staffers to join the campaign, especially the promise to employ the staffers through the general election,” an attorney representing an aggrieved former staffer told Politico.
“Thousands of people relied on that promise,” another lawsuit states. “They moved to other cities. They gave up school, jobs, and job opportunities. They uprooted their lives.”
‘We got word @realDonaldTrump watched the entire interview…’
Judy Mikovits / IMAGE: plaguethebook.com
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The repeated censorship of scientists who have alleged hoaxes in the current coronavirus pandemic is casting doubt on whether virtue-signaling platforms like YouTube are committed to truth-telling or, rather, are engaged in their own left-wing cover-up.
A widely circulated video by Dr. Judy Mikovits this week raised serious questions about Anthony Fauci, a prominent member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and the longtime director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The original version of the video, although it was unlisted, garnered considerable viewership before it was removed overnight on Wednesday, citing YouTube’s arbitrary “Community Guidelines.”
The video’s suppression follows closely on the heels of several other controversial censorship measures involving tech companies, like Google-owned YouTube and social-media giant Facebook.
Another recent viral video by two California scientists that promoted coronavirus skepticism reportedly garnered 5.5 million views before getting yanked off YouTube.
The platform then reversed itself following massive backlash over the censorship, but it has continued to be inconsistent in applying its guidelines.
Among the shocking allegations Mikovits has made, she claims that Fauci—who has become something of a left-wing folk-hero for second-guessing and undermining President Donald Trump’s efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic—conspired with other top scientific researchers to forestall a groundbreaking report on the treatment of human immunodeficiency viruses.
Mikovits says in the video that the delay likely led many to contract HIV (and the resulting AIDS) who might otherwise have avoided the deadly disease.
Moreover, she accused Fauci and others of taking undue credit for the research in order to secure lucrative patents.
Mikovits also said that deep-state officials within the Justice Department arrested her and held her without due process while demanding that she provide them with government reports that she denied taking.
Yay! President Trump listened to my words! We got word @realDonaldTrump watched the entire interview including THIS!
Watch full interview at: @TinaAguayoTV
— Judy A. Mikovits PhD (@DrJudyAMikovits) May 4, 2020
Left-wing critics moved swiftly in their effort to discredit Mikovits and debunk her claims by suggesting she had a personal score to settle.
Risky Research
Liberty Headlines has been unable to independently verify the claims in the 26-minute documentary, but Mikovits’s criticism of Fauci is consistent with other reports that have noted his cavalier attitude toward risky “gain-of-function” research.
Wuhan Institute of Virology / IMAGE: TVB Anywhere Life via YouTube
In a 2011 Washington Post article, Fauci defended his work using the lab-based manipulation of deadly viruses, claiming that the potential upsides outweighed the dangers.
“[D]etermining the molecular Achilles’ heel of these viruses can allow scientists to identify novel antiviral drug targets that could be used to prevent infection in those at risk or to better treat those who become infected,” he said.
But his approach may have helped cause the coronavirus pandemic if a widespread theory proves true that the virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Trump has espoused the belief, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and several prominent members of Congress, and even says he has evidence to support it that he cannot yet disclose.
Outlets including Newsweek have reported that Fauci gave at least $7.4 million to help fund the Wuhan lab, half of which went directly to the coronavirus research being conducted on bats by virologist Shi Zheng-Li and the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance.
The goal of the research was to manipulate strains of the virus in order to predict tie “spillover” potential in its transmission from animals to humans.
Fauci and fellow scientists also may have contributed to significant delays in the U.S. reaction to the virus.
Not only was he among those downplaying worries about the pandemic in late February, but his support for unprecedented “curve-flattening” quarantine measures may be among the reasons that widespread testing remains unavailable in the U.S.
Although COVID-19 has proven to be highly contagious and deadly to a vulnerable subset of the population, some argue that it is far more widespread than projected, with most carriers experiencing mild or no symptoms, and that exposure to develop herd immunity would be more effective than attempting to contain it while researchers attempt to develop treatments and vaccines.
Anthony Fauci / IMAGE: Face the Nation via Youtube
Fauci also appears to be working with corrupt globalist institutions like the World Health Organization to favor certain “winners” in the race for a cure.
Although he hyped the breakthroughs of Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir last week, it was later revealed that the drug’s effect may be more limited than projections indicated.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed the standard by which they were evaluating it from preventing COVID deaths to measuring the length of time it took surviving patients to recover.
Meanwhile, Fauci has trashed the Trump-touted hydroxychloroquine, a widely available treatment that has seen positive results both anecdotally and in clinical research.
‘This is a messy moment, and I think we need to acknowledge that…’
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez / IMAGE: Hot 97
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) It “certainly seems as though something has happened” between Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden and his former congressional staffer, Tara Reade, who accused Biden of sexual assault last year, according to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY.
Ocasio-Cortez admitted that Reade’s allegation isn’t “clear-cut,” but noted that her account has been corroborated by several independent sources.
She added, however, that others “have raised questions about other aspects of her accounts,” Ocasio-Cortez said during an interview with NPR on Thursday.
