What this really is is Mad King Ludwig's builder's envy. He thinks he should be in charge of the literal remaking of every Washington edifice, just as he thinks he should be in charge of everything else, including interest rates.
Powell's term expires on May 15, but the lunatic we put in charge of the country just can't let Powell fade away without picking this disgusting fight over nothing.
The Department of Justice should be ashamed of itself, but like most MAGAts, it is incapable of shame.
... his emergency control is set to expire after a maximum of 30 days,
according to the statute. That can be extended, but only if Congress
passes a law authorizing it.
While Trump has frequently complained
about crime in the district, violent crime there has fallen to a
30-year low as of January, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. ...
Kilmar Abrego Garcia
was returned to the United States to face criminal charges involving an
alleged undocumented immigrant smuggling ring Friday, months after the
Maryland resident was wrongfully deported to a prison in his native El Salvador. ...
The indictment alleges that Abrego Garcia and others from 2016
through 2025 “conspired to bring undocumented aliens to the United
States from countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Ecuador,
and elsewhere, ultimately passing through Mexico before crossing into
Texas.”
The grand jury that issued the indictment found that he made more than 100 trips smuggling thousands of immigrants. ...
In a post on X on Friday, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele wrote,
“As I said in the Oval Office:1. I would never smuggle a terrorist into
the United States. 2. I would never release a gang member onto the
streets of El Salvador.”
“That said, we work with the Trump
administration, and if they request the return of a gang member to face
charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse,” Bukele wrote. ...
... The administration is “asserting a
right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without
the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our
constitutional order,” wrote Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson in an opinion for a panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Further, it claims in essence that
because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be
done,” he wrote. “This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the
intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses
still hold dear.” ...
Wilkinson
and the two other judges on the 4th Circuit panel rejected the
administration’s appeal of an April 10 order from Xinis directing the
administration to “take all available steps” to facilitate Abrego
Garcia’s return to the U.S. “as soon as possible.”
Wilkinson zeroed in on the Justice Department’s admission that it had “mistakenly” deported Abrego Garcia.
“Why then should it not make what was wrong, right?” Wilkinson wrote. ...
Wilkinson warned of a dangerously
slippery slope on the horizon. “If today the Executive claims the right
to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what
assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American
citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” he wrote.
“And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?” ...
A seventh federal prosecutor resigned Friday over the Department of Justice’s controversial order to dismiss criminal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.
The prosecutor, Hagan Scotten,
in a blistering letter to top DOJ official Emil Bove, said “I expect
you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a
coward, to file your motion” to dismiss the Adams case.
“But it was never going to be me,” wrote Scotten, who had been the lead prosecutor in Adams’ case for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
On Thursday, Scotten’s boss, acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned in protest over Bove’s order to toss the case. ...
Scotten is a Harvard Law School grad, who clerked for Supreme Court
Chief Justice John Roberts after serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq in
the Special Forces. He also served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice
Brett Kavanaugh when Roberts’ fellow conservative was sitting on a lower
court.
... After Sassoon refused to dismiss the case Thursday, the matter was reassigned to John Keller, the acting head of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, who then also refused to dismiss the case and quit, NBC reported. ...
Acting DOJ criminal division chief Kevin Driscoll also resigned Thursday after refusing to accept the Adams case.
At least three other senior officials in the DOJ’s Public Integrity
Section quit after that following a meeting with the deputy attorney
general. ...
Sassoon had been the lead prosecutor at the fraud and conspiracy trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the former head of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried was sentenced last March to 25 years in prison.
It's a strange day when I find myself agreeing with Ed Markey.
. . . “The courts, if they
interpret the Constitution correctly, are going to stop Musk, are going
to stop Trump,” Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey told CNN’s Erin
Burnett on Thursday.
“Article
One is the Congress. Article Two is the president, Article Three is the
judiciary. There is not an Article 3.5 where Elon Musk gets to do
whatever he wants to do,” Markey said. “They are trying to rewrite
constitutional law in this country.” . . .
