“Key Point: At least $20 billion of the revenue Democrats hope to collect from taxpayers with a supercharged IRS would come from lower- and middle-income earners and small businesses, according to a new analysis by the nonpartisan congressional scorekeeper. That’s in addition to existing audits of these income levels.”
—–
“From CBO:
“CBO has not completed a point estimate of this amendment but the preliminary assessment indicates that amendment 5404 would reduce the ‘non-scorable’ revenues resulting from the provisions of section 10301 by at least $20 billion over the FY2022-FY2031 period.”
The GOP committee members provided these points:
Lower- and middle-income earning Americans are the primary target in Democrats’ bill:
A previous Congressional Budget Office analysis makes clear that under this plan, audit rates will “rise for all taxpayers” and the policy “would return audit rates to the levels of about 10 years ago.”
The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78 percent to 90 percent of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Nearly half of the audits would hit Americans making $75,000 per year or less and only 4 percent to 9 percent would come from those making more than $500,000.
Democrats voted against guardrails preventing audits for middle-income earners, instead using non-binding legislative language that would do nothing to protect taxpayers from agency abuse.”
The same tactics, from the same bad actors, and the media once again carries water and spreads Dem lies and propaganda.
It’s all so predictable.
“Mar-a-Lago Raid: Swimming in a Sea of Anti-Trump Media ‘Bombshell’ Hype, Again
This is a replay of the Russia Collusion hysteria, where media competed with one another for “scoops” to generate clicks and social media sociopaths competed for Twitter followers.”
The mainstream media and well-credentialed social media lunatics particularly on Twitter, have so many bombshells. Too many to count. Trump stole the names of undercover US spies operating abroad, he has nuclear secrets he’s trying to peddle to the Saudis (somehow related to a loan to Jared), Trump’s lawyers lied to the feds, Trump sold nuclear secrets, and on and on and on. About the only report that sounds plausible is that Trump was in a rush to exit the White House and had staff throw stuff into boxes in a hurry:
When it finally dawned on Donald Trump in the twilight of his presidency that he wouldn’t be living at the White House for another four years, he had a problem: He had barely packed and had to move out quickly.
West Wing aides and government movers frantically tossed documents and other items into banker boxes that were shipped to a storage room at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida along with other, previously packed records set aside by Trump, sometimes erratically so, according to two sources with knowledge of Trump’s move and records issues.
This is a replay of the Russia Collusion hysteria, where media competed with one another for “scoops” to generate clicks and social media sociopaths competed for Twitter followers. And nothing generated clicks better than predicting based on scoops that Trump was done:”
——
“The question now is what was the rush to get a search warrant were even the mainstream media is reporting there were numerous interactions between DOJ and team Trump, and the documents in question had been at Mar-a-Lago for a year and a half, including at least several weeks after a visit by DOJ officials.”
“As if the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home wasn’t controversial enough, the Department of Justice might have known that there were no classified documents at the home of the former president since last June. One of Trump’s attorneys verified that no classified documents remained on-site, but someone at the Justice Department appears to have disregarded it as federal agents swarmed the residence last Monday (via NYT):
At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government, four people with knowledge of the document said.
The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.
The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material. And it could help explain why a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction was cited by the department as one basis for seeking the warrant used to carry out the daylong search of the former president’s home on Monday, an extraordinary step that generated political shock waves.”
🚨NEW, thread: from our Justice Dept producer Bill Mears:
A lawyer for Donald Trump had certified two months ago that no classified material remained at former president Donald Trump’s Florida, two sources with knowledge of the investigation tell Fox News.
The June letter signed by the unnamed Trump lawyer would be at odds with the unsealed property list contained in the search warrant. One of the possible violations of federal law cited as justification for the search warrant was an obstruction statute.
“Later this week, the unsealed search warrant pointed to allegations of obstruction of justice and violations of the Espionage Act, which, to quote the late Justice Antonin Scalia, is pure applesauce. The best part was the deluge of leaks once Attorney General Merrick Garland held a presser to defend this political witch hunt and called the employees and agents at the FBI faithful public servants and patriots. The best nugget here was the allegation that the FBI thought nuclear secrets were tucked away at the residence.
No level of spin can produce a credible reason behind this ransacking. Especially since the basis for this raid appears to be grounded on suspicions by government officials that not all the materials requested from Mar-a-Lago were returned last January. It does seem that a cocktail napkin led to this federally approved plundering. Yes, a cocktail napkin was an item on the National Archives list, which points to what Mike Davis, a former law clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, noted about how the government over-classifies everything.
It’s also clear that no one read the critical memo issued on January 19, 2021, wherein all documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation were declassified by Trump in the waning days of his presidency.