“Frankly, this is a messy moment, and I think we need to acknowledge that,” she said.
Asked what she’d like to see happen moving forward, Ocasio-Cortez noted that Reade has not yet called on Biden to abandon his bid for the White House.
“While a lot of folks, again, are trying to jump to the political implications, she has never explicitly said, ‘Don’t vote for Joe Biden,'” she explained. “She hasn’t explicitly said anything in terms of a political remedy that she wants. If anything, it sounds like she simply wants to be heard.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont for president back in October, went on to say that she plans to vote for Biden this November anyway, though she has thus far declined to endorse him.
She added that she won’t feel comfortable endorsing Biden until she and Biden agree on “a vision … not just for winning [in November], but for getting our country to a better place.”
The self-described Democratic socialist, Ocasio-Cortez defended Reade last month, arguing that it is “legitimate” for the Democratic Party to “talk about” her allegations.
“If we want, if we again want to have integrity, you can’t say, you know—both believe women, support all of this, until it inconveniences you, until it inconveniences us,” she said during an online forum in April.
‘7 days in jail, no bail and a $7K fine is outrageous…’
Shelly Luther/Dallas County Sheriff’s Office
UPDATE 2:45 p.m. Thursday from KTVT-TV in Dallas: “The Supreme Court of Texas has ordered the release of Dallas salon owner, Shelly Luther, who was jailed for violating executive stay at home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic…The jail is expected to release her Thursday afternoon.”
EARLIER UPDATE: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott modified his executive order on Thursday morning, to prevent incarceration as punishment for violation of his COVID-19 restrictions. He released a statement in announcing the change:
Throwing Texans in jail who have had their businesses shut down through no fault of their own is nonsensical, and I will not allow it to happen. That is why I am modifying my executive orders to ensure confinement is not a punishment for violating an order. This order is retroactive to April 2nd, supersedes local orders and if correctly applied should free Shelley Luther. It may also ensure that other Texans like Ana Isabel Castro-Garcia and Brenda Stephanie Mata who were arrested in Laredo, should not be subject to confinement. As some county judges advocate for releasing hardened criminals from jail to prevent the spread of COVID-19, it is absurd to have these business owners take their place.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE: (Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Concerned citizens have raised more than $500,000 for the Dallas salon owner who was sentenced to seven days in jail and fined $7,000 for reopening her salon.
The GoFundMe page describes Shelley Luther, the owner of Salon a la Mode, as an “American Hero” who resisted “tyranny by opening her business against an unlawful state executive order.”
All contributions to the fund will directly support Luther and “the idea that our founders put in writing gin the Constitution,” the GoFundMe page states.
Luther reopened her salon on April 25 despite Texas’s shelter-in-place order.
A county judge handed her a cease-and-desist letter and ordered her to close her salon, but Luther refused, arguing that it “isn’t a crime to make a living.”
In response, she was sentenced to a week in prison and fined $500 for every day her salon remained open in violation of the law.
Luther’s case drew the attention of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, both of whom demanded she be released from prison immediately. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also announced that he would pay Luther’s $7,000 fine, calling the judge’s response “over the top.”
7 days in jail, no bail and a $7K fine is outrageous. No surprise Texans are responding. I’m covering the $7K fine she had to pay and I volunteer to be placed under House Arrest so she can go to work and feed her kids. #txlege#TexansHelpingTexanshttps://t.co/gdtMLAHFV5
Paxton said her arrest seems more like a “political stunt” than a legitimate attempt to protect community members’ health.
“I find it outrageous and out of touch that during this national pandemic, a judge, in a county that actually released hardened criminals for fear of contracting COVID-19, would jail a mother for operating her hair salon in an attempt to put food on her family’s table,” Paxton said in a statement.
‘This information was redacted until now for one single reason—to hide the fact that false allegations from the Steele dossier were included in Mueller’s scoping memo…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Once a strong advocate for appointing special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate claims of Russian collusion involving President Donald Trump, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, said that the newly unredacted release of a scope memo showed the “legal foundation for Mueller’s appointment is crumbling.”
The Justice Department released the document Wednesday at Graham’s request.
In it, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was overseeing the Russia probe following then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions‘s recusal, outlined the specific authority that Mueller’s office had to investigate five individuals connected with the Trump campaign.
“So now we know that the scope of the investigation was to look at Carter Page, Flynn, Papadopoulos and Manafort as to whether or not they were working with the Russians. Now, this is in August of 2017,” Graham said during an appearance on Sean Hannity‘s Fox News show, according to Breitbart.
The fifth, still-redacted individual is presumed to be Trump, himself, given the focus of the Mueller Report, which was released a year ago following nearly two years of investigating, on top of the FBI’s prior “Crossfire Hurricane” operation.
In hindsight, Graham said, Mueller’s costly and politically divisive probe was entirely unwarranted based on what the FBI and Justice Department already knew at the time.
Many conservative journalists who have helped to untangle the web of lies and cover-ups agreed with Graham that the developing picture showed it was a sham.
