Tag Archive for: Judicial Watch

Trump Wins the Lawfare War

The Left hasn’t caught on yet that Donald Trump is a fighter who doesn’t fold easily. As our chief investigative reporter, Micah Morrison, reports, Trump’s win at the polls helped lead to wins in the courts.

Pundits and historians will be a long time sorting out the magnitude of Donald Trump’s electoral victory but one thing already is clear: Trump not only triumphed in the presidential contest, he also won the lawfare war. The latter—a victory for the constitutional foundation of the country —may prove as consequential as the former.

“Lawfare” is a political war fought by other means: partisan warfare conducted in the courts and the media. Trump spent the entire Biden presidency battling lawfare cases brought by  Democrat-allied prosecutors and judges—by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, New York judges Juan Merchan and Arthur Engoron, and others.

Trump fought back in the courts and in the court of public opinion. His election win not only deals death blows to the Democrat-aligned lawfare cases, but possibly to the practice of lawfare itself. Let’s take a moment to survey the legal landscape:

Jack Smith Goes Down

In November 2022, President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, appointed prosecutor Jack Smith as special counsel for two Justice Department investigations: the January 6, 2021, events at the U.S. Capitol, and separately, alleged Trump mishandling of classified documents. It was a particularly brazen lawfare move because by that time, the outline of the 2024 presidential contest was clear: Donald Trump was the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination and Joe Biden was signaling that he would run for re-election. The Biden Justice Department investigating the GOP presidential candidate seemed an outlandish and illegal proposition, but Garland and Smith pressed on. In July, Judge Aileen Cannon had seen enough and dismissed the classified documents case on the grounds that the special counsel was unlawfully appointed. In November, after the election, the Justice Department threw in the towel, moving to drop all January 6 charges against Trump on the grounds that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime. Trump rightfully claimed victory. “I persevered, against all odds, and WON,” he wrote on Truth Social. He added, “These cases, like all of the other cases I have been forced to go through, are empty and lawless, and should never have been brought,”

Bragg’s New York Criminal Case in Death Spiral 

Deep blue New York produced a cadre of lawfare warriors in pursuit of the once and future Republican president. One of its chief combatants was Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who campaigned for office on an anti-Trump platform, reminding voters that he had “sued Trump more than a hundred times.” Before charging Trump in April 2023 with thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records—generally a low-level misdemeanor—Bragg had led a civil lawsuit against the Trump Foundation and criminal cases against the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer. Trump was convicted in May on the business records charges, but his lawyers are asking that the case be thrown out on numerous grounds, including that any sentencing would unconstitutionally interfere with Trump’s conduct of a second term in the presidency. Bragg recently petitioned the court to put the case on ice for the entirety of Trump’s second presidential term—a move the Trump team ridiculed as “a total failure of the prosecution” signaling that the case is “effectively over.”

Lawfare Judges Under Pressure

Presiding over the flurry of appeals in the business-records case is Justice Juan Merchan, another New Yorker with a lawfare pedigree. Earlier this month, Merchan threw out Trump’s appeal to dismiss the case on the basis of presidential immunity. Like most New York judges, Merchan rose through the ranks of the Democratic Party’s political machine, which plays a significant role in state judicial appointments. Before becoming a judge, Merchan served as a prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office and worked for the New York attorney general. In 2006, Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed him to a family court judgeship, and he was elevated to criminal court in 2009. In July, Merchan received a “caution letter” from the New York Commission of Judicial Conduct warning him about donations to Joe Biden and other Democratic causes. Merchan’s daughter, Loren, is president of the left-wing digital advertising firm, Authentic Campaigns. Juan Merchan will have plenty of power over the Trump appeals in the coming months, but he will not have the final word. Trump can appeal to higher New York courts and, ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump also faced a high-stakes legal assault from New York State Attorney General Letitia James in a civil fraud case presided over by Justice Arthur Engoron. James and Engoron both came up through the progressive ranks of the New York Democratic Party. Like Alvin Bragg, James used Trump as a punching bag in her campaign for political office. She denounced Trump as an “illegitimate president” and vowed to “shine a bright light into every corner of his real estate dealings.” Engoron, a longtime Democrat, protested the Vietnam War at Columbia University and has been a member of the ACLU for three decades. Engoron presided over a non-jury civil fraud trial related to real-estate valuations by the Trump Organization and stunned legal observers on both sides of the political aisle in February with a guilty verdict ordering Trump to pay a staggering $335 million penalty—plus rapidly growing interest and additional fines. Trump immediately vowed an appeal and at a September hearing, New York appellate judges signaled skepticism about the Engoron ruling.

The Georgia Case Collapses

Meanwhile, in Georgia, Fulton County DA Fani Willis’s case against Trump for allegedly conspiring to change the outcome of the 2020 election has collapsed. A state appeals court removed Willis and her entire office from the Trump prosecution over a conflict of interest involving a romantic relationship between Willis and another member of her team. The Georgia Court of Appeals panel said the “appearance of impropriety” was so powerful that “this is the rare case in which disqualification is mandated and no other remedy will suffice to restore public confidence in the integrity of these proceedings.” Willis, a longtime Democrat, can appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, but the legal tides are running against her. Trump’s Georgia lawyer issued a statement saying that the decision “puts an end to a politically motivated persecution of the next President of the United States.”

Judicial Watch has been investigating the lawfare against Trump for years. Our own Tom Fitton was dragged into a Jack Smith grand jury for, as he noted on X, “four hours of harassing questions about First Amendment-protected activity and debates about electors, tweets, what I ate for lunch at the White House, and whether I watched Trump’s election night speech. It was all about politics.”

At Judicial Watch, we continue to closely track lawfare developments, push for more accountability, and report to the public. Among our recent moves, we’re seeking a special master in our lawsuit for Fani Willis’s communication with lawfare warriors Jack Smith and the House January 6 Committee; earlier this month, Willis admitted communicating with the January 6 Committee, but released only one already public letter.  In February, we protested a Biden Administration move to keep secret the names of top Jack Smith staff. In 2023, we sued the Justice Department for records of funding and assistance between Smith’s office and Willis’s office, and we obtained information showing Manhattan DA Bragg hiring high-priced lawyers to beat back Congressional inquiries into his Trump prosecutions.

There’s more to come. Stay tuned.

©2024 . All rights reserved.

Judicial Watch Sues for Records on $27M Grants to ‘Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees’ for Use in Gaza

Washington, D.C. – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for records about to the $27 million in U.S. grants awarded to “Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees” that have been designated for use in Gaza (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Agency for International Development (No. 1:24-cv-02159)).

On April 2, 2024, Judicial Watch filed a FOIA request with the USAID for:

  1. All records identifying the recipients of USAID funding under the $7,000,000 grant allocation awarded on or about November 15, 2023, and associated with Federal Award Identification Number 720BHA24GR00005.
  2. 2. All proposals, applications, scope of work documents, or similar records related to any grant award or sub-award associated with Federal Award Identification Number 720BHA24GR00005.

Recently USAID produced records in this case but is refusing to disclose what organizations received the money. Judicial Watch is challenging that withholding.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas—a U.S.-designated terrorist organization—invaded southwest Israel, killing over a thousand people and kidnapping hundreds of others.