Damning political documents that make the Obama administration look bad are declassified—and then, the feds knock down the door at Mar-a-Lago. And now, we have memos showing that certain documents were either declassified or that none were present at Trump’s home. It looks like this circus just added another tent. ”
“Author and historian Victor Davis Hanson said Friday on FOX News about the FBI’s “surprise search” of the former president’s Florida home:
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They’re afraid in the short term. But in the long term, they believe they’re morally superior to America, and therefore any means necessary are justifiable for their morally superior ends.
But right now, we don’t have the rule of law in Washington. Whether you’re targeted or exempt depends on your ideology. So in the past, when there was a dispute over the archives, the presidential papers, Barack Obama just said, “I’m not going to turn them over” to the Freedom of Information [Act]. He spent over $30 million dollars resisting efforts to do that.
George Bush had an executive order that said, you know what, I’m not going to do this. And that was adjudicated. But now we go after a president and go to his house with 30 agents. In the past, when a high official was called for a Congressional subpoena, [Obama A.G.] Eric Holder just said [he’s] not going and [he’s] not turning over any of the [documents regarding the scandal called] “Fast and Furious.”
The idea that you would put him in shackles or you’d confront him with his family and grab his phone is just ridiculous. But this is what we’re doing, on an ideological basis. And when you start to do that, you don’t have a democracy anymore and I don’t think we do.
The second thing is this January 6th committee… is sort of like a French Robespierre “Committee on Public Safety.” To be on that committee, you have to have one criteria — you had to vote to impeach Donald Trump. If you’re a Republican, there was one other qualification, you had to be politically inert, with no future. And it was deductive. It started with the premise that we’re going to destroy Donald Trump, and then we’re going to bring in witnesses and we’re going to allow narratives for that end.
There’s going to be no cross-examination. There’s going to be no disinterested counsel. We know that when Dick Cheney himself made a commercial, and he bragged about his daughter, that she was the one power that could stop Donald Trump. But that’s not what her job is on that committee. It’s to be disinterested. It’s to be inductive. It’s to find out what happened on January 6th, not start with a boast that you’re going to destroy Donald Trump, and make the witnesses and the testimony fit that.
And finally, I never thought I would say this. The FBI is beyond redemption.
All of its bureaus and institutions have to be farmed out and broken up. If you have a warrant, an FBI warrant, there’s no guarantee that that has not been altered If you subpoena, and you want FBI records on phones with Mueller, they will be wiped clean.
If you want disinterested legal counsel, look at Lisa Page and Peter Strzok. If you’re the FBI and you want to find out why Hillary Clinton has hired a foreign national to find dirt on a political opponent, then you will hire that same foreign national.
And you look at the last four directors, we just saw Christopher Wray, and he just stonewalled every question and then he flew on an FBI plane, our plane, a luxury jet because he had to go to his own vacation spot.
He took over, remember, from Andrew McCabe. What did he do? He lied four times to federal investigators and his wife was running for an office with Clinton-related PAC money while he was investigating Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.
He took over from James Comey, who leaked confidential memos written on FBI devices to the media. And then when he was called before Congress on two hundred and forty-five occasions, he said he didn’t know or didn’t remember. Anybody listening to this tries that with the IRS and they’re going to go to jail.
And he took over from Robert Mueller, whose entire special counsel case was based on two premises, the information that was false in the Steele dossier and the shenanigans of the Clinton-hired [Fusion] GPS disinformation firm. And when he was asked specifically, he said under oath he knew nothing about either entity.
And so this is very ironic, because all of this is destroying this country and it comes from the people who warned us “democracy dies and darkness,” and they have descended upon the greatest cloud of autocracy and liberality in the history of this republic.”
“But what is life like for the Afghan people? Reasonable arguments can be made about what the United States owes Afghanistan following two decades of occupation. But one year after the military withdrawal, it’s clear that existence under Taliban rule has deteriorated across a range of measures — from the economy and security situation to human rights and governance.
To the surprise of few, the Taliban has been unable to stabilize Afghanistan’s economy and the nature of the Taliban’s draconian rule has scared off both foreign aid and potential investors. Taliban leaders remain under sanctions and, while they have experience commanding an insurgency, know little about financial markets or the trappings of managing a modern economy. Afghanistan’s nearly 40 million people are at risk of falling below the poverty line.
Related to the economic collapse, half of Afghanistan’s population is facing critical food shortages and acute hunger. Over the winter, there were credible reports about Afghan families selling their children in order to get money to survive.
Meanwhile, the one area where the Taliban actually has experience and skill — fighting and armed conflict — has not been enough to keep an aggressive insurgency at bay. Islamic State Khorasan (ISK), the Islamic State’s Afghan branch, has wreaked havoc throughout Afghanistan, waging a guerrilla campaign of bombings, assassinations and suicide attacks that the Taliban has been unable to combat. ISK has also waged a relentless campaign of bombings targeting Afghanistan’s Shia Hazara minority.