Three weeks in, the
growing storm of lawsuits means some of this young administration’s most
extraordinary applications of unilateral presidential power could be
reined in. But the litigation also conjures a scenario that no one wants
to think about: what would happen if the administration refused to
recognize court rulings — even one handed down by the Supreme Court?
This
is a particularly acute matter because it’s the Justice Department,
which is now operating under Trump’s firm hand, that’s responsible for
enforcing the law. The constitutional remedy for a president who breaks
the law is impeachment, but Republicans have twice shown that they will
not hold Trump to account in such trials, making moot this key check on
power envisioned by the founders.
“That
is the doomsday scenario,” Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department
special counsel and NYU law professor, told CNN’s Burnett. “So far, they
are complying with all the court orders, but what happens come the day
that they do lose at the Supreme Court?” Goodman asked.
“If they really want to push it, we are in a real constitutional crisis.”
Meanwhile, earlier in December Biden's own Department of Justice warned Jan 6 "insurrectionists" that accepting a pardon from Trump would amount to a confession of guilt.
So Fauci, Milley, et alia are all ipsofacto guilty.
A pro-abortion RFK Jr. at HHS. A pro-union Chavez-DeRemer at Labor. Lefty Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. And gay George Soros adviser Scott Bessent at Treasury.
Mike Allen of AXIOS reminds me of no one so much as George W. Bush: "There is no conservative movement. I redefined the Republican Party".
I think Mike is in a perpetual state of PTSD because his father was a John Bircher.
Donald Trump's problem is that no real conservative wants to be associated with his lame duck brand, so he's got to find people SOMEWHERE to serve in his hapless administration. Might as well be lefties and liberals and Jeb Bush retreads like Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice after the Gaetz flameout.
Meanwhile, Donald J. Trump and George W. Bush are exactly the same person, except Georgie actually got more than 49.83% of the vote.
The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults. The Bureau – which has been at the center of partisan storms – made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. ...
It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers. ...
The updated data for 2022 report that there were 80,029 more violent crimes than in 2021. There were an additional 1,699 murders, 7,780 rapes, 33,459 robberies, and 37,091 aggravated assaults. The question naturally arises: should the FBI’s 2023 numbers be believed? ...
While the FBI claims that serious violent crime has fallen by 5.8% since Biden took office, the NCVS numbers [from the U.S. Department of Justice] show that total violent crime has risen by 55.4%. Rapes are up by 42%, robbery by 63%, and aggravated assault by 55% during Biden’s term. Since the NCVS started, the largest previous increase over three years was 27% in 2006, so the increase under Biden was slightly more than twice as large. ...
At the beginning of this year, the media was running headlines like National Public Radio’s: “Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don’t believe it.” “At some point in 2022 … there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall,” NPR claimed. But now the FBI has itself admitted its violent crime numbers were way off. ...
A Gallup survey late last year found that 92% of Republicans and 58% of Democrats thought crime was increasing. A February Rasmussen Reports survey found that, by a 4.7-to-1 margin, likely voters say violent crime in the U.S. is getting worse (61%), not better (13%). A Gallup poll found in March that “crime and violence” was Americans’ second biggest concern, after inflation. But the media and politicians used the inaccurate FBI data to try to convince people that they were wrong.
On
taking office in 2019, Gov. Walz was restrained by a one-seat Republican
majority in the state Senate—until Covid hit in the spring of 2020. He
declared a state of emergency on March 25, 2020, and ruled by decree for 15 months. He proclaimed the emergency on the basis of an allegedly sophisticated Minnesota Model
projection of the virus’s course in the state. In fact, the projection
reflected a weekend’s work by graduate students at the University of
Minnesota School of Public Health. Relying on their research, Mr. Walz
presented a scenario in which an estimated 74,000 Minnesotans would
perish from the virus. The following week the Star Tribune reported that
with the lockdown Mr. Walz ordered, 50,000 would die. Maybe it would
have been preferable to address the virus through democratic means.
Having
destroyed jobs and impeded life routines, including family get-togethers
and church attendance, Mr. Walz finally let his one-man rule lapse on July 1, 2021. When the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center stopped counting in March 2023, the deaths of 14,870
Minnesotans were attributed to the virus. (In 2020 I successfully sued
the administration for excluding me from Health Department press
briefings on Covid.)