Previously declassified files have since revealed that the FBI already should have ruled out some of the charges, which were based on false pretenses and misinformation, while the remaining considerations failed to justify a massive criminal probe.
This was a joke from day 1. When Rosenstein wrote this memo Mueller already knew none of these people “Colluded”
As with much of the FBI case, which was used to justify eavesdropping on Trump staffers using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the subsequent Mueller probe leaned heavily on the unverified—and largely debunked—information contained in the Democrat-funded Steele Dossier.
Recent documents revealed that the dossier itself was based in a Russian disinformation campaign—a fact which corrupt FBI agents chose to ignore and conceal.
“In January 2017, the sub-source disavowed the dossier,” Graham said. “And without the dossier, there is no warrant. So they knew that the Carter Page thing was a fraud.”
More recently, a new investigation into Flynn’s charges show that FBI agents conspired to frame him, using as its basis the questionable claims that Flynn violated the antiquated Logan Act.
— Sidney Powell ??⭐⭐⭐ (@SidneyPowell1) May 6, 2020
The law, dating from 1799 and never successfully used in prosecution, bars civilians from engaging in foreign policy and diplomacy on behalf of the U.S.
Flynn was accused on the basis of his communications with a Russian diplomat in December 2016, a month before Trump took office.
Then-President Barack Obama had expelled the Russian emissaries and threatened sanctions over the claims that they interfered in the 2016 election.
However, since the Russians were involved in crafting the conspiracy theories promoted by the Steele Dossier, it was the Obama FBI that was, effectively, colluding with them covertly to smear the new president.
Ironically, the same Logan Act charges levied against Flynn have since been raised in relation to former Secretary of State John Kerry for interfering in Iranian diplomacy.
But Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton was among those who confirmed it provided a flimsy foundation for what followed with the Mueller probe.
Obama’s “Logan Act” predicate for the @GenFlynn investigation is a knowing fraud and an attack on the constitutional powers of @RealDonaldTrump to conduct foreign policy. A pardon is mandated in these circumstances to protect the Constitution and the presidency. https://t.co/zA7BZKzCwS
Although the FBI aimed to close the Flynn case following a highly irregular White House interview in January 2017, corrupt counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok insisted on keeping it open, with his justification being that people on the “7th floor”—aka FBI leadership—were involved, Fox News reported.
The Other Targets
Prior to the recent breaks in Flynn’s case, former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos has disclosed in February that the FBI also attempted to set him up.
In his recently published exposé, titled Deep State Target, Papadopoulos noted that the U.S. intelligence apparatus used foreign assets like Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud to plant misinformation linked to Russia, which it then hoped Papadopoulos would spread virally throughout the Trump campaign.
As with Flynn’s case, the prosecutors stand accused of leaving out exculpatory information in his case.
“We’ve got Papadopoulos on record denying working with the Russians, saying to do so would be treason,” said Graham during his Hannity appearance. “So the foundation for the Mueller investigation is crumbling.”
As part of an effort to get him to flip on the president, Manafort—who served briefly as Trump’s campaign chief—ultimately was indicted by the Mueller probe for entirely unrelated process crimes liked to tax evasion. He is currently serving a seven-year sentence.
Page—the primary target of FBI spying—was eventually cleared by the Mueller probe, which found no evidence that he colluded with Russia.
Preparing for Fallout
Robert Mueller, James Comey and Barack Obama / IMAGE: The Obama White House via Youtube
The fallout has left many of the co-conspirators scurrying as Justice Department special prosecutor John Durham presses forward with a criminal probe.
Top FBI brass of the Obama era are implicated—among them former Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and counterespionage chief Bill Priestap.
In addition, the disclosures confirm long-held assumptions that current House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, D-Calif., knowingly lied to the public on multiple occasions by claiming “direct evidence” of collusion.
Top Trump administration officials are now preparing to release transcripts from a GOP-led House Intelligence probe, despite Schiff’s efforts to block them.
“Schiff is in panic mode,” a senior administration official reportedly told Fox News.
The disclosures may also raise further questions about Rosenstein—and about Mueller. With new assertions that they violated DOJ regulations outlining the appointment of a special prosecutor, some speculate that the underlying motive of the former FBI director’s involvement was to conduct his own counterintelligence investigation.
Schiff’s Intelligence Committee counterpart, ranking minority member Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said that many of those now facing charges are starting to jump ship as the plot unravels.
It is believed that former FBI Counsel James Baker is among the key witnesses now cooperating with Durham’s probe.
Nunes put the entire scheme into simple context as an elaborate—and expensive—anti-Trump smear campaign, conceived, funded and orchestrated by the president’s political rivals.
“This information was redacted until now for one single reason—to hide the fact that false allegations from the Steele dossier were included in Mueller’s scoping memo,” Nunes told Just the News.
“In other words, a bunch of lies paid for by the Democrats were used to engineer the appointment of a Special Counsel to drag the Trump administration through the mud for years,” he said. “The Russia collusion hoax was a disgrace, and we can’t let anything like it ever be repeated.”