On November 15, 2023, the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, a component of the USAID, issued a $7 million grant for “multisectoral response in Gaza.” The grant was awarded to “Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees.” The same day a “continuation” grant of $20 million was also issued for “multisectoral response.”

“The involvement of employees of a U.S. backed multinational organization in the October 7 attack on Israel underscores the importance of transparency in who receives U.S. taxpayer dollars and how they are spent,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “This is critical to protecting the national security of the U.S. and Israel.”

USAID reports that over $282 million was obligated to the West Bank and Gaza in fiscal year 2023.

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

U.S. Air Force Has Become a Den of Debauchery

Judicial Watch blows the whistle on state of U.S. military with focus specifically on Air Force promoting CULTURE CRUSHING filth among its ranks, including programs targeting children


Judicial Watch recently received 25 pages of records regarding drag shows, drag story hours and other pride events for military personnel and their dependent minor children, all of it organized and paid for by the U.S. Air Force, meaning your tax dollars.

According to a May 30 press release from Judicial Watch, documents were obtained one year ago through a May 5, 2023, Freedom of Information Act request submitted to the U.S. Department of Defense by Judicial Watch and CatholicVote Civic Action. The Defense Department issued at least half a dozen “no records” responses to the FOIA request prior to finally releasing these records.

On June 10, 2021, a social media post by the Ramstein & Vogelweh Air Force Libraries advertises:

“We’re celebrating PRIDE month with our very first DRAG STORY TIME! Our local Drag King, Sauvage, will be reading some of our favorite stories about what makes each of us special. Story time begins at 1030!”

Graphics included with the post include a rainbow flag and two books from which Drag King Sauvage intends to read. The first book is titled “I Am Perfectly Designed” by Karamo Brown. The second book is titled “The HIPS on the DRAG QUEEN Go Swish, Swish, Swish” with a depiction of three males in dresses.

The records also include a graphic for a June 2 “Drag Queen Story Time” event at the Ramstein Library.

An advertisement for an 18-and-older event on June 4 called “Drag Karaoke” at “Club E” with “special guest from Monarchy of RoyalTEA” announces prizes for “best dressed” and drink specials.

An advertisement for a seven-week summer reading program re-promotes “Drag Queen Storytime” on June 10 and shows each week given a different color identification for events that include virtual story times, teen socials and scavenger hunts.

The newly obtained records include several additional advertisements for adult events (e.g. Bingo Night, Karaoke Night and D&I Pride Night) at “Club E” and the “Galaxy Club.”

communication from the marketing department of the 100th Force Support Squadron discusses proofs of brochures, posters and tickets for a “LGBT Observance Event” to be held at the Galaxy Club on February 25, 2022. The names of all participants in the chain are redacted.

Separate from the Judicial Watch research, check out this press release from the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.

Good luck fighting the Russians in World War III with this crew.

©2024. Leo Hohmann. All rights reserved.

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Judicial Watch Sues California to Force Clean-Up of Voting Rolls

Washington, D.C. — Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a lawsuit to force California to clean up its voter rolls. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Judicial Watch and the Libertarian Party of California, asks the court to compel California to make “a reasonable effort to remove the registrations of ineligible registrants from the voter rolls” as required by federal law (Judicial Watch Inc. and the Libertarian Party of CA v. Shirley Weber et al. (No. 2:24-cv-3750)).

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to compel the defendants to comply with their voter list maintenance obligations under Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).

The National Voter Registration Act requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the official voter rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have died or changed residence. The law requires registrations to be cancelled when voters fail to respond to address confirmation notices and then fail to vote in the next two general federal elections.

In 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed that such removals are mandatory. In February 2023, Los Angeles County confirmed removal of 1,207,613 ineligible voters from its rolls since the year before, under the terms of a settlement agreement in a federal lawsuit Judicial Watch filed in 2017. (Legal pressure from Judicial Watch ultimately led to the removal of up to four million ineligible voters from voter rolls in New York, California, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, and elsewhere.)

Judicial Watch filed the latest lawsuit after uncovering a broad failure to clean up voter rolls in dozens of California counties.

The complaint details that, in correspondence with Judicial Watch, that California:

admit[ted] that 21 California counties removed five or fewer registrations pursuant to [the NVRA] …  for failing to respond to a Confirmation Notice and then failing to vote in two general federal elections … from November 2020 to November 2022. Sixteen of the 21 counties removed zero such registrations during this period. The 21 counties are: Alameda (1 such removal), Alpine (0), Calaveras (0), Imperial (0), Lake (1), Modoc (0), Placer (0), Plumas (0), San Benito (0), San Bernardino (0), San Luis Obispo (5), San Mateo (0), Santa Barbara (0), Santa Cruz (0), Shasta (0), Siskiyou (2), Solano (0), Stanislaus (0), Trinity (0), Ventura (0), and Yolo (2).

Together, these 21 counties reported a combined total of 11 removals under Section 8(d)(1)(B) during this two-year reporting period.

The complaint notes that “these 21 counties contain about 22% of the population of California.” The lawsuit alleges that, in Judicial Watch’s experience “based on years of enforcing the NVRA,” there “is no possible way any county” with such “absurdly small” removal numbers can be complying with the NVRA’s requirement “to cancel the registrations of voters who have become ineligible because of a change of residence.” The complaint points out that about 11.6% of California residents move each year, and that in the last year for which data are available (2022) “about 818,000 California residents moved out of state.”

The Judicial Watch lawsuit also points out that another 16 California counties could not even “tell how many registrations were removed pursuant to [the NVRA] … The 16 counties are: Del Norte, El Dorado, Inyo, Kern, Lassen, Marin, Mendocino, Merced, Mono, Nevada, Orange, Riverside, San Joaquin, Santa Clara, Sonoma, and Tulare.” These 16 counties together “contain about 28% of the population of California.”

“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections. And California’s voting rolls continue to be a mess,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Judicial Watch litigation already caused the state to remove over a million outdated names from the rolls in California but our new lawsuit shows there is more work to do.”

Judicial Watch is a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of its work, Judicial Watch assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in across the country, among other achievements.

Robert Popper, a Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads its election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.

In March 2023, Judicial Watch filed a federal lawsuit against the Illinois State Board of Elections and its Executive Director, Bernadette Matthews, over their failure to clean Illinois’ voter rolls and to produce election-related records as required by federal law.

Judicial Watch in February 2024 filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Mississippi, challenging a Mississippi election law permitting absentee ballots to be received as long as five business days after Election Day.

In December 2023, Judicial Watch sent notice letters to election officials in the District of Columbia, California, and Illinois, notifying them of evident violations of the NVRA, based on their failure to remove inactive voters from their registration rolls. In response to Judicial Watch’s inquiries, Washington, D.C., officials admitted that they had not complied with the NVRA, promptly removed 65,544 outdated names from the voting rolls, promised to remove 37,962 more, and designated another 73,522 registrations as “inactive.”

In July 2023, Judicial Watch filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, supporting the decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine, which struck down Maine’s policy restricting the use and distribution of the state’s voter registration list (Public Interest Legal Foundation v. Shenna Bellows (No. 23-1361)). According to a national study conducted by Judicial Watch in 2020, Maine’s statewide registration rate was 101% of eligible voters.

