Trump is punking the former tough talking Obama officials.
President Donald Trump tweeted Monday morning that those former intelligence officials who had emerged publicly to defend former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan had done so to protect their former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director John Brennan interests.
Trump drew attention to the fact that holding high-level security clearance is often a prerequisite for the top jobs in Washington, DC, and that retaining that clearance after retirement — when it is no longer needed for public purposes — is a well-known perk of life at the top of the food chain in the Beltway “swamp.”
So Drain The Damn Swamp Now.
Trump began by responding to Brennan’s threat hat he might sue the president after Trump revoked his clearance last week. Brennan has described that decision as an attempt to stifle freedom of speech, and criticism of the president in particular.
But Trump said he would welcome a lawsuit as a chance to use discovery to uncover Brennan’s involvement in allegedly conducting surveillance on his campaign during the 2016 election, which led indirectly to the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller:
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
I hope John Brennan, the worst CIA Director in our country’s history, brings a lawsuit. It will then be very easy to get all of his records, texts, emails and documents to show not only the poor job he did, but how he was involved with the Mueller Rigged Witch Hunt. He won’t sue!
Trump then followed up by calling out the practice of using security clearance for economic gain:
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Everybody wants to keep their Security Clearance, it’s worth great prestige and big dollars, even board seats, and that is why certain people are coming forward to protect Brennan. It certainly isn’t because of the good job he did! He is a political “hack.”
Trump’s argument about corrupt relationships at the top levels of intelligence and Beltway companies is bolstered by a new book by Seamus Bruner of the Government Accountability Institute: Compromised: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption.
Make America First! 22 Illegal Aliens Arrested in Identity Fraud Scheme, Stealing Thousands in Taxpayer Money
The Department of Justice announced charges against 25 individuals on Friday who committed fraud using Puerto Rican identities in an effort to gain government benefits and in some cases even vote. 22 of the 25 charged were illegal aliens, many with records of drug dealing, violent crimes, and some previously deported.
Imposters regularly use birth certificates and social security cards stolen or copied from Puerto Ricans to pose as American citizens in order to receive Medicare, evade arrest, and take advantage of welfare benefits such as EBT cards and food stamps. In a sting operation known as, “Operation Double Trouble” the DOJ was able to nab 25 individuals who took advantage of poor oversight at Massachusetts’ Registry of Motor Vehicles and steal people’s identities.
“Across this city and across America, teachers, truck drivers, construction workers are going to work and paying taxes that are being stolen from the public treasury by fraudsters and criminals,” Sessions said at a press conference held earlier this week
“These government programs are intended to help the poor, the elderly, American citizens. Not those that are trespassing in the country,” Sessions added. “This kind of fraud is a theft from our seniors, a theft from our taxpayers, and a theft from the needy, theft from America.”
Illegal aliens often use Puerto Rican identities because the Hispanic surnames are less likely to cause suspicion amongst the government than non-Hispanic surnames. Lapse oversight at the RMV then allows these individuals to gain numerous identities.
“What happens in Puerto Rico is that you have an influx of Dominican nationals who either purchase or steal identities belonging to Puerto Ricans, who are obviously U.S. citizens, so I think there’s still work to be done to shore up that area of enforcement,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said describing why many take advantage of Puerto Rican documents.
Among the illegal aliens arrested include, “Frank Lara, also known as Roberto Villegas, was a heroin and cocaine dealer in Boston. He had seven convictions, five Massachusetts licenses with different identities and 11 aliases. Lara was deported after we tracked him down. Rafael Nicolas Lopez Carrasco was a major heroin dealer arrested in Lawrence with 30 pounds of heroin. He had two driver’s licenses, three aliases and had been previously deported.”
As well as, “Juan Gonzalez was arrested with four pounds of heroin stashed in a mayonnaise jar. He is smiling on his state-issued EBT card given to him under the assumed identity of Alex Hernandez,” according to WCVB 5.
Mr. “Fast and Furious” should be put in a Mexican prison for allowing guns to be received by the Drug Cartels.
Former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder defended the use of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to spy on the Trump campaign Monday, during an interview with comedian Stephen Colbert.
“No idea. I signed a lot,” Holder said on “The Late Show.” “A lot, a lot, a lot. That’s more than a little.”
Holder also said he’s glanced at the FISA warrant regarding former Trump adviser Carter Page, but has not read it in full.
How Can Anyone Believe What Eric Holder Says?
“I’ve looked at it. I’ve not read it fully, no,” he replied. Holder said President Donald Trump should not feel exonerated by the release of the FISA warrant and slammed California GOP Rep. Devin Nunes for his work on bringing the information to light.
“I’m serious, if you look at it, it goes totally contrary to that which he says it’s going to contain. Devin Nunes is proven to be totally wrong,” Holder said. “It is really one of these questions of ‘who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’ You just look at it and you can see that it is — as I said, paints just a totally different picture than what the House Republicans and this president has said.”
