‘Dr. Ford’s lawyers are no longer involved in the event…’
Tammy Baldwin/Photo by Center for American Progress Action Fund (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Up is down, down is up. The sexual assault accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have led to many surprise reversals, from a rare Congressional consensus to more Democratic flip-flopping than normal, to an unusually reserved Donald Trump.
But none could be as shocking as the revelation today of an honest report from CNN that undermined the purportedly non-partisan nature of Christine Blasey Ford’s 36-year-old high-school groping allegations against the judge.
On Thursday afternoon, CNN Senior Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju tweeted about a fundraiser that Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisconsin, had scheduled with Ford’s attorney, Debra Katz. Raju said that the invitation was mailed Thursday morning for the event, scheduled for Oct. 1. After he reached out, however, it was canceled.
Christine Blasey Ford’s attorneys were listed as headliners at a DC fundraiser at their law firm for Tammy Baldwin, slated to occur Oct. 1. Invite was emailed this morning. Campaign and Katz now say the event has been canceled after I reached out. https://t.co/aFAhc8Zlvr
According to Raju, Baldwin’s spokesman replied with a statement that “The event was scheduled before Dr. Ford made the allegations,” the spokesman said. “Dr. Ford’s lawyers are no longer involved in the event.”
Social media reaction, as compiled on Twitchy, was varied, from some applauding the “fake news” network for its “random act of journalism” to pointing out the terrible optics to cautioning against faulting Ford for her attorneys’ actions.
But it was just one of many setbacks that the accuser’s narrative had to face over the past 24 hours, including the contradictory statements of a former classmate and the inflammatory, eyebrow-raising, misandrist commentary of Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono.
Ford supporters may have hoped that a letter from her fellow alumnae of the Holton-Arms School (including comedian Julia Louis-Dreyfus) would build momentum for the expressed objective of launching an FBI investigation. Despite her classmates’ assertion that Ford’s “decision to provide information pertaining to a sexual assault is not a partisan act. It is an act of civic duty,” however, her lawyers’ actions suggest otherwise.
‘Her decision to provide information pertaining to a sexual assault is not a partisan act. It is an act of civic duty…’
Sens. Kristen Gillibrand and Mazie Hirono/IMAGE: screenshot via CSPAN
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Offering no further corroborating evidence for the specific episode in question, Sens. Kristin Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, presented a spectacle in political theater Thursday by having alumnae of the all-girls Holton-Arms school present a letter supporting the accusations of Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
“Dr. Blasey Ford’s experience is all too consistent with stories we heard and lived while attending Holton. Many of us are survivors ourselves,” said the letter, signed by 1,039 former students, according to their website.
Ford has accused Kavanaugh of pinning her down at a high school party and drunkenly groping her through her clothes and bathing suit while he was a student at the nearby all-boys Georgetown Preparatory.
Many of Kavanaugh’s classmates, along with female co-workers and others, have issued public statements supporting the judge’s character and have denied any awareness of Ford’s accusations. Kavanaugh himself has strongly denied that the incident occurred.
Those participating in the press conference repeatedly characterized the rebuttals to the accusations as “unfair.”
“Dr. Blasey Ford has shown that she is beyond credible,” said 2005 Holton-Arms alumna Sarah Burgess at the press conference.
Among the signatories was former “Seinfeld” actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a 1979 alumna and billionaire heiress to a French global merchant, who earlier in the week tweeted her support:
Echoing the previous efforts to derail a confirmation vote on Kavanaugh prior to the midterm election, which has included heckling from both paid protestors and Democratic senators, the women called on the Judiciary Committee to delay the proceedings.
“[Ford’s 36-year-old accusation] demands a thorough and independent investigation before the Senate can reasonably vote,” the letter said.
Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, and Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have rejected the notion of a delay, pointing out that Kavanaugh already had undergone months’ worth of intensive screening, hearings and interviews before Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. dramatically unveiled the presence of the letter last week, which she had been in possession of since July.
Ford, a psychology professor at California’s Palo Alto University, was revealed to have engaged previously in women’s rights protests against President Donald Trump, although according to her own account, she did not reveal the alleged assault on her until a 2012 counseling session.