Although Afghanistan has not immediately devolved into a failed state from which transnational terrorist groups can launch attacks with impunity, senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials are growing concerned that jihadist groups like al Qaeda and ISK may develop those capabilities over the coming months. Many assessments, including that of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, place the timeframe at between 12 and 36 months for jihadist groups to rebuild their external attack capabilities. In late June, CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla claimed the U.S. was in possession of intelligence confirming that terrorist groups are already building training camps inside Afghanistan.
The fact that Zawahri was comfortable traveling to Afghanistan’s capital Kabul merely shows how close al Qaeda and the Taliban remain. Despite the vague statements that accompany the Doha agreement that the Taliban would break with al Qaeda, that has not happened, and indeed many argue that the two groups are just as close as ever.
Beyond a deterioration of economic and physical security, there has been an erosion of human rights under the Taliban regime, especially for women and girls. The United Nations Mission in Afghanistan released a report detailing extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and myriad other violations of fundamental freedoms by the Taliban. Girls have been banned from attending secondary school, while women have seen their right to access the workplace and participate in public life significantly diminished.
As the Taliban solidified control over large swaths of Afghanistan, beginning in July 2021, there was a steady uptick in forced marriage and sex slavery. Afghans that identify as LGBTQ have been forced to flee the country. Those who stay behind have been electrocuted, tortured and, in some cases, murdered. In an attempt to suppress dissent or even reporting on these issues, the Taliban has also cracked down severely on independent media. Lynne O’Donnell, an Australian journalist who writes for Foreign Policy and other outlets, was “detained, abused, and threatened” by the Taliban’s internal security apparatus.”
“Nothing symbolizes the decline of the American republic better than the weaponization of justice that we saw last week when the FBI raided the home of former President Trump.
And nothing better represents the divide that now exists between Democrats and Republicans than the fact that some people still have faith in the FBI.
Aren’t they paying attention? Heck, that’s like a citizen of the old Soviet Union saying they had faith in the KGB – yeah, to crush dissent and lock up opponents of the regime in a Siberian gulag.
The evidence is overwhelming. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now the Federal Bureau of Intimidation. Or more appropriately, the Federal Intimidation Bureau, whose acronym would spell out FIB, as in the Big Lie. Face it, nothing the FBI has said for the last six years since they joined with the Democratic Party to invent the Russia collusion hoax can be taken seriously.
Is there any need to go through the whole laundry list of lies and fabrications that the FBI, with the aid and comfort of the Justice Department, has foisted on the American public?
You can start with the extraordinary 2016 press conference when FBI Director James Comey detailed crimes committed by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton related to her improper use of a private email account to store classified material. Moments after saying she had broken the law, Comey announced with a straight face that “no reasonable prosecutor” would ever bring a case against her. Yeah, because she was a Democrat!
A couple months later, Comey set up President Trump’s National Security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, by sending agents to interview him about his supposed contacts with Russians.
“What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” wrote Bill Priestap in a memo before the interview. Priestap was counterintelligence director at the FBI, and it became evident later that the agency’s goal was indeed to get him fired – and more importantly to get Trump impeached, fired, humiliated, you name it.
Comey himself admitted that the FBI targeted Flynn and chose not to approach him through the White House legal counsel, but informally with a direct phone call to arrange an interview. As Comey later told a reporter, it was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more … organized administration.”
What about the FBI’s abuse of Carter Page and George Papadopoulos? The agency made up evidence in support of subpoenas, FISA warrants, whatever it took to get the desired result. What about the FBI and Department of Justice targeting parents at school boards as “domestic terrorists” because they demanded that their elected representatives actually represent them? What about the unilateral rescission of executive privilege and attorney-client privilege wherever it would have protected President Trump and his advisers?
The purpose of all of this activity, along with the raid at Mar-a-Lago, was to intimidate not just Trump, but also his supporters. Anyone other than Donald Trump would have given up long ago. Who could possibly withstand the power of the state marshaled against you for six long years – through multiple FBI investigations, through two impeachments, through relentless persecution of your children and your friends and family?
Finally, what about the double standard that allows Democrats and their government allies to go unpunished for a multitude of sins? Notwithstanding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s feigned indignation on behalf of the bureau, what about the FBI agents who lied repeatedly during the Trump-Russia investigation, sometimes under oath. Even more stunning has been the FBI’s monumental failure to investigate presidential son Hunter Biden, even though it received his laptop with extensive incriminating evidence of criminal activity in 2019.
Even when the laptop was made public during the 2020 presidential election, the FBI stood silent and thus gave tacit approval to the cynical Democratic Party talking point that the laptop was somehow a GOP dirty trick. It would be interesting to know if the FBI had anything to do with the letter signed by 51 national security experts, falsely claiming that the laptop was “Russian disinformation”! Maybe, like Comey before him, FBI Director Chris Wray thought he could “get away with it.”
