11/4/15

Sen. Cruz Demands Answers from Associate AG Nominee on Operation Choke Point

Right Side News

Ted Cruz CPAC

The DOJ has acted as a partisan arm of the White House

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today in a full Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) questioned the Hon. Stuart Delery, nominee for U.S. Associate Attorney General. Mr. Delery approved Operation Choke Point, a Department of Justice (DOJ) initiative that unconstitutionally sought to choke off access to banking services for gun dealers and other lawful business enterprises.

“The DOJ has a long and bipartisan tradition of staying out of politics, of defending the law and the Constitution, and not acting simply as a partisan arm of whatever president happens to be in the White House. I believe the DOJ has violated that tradition of staying out of politics. The DOJ has an obligation to defend the Constitution, and instead, this Administration’s DOJ has consistently violated the constitutional rights of American citizens and has treated the Bill of Rights with contempt,” Sen. Cruz said. “By cutting off financial resources to lawful small businesses, Operation Choke Point is an abuse of power that undermines the integrity of the DOJ.”

11/4/15

#LoudonClear: Special guest Judd Saul to discuss #EnemiesWithin movie

New Zeal

Loudon Clear

Tonight, Trevor brings on Director Judd Saul to discuss the upcoming film, The #EnemiesWithin. Listen here and find podcasts of previous episodes here.

The Enemies Within will give you information about leading senators and congress members you have never seen before.

It will shock you.

Help Trevor and Judd fund this movie HERE!

Trevor Loudon with Director Judd Saul (YouTube screenshot courtesy Judd Saul)

Trevor Loudon with Director Judd Saul (YouTube screenshot courtesy Judd Saul)

11/4/15

Empty the Prisons Bill Now on Fast Track

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

We are witnessing a carefully orchestrated political and media campaign to pass the George Soros-backed Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 (S.2123) on the grounds that it is “bipartisan.” But critics are calling it a soft-on-crime bill that will backfire on the Republicans who help pass it.

A big hole in the congressional process to rush the bill through to full approval in the Senate has been exposed by a former prosecutor who says victims of crime were not given a chance to be heard.

The former prosecutor, Mary Leary, is a professor at Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law in Washington, D.C. She has written a scathing review of the bill and the process underway to pass it, saying, “The president and Congress need to reach out to victims. The president has gone all the way to Oklahoma to meet with prisoners. Perhaps he should take a walk in Washington and meet with one of the victims of the over 40,000 crimes that occurred there in 2014 or speak to the families affected by a homicide rate that has increased over 47 percent since last year.”

The same criticism applies to the senators who passed the bill.

Despite the flaws, the following papers have weighed in with editorials in favor of the legislation:

  • Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
  • Los Angeles Times
  • Cedar Rapids Gazette (IA)
  • Waco Herald Tribune (TX)
  • Kansas City Star
  • Santa Rosa Press Democrat (CA)
  • Indianapolis Star

The Waco Herald Tribune made a correct point, however, in noting that “the reforms were pressed hard by both the politically powerful Koch brothers as well as the American Civil Liberties Union.”

But while the Koch brothers did give $5 million to the Coalition for Public Safety, a group that met with former Attorney General Eric Holder to push “criminal justice reform,” it is the left-wing billionaire, George Soros, who has really been behind the campaign. He gave the ACLU $50 million in 2014 “to end mass incarceration.”

We noted in a previous article that one Soros-funded group, Critical Resistance, was founded by communist Angela Davis and says it seeks “to end the prison industrial complex” by “challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.”

We thought the group had only received $100,000 from Soros. It turns out the organization got $200,000 from the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations in the year 2000, $200,000 in 2002, and another $100,000 in 2009.

Dr. Tina Trent, an advocate for victims of crime, was writing about the campaign for “criminal justice reform” when it was primarily underwritten by Soros and before the Koch brothers started pouring millions of dollars into it. She discovered that the group Critical Resistance had invented the “cop-watch concept” that would be popularized by Van Jones in Oakland, California, through a group called Bay Area Police Watch. Angela Davis wrote, Are Prisons Obsolete?, a book arguing that criminals are victims of capitalist society.

Van Jones would later become Obama’s so-called Green Jobs Czar, only to resign when his communist background came to light. He is now working with Koch Industries to promote the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015.

As a commentator on CNN, Jones has also been promoting the bill, calling it a “smart” way to deal with crime. “By year’s end,” he writes, “President Barack Obama could sign into law major criminal justice reforms—passed because of the leadership and full engagement of the congressional GOP.”

If so, it would be a major victory for George Soros and the Democratic Party.

In total, according to “prisoner rights advocate” Christopher Zoukis, George Soros and his Open Society Foundations have “invested” more than $200 million in the past decade toward “reform of criminal justice policies.”