Nonetheless, in a separate letter, issued by the alumnae from Ford’s class of 1984, the women wrote “that her decision to provide information pertaining to a sexual assault is not a partisan act. It is an act of civic duty…”
The two liberal senators hosting the press event already had been vocal in expressing their belief in Ford’s accusations, despite there having been no formal investigation to substantiate that belief.
Hirono turned heads with an inflammatory statement on Wednesday, calling on men everywhere to stop questioning the accusations.
“Guess who is perpetrating all of these kinds of actions? It’s the men in this country,” she said. “I just want to say to the men in this country: Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing for a change.”
One former classmate of Ford’s, Cristina King Miranda, was forced to backpedal Wednesday on claims that the incident was common knowledge among Holton-Arms students after inconsistencies between her account and Ford’s were pointed out.
‘To clarify my post: I do not have first hand knowledge of the incident…’
Cristina King Miranda/IMAGE: Cecilia Domeyko via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Congressional partisans continued to draw battle lines over the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Wednesday as news broke that sexual assault accuser Christine Blasey Ford would likely welsh on an earlier promise to appear before Congress.
In a bid to delay the hearing as long as possible, with November’s midterm election approaching, Ford’s attorney, along with a parade of left-wing talking heads demanded an FBI investigation into the 36-year-old accusations.
Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, bristled at the notion of a last-minute delay following months of background checks and testimonials.
“Now an accusation of 36-year-old misconduct dating back to high school has been brought forward at the last minute in an irregular manner,” McConnell said.
As liberal media attempted to impugn the only possible eyewitness, Mark Judge, as a libido-driven, woman-hating, drunken accomplice, they also trotted out Cristina King Miranda, a classmate at Ford’s all-girls school who posted on social media that the episode between Kavanaugh and Ford had been widely “talked about.”
“Christine Blasey Ford was a year or so behind me, I remember her,” wrote Miranda, who also claimed to have known Kavanaugh and Judge when they were students at the all-male Georgetown Prep.
“This incident did happen,” Miranda wrote. “Many of us heard about it in school and Christine’s recollection should be more than enough for us to truly, deeply know that the accusation is true.”
Miranda said that Kavanaugh should “admit his actions from so long ago, speak from the heart, and apologize” if he wants to be confirmed.
“Those would be the actions of a person we want in the Supreme Court,” she said.
The Facebook post was widely circulated, with Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California among those retweeting an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter’s tweet with a copy of Miranda’s original post.
“The FBI needs to interview this witness,” Lieu wrote of Miranda, before asking, “Will more witnesses step forward?”
Unfortunately for Ford and Miranda, their stories seemed to contradict one another. As reported by The Western Journal, Miranda’s assertion that it was widely known undercut Ford’s statement that she did not discuss it until a 2012 therapy session.
Moreover, while Miranda’s account would have placed it during the school year, Ford said it happened over summer.
Miranda subsequently deleted the post and ultimately issued another one via Twitter stating that she would no longer be speaking with media.”To clarify my post: I do not have first hand knowledge of the incident,” it said.
By Tuesday evening, it appeared her entire Twitter account had been deleted.
According to Miranda’s LinkedIn account, she is a self-employed performing-arts curator and producer in Mexico City whose pet causes include “animal welfare” and “human rights.” A 2017 profile says she moved to Mexico 20 years ago.
Although the connection was not explicitly confirmed, a search of the Federal Elections Commission database lists a Cristina King, also self-employed, of California, who made 53 separate donations, totaling $1,258 to the Bernie Sanders campaign and Act Blue political action committee prior to the 2016 election.
‘It’s kind of like the Nixon “Deep Throat” type of thing…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After shocking confessions from a hidden-camera interview with a State Department employee who spent his workday doing research for the Democratic Socialists of America, Project Veritas produced even more explosive revelations on Wednesday with its second video in an investigative series on Deep State corruption.
The video features proud members of the Trump ‘Resistance’ who use their positions in the Justice Department and Health and Human Services Department to promote their partisan agendas.