In a separate lawsuit, Judicial Watch in July 2023 settled a federal election integrity lawsuit on behalf of the Illinois Conservative Union against the state of Illinois, the Illinois State Board of Elections, and its director, obtaining access to the current centralized statewide list of registered voters for the state.

In April 2023, Pennsylvania settled with Judicial Watch and admitted in court filings that it removed 178,258 ineligible registrations in response to communications from Judicial Watch. The settlement commits Pennsylvania and five of its counties to public reporting of statistics regarding their ongoing voter roll clean-up efforts for the next five years.

In March 2023, Colorado agreed to settle a Judicial Watch NVRA lawsuit alleging that Colorado failed to remove ineligible voters from its rolls. The settlement agreement requires Colorado to provide Judicial Watch with the most recent voter roll data for each Colorado county each year for six years.

Judicial Watch settled a federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps going forward to clean its voter registration lists.

Kentucky also removed hundreds of thousands of old registrations after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.

In February 2022, Judicial Watch settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 inactive registrations from its voter rolls.

In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of Judicial Watch’s challenge to the Democratic state legislature’s “extreme” congressional-districts gerrymander.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Judicial Watch Statement on Prosecution of President Donald Trump in the ‘Hush Money’ Trial

Washington, D.C. – Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement regarding the unprecedented prosecution of President Donald Trump by Democrats in New York:

It will be nearly impossible for Trump to receive a fair trial in a courtroom run by biased, anti-Trump Democratic Party politicians. Today’s kangaroo court proceedings in the Manhattan Supreme Court mark the first-ever criminal trial of a U.S. president. Today is a sad day that will go down in infamy. This is a dangerous attack on the rule of law and a brazen attempt to rig the 2024 elections for President Biden and Democrats. Judicial Watch denounces Alvin Bragg’s corrupt attempt to make former president Donald Trump a political prisoner.

Trump committed no crimes, and this is a prosecution about “nothing.” These and other Democratic Party political prosecutions of Trump are an abomination under law and are destabilizing to our nation.

Judicial Watch will continue to expose in court the truth about these attacks on the rule of law, free and fair elections, and the U.S. Constitution.

Judicial Watch has several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits related to the prosecutorial abuse targeting Trump:

In March 2024, Judicial Watch filed a Georgia Open Records Act lawsuit against District Attorney Fani Willis and Fulton County, Georgia, for records of any communication Willis and the county had with Special Counsel Jack Smith and the House January 6 Committee. The lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court of Fulton County after Willis and the County denied having any responsive records.

In February 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice asked a federal court to allow the agency to keep secret the names of top staffers working in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office that is targeting former President Donald Trump and other Americans.

(Before his appointment to investigate and prosecute Trump, Special Counsel Jack Smith previously was at the center of several controversial issues, the
IRS scandal among them. In 2014, a Judicial Watch investigation revealed that top IRS officials had been in communication with Jack Smith’s then-Public Integrity Section about a plan to launch criminal investigations into conservative tax-exempt groups. Read more here.) 

In January 2024, Judicial Watch filed  lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, for records regarding the hiring of Nathan Wade as a special prosecutor by District Attorney Fani Willis. Wade was hired to pursue unprecedented criminal investigations and prosecutions against former President Trump and others over the 2020 election disputes.

In October 2023, Judicial Watch  sued the DOJ for records and communications between the Office of U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney’s office regarding requests/receipt of federal funding/assistance in the investigation of former President Trump and his 18 codefendants in the  Fulton County indictment of August 14, 2023. To date, the DOJ is refusing to confirm or deny the existence of records, claiming that to do so would interfere with enforcement proceedings. Judicial Watch’s litigation challenging this is continuing.

Through the New York Freedom of Information Law, in July 2023, Judicial Watch received the  engagement letter showing New York County District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg paid $900 per hour for partners and $500 per hour for associates to the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher law firm for the purpose of suing Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in an effort to shut down the House Judiciary Committee’s oversight investigation into Bragg’s unprecedented indictment of former President Donald Trump.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch statement is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Experts: Trump Indictment Highlights ‘Disturbing’ Double Standard of Justice

Former president Donald Trump was indicted Tuesday on 34 felony counts by a Manhattan-based grand jury, in what Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton on “Washington Watch” called an “unprecedented indictment” of a former president. “The two-tiered system of law that is unfolding here is disturbing and just outright wrong,” said former Congressman Jody Hice, who now serves as FRC’s senior advisor to the president, on “Washington Watch.”

Representative Bob Good (R-Va.) on “Washington Watch” said the “conviction in search of a crime” is a plain attempt to prosecute a political opponent, “like we’re a third world country, or a banana republic, or a communist totalitarian state.” Good pointed out that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg campaigned by “saying he was going to go after President Trump … bragging about how many times he’d filed suit against President Trump before he ran for office. And now he’s trying to make good on that and deliver to his radical left base.”

“They went after this president for some seven, eight years now. And this is what they’ve come up with, a false business charge?” demanded Good.

Professor Phill Kline, who was formerly the attorney general of Kansas, agreed. “This [case] is not being brought because Mr. Trump is a big threat on the loose to America, even though these charges force him to face life in prison. … He’s being charged because the DA doesn’t like him.”

“They’ve turned this president every which way but loose,” said FRC president and “Washington Watch” host Tony Perkins. “Fifty congressional investigations, impeached twice by a Democrat-led House,” he recounted. “Of course, nothing stuck to him because, at the end of the day, there was nothing there.”

This opinion is not exclusively held by those immersed in the details; the crowd outside the Manhattan courthouse reportedly held the same view. Reporter Jarrett Stepman, who was present in Manhattan when the indictment was unsealed, said the sense “from the crowd, even before this came down,” was that the Trump indictment “was essentially a political charge … because of his governing philosophy, because of who he was.”

“This standard [that] is being held to now former President Donald Trump,” Stepman added, “wouldn’t be held to other people.” Days after taking office, Bragg announced he would not prosecute marijuana misdemeanors, public transportation fare evasion, most trespassing charges, unpaid traffic fines, “any violation, traffic infraction, or other non-criminal offense,” resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration, prostitution, and outdated offenses.

“To be clear, President Trump’s immoral behavior of the past really set in motion these wheels of political attacks that have been churning for years now,” said Perkins.

But, Perkins added, “if [Trump] would have governed the way he is alleged to have lived prior to being president, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, because the Left would have loved him. But he governed as a conservative, and he put people around him unlike any other Republican president in modern history, who actually advanced a conservative agenda.” Perkins said the Left has made him a target because “he represents a movement.”

“Unfortunately, we have seen increasing weaponization of government against political enemies,” Kline agreed. “You see that with the Department of Justice now and how they’re treating different potential investigative targets based on really their political opinions and positions that they have taken. So, we are creating a two-tiered system of justice in this country.”

“It’s also about scaring folks like you, and me … and every average day Americans and activists who are conservative, Republican, or frankly, dissident liberals,” added Fitton. Last week, IRS agents visited the home of Matt Taibbi, one of the liberal journalists reporting on the Twitter files, while Taibbi was testifying before the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. “They must fear — rightly so — their personal liberties [are] at stake or at risk as a result of this authoritarian, this totalitarian instinct among the Left to use the powers of prosecutors, all government bodies to try to jail their opponents.”