Holder claimed the warrant wasn’t strictly based on the Steele dossier, but a litany of facts and evidence he failed to mention during the interview.
“There are these things called facts, and then there’s this other stuff,” Holder concluded. “They still exist. The sun’s the center of the solar system, that’s still true. There are certain facts. And if you look at this FISA warrant, you will see that it is not simply based, as they’ve been trying to say — it’s all based on the Steele dossier. It is clear that it is not.”
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday that the U.S. has, like Russia, tried to influence many foreign elections.
Verdict: True
The U.S. attempted to influence over 80 foreign elections from 1946 to 2000, sometimes secretly.
Fact Check:
Paul mentioned the U.S.’s history of attempting to influence other elections in advance of President Donald Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin Monday in Helsinki, Finland. News outlets asked Trump whether he would hold Putin accountable for Russian meddling in the 2016 election by asking him to hand indicted Russians over to the U.S.
“I think really we mistake our response if we think it’s about accountability from the Russians,” Paul said on CNN’s “State Of The Union.” “They are another country. They are going to spy on us. They do spy on us. They are going to interfere in our elections. We also do the same.”
Loch K. Johnson, a professor at the University of Georgia who began his career investigating the CIA as a Senate committee staffer in the 1970s, told The New York Times that the U.S. has certainly tried to influence foreign elections.
“We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the CIA was created in 1947,” Johnson said. “We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call ‘King George’s cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”
Paul cited research from Dov H. Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Levin identified 81 instances in which the U.S. interfered in foreign elections from 1946 to 2000. He could confirm that Russia interfered in 36 elections over the same period.
“One well-known example is in the case of Italy in 1948, the United States was really worried that the Italian Communist Party, the PCI, would come to power in Italy, which was seen as very likely to lead to Italy becoming a communist dictatorship and eventually becoming a Soviet ally,” Levin told The Daily Caller News Foundation. A declassified National Security Council report recommended that the U.S. end economic aid to Italy if it did not combat Communist control.
More recently, the U.S. spent millions of dollars to influence the election in Yugoslavia in 2000 and unseat its socialist leader, Slobodan Milošević.
“We gave them tens of millions of dollars in campaign funding, we sent in a campaigning adviser who basically did the polling for them,” Levin said. “We also trained thousands of campaign personnel in various campaigning methods – how to get out the vote, and so forth.”
The U.S. paid for 2.5 million stickers with the slogan “He’s Finished” and 5,000 cans of spray paint. “One of the techniques of the opposition’s election campaigns in Serbia and Yugoslavia was spraying slogans on peoples’ houses,” Levin said. “So we also gave them 5,000 spray cans to spray campaign slogans throughout Serbia.”
Opposition supporters wave flags and leaflets reading “He is finished” aimed at Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic during a pre election rally by the Democratic Opposition of Serbia’s candidate for upcoming Yugoslav presidential elections Vojislav Kostunica in Nis, some 200km south of Belgrade September 19, 2000. More than 25,000 opposition supporters rallied in the center of Nis in support of the opposition presidential nominee. PEK/FMS via Reuters
“Naturally, the consideration of breaking laws or not when it came to these types of interventions was not a major concern for secret or covert intervention,” Levin said. But he cautioned that instances of U.S. election interference are not directly comparable to Russia’s recent actions. “I do not see any moral equivalence between what Russia has done in 2016 and what we have done in past interventions in elections,” he said.
Steven L. Hall, the former chief of Russian operations for the CIA, told TheNYT that while U.S. actions in recent decades have not been morally equivalent to those of Russia, Russia’s actions were not far outside the norm of expected behavior. “If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” Hall said.
Levin’s report excluded actions taken independently by private citizens or non-state actors (such as private campaign consultants), instances where the U.S. or Russia tried to delegitimize elections as a whole and policy decisions that could have unintentionally affected the election results in another country.
He does not list any U.S. cyber election intervention methods comparable to Russian cyber hacks in the 2016 election, in part because the report only examines elections before the year 2000. But he said that the U.S. did use pre-internet “analog” methods which were similar in design.
The CIA, for example, planted agents in Japanese socialist youth groups, student groups and labor groups in the 1950s and 1960s. Levin said that informants during the 1958 Japanese election gave “dirt” on people in the Socialist Party to the U.S., and then the U.S. gave that information to the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). One LDP leader told TheNYT in 1994 that he had a “deep relationship” with the CIA.
Levin categorized instances of spying on opposing campaigns, spreading damaging information and encouraging the breakup of rival political coalitions as “dirty tricks.” Russia favored influencing elections with these tactics, he said.
He expects that foreign election interference will become more common. “The use of force is becoming more and more expensive for countries while at the same time opportunities to intervene in this way are expanding,” he said.
Why Is It That Gay Men Like Don Lemon Gets Butt (pun intended) Go To The Ghetto And Take A Knee Don, Because You Do It For Your Many Boyfriends.