Project Veritas President James O’Keefe introduces the video with a discussion about the widespread problem of leakers within the federal bureaucracy.
“During the Trump administration, our government has turned into a sieve,” he says. “Leakers weaponize information in order to thwart a duly elected administration.”
Drawing from recent headlines, such as the Justice Department’s coordinated effort to use media leaks of information—some of it false—in order to obtain surveillance warrants to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign, O’Keefe says “The media, rather than expose these people and shine a light on them, conspire with them—getting the scoop and leaving the people in the dark.”
The first subject O’Keefe introduces is Jessica Schubel, the former chief of staff for HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Obama.
Jessica Schubel/IMAGE: Project Veritas
Over a series of casual meetings with the Project Veritas undercover interviewer, Schubel, who quit her government job the day before Trump’s inauguration to pursue an analyst position at the left-wing Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, discloses that friends in her former workplace continue to surreptitiously mail her confidential information about Trump administration policy.
“It’s kind of like the Nixon “Deep Throat” type of thing,” she says, in reference to FBI associate director Mark Felt’s infamous parking-garage meetings with Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Schubel acknowledges that she is able to use the advance information to disseminate copy to reporters—and speculates that the actions are “probably” illegal.
“It helps me because then I can tell other people, and then we’re all prepared for when it happens, and then we can do something about it,” she says.
Speaking with Judicial Watch’s Bill Marshall, O’Keefe anticipates critics who might try to paint Project Veritas’ undercover stings in the same swath with the government leakers.
Marshall says the difference is that one is an effort to hinder democracy and the other to promote transparency.
“These people who are leaking from inside the government are doing it to thwart an incoming president’s agenda,” he says. “We are simply trying to expose the fraud that is occurring within the government itself.”
Allison Hrabar/IMAGE: Project Veritas
O’Keefe then introduces Justice Department Paralegal Allison Hrabar, who, like the previous video’s subject, was rooted out by infiltrating the Washington, D.C. branch of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Through her position with the leftist DSA, Hrabar previously led a protest confronting Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she privately dined in a restaurant.
O’Keefe says that Hrabar also may be using government resources through the DOJ’s antitrust division to further her ‘Resistance’ efforts.
Hrabar first acknowledges that many coworkers within her department share her leftist slant. Although some are socialists, she says, “most of them are just sort of like regular liberals” whom she describes as being “vaguely politically involved” through fundraising and canvassing activities.
She goes on to say “there’s a lot of talk at work about how we can resist from inside, and there’s a lot of, kind of, push back.”
Sometimes this involves deliberately slowing down the administrative process, she says, such as waiting until the last minute to submit a form. “It just means that they can’t start doing anything,” she says, which in her case might impact a company’s profit margins during a merger.
Additionally, she mentions a friend in the Agriculture Department whose effort to hinder food-stamp reduction policies “means that people are going to be able to stay on food stamps for another month or two.”
Hrabar also boasts of using access to confidential information to track down the address of a lobbyist, against whom she led a DSA protest. The group, she says, stalked the lobbyist’s address and then unofficially ran a license plate in order to confirm his identity.
Moreover, Hrabar uses her department access to the pricey LexisNexis database to locate information on company heads.
The video includes one of Hrabar’s fellow DSA conspirators, Natarajan Subramanian, an employee in the Government Accountability Office, who confirms that her use of the DOJ database subscription for her private partisan activities iss a fireable offence.
“People do not have the silver bullet, the smoking gun or whatever. If they were able to get proof of that, you know…? So, we’re all walking that line in a lot of ways.”
According to a press release from Project Veritas, the release of the series’ first video on Tuesday already helped initiate a response from the State Department saying they are looking into potential violations of the Hatch Act.
Yet, his latest effort to take on ‘Deep State’ partisan activists at government agencies like the State Department may be O’Keefe’s most ambitious to date.