During the state of emergency, protests broke out in Minneapolis on Memorial Day 2020 following the death of George Floyd.
That Thursday, rioters burned Minneapolis’s Third Precinct police
station to the ground. Mr. Walz didn’t deploy the National Guard until
the weekend. Riots, arson and looting throughout the Twin Cities caused
about $500 million in damage.
Minnesota leads the nation in Covid fraud. Under the auspices of the Feeding Our Future nonprofit, its founder, Aimee Bock,
allegedly recruited mostly young Somali men to seek reimbursement for
millions of meals supposedly served to poor students and families.
According to indictments handed up by a grand jury to U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, Ms. Bock and others allegedly defrauded the state and federal government of $250 million. Ms. Bock has pleaded not guilty to the fraud charges.
My organization has been highlighting this dangerous double-standard, warning Americans that the Justice Department and FBI are exploiting the FACE Act to target and harass individuals like Eva who stand in the way of their extremist agendas.
Just this month, a man named Elliot Bennet set fire to a Catholic
Church in New Jersey. This was the third time Bennet had committed acts
of violence or vandalism against the church since 2018, the 21st attack
on a Catholic Church in 2024, the 274th attack since May 2022 and the
412th attack since May 2020.
Yet the same Justice Department that is fighting to throw Eva in jail
failed to prosecute Bennet for these multiple and obvious FACE Act
violations. It has also failed to federally prosecute a single one of
the more than 400 egregious FACE Act violations against Catholic Churches since May 2020, or to meaningfully address the 90 attacks on pregnancy resource centers across the nation since May 2022.
These attacks don’t involve prayer and hymns. They’ve involved fire-bombings and arson,
vandalism of pregnancy clinics and churches, spray painted threats on
clinic and church walls, decapitated statues, smashed glass, disrupted
masses, blocking of church entrances and even physical attacks on
priests and parishioners. They have cost at least $25 million in damages
to Catholic Churches, while intimidating hundreds of peaceful Catholic
and pro-life communities.
In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden's memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ("if it was 2013 - when did I stop being Vice President?"), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ("in 2009, am I still Vice President?"). He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he "had a real difference" of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Eiden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
Our country is a giant prank played on the American people.
But the special counsel, Robert Hur, said he was declining to
prosecute Biden over his handling of classified documents about military
and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and notebooks containing Biden’s
entries about national security.
This is James Comey not prosecuting Hillary all over again.
But they will prosecute Trump in his classified documents case, upcoming.
This double standard will be all the reason people want and need to vote for Donald Trump again.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department wants former Trump White House
adviser Peter Navarro to spend six months behind bars after being convicted of criminal contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena. ...
“The Defendant chose allegiance to former President Donald Trump over
the rule of law,” prosecutors wrote in Thursday’s sentencing memo.
Fox News correspondent David Spunt has the latest on the first son's refusal to testify on 'Special Report.'
The assistant U.S. attorney who was accused oflimiting questionsrelated to President Biden during the federal investigation into Hunter Biden is no longer employed by the Justice Department, Fox News has learned.
Lesley Wolf, who served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Delaware, is no longer with the DOJ, according to a source familiar with the situation.
The source said Wolf had longstanding plans to leave the Department of Justice and did so weeks ago.
Wolf, who IRS whistleblowers claimed slow-walked the Hunter Biden investigation, is sitting for a transcribed interview before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday morning.
Specifically, IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley alleged that Wolf worked to "limit" questioning related to President Biden and apparent references to Biden as "dad" or "the big guy."
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Brooke Singman is a Fox News Digital politics reporter. You can reach her at Brooke.Singman@Fox.com or @BrookeSingman on Twitter.
WASHINGTON — The former federal prosecutor who allegedly shielded President Biden and his son Hunter
during a criminal investigation testified 79 times to Congress that she
was “not authorized” by the Justice Department to answer questions
about the case, according to a transcript reviewed by The Post.