Hice said that the injustice of this situation should bother Christians, even if Trump’s immoral lifestyle offends them. “God loves those who stand for justice,” he said, “and this is a time where the two-tiered system … is becoming so blatantly obvious to every American citizen.”

“It doesn’t matter your points of view on whatever it is, the law should be applied to everyone,” Hice continued. “Where crimes have been committed, then there should be consequences. But where there is the strong arm of government simply going after political opponents, that is injustice.”

Perkins agreed. “We addressed this when this [scandal] came up, when the president was running for office back in 2016. This does not measure up to the standard by which we like to see as Christians in this country. In fact, I was not an early, early supporter of the president for these very reasons.” But now, he added, former president Trump is being made “a target because of his policies and the way he governed.”

“All of us have fallen and come short of the glory of God,” said Hice, and “every single one of us one day will stand before God, and we’ll give an account of our lives.”

“We understand the love and the grace of God to reach out and forgive us and transform us through giving his Son,” Hice continued, “so let’s keep that hope in mind. … And at the end of the day, God will have the final word over each of our lives. But until then, we are here in a world trying to stand for justice.”

“I can’t vouch for everything the president did,” Perkins said. But now that a man who “took the heat in advancing policies that we advocated for” is under attack, Perkins said he feels an obligation to defend “the rule of law and the fact that there is a disparity here in the justice that he is being denied.”

“I think we need to be passionate. We need to be engaged,” said Perkins. “But I do think we’ve got to be very careful that we do not breach this line of inciting and calling for political violence against our political opponents. I think that’s where we completely lose it as a country.”

Fitton echoed the same concern that the indictment of a former president and current presidential candidate will erode America’s bedrock institution. “This is a rigged prosecution for a rigged election,” he said. It “not only is designed to thwart the exercise of President Trump’s First Amendment rights, but to thwart our right to govern ourselves.”

“Bragg isn’t running the country, and we have to remind him of that. Congress should remind him of that,” said Fitton. He urged Congress to “figure out how much U.S taxpayer money at the federal level is being used by Bragg and anyone else” in New York City and “defund New York to the extent practical. If New York and the justice system up in New York wants to undermine our republic … taxpayers should have nothing to do with it at the federal level.”

“This isn’t ordinary, in terms of our nation’s history,” Fitton warned, to “have an entire movement who’s rejecting the American way, the protection of law, equal protection of the law, respect for election systems, and elections generally. … We don’t use criminal law to just go after our political opponents just because they’re our political opponents.”

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Illegal Immigrant Child Rapist Released from Jail by Maryland Sanctuary County Remains at Large

A Maryland county that offers illegal immigrants sanctuary keeps releasing dangerous criminals from jail to shield them from federal authorities, most recently a man from El Salvador who raped a seven-year-old girl multiple times. Rather than honor a detainer issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), officials in Montgomery County freed the child rapist on bond recently and he remains at large. Court documents obtained by a local media outlet say the 56-year-old, Rene Ramos-Hernandez, who reportedly lives illegally in Brentwood “forced unwanted sexual intercourse” with the girl “at least ten times.”

In a statement issued this week, ICE blasts Montgomery County officials for protecting illegal aliens who commit state crimes. “Montgomery County continues the practice of not honoring lawful ICE detainers and release potential public safety threats back into the community,” said acting Baltimore Field Office Director Francisco Madrigal. “When they refuse to give adequate notification of an impending release to allow a safe transfer of custody, it shows their actions are insincere. ICE believes the best way to protect public safety is for law enforcement to work together.” The agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) lodged a detainer with the Montgomery County Detention Center on June 19 and authorities blew it off, instead discharging Ramos-Hernandez on June 23. ICE was notified that the illegal immigrant rapist was let go, but officers at the Montgomery County jail refused to hold Ramos-Hernandez until ERO officers arrived at the facility, according to the agency.

Ramos-Hernandez has lived in the U.S. illegally for years. In fact, the rapes occurred from 2002 to 2003, when he was in his late 30s and the girl was just seven. The victim reported the crimes to Montgomery County Police in 2017 and it took almost two years for local authorities to track down the illegal alien. On June 18 he was booked at the Montgomery County Detention Center (MCDC) in Rockville on two counts of second-degree rape and one count of sexual abuse of a minor. The next day ICE lodged the detainer.  A Montgomery County judge granted Ramos-Hernandez a $30,000 bond and now the feds cannot find him even though bail conditions include electronic monitoring and curfew. Ramos-Hernandez was also ordered to have no contact with minors, which is a joke considering authorities do not even know where he is. He provided the court with a Brentwood address and claims to work as a “remodeler,” according to court records cited in the news story. He faces up to 70 years in prison if authorities ever find him.

This case is part of a national crisis generated by local governments around the country that offer violent illegal immigrants sanctuary. Under a local-federal partnership known as 287(g), ICE is notified of jail inmates in the country illegally so that they can be deported after serving time for state crimes or making bail like Ramos-Hernandez. Unfortunately, a growing number of city and county law enforcement agencies are instead releasing the illegal aliens—many with serious convictions such as child sex offenses, rape and murder—rather than turn them over to federal authorities for removal. The lack of cooperation has led ICE to resort to desperate measures, like striking preemptively by publicly disclosing convicts, complete with mug shots, scheduled to be released before they are actually let go by police in municipalities that offer illegal aliens sanctuary. A few months ago, ICE targeted six offenders incarcerated in two Maryland counties—Montgomery and Prince George’s—notorious for shielding illegal immigrants from the feds. Most were incarcerated for sexual crimes involving children, including rape and serious physical abuse that resulted in death. A couple of the offenders were jailed for murder and assault.

Besides Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, two other large Maryland jurisdictions—Baltimore County and the city of Baltimore—shield illegal immigrants from the feds and deportation. Maryland’s Attorney General, the state’s chief law enforcement official, issued a legal memo in late 2018 defending the practice. Complying with ICE detainers for criminal illegal aliens is voluntary, the Attorney General writes in the document, and state and local law enforcement officials are potentially exposed to liability if they hold someone beyond the release date determined by state law. In 2017, Baltimore’s Chief Deputy State’s Attorney instructed prosecutors to think twice before charging illegal immigrants with minor, non-violent crimes to shield them from Trump administration deportation efforts. This summer Montgomery County took an extra step to help illegal immigrants by launching a $10 million COVID-19 relief fund. Judicial Watch sued on behalf of two county residents and a federal court ruled that the payments likely violate federal law and irreparably harm county taxpayers.

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

3 Out of 4 Convicted Terrorists Came to U.S. Legally Via Current Immigration System

Illustrating the national security threats created by the nation’s immigration system, the overwhelming majority of individuals convicted of terrorism are foreigners who entered the United States legally through various federal programs. Three out of every four convicted terrorists between September 11, 2001 and December 31, 2016 are foreign born and came to the United States through our immigration system, according to a new report issued jointly by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).