As The New York Times, whose leftist agenda was earlier exposed by O’Keefe, celebrates the secret ‘Resistance’ embedded within the Trump administration through the publication of anonymous missives, Project Veritas could play an instrumental role in shedding light on bureaucratic efforts to defraud taxpayers and undermine the political process.
On Tuesday, they unveiled the first installment in their latest investigation. O’Keefe explains in his introduction just what is at stake if such activities are not exposed. “These avowed socialists—this unelected cabal—would argue that they’re saving America, but by thwarting the will of the people what they’re actually doing is subverting our democracy and setting up a constitutional crisis.”
The video then introduces Stuart Karaffa, identified as a federal employee of the State Department, who confesses to doing activist work while on the job on behalf of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“I’m careful about it” Karaffa tells the undercover interviewers, while downing pints in a busy bar. “I don’t leave a paper trail, like I leave emails, and like any press s**t that comes up I leave that until after 5:30. But as soon as 5:31 hits, got my like draft messages ready to send out.”
A private Twitter account that appeared to belong to Karaffa confirmed his DSA association, while a website for his campaign to be Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for D.C.’s Mount Pleasant area provided some details into his personal and professional life, saying he had “spent time in government and tech.”
The Chicago native said he is an eight-year resident of the D.C. area, “with no plans to move away anytime soon.”
In the video, Karaffa seems to pin his partisan activity on the Trump administration for cutting the data analysis project he was working on.
“It gives me so much more time and emotional bandwidth to do all this stuff,” he says.
According to his own accounts, this could mean spending three hours during his workday on the Virginia campaign finance website, doing research and drafting emails for the DSA, where he says he served as co-chair of the electoral caucus.
Between clips, O’Keefe brings on attorney Steve Klein, who explains that Karaffa’s actions constitute a violation of the Hatch Act “by engaging in political activity while working for the federal government.”
Although the interviewers press Karaffa on how he is able to conceal his tracks, he seems self-assured with his ability to game the system.
“I have nothing to lose. It’s impossible to fire federal employees,” he says.
He boasts that even when disclosing his political offices on an annual financial disclosure form designed to safeguard ethical practices, “somebody just rubber stamps it and it goes forward… and so, now I can look back and be like, ‘You know, the ethics officer, he was aware of what I was doing.'”
O’Keefe also interviews Judicial Watch’s Bill Marshall, who says the key to reform is that “government employees need to do their jobs.”
“If this employee’s supervisor isn’t carefully reviewing the form and its contents, and enforcing them, then it serves no purpose other than to provide cover for the employee’s nefarious activities while he’s on government time.”
O’Keefe closes with the promise of much more to come.
“It’s necessary for us to unmask them, to personify them, to put a face to the individuals who seek to undermine the fabric our republic.”
It takes Clinton a mere two sentences before the lying commences. After observing that “It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States” (true), Clinton issues her first falsehood by implying that she graciously conceded the election.
“On the day after, in my concession speech, I said, ‘We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.’ I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown.”
Clinton’s next false statement pertains to the detention of illegal immigrant children at the border. Citing a statistic from the ever-reliable New York Times, she says, “the administration continues to detain 12,800 children right now, despite all the outcry and court orders.” However, the Times story, while itself misleading in the way the information is presented, buries the fact that “most of the children crossed the border alone, without their parents,” thus connecting it directly with Obama’s unconstitutional decision to encourage tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors to cross the border, with some estimates of around 130,000 children and teens.
While the more dishonest “fact-checking” sites attempt to muddle the issue by suggesting that Obama’s welcoming of unaccompanied minors was different from Trump separating families while attempting to suspend the ineffective “catch and release” practice permitted by the Flores settlement, the reality is that Obama’s policies led to what some considered ‘mistreatment’ in detention centers. Moreover, only around 2,000 kids were detained separately from parents during the brief window in April and May when Trump permitted family separations. As of September, only about 500 of those separated from their families remain in custody while authorities work to verify the relationships.
As the Times article noted, “The big difference [under Trump …] is that red tape and fear brought on by stricter immigration enforcement have discouraged relatives and family friends from coming forward to sponsor children.” However, The Daily Caller reported that under the previous unaccompanied minor policy, roughly 80 percent were placed in the care of other illegal immigrants with the potential of being released into the hands of MS-13 gang members and human traffickers.