That is certainly the only explanation for the raid on the president’s personal residence. It was not appropriate. It was not reasonable. It had no precedent. The FBI claims that the pre-dawn raid by more than 30 armed agents was for the purpose of collecting presidential papers that the National Archive wanted. The Washington Post says that Trump reportedly had documents with nuclear secrets on them, and the legacy media went ballistic with the story. But wait a minute, isn’t that the same Washington Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for collaborating with the FBI to invent the Russia collusion hoax?
Don’t believe a word from either the Washington Post or the FBI. Trump had been cooperating with the National Archive and had already turned over 15 boxes of documents, all of which he could have made a claim to legally possess. If they wanted papers turned over, they could have gone through Trump’s lawyers. No, they wanted the spectacle. They wanted the sizzle. They wanted the headlines.
This wasn’t about the rule of law; it was about the rule of the schoolyard. Bullies get what they want through force and intimidation, and there is no reason for any of us to believe that the raid had any purpose other than to intimidate Donald Trump into backing down from his plans to run for president in 2024.”
With the FBI’s raid of Trump’s private residence, I wanted to repost a video that I did back in 2016 showing James Comey of the FBI letting Hillary off the hook for mishandling classified info. Insane hypocrisy!
“In the words of John McClane, “welcome to the party, pal.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is learning what it means to become a public figure. Whether they like it or not, the cumulative effect of their operations against Donald Trump is that they’re a de facto political arm of the Democratic Party. Did they expect American voters not to be taken aback by their ransacking of a home of a former president? I know the Department of Justice is in an era of unprecedented injudicious rule from the top brass, but this thought process is just as dense as the millions of condescending liberals who inhabit the Acela Corridor.
It would be different if the Justice Department were not caught fabricating evidence to justify FISA spy warrants of Trump campaign officials, suppressing exculpatory evidence during that process, and conducting a bonafide surveillance operation against the larger Trump campaign in 2016. The revelation that then-Director James Comey and others knew that the Steele Dossier, a political propaganda job amassed by a former MI6 spy funded by the Clinton campaign, and still proceeded to run with the Russian collusion hoax was the start of the DOJ’s rapid makeover into a political police force for Democrats.
The raid on Mar-a-Lago has now entrenched that narrative in the minds of tens of millions of voters. The Justice Department has declared war on the American public, and soon the IRS—with its 87,000 additional agents, will be coming after them too. So, in a nation with freedom of speech and expression, I guess you shouldn’t be shocked that threats of violence against federal agents have increased (via NBC News):
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have issued an unclassified joint intelligence bulletin warning of a spike in threats to federal law enforcement officials since the search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-lago club in Florida, two senior law enforcement officials told NBC News.
“The FBI and DHS have observed an increase in threats to federal law enforcement and to a lesser extent other law enforcement and government officials following the FBI’s recent execution of a search warrant in Palm Beach, Florida,” the bulletin, dated Friday, reads, according to one official.
The bulletin, which advises that such threats are coming from online and other platforms, was sent out of an abundance of caution, according to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
It calls on officials to be aware of issues surrounding domestic violent extremists, past and present incidents as well as past behaviors, and to be vigilant, the officials said.
That’s the price you pay for becoming a public figure. Not everyone is going to like you, and those odds increase when you go after a former president based on farcical narratives about Russian infiltration, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice. That political fiction saga reached new levels of risibility when it was leaked that federal agents thought atomic secrets were stored at the home of President Trump.
The FBI thought nuclear secrets were at Mar-a-Lago but couldn’t declare a mass assassination attempt, like what we saw with the GOP congressional baseball team in 2017, was an act of domestic terrorism. Also, how many mass shooters have slipped through their net while trying to manufacture evidence to ensnare Trump in a legal pickle? It’s been the better part of a decade—you’re not going to be able to sell anything credible to roughly half the country. All they see, and rightfully so, is a witch hunt.”
Wandering Views 
You didn’t really believe the Democrats or Biden on their lies about no one making under 400K being subjected to this, did you?
“CBO Confirms at Least $20 Billion From New Audits Will Come From Those Making Less than $400K
Key point: “At LEAST.” So more than likely, it will be more than $20 billion.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/08/cbo-confirms-at-least-20-billion-from-new-audits-will-come-from-those-making-less-than-400k/
“Key Point: At least $20 billion of the revenue Democrats hope to collect from taxpayers with a supercharged IRS would come from lower- and middle-income earners and small businesses, according to a new analysis by the nonpartisan congressional scorekeeper. That’s in addition to existing audits of these income levels.”
—–
“From CBO:
“CBO has not completed a point estimate of this amendment but the preliminary assessment indicates that amendment 5404 would reduce the ‘non-scorable’ revenues resulting from the provisions of section 10301 by at least $20 billion over the FY2022-FY2031 period.”