The evidence is mounting that Senate Republicans voting for the bill have walked into a trap set by the leftists. Jonathan Keim, Counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network, advises Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell not to bring the bill up for a vote. He writes, “…why would Senate leaders bother bringing it to a vote when the fault-lines established by the opposing Senators would expose Republicans to charges of being ‘soft on crime’ in the upcoming election?”

Those opposing senators, as we reported, include Republicans Ted Cruz (TX), Orrin Hatch (UT), David Perdue (GA), Jeff Sessions (AL) and David Vitter (LA).

But other conservatives are making their voices known, such as Dan Cadman of the Center for Immigration Studies, who says the bill could result in illegal aliens being released from prison to prey on innocent Americans.

He writes about S.2123, “…there is nothing in the bill to ensure that released alien prisoners will be detained during the entire pendency of deportation proceedings. In fact, it is entirely possible that in some instances alien prisoners whose actual time served is substantially lessened by the provisions of S.2123 may find themselves in a position to go before the immigration court and ask for relief from removal because they will no longer face statutory debarment under various provisions of the immigration laws, as would have happened had they been obliged to serve the original sentence.”

If Congressional Republicans pass the bill, it would not only be a major victory for President Obama but likely also for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton “made it [incarceration] the centerpiece of her first major policy address since officially declaring her candidacy in a speech Wednesday at Columbia University in New York City,” gushed Leonard Noisette at the website of the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations back in April.

Noisette went on: “Clinton’s speech followed a front-page story in the New York Times noting an unusual consensus among Democrats and Republicans in the 2016 presidential race on the need for criminal justice reform. New alliances are being formed between such politically disparate groups as the Center for American Progress and the Koch Brothers. Indeed, these issues are fostering a spirit of bipartisan cooperation seldom seen in our ideologically polarized politics of late.”

Isn’t it interesting that Clinton chose that theme after The New York Times pumped it up as a major issue?

While the Koch brothers may have funded some good free-market causes over the years, the issue of “criminal justice reform” has clearly been hijacked by the left.

The Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities USA are among the groups endorsing the bill. They cited the comments of Pope Francis, made in a talk with prisoners at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility outside Philadelphia. Pope Francis said, “This time in your life can only have one purpose: to give you a hand in getting back on the right road, to give you a hand to help you rejoin society. All of us are a part of that effort, all of us are invited to encourage, help and enable your rehabilitation.”

They added, “We join the Holy Father by advocating for reforms to our nation’s criminal justice policies that lead to mercy, healing and restoration.”

The only reference to crime victims comes in this part of the letter: “Our Catholic tradition supports the community’s right to establish and enforce laws that protect people and advance the common good. But our faith also teaches us that both victims and offenders have a God-given dignity that calls for justice and restoration, not vengeance.”

Hence, offenders are, in effect, being treated as victims by these liberal Catholic groups.

Leary, the professor at Catholic University, spoke for many Catholics when she voiced concerns that the victims of crime have not been heard, as S.2123 has been marked up and passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

She wrote that “…apparently no one in the Senate thought it appropriate to hear what victims have to say about criminal justice reform. Last year, about 1.17 million violent crimes and nearly 8.3 million property crimes were reported to law enforcement. The victims of that criminal activity are the people who bear the direct and secondary harm. That is not all. It is not just that victims were not included as witnesses; they were barely even mentioned. A review of the written testimony of all nine witnesses indicates that the word ‘victim’ or any derivative thereof was used a mere nine times.”

But no advocate for victims of crimes testified.

She added, “Although the Judiciary Committee saw it appropriate to include representatives from Families Against Mandatory Minimums, prison ministers and lawyers, it did not apparently see it necessary to include the people most affected by crime through no fault of their own—victims.”

Families Against Mandatory Minimums is another Soros-funded group, having received $600,000 from his Open Society Foundations in 2012, $200,000 in 2008, and $400,000 in 2007.

Leary is a former prosecutor and attorney who has focused on crimes against women and children, including the exploitation of children and women, child pornography, child prostitution, computer facilitated crimes against children, and family violence cases.

In her National Law Journal article about the flaws in the bill, she noted that Congress passed the Crime Victims Rights Act in 2004, giving victims the right to be “reasonably heard” at public court proceedings.

“This same Congress should recognize that right in this context and allow victims to be ‘reasonably heard’ regarding” the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015, she said. “Not only is it reasonable to listen to crime victims, but it is necessary for any criminal justice reform to be legitimate.”