Hurricane Relief
Without so much as a paragraph break, Clinton jumps into her third untruth, attempting to implicate Trump in the deaths of 3,000 Puerto Ricans after last year’s Hurricane Maria. As conservative Never-Trumper Ben Shapiro noted, this is not an actual number, but an estimate of “excess deaths” beyond the normal death rate. He cites Lynn Goldman, the dean of George Washington University’s Milken Institute of Public Health, which released the estimated toll, as saying that “among all the deaths that occurred, which of them were related to Maria, which of them would not have occurred if it hadn’t been for the storm? We’re not able to say that now.”
Russian Collusion
As if worried that the truth might catch up, Clinton then, in the same paragraph, makes a passing reference to the Russian collusion investigation, attempting to falsely implicate Trump by once again conflating two separate questions: 1) Did the Russians meddle?; and 2) Was he involved in it?
Trump has acknowledged the former, and he recently signed an order that would punish foreign meddling, though some media reports, unsurprisingly, attempted to spin it against him. By contrast, even as Obama claimed to be aware of Russian meddling, he did nothing to prevent it under the presumption that it would benefit Clinton.
Of course, Hillary’s claim is particularly disingenuous in light of the many documented instances of largely Chinese election meddling and campaign funding violations that occurred under Bill Clinton. Furthermore, whatever Trump did or did not do, there has been little attention paid to the fact that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, likely was engaging inappropriately with a number of foreign entities who then contributed to a campaign slush fund via the Clinton Foundation, including her dealings with Russia via the Uranium One company.
All in all, Clinton’s nearly 2,600 word diatribe/stump speech is packed so full of fabrications and a lack of self awareness that adding the proper context to every whopper would take up more server space than her 30,000 missing emails.
“Trump and his cronies do so many despicable things that it can be hard to keep track,” she ironically claims.
Fortunately, those who may feel a tinge of buyer’s remorse need only consider the alternative.
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Democrats have upped the ante by digging back to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s high school days to find an 11th-hour controversy before Thursday’s razor-thin Senate vote to approve him.
The scandal—in which Palo Alto University professor Christine Blasey Ford, an outspoken Democrat, alleges that a drunken, teenage Kavanaugh forced himself upon her before she was able to escape—has all the trappings of a pre-fabbed ‘October surprise.’
First, Sen. Dianne Feinstein sat on Ford’s letter for months before acting on it, undercutting the notion that the decades-old episode was a wrong that needed to be righted with any level of urgency. Then came the anonymous whistleblower’s dramatic reveal to give more steam to the story, just as a hurricane was about to blow it from the headlines.
The Democrats are now calling for a delay in the confirmation vote to investigate further (despite the FBI having said it did not intend to investigate).
Whether the gambit succeeds or fails, though, Democrats are forgetting an important lesson from the past when it comes to their “ends justify the means” tactics: They always backfire.
The Left’s latest scorched-earth tactic combines both of those examples, using the yet unsubstantiated harassment claim against Kavanaugh as a way to effectively filibuster the nomination (at least until the midterm election).
However, the Left, which still has plenty of beams in its own eye, may not be considering the unintended consequences of borking Kavanaugh, which will open every public official—past, present or future—to having their own high school records scrutinized, whether justifiably or not.
Keith Ellison/Photo by Center for American Progress Action Fund
Already, The Daily Caller has pointed out one such hypocrisy among the Democratic ranks, noting that DNC chair Tom Perez has hopped on the Kavanaugh investigation bandwagon despite refusing to address the very real domestic abuse allegations against his own deputy, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison.
Ellison, who is running for Minnesota attorney general, has been accused of physically abusing ex-girlfriend Karen Monahan, including dragging her off a bed. Monahan’s son, Austin, corroborated the accusations, saying he had seen video footage on his mother’s computer.
“I only know what I saw and I know what’s true,” Austin Monahan said. “It was my job to stand up for my mother. … I have no reason to tear down this man.”