At least 549 individuals were convicted of terrorism-related charges in American federal courts since 2001 and 402 of them—approximately 73%–were foreign-born, the report says. Here’s the breakdown by citizenship at the time of their convictions; 254 were not U.S. citizens, 148 were naturalized and received American citizenship and 147 were U.S. born. Additionally, 1,716 foreigners with national security concerns were removed from the United States. The Trump administration stresses that figures include only those aliens who were convicted or removed and therefore do not represent the total measure of foreign terrorist infiltration of the United States. Statistics on individuals facing terrorism charges who have not yet been convicted will be provided in follow-up reports that will be made available to the public.

This DHS/DOJ report, issued this month, is disturbing enough and reveals that a significant number of terrorists entered the country through immigration programs that use family ties and extended-family chain migration as a basis for entry. Among them is Mufid Elfgeeh, a national of Yemen who benefitted from chain migration in 1997 and was sentenced to more than 22 years in prison for attempting to recruit fighters for ISIS. Sudanese Mahmoud Amin Mohamed Elhassan came to the U.S. in 2012 as a relative of a lawful permanent resident and eventually pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS. Pakistani Uzair Paracha was admitted to the U.S. in 1980 as a family member of a lawful permanent resident and in 2006 was sentenced to more than three decades in prison for providing material support to Al Qaeda. Khaleel Ahmed, a national of India, was admitted to the United States in 1998 as a family member of a naturalized United States citizen. Ahmed eventually became an American citizen and in 2010 was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

Other convicted terrorists came to the U.S. through the controversial visa lottery program, the multi-agency probe found. Among them is Abdurasaul Hasanovich Juraboev, a national of Uzbekistan who was admitted into the country as a diversity visa lottery recipient in 2011. In 2015, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to support ISIS and in 2017 Juraboev was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Sudanese Ali Shukri Amin was admitted to the U.S. in 1999 as the child of a diversity visa lottery recipient and subsequently obtained American citizenship through naturalization. In 2015, he was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for conspiring to provide material support and resources to ISIS. Amin admitted to using social media to provide advice and encouragement to ISIS and its supporters and facilitated ISIS supporters seeking to travel to Syria to join the terrorist group. Amin also helped a Virginia teen named Reza Niknejad get to Syria to join ISIS in 2015.

“The United States faces a serious and persistent terror threat, and individuals with ties to terror can and will use any pathway to enter our country,” the new DHS/DOJ report states. “Accordingly, DHS has taken significant steps to improve the security of all potential routes used by known or suspected terrorists (KST) to travel to the United States to ensure that individuals who would do harm to Americans are identified and detected, and their plots are disrupted. These figures reflect the challenges faced by the United States and demonstrate the necessity to remain vigilant and proactive in our counterterrorism posture.”

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Americans are OUTRAGED over #Obamagate & Biden Corruption–WHERE IS CONGRESS?

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton appeared on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” to discuss Judicial Watch obtaining the secret service records showing extensive travel by Hunter Biden during the Obama years; Burisma Holdings landing a deal with a USAID program while under a corruption investigation; the FBI refusing to release documents to the Daily Caller relating to the primary source for dossier author Christopher Steele; mail-in ballots in New Jersey destroyed in a mail truck fire; AG Barr denying pattern of upholding President Trump’s interests while blaming the “media narrative”; and more!

RELATED ARTICLES:

The Benghazi Cover-Up and Biden Corruption Scandal—Here’s What We Know”

Understanding #ObamaGate Means Questioning Obama Directly!

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: The Sun City Cell – Investigative Documentary by Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch presents “The Sun City Cell” – a stunning investigative documentary detailing the Narco-Terrorist Cell operating out of El Paso, Texas!

Featuring Judicial Watch’s Director of Investigations, Chris Farrell, “The Sun City Cell” exposes a chilling narco-terror plot that government officials deny.

In this 40-minute expose, you follow the trail of corruption. You see the actual court documentation. You listen up close and personal to the confidential informants. And with Chris Farrell as your guide, you follow the four-year investigation and meet the sources inside the law enforcement and government who risk their lives to get the truth to the American people.

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch documentary with images and video is republished with permission.

Judicial Watchdog on Corruption in Washington, D.C.

benghazi-libya-_teccOn December 8, 2015, Judicial Watch (JW) issued a press release about a long sought Pentagon email sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and aide, Jake Sullivan, by Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash, a deputy to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, on the evening of September 11th, 2012. The Bash Pentagon email was sent just after the attack by Ansar al-Sharia and others at the Benghazi Special Mission Compound. The JW release noted:

Judicial Watch today released a new Benghazi email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. In an email sent to top Department of State officials, at 7:19 p.m. ET, only hours after the attack had begun, Bash says, “we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” The Obama administration redacted the details of the military forces available, oddly citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption that allows the withholding of “deliberative process” information.

Bash’s email seems to directly contradict testimony given by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. Defending the Obama administration’s lack of military response to the nearly six-hour-long attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi. Panetta claimed that “time, distance, the lack of adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

The first assault occurred at the main compound at about 9:40 pm local time – 3:40 p.m. ET in Washington, DC.  The second attack on a CIA annex 1.2 miles away began three hours later, at about 12 am local time the following morning – 6 p.m. ET.

Due to the leadership of President Tom Fitton, Director of Investigations Christopher “Chris” Farrell,  and Director of Litigation Paul Orfanedes and the team of investigators and lawyers at Washington, DC-based JW, we now know that U.S. special operations assets were “spinning up” to go to the aid of besieged U.S. personnel in Benghazi within hours of the attack on the evening of September 11, 2012. If launched that operation might have spared the lives of former Navy Seals and CIA contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods who were killed in a mortar attack of suspicious origins on the morning of September 12. Did Former Secretary of State Clinton, currently 2016 Democrat Presidential front runner deny the release of those special operator assets?

Ken Timmerman, veteran investigative journalist in a Daily Caller column declared, “Benghazi “smoking gun” email unmasks Hillary Clinton.”

Judicial Watch, Inc. (JW) is a conservative non-partisan foundation whose objective is to assure “integrity, transparency and accountability in government” often unearthing official corruption, regardless of which party is in power. Founded in the mid-1990’s it has become the watchdog of record pursuing high profile issues using the power of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and when required, filing cases in the federal courts to force open government files to produce evidence of official wrongdoing. Currently, JW has over 3,400 outstanding pending FOIA requests.

JW has been in the forefront of a series of high profile investigations. There was the Fast and Furious Justice Department Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) “gun walking” probe by the House Government Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearings with former Attorney General Eric Holder. They were triggered by the killing of US Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry in a 2010 Arizona border shoot out by two Mexican “rip gang” members. The Two Mexican nationals, who perpetrated Agent Terry’s murder, using weapons sold under the controversial BATF program, were extradited and convicted of the crime in the U.S. District Court in Phoenix, Arizona in October 2015.

There is the continuing House Select Benghazi Committee investigation that divulged the alleged Pentagon “smoking gun” email and former Secretary Clinton’s State Department’s dereliction in preventing special operator aid to the embattled CIA annex team in Benghazi, Libya. Currently JW is heavily engaged in more than 16 lawsuits in connection with its investigations of the alleged abuse of private email servers by Democratic frontrunner, former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton that prompted FBI seizure of four email servers and investigation into possible national security law violations by Clinton and aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

JW was instrumental in bringing a suit against the IRS that forced the federal revenue agency to recover over 1,800 disputed emails of former Federal Elections Commission executive and IRS official Lois Lerner regarding complaints over delays in processing non-profit applications of Tea Party groups. In July 2015, the IRS released the emails under a court order by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan.