11/4/15

HARSH: Obama Official Who Pled Guilty to Espionage Gets… $250 Fine

By Richard Pollock
Doug Ross @ Journal

Glenn Woodell, a NASA supervisor who pled guilty to violating U.S. espionage laws involving a Chinese NASA contractor was given a slap on the wrist with six months’ probation and a $250 fine, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

Daniel Jobson, a Woodell colleague and fellow NASA supervisor, had his espionage charges reduced to a misdemeanor and was released without any penalty.

The lenient plea deals were quietly delivered October 26 in U.S. District Court in Newport News, Virginia. The U.S. Attorneys office did not to issue a press release about the deals and declined comment when contacted by the DCNF.

Woodell was charged under Title 18 of the nation’s espionage laws and faced a maximum penalty of one-year imprisonment and a fine of $100,000.

“It’s like a traffic ticket or something for littering,” commented former U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf in an interview with the DCNF. A former Virginia Republican congressman who was chairman of a House appropriations oversight subcommittee for NASA, worked to expose Bo Jiang, the Chinese NASA contractor at the heart of the espionage case.

Woodell permitted Bo Jiang “complete and unrestricted access” to the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia, according to the indictment filed October 20. The indictment stated that he had violated NASA’s security and IT regulations over a two-year period, from Spring 2011 to January 2013.

The Obama administration’s lenient treatment of Woodell drew immediate criticism of what is viewed as a too-permissive attitude toward foreign nationals working at government facilities containing national security assets.

House Space Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Brian Babin, a Texas Republican, told the DCNF, “This punishment is inadequate and sends the wrong signal to our adversaries and those entrusted with protecting America’s most sensitive information.”

Rep. John Culberson, who succeeded Wolf as chairman of the NASA appropriations subcommittee, also deplored the plea deal.

“It is intolerable that espionage is not taken more seriously by the administration,” Culberson, also a Texas Republican, told the DCNF.

Culberson vowed to seek changes in the law concerning foreign nationals with access to NASA confidential activities. “I will do what I can to change the law and put conditions on NASA’s receipt of our hard-earned tax dollars to ensure they keep the Chinese government as far away from our space program as possible,” he said.

FBI Director James Comey told the House Homeland Security Committee October 20 that the administration must “get smarter” about foreign citizens with green cards who “wander around” sensitive U.S. facilities like NASA.

“This is the weakest administration. They are afraid of China,” Wolf charged.

Wolf noted China’s unveiling yesterday of its first large airliner to compete with Airbus and Boeing.

“The Chinese are stealing us blind. Look at their new commercial airline,” Wolf said. “Almost everything on that airplane is from Airbus and Boeing,” he charged.

Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly promised President Obama in his September 25 visit to the White House that there would be no more Chinese cyberespionage.

Yet a month after Xi left Washington, Chinese hackers targeted at least seven U.S. companies, according to CrowdStrike, a company the helps American companies fight cyberespionage attacks.

According to Woodell’s admission of facts published by the U.S. Attorneys office during the plea deal, a NASA security plan for Bo Jiang “required Woodell to ensure that Jiang’s access to information was limited to information that was unclassified, non-sensitive, non-export controlled that was directly applicable to the tasks assigned to Jiang.”

Instead, Woodell had given Bo Jiang unfettered access. “At no time did Woodell ever act to secure, protect or fully restrict Jiang’s access to the information,” the U.S. Attorneys office wrote.

Working with NASA Langley whistleblowers who were alarmed at Bo Jiang’s activity, Rep. Wolf publicly announced his concern in a March 2013 news conference.

Shortly after Wolf’s press conference Bo Jiang sought to flee the United States and was intercepted by federal agents at Dulles Airport on March 16, 2013. He had purchased a one-way ticket to his homeland in China.

The Chinese had in his possession a laptop with a Seagate External Hard Drive “that contained the NASA unauthorized, unrestricted access information,” from NASA Langley, according to the U.S. Attorneys office.

NASA headquarters did not respond to a request for comment.

Read more at Daily Caller.

11/4/15

Our Watcher’s Council Nominations – Witch Hunt Edition

The Watcher’s Council

Witch Hunt

Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday morning.

Council News:

This week, Doug Ross, Sheryl Atkisson and Simply Jews earned honorable mention status with some great articles.

You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.

To bring something to my attention, simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title and a link to the piece you want considered along with an email address (mandatory, but of course it won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6 PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. Then return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week when it comes out on Wednesday morning.

Simple, no?

It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members, while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?

So, let’s see what we have for you this week…

Council Submissions:

Honorable Mentions:

Non-Council Submissions:

Enjoy! And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that! And don’t forget to tune in Friday for the results!

11/4/15

Thanks for helping us to fund “The Enemies Within”

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

When we recorded this last night we had 5% of our goal.

Thanks to very generous donations overnight we are past 10%

Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed and who has circulated our materials.

To get this vital documentary finished – please go here.

Thanks from Trevor and Judd.