While the DNC claimed on Aug. 14 to be reviewing the accusations against Ellison, Perez later punted the investigation to the Minnesota branch, the Democratic Farmer-Labor party, without ever publicly addressing the findings.
The Daily Caller noted that “Like the DNC, the DFL has remained elusive about the details of its Ellison investigation—for example, who exactly is running the investigation, how they’re conducting it and what the status of the probe is.”
One critical difference, of course, is that the accusations against Ellison relate to the actions of a fully-grown adult who, like other #MeToo culprits, exploited a position of power and authority.
By contrast, Ford’s account of the failed hookup with Kavanaugh alleges that he “clumsily attempt[ed] to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it” until a friend jumped on top of the bed they were on, according to The Washington Post.
Republicans might well come out on top in the race to capitalize on youthful indiscretions, but the terror of having teenage baggage aired out and privacy violated should be enough to give pause to many, whether for their own sake or their children‘s.
‘They’ve decided that the next stop is Virtue Town…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) According to NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, kids TV icon Thomas The Tank Engine has gone off the rails.
In the “Final Cut” segment of her show Relentless on NRA TV last week, Loesch took aim at the show Thomas and Friends for its new multi-ethnic makeover, which includes anthropomorphic trains of different genders, cultures and nationalities.
“They’ve decided that the next stop is Virtue Town,” Loesch said.
The show now includes a staggering array of train characters from places like Kenya, China, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Russia and different regions of India.
While some may see it as a marketing ploy to sell more toys, Loesch questioned the logic in ascribing different ethnic stereotypes to the mechanical objects.
“That’s where it gets really strange to me, because I’ve looked at Thomas and Friends—at their pictures—and I see gray and blue,” she said. “Am I to understand that this entire time Thomas and his friends were white?”
Loesch underscored her point on the senselessness of injecting identity politics into a kids’ show by using a graphic of three cartoon engines wearing KKK hoods.
“Was there some concern that the show had racist undertones? … Thomas the Tank Engine has been a blight on race relations for far too long. Clearly, this is overdue,” she said.
After Media Matters picked up on it, the segment made the rounds in liberal talking points, enabling lefties like director Judd Apatow to vent their spleen at Loesch and an unspecified “they.”
Such a hateful nightmare they are. We are all so exhausted by dumb, vicious people. Vote in November. Let’s enjoy ending this nightmare. @WhenWeAllVote https://t.co/R8uQFgiYmY
‘Once again, it may be Judicial Watch—not Congress—that is finally able to extract the truth about this continuing Deep State scandal…’
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton/IMAGE: Fox News
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A week after members of the House Freedom Caucus publicly called on President Donald Trump to force the declassification of key documents in their investigation of bias and conspiracy within the Justice Department, government watchdog Judicial Watch is suing to obtain some of the records.
Judicial Watch submitted its latest case on Sept. 10, using the Freedom of Information Act to request six months of records—or 1,650 pages—related to 12 interviews between former Justice Department official Bruce Ohr and former British spy Christopher Steele.
The lawsuit comes after the DOJ failed to meet the deadline for responding to several prior FOIA requests.
“Judicial Watch is doing the heavy lifting in federal court against the DOJ’s outrageous delays and secrecy about the Ohr-Strzok-Steele-Fusion GPS-Dossier scheme targeting President Trump,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said.
Ohr, who was fourth in command at the DOJ, promoted information provided by Steele—much of which was later discredited—for the FBI to justify its investigation of Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, including the wiretapping surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The FBI used the “Steele Dossier” compiled by research firm Fusion GPS in its warrant applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s top-secret tribunal, which then authorized the domestic surveillance.
However, the intelligence agency neglected to mention in their FISA applications that the dossier was being funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and that Ohr’s wife, Nellie, was one of the Fusion GPS employees responsible for compiling it.
Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, brought this information to light in a February memo delivered to the White House.
The FBI agent overseeing the investigation, Peter Strzok, was subsequently embroiled in accusations of bias and impropriety that led to his firing in August.