JW raised denials from the Texas Department of Public Safety and US Department Homeland Security when in the spring of 2015; it revealed the possibility, based on informed sources, that ISIS may have established possible training camps just across the US border at El Paso in the adjacent area of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. JW’s further investigation into the porous southern border influx of illegal immigrants from Central America has revealed an underground network of camps in Mexico radiating out of the port of Tampico enabling the transformation of Islamic terrorists from “Mohammed into Manuel” replete with authentic Mexican identification documents, linguistic and cultural training.

Evidence of JW’s non-partisan investigations into official Washington corruption is exemplified by its examination of Hillary Clinton’s role in the unauthorized development of Health Care national programs under a semi-secret task force in the mid-1990’s versus that of former Vice President Cheney’s unauthorized energy task force a decade later in the Bush Administration. In the later case, JW went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court that remanded a decision to a lower Federal court that forced open the files of the illegal Bush Administration energy task force led by Vice President Cheney.

The interview by my colleague Mike Bates with Chris Farrell was triggered by an encounter we had with him when he appeared at a Pensacola, Florida Tiger Bay presentation on December 11, 2015 on the heels of the Pentagon ‘smoking gun” email news. Farrell was interviewed by Bates about JW and its activities unearthing corruption and fascinating historical information that aired on 1330amWEBY on December 28, 2015. We published an earlier New English Review interview with Farrell in September 2014 on “Insecure Borders and Broken Immigration Laws.”

Christopher ”Chris” Farrell is Director of Investigations at JW. Farrell is a long term member of the staff and board of JW in Washington D.C.  He is a Distinguished Military Graduate from Fordham University with a Bachelor in History after which he accepted a regular Army commission and served as a Military Intelligence Officer specializing in counter-terror intelligence and human intelligence. He has appeared frequently on cable news TV programs, Fox News channel and others.

(READ MORE)

RELATED VIDEO: 13 Hours – The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi – Official Trailer

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Pentagon “smoking gun” email implicates Hillary Clinton

On December 8, 2015, Judicial Watch (JW) issued a press release about a long sought Pentagon email sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and aide, Jake Sullivan, from Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash  to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on the evening of September 11th, 2012. The Bash Pentagon email was sent just after the attack by Ansar al-Sharia and others at the Benghazi Special Missions Compound. The JW release noted:

Judicial Watch today released a new Benghazi email from then-Department of Defense Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash to State Department leadership immediately offering “forces that could move to Benghazi” during the terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. In an email sent to top Department of State officials, at 7:19 p.m. ET, only hours after the attack had begun, Bash says, “we have identified the forces that could move to Benghazi. They are spinning up as we speak.” The Obama administration redacted the details of the military forces available, oddly citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption that allows the withholding of “deliberative process” information.

Bash’s email seems to directly contradict testimony given by then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2013. Defending the Obama administration’s lack of military response to the nearly six-hour-long attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.  Panetta claimed that “time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response.”

The first assault occurred at the main compound at about 9:40 pm local time – 3:40 p.m. ET in Washington, DC.  The second attack on a CIA annex 1.2 miles away began three hours later, at about 12 am local time the following morning – 6 p.m. ET.

Thanks to Tom Fitton and Chris Farrell at Washington, DC-based JW, we now know that U.S. special operations assets were “spinning up” to go to the aid of beseiged U.S. personnel in Benghazi within hours of the attack on the evening of September 11, 2012. If launched that operation might also have spared the lives of former Navy Seals and CIA contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods who were killed in a mortar attack of suspicious origins on the morning of September 12.  Did Former Secretary of State Clinton, currently 2016 Democrat Presidential front runner deny release of those special operator assets?

Ken Timmerman, veteran investigative journalist  discusses the background in a Daily Caller op-ed published  today, “Benghazi “smoking gun” email unmasks Hillary Clinton”.  Chris Farrell of JW will be speaking at the Tiger Bay Club in Pensacola, Florida on Friday, December 11, 2015. Doubtless we and others in attendance will ask questions about the Pentagon and other Clinton private server classified emails.

The House Special Benghazi Committee under Chairman, Trey Gowdy (R-SC) has acquired the alleged  “smoking gun” email  prior to Mrs. Clinton’s October 22, 2015 testimony, but was missing key evidence they needed to be able to question her effectively about it. Since the Committee member Rep. Lynn Westmoreland went to Africom headquarters in early December to interview top officials and line officials, hopefully they now have that evidence. The Pentagon email raises questions that need answers, if the American public is to assess the integrity and truthfulness of both Ms. Clinton and former Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta.

Watch this FoxNews Special Report segment on the Pentagon email obtained by JW.

Over the period July through October 2014, we ran a multiple part series called “Death in Benghazi” in the New English Review.  Northwest Florida Talk Radio station, 1330amWEBY  conducted two major interviews with Ken Timmerman, author of Dark Forces: The Truth about What Happened in Benghazi. In “Death in Benghazi: Part 1 The Attack,” NER July 2014 , we asked about whether resources could have been deployed in time to spare Ambassador Stevens and communications aide, Stan Smith and  possibly prevent the mortar attack at the CIA annex on the morning of September 12, 2012 that took the lives of Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

Here is Timmerman’s assessment of why the Pentagon email released by JW is significant.

Benghazi “smoking gun” email unmasks Hillary Clinton

By Kenneth R. Timmerman

It shows Mrs. Clinton gave the “stand-down” order

Touted by FoxNews as a “possible smoking gun,” the email from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s chief of staff shows that special operations teams within a few hours flight from Benghazi were preparing to deploy as early as 7 PM Washington time on the night of the attacks, well within the time needed to get to Benghazi before the deadly mortar strike that killed U.S. Navy Seals Glen Doherty and Ty Woods.

You would think such a key piece of evidence would have been the first thing the State Department turned over to Congressional investigators. After all, it establishes that help was “on the way” to our diplomats and special operators and intelligence officers under siege.

Panetta aide Jeremy Bash emailed Mrs. Clinton’s top aides at 7:09 PM, to let them know that quick reaction forces, then stationed in Europe, were “spinning up as we speak” to deploy to Benghazi.

“Assuming Principals agree to deploy these elements, we will ask State to secure the approval from host nation,” Bash wrote. Please advise how you wish to convey that approval to us.”

Bash said he had just tried to call them at State, but that they were all in a meeting with Secretary Clinton, hence the email.

We know from the timeline submitted to Congress by the Defense Department exactly which forces Bash was referring to. They included a Delta Force hostage rescue team based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina that was on call 24/7, two Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team (FAST) platoons based in Rota, Spain, and the Commander’s In Extremis Force (CIF) for European Command, also known as C-110.

C-110 was a fifty-man team of Special Operations troops with their own airlift, specially composed to be able to respond to precisely the type of emergency that was then occurring in Benghazi.

They were trained in hostage rescue operations and “hot” extractions. This was the Unit most suitable for Benghazi. When they got word to start “spinning up,” they were in Croatia on a training mission, just a two-to-three hour flight from Benghazi.