Former Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf repeatedly cited a
five-page authorization letter from Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer as she refused to answer questions during a House Judiciary Committee deposition last week.
Weinsheimer’s Dec. 12 letter, also reviewed by The Post, says: “[T]he
Department generally does not authorize congressional testimony from
line-level personnel, especially relating to an ongoing investigation
with charges pending in court. The Department has declined to do so in
connection with this matter.”
Wolf’s dozens of refusals to answer questions — just one day after the full House voted to authorize an impeachment inquiry
into President Biden — frustrated attempts to firm up the storyline
involving what whistleblowers say was a sweeping cover-up by Wolf and
colleagues to protect the Biden family.
A
former federal prosecutor who allegedly shielded President Biden and
his son Hunter during a criminal investigation testified that she was
“not authorized” to answer questions about her actions, according to a
transcript. AP
The near-blanket rejection of questions follows pressure from House
Republicans on the administration to allow witness testimony and could
bolster GOP arguments that the White House is obstructing the inquiry,
which itself could form an article of impeachment.
Two IRS agents who worked on the long-running tax fraud investigation
into Hunter Biden, which focused on his foreign income from countries
such as China and Ukraine, alleged in prior testimony to House
committees that Wolf tipped off the first son’s lawyers to investigative
steps and forbade inquiries into Joe Biden, even when communications
mentioned him.
Wolf served on the squad of prosecutors that signed off on a
probation-only plea deal in June for the first son on tax and gun
charges, which fell apart the following month under scrutiny from a federal judge.
Lesley
Wolf (above) repeatedly cited a five-page authorization letter from
Bradley Weinsheimer as she refused to answer questions during a House
Judiciary Committee deposition. Fedbar.org
IRS supervisor Gary Shapley, who oversaw the Hunter Biden
investigation for three years, and case agent Joseph Ziegler, who worked
on the inquiry for five years, made a series of specific claims against
Wolf, which she did not refute in her testimony.
Tax investigators learned in December 2020 that Wolf “reached out to
Hunter Biden’s defense counsel and told them” about investigators’ plans
to search a northern Virginia storage unit that contained business
records, “circumventing our chance to get to evidence from potentially
being destroyed, manipulated or concealed,” Ziegler testified in July.
Shapley testified that investigators were months earlier barred from
searching a guest house at Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home, where
Hunter often stayed.
Wolf’s
refusals to answer questions come one day after the full House voted to
authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. REUTERS
Shapley said that on Sept. 3, 2020, “Wolf told us there was more than
enough probable cause for the physical search warrant there, but the
question was whether the juice was worth the squeeze.”
Wolf also allegedly objected during a meeting on Dec. 3, 2020, to questioning a key Biden family associate, Rob Walker, about the president.
“Wolf interjected and said she did not want to ask about the big guy
and stated she did not want to ask questions about ‘dad,’” he said.
“When multiple people in the room spoke up and objected that we had
to ask, she responded, there’s no specific criminality to that line of
questioning. This upset the FBI, too,” Shapley testified.
Wolf served as a key point person for the investigation, serving under Delaware US Attorney David Weiss.
The whistleblowers accused Weiss’ office of giving Hunter Biden’s
legal team advance knowledge of a planned interview attempt in late
2020, scuttling a planned approach, and said prosecutors didn’t pass
along a paid FBI informant’s tip that Joe and Hunter Biden received $10 million in bribes from Ukrainian energy company Burisma,
which paid Hunter a salary of up to $1 million to serve on its board
beginning in 2014 when his vice president dad led US policy toward the
country.
Wolf allegedly instructed FBI agents in August 2020 to remove
references to Joe Biden from a search warrant affidavit, writing,
“Someone needs to redraft [the affidavit] … There should be nothing
about Political Figure 1 in here,” according to an email released by the Ways & Means Committee.
“That email, I think, is super important because it’s a one-off
example in writing of the constant concern of following investigative
leads that might lead to Joe Biden,” Ziegler said last week in a Fox
News interview.
“The FBI agents who drafted that affidavit, they believed that they
had sufficient evidence — probable cause — to support including
Political Figure 1 in that affidavit,” said the self-identified Democrat.