The GOP committee members provided these points:
Lower- and middle-income earning Americans are the primary target in Democrats’ bill:
A previous Congressional Budget Office analysis makes clear that under this plan, audit rates will “rise for all taxpayers” and the policy “would return audit rates to the levels of about 10 years ago.”
The Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s official tax scorekeeper, says that from 78 percent to 90 percent of the money raised from under-reported income would likely come from those making less than $200,000 a year. Nearly half of the audits would hit Americans making $75,000 per year or less and only 4 percent to 9 percent would come from those making more than $500,000.
Democrats voted against guardrails preventing audits for middle-income earners, instead using non-binding legislative language that would do nothing to protect taxpayers from agency abuse.”
LikeLiked by 3 people
You can always count on the media to hold the details back until the Democrats do their dirty deeds.
———
Remember folks, their number 1 job is to carry water for Democrats.
LikeLiked by 3 people
It was urgent and necessary.
Sure…..
LikeLiked by 1 person
Lather, rinse, repeat.
The same tactics, from the same bad actors, and the media once again carries water and spreads Dem lies and propaganda.
It’s all so predictable.
“Mar-a-Lago Raid: Swimming in a Sea of Anti-Trump Media ‘Bombshell’ Hype, Again
This is a replay of the Russia Collusion hysteria, where media competed with one another for “scoops” to generate clicks and social media sociopaths competed for Twitter followers.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/08/mar-a-lago-raid-swimming-in-a-sea-of-anti-trump-media-bombshell-hype-again/
“It’s deja vu all over again.
The mainstream media and well-credentialed social media lunatics particularly on Twitter, have so many bombshells. Too many to count. Trump stole the names of undercover US spies operating abroad, he has nuclear secrets he’s trying to peddle to the Saudis (somehow related to a loan to Jared), Trump’s lawyers lied to the feds, Trump sold nuclear secrets, and on and on and on. About the only report that sounds plausible is that Trump was in a rush to exit the White House and had staff throw stuff into boxes in a hurry:
When it finally dawned on Donald Trump in the twilight of his presidency that he wouldn’t be living at the White House for another four years, he had a problem: He had barely packed and had to move out quickly.
West Wing aides and government movers frantically tossed documents and other items into banker boxes that were shipped to a storage room at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida along with other, previously packed records set aside by Trump, sometimes erratically so, according to two sources with knowledge of Trump’s move and records issues.
This is a replay of the Russia Collusion hysteria, where media competed with one another for “scoops” to generate clicks and social media sociopaths competed for Twitter followers. And nothing generated clicks better than predicting based on scoops that Trump was done:”
——
“The question now is what was the rush to get a search warrant were even the mainstream media is reporting there were numerous interactions between DOJ and team Trump, and the documents in question had been at Mar-a-Lago for a year and a half, including at least several weeks after a visit by DOJ officials.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Of course they did.
“Did the Justice Department Already Know That No Classified Docs Were at Mar-a-Lago?”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/08/13/the-justice-department-knew-that-no-classified-docs-were-at-mar-a-lago-last-june-n2611704
“As if the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home wasn’t controversial enough, the Department of Justice might have known that there were no classified documents at the home of the former president since last June. One of Trump’s attorneys verified that no classified documents remained on-site, but someone at the Justice Department appears to have disregarded it as federal agents swarmed the residence last Monday (via NYT):
At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government, four people with knowledge of the document said.
The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.
The existence of the signed declaration, which has not previously been reported, is a possible indication that Mr. Trump or his team were not fully forthcoming with federal investigators about the material. And it could help explain why a potential violation of a criminal statute related to obstruction was cited by the department as one basis for seeking the warrant used to carry out the daylong search of the former president’s home on Monday, an extraordinary step that generated political shock waves.”
“Later this week, the unsealed search warrant pointed to allegations of obstruction of justice and violations of the Espionage Act, which, to quote the late Justice Antonin Scalia, is pure applesauce. The best part was the deluge of leaks once Attorney General Merrick Garland held a presser to defend this political witch hunt and called the employees and agents at the FBI faithful public servants and patriots. The best nugget here was the allegation that the FBI thought nuclear secrets were tucked away at the residence.
No level of spin can produce a credible reason behind this ransacking. Especially since the basis for this raid appears to be grounded on suspicions by government officials that not all the materials requested from Mar-a-Lago were returned last January. It does seem that a cocktail napkin led to this federally approved plundering. Yes, a cocktail napkin was an item on the National Archives list, which points to what Mike Davis, a former law clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, noted about how the government over-classifies everything.
It’s also clear that no one read the critical memo issued on January 19, 2021, wherein all documents related to the Crossfire Hurricane investigation were declassified by Trump in the waning days of his presidency.
Damning political documents that make the Obama administration look bad are declassified—and then, the feds knock down the door at Mar-a-Lago. And now, we have memos showing that certain documents were either declassified or that none were present at Trump’s home. It looks like this circus just added another tent. ”
———-
And they sent in the clowns…..