As Bash sent his email, General Carter Ham, commander of Africa Command (Africom), initiated the process to transfer them from Eucom to Africom, temporarily placing them under his direct orders. The Unit commander ordered his men to begin loading their gear into their C-130s. All they needed was the go-ahead from State.

And that’s where it died. Hillary Clinton did not want U.S. Special Operations forces coming into Libya with “guns ablazing.” Instead of flying directly to Benghazi, C-110 was told to “stage” in Sigonella, Italy. Meanwhile, Panetta counter-manded General Ham’s order, and returned C-110 to the authority of EUCOM.

This is the key piece of information Mrs. Clinton and her protectors have fought tooth and nail to keep from Congress and the U.S. public until now. Why? Because it contradicts all the earlier timelines presented by the State Department, the CIA, and the Department of Defense, and shows that U.S. forces could have rescued our men in Benghazi before the fateful 5 AM mortar strike, if only Mrs. Clinton had given the go-ahead. Only a lawsuit by Judicial Watch forced its release.

I investigated this timeline and Mrs. Clinton’s role in blocking military assets from reaching Benghazi in my book Dark Forces: the Truth About What Happened in Benghazi. I interviewed senior Africom commanders, unit commanders, spec-ops officers and others with direct knowledge of the U.S. Forces available for deployment that night.

In the redacted version of his testimony that was ultimately released by the House Armed Services Committee, General Ham said the main reason he didn’t go balls to the wall to get forces to Benghazi was simple. “We were never asked,” he said.

Pathetic, but true.

The Bash email shows that the Pentagon was asking – two hours earlier than previous timelines have revealed. So far, the State Department has not released the response that Mrs. Clinton’s minions sent back to Bash. But we know what it was: stand down.

Glen Doherty and Ty Woods soon found out what it was as well.

Timmerman’s accusation begs the question of was there a stand down order issued by Clinton?

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

OUCH! CDC Official Reportedly Calls Obama a ‘Marxist’ and that’s not all!

The Blaze Reports:

An official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called President Barack Obama an “amateur,” a “Marxist” and “the worst president we’ve ever had,” according to emails released by Judicial Watch.

The emails were written amid the surge of illegal immigrants at America’s southern border last year, and were uncovered amid an investigation into the CDC’s usage of an Emergency Operations Center, something Judicial Watch describes as “a major and costly operation that can stick American taxpayers with a huge tab.”

The emails were written by CDC Logistics Management Specialist George Roark to CDC Public Health Advisor William Adams on June 9, 2014.

FULL STORY CONTINUES:

CDC Official Reportedly Calls Obama a ‘Marxist’ and the ‘Worst President We’ve Ever Had’ | TheBlaze.com

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Allen West Republic.

Obama knew jihadis were planning Benghazi attack 10 days in advance

This makes his blaming of the freedom of speech — his attribution of the attack to a spontaneous reaction to a YouTube video — frankly insidious. What anti-free speech initiative was he hoping to implement in the wake of the attack?

“JW: Obama Admin Knew About Benghazi Before It Happened,” Judicial Watch, May 18, 2015:

Administration knew three months before the November 2012 presidential election of ISIS plans to establish a caliphate in Iraq 

Administration knew of arms being shipped from Benghazi to Syria

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it obtained more than 100 pages of previously classified “Secret” documents from the Department of Defense (DOD)and the Department of State revealing that DOD almost immediately reported that the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi was committed by the al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood-linked “Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman” (BCOAR), and had been planned at least 10 days in advance. Rahman is known as the Blind Sheikh, and is serving life in prison for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other terrorist acts.  The new documents also provide the first official confirmation that shows the U.S. government was aware of arms shipments from Benghazi to Syria.  The documents also include an August 2012 analysis warning of the rise of ISIS and the predicted failure of the Obama policy of regime change in Syria.

The documents were released in response to a court order in accordance with a May 15, 2014, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed against both the DOD and State Department seeking communications between the two agencies and congressional leaders “on matters related to the activities of any agency or department of the U.S. government at the Special Mission Compound and/or classified annex in Benghazi.”

Spelling and punctuation is duplicated in this release without corrections.

Defense Department document from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), dated September 12, 2012, the day after the Benghazi attack, details that the attack on the compound had been carefully planned by the BOCAR terrorist group “to kill as many Americans as possible.”  The document was sent to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Obama White House National Security Council.  The heavily redacted Defense Department “information report” says that the attack on the Benghazi facility “was planned and executed by The Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman (BCOAR).”  The group subscribes to “AQ ideologies:”

The attack was planned ten or more days prior on approximately 01 September 2012. The intention was to attack the consulate and to kill as many Americans as possible to seek revenge for U.S. killing of Aboyahiye ((ALALIBY)) in Pakistan and in memorial of the 11 September 2001 atacks on the World Trade Center buildings.

“A violent radical,” the DIA report says, is “the leader of BCOAR is Abdul Baset ((AZUZ)), AZUZ was sent by ((ZAWARI)) to set up Al Qaeda (AQ) bases in Libya.”  The group’s headquarters was set up with the approval of a “member of the Muslim brother hood movement…where they have large caches of weapons.  Some of these caches are disguised by feeding troughs for livestock.  They have SA-7 and SA-23/4 MANPADS…they train almost every day focusing on religious lessons and scriptures including three lessons a day of jihadist ideology.”

The Defense Department reported the group maintained written documents, in “a small rectangular room, approximately 12 meters by 6 meters…that contain information on all of the AQ activity in Libya.”

(Azuz is again blamed for the Benghazi attack in an October 2012 DIA document.)

The DOD documents also contain the first official documentation that the Obama administration knew that weapons were being shipped from the Port of Benghazi to rebel troops in Syria. An October 2012 report confirms:

Weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the Port of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The weapons shipped during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s, and 125 mm and 155mm howitzers missiles.

During the immediate aftermath of, and following the uncertainty caused by, the downfall of the ((Qaddafi)) regime in October 2011 and up until early September of 2012, weapons from the former Libya military stockpiles located in Benghazi, Libya were shipped from the port of Benghazi, Libya to the ports of Banias and the Port of Borj Islam, Syria. The Syrian ports were chosen due to the small amount of cargo traffic transiting these two ports. The ships used to transport the weapons were medium-sized and able to hold 10 or less shipping containers of cargo.

The DIA document further details:

The weapons shipped from Syria during late-August 2012 were Sniper rifles, RPG’s and 125mm and 155mm howitzers missiles.  The numbers for each weapon were estimated to be: 500 Sniper rifles, 100 RPG launchers with 300 total rounds, and approximately 400 howitzers missiles [200 ea – 125mm and 200ea – 155 mm.]

The heavily redacted document does not disclose who was shipping the weapons.

Another DIA report, written in August 2012 (the same time period the U.S. was monitoring weapons flows from Libya to Syria), said that the opposition in Syria was driven by al Qaeda and other extremist Muslim groups: “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria.” The growing sectarian direction of the war was predicted to have dire consequences for Iraq, which included the “grave danger” of the rise of ISIS:

The deterioration of the situation has dire consequences on the Iraqi situation and are as follows:

This creates the ideal atmosphere for AQI [al Qaeda Iraq] to return to its old pockets in Mosul and Ramadi, and will provide a renewed momentum under the presumption of unifying the jihad among Sunni Iraq and Syria, and the rest of the Sunnis in the Arab world against what it considers one enemy, the dissenters. ISI could also declare an Islamic state through its union with other terrorist organizations in Iraq and Syria, which will create grave danger in regards to unifying Iraq and the protection of its territory.