IRS supervisor Gary Shapley (not pictured) oversaw the Hunter Biden investigation for three years. REUTERS
“That related to [Ukrainian energy company] Burisma, access to Joe
Biden and access to the administration and there was ample evidence that
was included in that affidavit that’s supported including Political
Figure 1. That has a waterfall effect on the investigation because those
emails that we’re searching for might not come through to the team.”
Shapley and Ziegler said they were not allowed to get cellphone
geolocation data that could have proved Joe Biden was with his son in
July 2017 when Hunter sent a threatening text message to a Chinese government-linked businessman saying, “I am sitting here with my father,” and warning of retribution.
Within 10 days of that message, $5.1 million flowed to accounts
linked to Hunter and first brother James Biden from CEFC China Energy —
after a tranche of $1 million earlier that year, less than two months
after Biden left office as vice president.
Internal
Revenue Service whistleblowers Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley testify
in the House Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing
about alleged meddling in the Justice Department’s investigation of
Hunter Biden. REUTERS
A May 2017 email penciled in Joe Biden, referred to as the “big guy,” for a 10% cut from CEFC dealings.
The IRS whistleblowers say that — in addition to preferential
treatment for Joe and Hunter Biden — Attorney General Merrick Garland
misled Congress under oath about Weiss’ ability to independently bring
criminal charges against Hunter Biden.
Biden-appointed US attorneys in Los Angeles and Washington have
confirmed in testimony that they declined to partner with Weiss, who in
August was elevated by Garland to be a special counsel, allowing him to bring charges independently outside of Delaware.
The DOJ didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about Wolf’s testimony.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf featured prominently in the testimony of two IRS agents who spent years working on the Hunter Biden investigation. Both Gary Shapley and Ziegler, theIRS whistleblowers, said Wolf intervened to stop multiple investigative steps from moving forward, including by preventing FBI agents from asking witnesses any questions about Joe Biden’s involvement in foreign business affairs and by tipping off Hunter Biden’s attorneys about a planned search of his storage unit.
Wolf worked alongside Mackler in the U.S. attorney’s office before Mackler’s departure. She and Macklerprosecuteda major case together, for example.
When Obama nominated that guy for the Supreme Court, it was like throwing a Molotov Cocktail at it.
The federal prosecutor tasked with investigating Hunter Biden told at least six witnesses last
year that he lacked authority to charge the first son outside Delaware
and was denied special counsel status, according to an IRS whistleblower
— and now the House Judiciary Committee wants to talk to them.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Sunday that Republicans
will launch an impeachment inquiry into Garland if Shapley’s account is
corroborated.
Hunter Biden wanted something from Zhao — it appears it was a
payment of some sort — and he wanted it immediately. "I am sitting here
with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made
has not been fulfilled," Hunter Biden wrote. "Tell the director that I
would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means
tonight. And Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this
other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between
the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to
forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I
am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
Shapley said the IRS team discovered
the message in August 2020. Even for people who questioned the
authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop — and we now know the FBI had
verified its authenticity in December 2019 — the WhatsApp message was
worth investigating. "In August 2020, we got the results back from an
iCloud search warrant," Shapley said. "Unlike the laptop, these came to
the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a
set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to
follow up on."
No kidding. The July 30, 2017, WhatsApp message was the clearest evidence ever
that Joe Biden, then the former vice president, knew about his son's
business dealings. Now, maybe Hunter Biden was lying in the message.
Maybe his father wasn't in the room. Maybe there's some other
explanation. What was clear was that the WhatsApp message was evidence
that needed to be investigated. But Shapley and the other IRS
investigators soon ran into a brick wall at the Justice Department.
The IRS team wanted to execute a search warrant
at the guest house and Joe Biden's house in Delaware, where Hunter
Biden was staying at the time of the message. In discussions with the
Justice Department, they were told that there was more than enough
probable cause to get a warrant but that "optics" were a problem. A
Justice Department official told them, in Shapley's words, that "a lot
of evidence in our investigation would be found in the guest house of
former Vice President Biden but said there is no way we will get that
approved."