In addition to his role in pushing the false information to the FISA court, Strzok has been accused of orchestrating a coordinated leak campaign to spread the information to the media.
Through its series of FOIA request, the nonprofit has sought to obtain all of the correspondence between Ohr and Steele, as well as that with Fusion GPS owner Glenn Simpson or any employees or representatives of the company. (Presumably, this would include any official communications stored on DOJ servers between Ohr and his wife.)
They also have requested all of Ohr’s travel requests, authorizations and expenses, as well as his calendar entries.
The most recent lawsuit relates specifically to the Form 302 documents that the FBI uses to summarize interviews.
The meetings in question occurred between November 2016 and May 2017, despite Steele having been admonished by the agency in February 2016 and subsequently deemed unsuitable as a source for revealing his relationship with the FBI to a third party.
At a press conference last week, several members of Congress, including Freedom Caucus leaders Mike Meadows, R-N.C., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, requested the 302 documents along with the FISA warrants and other related information.
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A nonprofit dedicated to maintaining election integrity says the latest report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights serves no purpose but scaremongering.
According to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the voting report from the “nonpartisan” eight-person panel—which contains only two conservatives—is riddled with errors and intent on discrediting the GOP.
“The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights isn’t living up to its historic standards,” said J. Christian Adams, PILF president and general counsel. “The report on voting and elections is full of errors, exaggerations, and outlandish efforts to scare minorities into thinking they won’t be able to cast a ballot.”
The USCCR has limited authority of its own and has been subject to partisan squabbling since at least the Reagan era, when it went to its current configuration with four members appointed by the president, two by the Senate and two by the House of Representatives.
However, members may be called to address Congress on the findings, which then may be used both to set a policy agenda and sway public perception.
The members are appointed to six-year terms and cannot be fired except for reasons of misconduct. Despite strict rules governing the number of party members who can be appointed to the commission, appointees have been able to circumvent restrictions by registering as independents.
All four of the current presidential appointees are holdovers from Barack Obama, with two of those being twilight appointments issued in December 2016.
Last year, the USCCR announced that it was launching a two-year probe into whether President Donald Trump was preventing civil rights offices from performing their duties by cutting their budgets and staffing.
Among the recommendations the report, titled An Assessment of Minority Voting Rights Access in the United States, makes is to pursue more aggressive enforcement measures addressing states’ efforts to limit minority voters. The reasons it cites for disfranchisement are: voter identification laws, voter roll purges, proof of citizenship measures, challenges to voter eligibility, and polling places moves or closings.
Many of these are issues that PILF has fought against due to the rampant abuses in voter registration and polling verification, which have allowed thousands of illegal immigrants and other non-eligible citizens to cast ballots.
“The [USCCR] report reads more like a ‘Get Out the Vote’ flyer designed to benefit partisan turnout than a careful and credible report on voting,” Adams said. “That’s a shame, and President Trump will have to very carefully examine who serves on and works for this Commission when he has the ability to appoint replacement Commissioners.”
IMAGE: CBS News Los Angeles via Youtube
In a previous lawsuit, PILF estimated that a ‘glitch’ in the “Motor Voter” registration through Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation had put more than 100,000 ineligible voters on the rolls. However, many jurisdictions actively resist providing data about suspected voter fraud.
In a press release disputing many of the USCCR report’s details, PILF listed seven major errors, including a false claim that the board voted unanimously on its recommendations and its use of a George Soros-funded “news” operation to support claims that there was no substantial evidence of voter fraud.
Adams said that the brazen partisanship on the commission risked undermining its credibility and damaging overall public perception of civil rights and the Voting Rights Act.
“One of the most effective ways to preserve the viability of civil rights laws is to remove partisan politics from civil rights enforcement. As soon as a sizeable segment of the public believes that civil rights laws are being leveraged for partisan ends, a sizeable segment of the public will stop supporting civil rights,” he said.
“The Voting Rights Act has enjoyed broad bipartisan support for decades. But if enforcement of the law is hijacked by partisan interests, the law will lose this bipartisan support.”