Some of the “dire consequences” are blacked out but the DIA presciently warned one such consequence would be the “renewing facilitation of terrorist elements from all over the Arab world entering into Iraqi Arena.”…

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Will Marc Rich rise from the grave to topple Hillary?

On the very day that  tax evader and renegade oil speculator Marc Rich died  on June 26, 2013 in Lucerne, Switzerland, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act  (FOIA) request. Rich was pardoned on the very last day of former President Clinton’s second term in January 2001 in a series of pardons shepherded  by current US Attorney General Eric Holder. President Clinton had been entreated by Rich’s, ex-wife, Denise, a major Democrat fundraiser, aided by representations from ADL director, Abe Foxman, who was reported to have earned a large fee for facilitating the pardon. Despite Marc Rich engaging in back door oil deals with the late Saddam Hussein, the apartheid South African government and the Palestinian Authority, President Clinton had signed off. He has subsequently rued granting Rich’s pardon.

Judicial Watch finally received the results of the FOIA request and published the redacted copy on its website, yesterday.  Reading it, one can only surmise whether this  might prove to be a problem for several people; former US Ambassador to Israel during the Clinton era, Martin Indyk and then Israeli Foreign Minister, now President , Shimon Peres.and possibly ex-Mossad head, Efraim Halevy.

Peres assumed  the Israeli Premiership after PM Rabin’s tragic assassination by an Israeli extremist in November 1995.The period referenced in the Judicial Watch post followed  the arrival back of the PLO-Fatah under the late Yassir Arafat  in furtherance of the ill-fated Oslo Accords signed in September 1993 at the  White House under Clinton’s auspices. Arafat became the first President of the PA and, in 1996 began a series of attacks on Israeli joint patrols in the disputed territories the period of a near decade long  Palestinian violence against Israel. Indyk is currently  Secretary Kerry’s Special Envoy facilitating negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on a purported final status agreement. This redacted cable could be problematic for Hillary Clinton’s possible candidacy for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016?

Here is the Judicial Watch report:

Clinton’s Marc Rich Pardon – the Tell-Tale Cable

For years, there has been conjecture as to why Bill Clinton, in the waning moments of his presidency, suddenly and unexpectedly granted a full pardon to fugitive financier Marc Rich. Even the New York Times, normally a shameless cheerleader for the Clintons, excoriated the president, saying “Bill Clinton’s last-minute pardon of Marc Rich … was a shocking abuse of presidential power … Mr. Clinton’s irresponsible use of his pardoning authority has undermined the pursuit of justice.” And Clinton himself later described the pardon as “terrible politics. It wasn’t worth the damage to my reputation.”

Questions about the scandal are resurfacing in light of Judicial Watch’s obtaining a confidential cable from the U.S. Department of State that had been under tight wraps since 1995. The cable – from Clinton’s ambassador to Israel to his high-ups at State – reveals high-level Israeli efforts to persuade State Department officials to intercede with Department of Justice (DOJ) to enable Rich to conduct Israeli business affairs worldwide directly relating to Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

Specifically, the cable, obtained through a Judicial Watch June 2013 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, provides details of 1995 efforts by apparently top Israeli officials to pressure their counterparts at the State Department to intervene with the DOJ to withdraw outstanding arrest warrants against Rich on charges he had violated America’s 1981 domestic oil-price along with 64 other crimes, including racketeering and “trading with the enemy.” Israel, it turns out, had recruited Rich, then living in Switzerland, to travel internationally in order to raise funds to finance economic deals between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Rich died on June, 26, 2013, and Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about him with the Department of State on the same day.

While the Israeli official who interceded on Rich’s behalf is not identified in the cable obtained by Judicial Watch, he or she was in a sufficiently high-level position to confer directly with then-U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk and Clinton administration Middle East envoy Dennis Ross. The official was also able to persuade Indyk to meet with Rich’s lawyer, Isaac Herzog, just three days after requesting that he do so. The confidential classification of the cable was extended by the State Department on February 10, 2014 for an additional 15 years, following the Judicial Watch FOIA request, in an apparent effort by the State Department to keep the names of the Israeli official confidential. Ambassador Indyk is now President Obama’s Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations.

In the cable, entitled “[REDACTED] REQUEST FOR INTERVENTION WITH DOJ ON BEHALF OF MARK [SIC] RICH,” Indyk writes:

•    During August 29 [1995] meeting with Dennis Ross and I, [REDACTED] raised the issue of Mark Rich, a wealthy businessman now resident in Switzerland, whom [REDACTED] has recruited to head up an effort to promote private sector involvement in Palestinian economic development. [REDACTED] asked me to see Rich’s lawyer, Isaac Herzog, to be briefed on the subject. He further requested that Dennis and I follow up in Washington to try to resolve the problem.

•    Rich paid a large fine and according to Herzog, DOJ is no longer pursuing the matter … Nevertheless, there are still international warrants outstanding for Rich’s arrest. This severely restricts his travel … [REDACTED] request is that State consider the project and, if it is regarded as worthwhile, contact DOJ and communicate its interests in enabling Rich to engage in these activities – specifically that:  … The GOI [Government of Israel] has notified State that it is in the GOI’s interest to facilitate the travel on behalf of Marc Rich to advance the ‘Economic Solution’ … The U.S. has a legitimate interest in fostering these objectives.

Interestingly, the Indyk confidential memo claims that the U.S. ambassador, who at the time had been a key figure in American-Israeli affairs for more than a decade, had no knowledge of Rich or the activities that had led to the commodities trader’s 1983 indictment. According to Indyk’s confidential memo, “We have never heard of Mark [sic] Rich and have no way of evaluating his ability to contribute to this effort by bringing in foreign investors.” The ambassador added, “However, [REDACTED] is pushing him hard.”

On January 20, 2001, just hours before leaving office, President Clinton granted Rich a highly controversial presidential pardon. It was widely alleged at the time that Rich’s pardon had been the result of Denise Rich having given more than $1 million to the Democratic Party, including more than $100,000 to the Senate campaign of Hillary Clinton and $450,000 to the Clinton Library foundation. As far back as 2009, journalist Joe Conason, writing in Salon had conjectured, “Winning the pardon was a top priority for Israeli officials because Rich had long been a financial and intelligence asset of the Jewish state …” But the confidential cable obtained by Judicial Watch is the first solid evidence of close ties between the Israeli government and the fugitive financier.

The bottom line is that the cable raises salient new questions about the depth and breadth of the relationship between Marc Rich and the Israeli government. And they suggest possible new insights into the motivations behind the scandalous last-minute pardon granted by Bill Clinton. Ambassador Indyk should now disclose what he knows about the Rich pardon. As should John Podesta, Eric Holder, and Hillary Clinton – all high-level Obama appointees embroiled in the Rich pardon scandal.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The New English Review. The featured photo is courtesy of Ionel141. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.