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ya think?
“Victor Davis Hanson: Democrats And The Media Are Destroying The Rule of Law In America”
Dems and the media say it’s OK though, as long as the right people are targeted…..
VDH nails it again.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/08/14/victor_davis_hanson_democrats_and_the_media_are_destroying_the_rule_of_law_in_america.html
“Author and historian Victor Davis Hanson said Friday on FOX News about the FBI’s “surprise search” of the former president’s Florida home:
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They’re afraid in the short term. But in the long term, they believe they’re morally superior to America, and therefore any means necessary are justifiable for their morally superior ends.
But right now, we don’t have the rule of law in Washington. Whether you’re targeted or exempt depends on your ideology. So in the past, when there was a dispute over the archives, the presidential papers, Barack Obama just said, “I’m not going to turn them over” to the Freedom of Information [Act]. He spent over $30 million dollars resisting efforts to do that.
George Bush had an executive order that said, you know what, I’m not going to do this. And that was adjudicated. But now we go after a president and go to his house with 30 agents. In the past, when a high official was called for a Congressional subpoena, [Obama A.G.] Eric Holder just said [he’s] not going and [he’s] not turning over any of the [documents regarding the scandal called] “Fast and Furious.”
The idea that you would put him in shackles or you’d confront him with his family and grab his phone is just ridiculous. But this is what we’re doing, on an ideological basis. And when you start to do that, you don’t have a democracy anymore and I don’t think we do.
The second thing is this January 6th committee… is sort of like a French Robespierre “Committee on Public Safety.” To be on that committee, you have to have one criteria — you had to vote to impeach Donald Trump. If you’re a Republican, there was one other qualification, you had to be politically inert, with no future. And it was deductive. It started with the premise that we’re going to destroy Donald Trump, and then we’re going to bring in witnesses and we’re going to allow narratives for that end.
There’s going to be no cross-examination. There’s going to be no disinterested counsel. We know that when Dick Cheney himself made a commercial, and he bragged about his daughter, that she was the one power that could stop Donald Trump. But that’s not what her job is on that committee. It’s to be disinterested. It’s to be inductive. It’s to find out what happened on January 6th, not start with a boast that you’re going to destroy Donald Trump, and make the witnesses and the testimony fit that.
And finally, I never thought I would say this. The FBI is beyond redemption.
All of its bureaus and institutions have to be farmed out and broken up. If you have a warrant, an FBI warrant, there’s no guarantee that that has not been altered If you subpoena, and you want FBI records on phones with Mueller, they will be wiped clean.
If you want disinterested legal counsel, look at Lisa Page and Peter Strzok. If you’re the FBI and you want to find out why Hillary Clinton has hired a foreign national to find dirt on a political opponent, then you will hire that same foreign national.
And you look at the last four directors, we just saw Christopher Wray, and he just stonewalled every question and then he flew on an FBI plane, our plane, a luxury jet because he had to go to his own vacation spot.
He took over, remember, from Andrew McCabe. What did he do? He lied four times to federal investigators and his wife was running for an office with Clinton-related PAC money while he was investigating Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.
He took over from James Comey, who leaked confidential memos written on FBI devices to the media. And then when he was called before Congress on two hundred and forty-five occasions, he said he didn’t know or didn’t remember. Anybody listening to this tries that with the IRS and they’re going to go to jail.
And he took over from Robert Mueller, whose entire special counsel case was based on two premises, the information that was false in the Steele dossier and the shenanigans of the Clinton-hired [Fusion] GPS disinformation firm. And when he was asked specifically, he said under oath he knew nothing about either entity.
And so this is very ironic, because all of this is destroying this country and it comes from the people who warned us “democracy dies and darkness,” and they have descended upon the greatest cloud of autocracy and liberality in the history of this republic.”
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Remember to thank Joe Biden.
“One Year Later, Life Under Taliban Rule is Brutal
The religious zealots are struggling to govern the country and rights are being rolled back.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/08/15/one-year-later-life-under-taliban-rule-is-brutal-00051473
“But what is life like for the Afghan people? Reasonable arguments can be made about what the United States owes Afghanistan following two decades of occupation. But one year after the military withdrawal, it’s clear that existence under Taliban rule has deteriorated across a range of measures — from the economy and security situation to human rights and governance.
To the surprise of few, the Taliban has been unable to stabilize Afghanistan’s economy and the nature of the Taliban’s draconian rule has scared off both foreign aid and potential investors. Taliban leaders remain under sanctions and, while they have experience commanding an insurgency, know little about financial markets or the trappings of managing a modern economy. Afghanistan’s nearly 40 million people are at risk of falling below the poverty line.
Related to the economic collapse, half of Afghanistan’s population is facing critical food shortages and acute hunger. Over the winter, there were credible reports about Afghan families selling their children in order to get money to survive.