CNN anchor Don Lemon believes standing for the national anthem at NFL games and the pageantry surrounding it are examples of “fake patriotism.”
While discussing President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel the White House celebration for the Philadelphia Eagles on Tuesday evening, Lemon also accused Trump of not understanding what “real patriotism” is.
“This isn’t about some fake patriotism, about standing or some pageantry. Real patriotism is understanding what the Constitution means for all Americans and abiding by the Constitution, not doing some false presentation that you pretend to be a patriot while other people are around you going to the concession stands, getting beer, or fights in the stands or talking to each other with their baseball caps on,” Lemon said Tuesday evening on CNN. “That is not real patriotism. Real patriotism is understanding that all of us are created equal and we have the choice to stand, kneel or sit, or even attend a football game if we choose to.”
Lemon said Trump and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “have it all wrong” about patriotism, and he highlighted the White House press secretary’s remarks about America being a great nation because “we stand during the national anthem.”
“What makes this country great is that we have the choice to stand or not to stand during the national anthem. This is not a dictatorship,” Lemon continued. “We don’t have to do anything in this country.”
During a recent appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell expressed a similar claim, saying the NFL’s “hypocrisy is so profound” on the issue.
“Take a look at any NFL stadium, and people are getting hot dogs, people are getting beers. They’re not standing and saluting the anthem, for a large part. They’re not. They’re distracted. They’re fans at an event,” Mitchell said last month. “And the fact that the players do not have this freedom of speech and that no one is even thinking about Colin Kaepernick … who’s been basically blackballed and can’t be hired — it’s just outrageous.”
Lemon added that Trump knows that asking athletes to stand for the national anthem “animates his base,” and “he is going to continue on with it.”
“He cannot be a unifier. He cannot be the unifier in chief. I don’t know what it is about him that he can’t do it,” Lemon said. “It seems that this is an issue where he could actually bring the country together, bring the team and talk to team owners and players, and try to get them to come to some sort of consensus about this.”
A long-time businessman in Stockton, California, Lyle Burgess, pleaded no contest to a charge of statutory rape of a 5-year-old. His punishment: 90 days of house arrest and five years of information probation, KTXL-TV reported.
About The Sentence
To make matters even worse, the 79-year-old does not have to register as a sex offender.
“A 5-6-year-old little girl was molested. Normally the sentence is state prison and then when you’re released, you have to register as a sex offender,” family attorney Ken Meleyco said. “He’s obviously very wealthy and it’s just an example of how the wealthy people, time and time again, escape the penalty for what they did.”
“It is just appalling that somebody commits an offense like this and you have protections like 290 (failure to register as a sex offender) and Jessica’s Law and someone has the propensity to harm children and now nobody is warned,” Davenport told The Stockton Record.
According to Burgess’ attorney, Gregory Davenport, the family is doing this with an agenda in mind.
“I believe the allegations are motivated by greed,” Davenport told The Stockton Record. “They are using this instance to try to gain financially.”
About The Assault
The rape in question allegedly took place in 2016 when Burgess — a trusted family friend and someone who knew the dad for more than two decades — invited the family to his cabin in Calaveras County, The Sacramento Bee reported.
“They trusted this man, he was a family friend, and he took advantage of them,” Meleyco told KMOV-TV.
Meleyco says the now 7-year-old is not doing very well. “She’s showing all the symptoms of somebody who’s been molested. She’s in counseling, and she’s gonna be in counseling all her life.”
The Stockton Record details the parents’ testimony:
“I’m incredibly disgusted by his behavior and continuously disgusted by his lies,” she said before describing his sentence as “getting off so easy” and not registering as a sex offender.
“I want other kids to be protected by possible future abuse by this man,” she said.
The victim’s father, who has known Burgess for more than two decades, said: “I don’t have too many prized possessions in this world other than my family. (My daughter) will remember this the rest of her life. She sleeps on the floor outside our room.”
San Joaquin County Superior Court Judge Ron Northup told the parents that their testimony makes an impact but, because the please was negotiated, “courts are somewhat limited” in how they sentence a case.
The Calls For Investigation
Now, a petition has surfaced, urging investigators to look into why Burgess’ sentence was “so lenient.”
Lyle Burgess, a wealthy man who lives in Stockton, sexaully [sic] assaulted a five year old girl. He was sentenced by San Joaquin County Superior Court Judge Ron Northup to either 90 days in an alternative-work program or in-home detention plus five years of informal probation! He doesn’t even have to register as a sex offender! House arrest and probation?! How does this happen?
This child deserves justice! She deserves to know that people care enough to make sure this man can never hurt her or any other child again! She will have to deal with this for the rest of her life, and her abuser is basically getting a slap on the wrist.
Please sign and share this petition! Put pressure on the people who can investigate why his sentence is so lenient. Maybe there is a way he can be re-sentenced. Thank you!
The petition currently has 148 signatures at the time of publishing.
Donald J. Trump