Meanwhile, the one area where the Taliban actually has experience and skill — fighting and armed conflict — has not been enough to keep an aggressive insurgency at bay. Islamic State Khorasan (ISK), the Islamic State’s Afghan branch, has wreaked havoc throughout Afghanistan, waging a guerrilla campaign of bombings, assassinations and suicide attacks that the Taliban has been unable to combat. ISK has also waged a relentless campaign of bombings targeting Afghanistan’s Shia Hazara minority.
Although Afghanistan has not immediately devolved into a failed state from which transnational terrorist groups can launch attacks with impunity, senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials are growing concerned that jihadist groups like al Qaeda and ISK may develop those capabilities over the coming months. Many assessments, including that of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, place the timeframe at between 12 and 36 months for jihadist groups to rebuild their external attack capabilities. In late June, CENTCOM Commander Gen. Michael Kurilla claimed the U.S. was in possession of intelligence confirming that terrorist groups are already building training camps inside Afghanistan.
The fact that Zawahri was comfortable traveling to Afghanistan’s capital Kabul merely shows how close al Qaeda and the Taliban remain. Despite the vague statements that accompany the Doha agreement that the Taliban would break with al Qaeda, that has not happened, and indeed many argue that the two groups are just as close as ever.
Beyond a deterioration of economic and physical security, there has been an erosion of human rights under the Taliban regime, especially for women and girls. The United Nations Mission in Afghanistan released a report detailing extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and myriad other violations of fundamental freedoms by the Taliban. Girls have been banned from attending secondary school, while women have seen their right to access the workplace and participate in public life significantly diminished.
As the Taliban solidified control over large swaths of Afghanistan, beginning in July 2021, there was a steady uptick in forced marriage and sex slavery. Afghans that identify as LGBTQ have been forced to flee the country. Those who stay behind have been electrocuted, tortured and, in some cases, murdered. In an attempt to suppress dissent or even reporting on these issues, the Taliban has also cracked down severely on independent media. Lynne O’Donnell, an Australian journalist who writes for Foreign Policy and other outlets, was “detained, abused, and threatened” by the Taliban’s internal security apparatus.”
——–
Joe built this.
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Indeed….
But again, it’s OK with Dems, as long as the right people are targeted.
“The FBI Is Now the Federal Bureau of Intimidation”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/08/15/the_fbi_is_now_the_federal_bureau_of_intimidation_148044.html
“Nothing symbolizes the decline of the American republic better than the weaponization of justice that we saw last week when the FBI raided the home of former President Trump.
And nothing better represents the divide that now exists between Democrats and Republicans than the fact that some people still have faith in the FBI.
Aren’t they paying attention? Heck, that’s like a citizen of the old Soviet Union saying they had faith in the KGB – yeah, to crush dissent and lock up opponents of the regime in a Siberian gulag.
The evidence is overwhelming. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now the Federal Bureau of Intimidation. Or more appropriately, the Federal Intimidation Bureau, whose acronym would spell out FIB, as in the Big Lie. Face it, nothing the FBI has said for the last six years since they joined with the Democratic Party to invent the Russia collusion hoax can be taken seriously.
Is there any need to go through the whole laundry list of lies and fabrications that the FBI, with the aid and comfort of the Justice Department, has foisted on the American public?
You can start with the extraordinary 2016 press conference when FBI Director James Comey detailed crimes committed by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton related to her improper use of a private email account to store classified material. Moments after saying she had broken the law, Comey announced with a straight face that “no reasonable prosecutor” would ever bring a case against her. Yeah, because she was a Democrat!
A couple months later, Comey set up President Trump’s National Security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, by sending agents to interview him about his supposed contacts with Russians.
“What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” wrote Bill Priestap in a memo before the interview. Priestap was counterintelligence director at the FBI, and it became evident later that the agency’s goal was indeed to get him fired – and more importantly to get Trump impeached, fired, humiliated, you name it.
Comey himself admitted that the FBI targeted Flynn and chose not to approach him through the White House legal counsel, but informally with a direct phone call to arrange an interview. As Comey later told a reporter, it was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more … organized administration.”
What about the FBI’s abuse of Carter Page and George Papadopoulos? The agency made up evidence in support of subpoenas, FISA warrants, whatever it took to get the desired result. What about the FBI and Department of Justice targeting parents at school boards as “domestic terrorists” because they demanded that their elected representatives actually represent them? What about the unilateral rescission of executive privilege and attorney-client privilege wherever it would have protected President Trump and his advisers?
The purpose of all of this activity, along with the raid at Mar-a-Lago, was to intimidate not just Trump, but also his supporters. Anyone other than Donald Trump would have given up long ago. Who could possibly withstand the power of the state marshaled against you for six long years – through multiple FBI investigations, through two impeachments, through relentless persecution of your children and your friends and family?
Finally, what about the double standard that allows Democrats and their government allies to go unpunished for a multitude of sins? Notwithstanding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s feigned indignation on behalf of the bureau, what about the FBI agents who lied repeatedly during the Trump-Russia investigation, sometimes under oath. Even more stunning has been the FBI’s monumental failure to investigate presidential son Hunter Biden, even though it received his laptop with extensive incriminating evidence of criminal activity in 2019.
Even when the laptop was made public during the 2020 presidential election, the FBI stood silent and thus gave tacit approval to the cynical Democratic Party talking point that the laptop was somehow a GOP dirty trick. It would be interesting to know if the FBI had anything to do with the letter signed by 51 national security experts, falsely claiming that the laptop was “Russian disinformation”! Maybe, like Comey before him, FBI Director Chris Wray thought he could “get away with it.”
That is certainly the only explanation for the raid on the president’s personal residence. It was not appropriate. It was not reasonable. It had no precedent. The FBI claims that the pre-dawn raid by more than 30 armed agents was for the purpose of collecting presidential papers that the National Archive wanted. The Washington Post says that Trump reportedly had documents with nuclear secrets on them, and the legacy media went ballistic with the story. But wait a minute, isn’t that the same Washington Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for collaborating with the FBI to invent the Russia collusion hoax?
Don’t believe a word from either the Washington Post or the FBI. Trump had been cooperating with the National Archive and had already turned over 15 boxes of documents, all of which he could have made a claim to legally possess. If they wanted papers turned over, they could have gone through Trump’s lawyers. No, they wanted the spectacle. They wanted the sizzle. They wanted the headlines.
This wasn’t about the rule of law; it was about the rule of the schoolyard. Bullies get what they want through force and intimidation, and there is no reason for any of us to believe that the raid had any purpose other than to intimidate Donald Trump into backing down from his plans to run for president in 2024.”
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What difference does it make?
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“FBI Should Have Expected This Could Be a Consequence of Their Raid on Mar-a-Lago”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/08/15/after-ransacking-trumps-home-fbi-says-theres-been-a-spike-in-threats-against-f-n2611715
“In the words of John McClane, “welcome to the party, pal.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is learning what it means to become a public figure. Whether they like it or not, the cumulative effect of their operations against Donald Trump is that they’re a de facto political arm of the Democratic Party. Did they expect American voters not to be taken aback by their ransacking of a home of a former president? I know the Department of Justice is in an era of unprecedented injudicious rule from the top brass, but this thought process is just as dense as the millions of condescending liberals who inhabit the Acela Corridor.
It would be different if the Justice Department were not caught fabricating evidence to justify FISA spy warrants of Trump campaign officials, suppressing exculpatory evidence during that process, and conducting a bonafide surveillance operation against the larger Trump campaign in 2016. The revelation that then-Director James Comey and others knew that the Steele Dossier, a political propaganda job amassed by a former MI6 spy funded by the Clinton campaign, and still proceeded to run with the Russian collusion hoax was the start of the DOJ’s rapid makeover into a political police force for Democrats.
The raid on Mar-a-Lago has now entrenched that narrative in the minds of tens of millions of voters. The Justice Department has declared war on the American public, and soon the IRS—with its 87,000 additional agents, will be coming after them too. So, in a nation with freedom of speech and expression, I guess you shouldn’t be shocked that threats of violence against federal agents have increased (via NBC News):
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have issued an unclassified joint intelligence bulletin warning of a spike in threats to federal law enforcement officials since the search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-lago club in Florida, two senior law enforcement officials told NBC News.
“The FBI and DHS have observed an increase in threats to federal law enforcement and to a lesser extent other law enforcement and government officials following the FBI’s recent execution of a search warrant in Palm Beach, Florida,” the bulletin, dated Friday, reads, according to one official.
The bulletin, which advises that such threats are coming from online and other platforms, was sent out of an abundance of caution, according to the officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.
It calls on officials to be aware of issues surrounding domestic violent extremists, past and present incidents as well as past behaviors, and to be vigilant, the officials said.
That’s the price you pay for becoming a public figure. Not everyone is going to like you, and those odds increase when you go after a former president based on farcical narratives about Russian infiltration, tax evasion, and obstruction of justice. That political fiction saga reached new levels of risibility when it was leaked that federal agents thought atomic secrets were stored at the home of President Trump.
The FBI thought nuclear secrets were at Mar-a-Lago but couldn’t declare a mass assassination attempt, like what we saw with the GOP congressional baseball team in 2017, was an act of domestic terrorism. Also, how many mass shooters have slipped through their net while trying to manufacture evidence to ensnare Trump in a legal pickle? It’s been the better part of a decade—you’re not going to be able to sell anything credible to roughly half the country. All they see, and rightfully so, is a witch hunt.”
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