Judicial Harassment of President Trump on Census
The Supreme Court Endorse Judicial Harassment of President Trump
Did The FBI Properly Vet Andrew McCabe’s Book?
Nicaragua Arrests ISIS Terrorists Planning to Enter the U.S.
What Does the CIA Know About The Mena Controversy?
Happy Independence Day!
The Supreme Court Endorse Judicial Harassment of President Trump
Through the years, we have been vigilant defenders of integrity in our elections and that has included exposing efforts to dilute the will of U.S. citizens at the polls. So of course, we are disappointed in the Supreme Court’s ruling that delays, perhaps permanently, the Trump administration’s plan to include a question on the 2020 census inquiring about a respondent’s citizenship status.
It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court has endorsed the continued judicial harassment of the Trump administration. It ought to be an obvious point that the U.S. Census should try to figure out how many Americans and non-Americans are present in the United States.
We strongly encourage the Trump administration to try to move this issue through the courts in time for the 2020 census.
In mid-February, we joined with the Allied Educational Foundation (AEF) in filing an amici curiae brief in the United States Supreme Court, urging it to overturn the ruling of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York blocking the Secretary of Commerce from adding a question about citizenship to the 2020 census. The brief argues that including a citizenship question would help us and the government make sure only eligible citizens are on the voting rolls:
But leftists hate the idea of the American people knowing more about the number of foreign nationals present in the United States, which is why they oppose a census question about citizenship. You can be sure that Judicial Watch will continue to monitor, and participate, when appropriate, in next round of court fights on this key question about the future of our nation.
Did The FBI Properly Vet Andrew McCabe’s Book?
The scandal involving former FBI Executive Andrew McCabe, his wife and Hillary Clinton henchman Terry McAuliffe was so transparent that only a DC “Swamp Creature” could overlook it.
We aren’t overlooking it and, as you know, we have several lawsuits in the works to throw light on this blatantly egregious behavior.
Here is our latest.
We have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for records of communications between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe related to his book, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-00976)).
We sued after the FBI failed to respond to our February 8, 2019, FOIA request seeking:
- All records of communication between the FBI and former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe relating to an upcoming book to be authored by Mr. McCabe and published.
- All records, including but not limited to forms completed by former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, relating to the requirement for prepublication review by the FBI of any book to be authored by Mr. McCabe with the intent to be published or otherwise publicly available.
McCabe was fired from the FBI in March 2018 for leaking to the media and lacking “candor.” Then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a statement said:
After an extensive and fair investigation and according to Department of Justice procedure, the Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) provided its report on allegations of misconduct by Andrew McCabe to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR).
The FBI’s OPR then reviewed the report and underlying documents and issued a disciplinary proposal recommending the dismissal of Mr. McCabe. Both the OIG and FBI OPR reports concluded that Mr. McCabe had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor − including under oath − on multiple occasions.
***
Pursuant to Department Order 1202, and based on the report of the Inspector General, the findings of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility, and the recommendation of the Department’s senior career official, I have terminated the employment of Andrew McCabe effective immediately.”
A February 2018 DOJ inspector general report concluded:
As detailed in this report, the OIG [Office of the Inspector General] found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ [The Wall Street Journal], and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.
McCabe played a central role in Spygate, the Deep State’s effort to spy upon and undermine President Trump. We aim to find out if McCabe’s book was properly vetted or simply rubberstamped by anti-Trump bureaucrats before being published.
And we are pursuing additional lawsuits regarding McCabe:
On February 14, 2019, we filed a FOIA lawsuit for all records of communication of McCabe, the Office of the Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or the Office of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussing the 25th Amendment or presidential fitness. Additionally, the lawsuit seeks all recordings made by any official in the Office of the Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General of meetings in the Executive Office of the President or Vice President.
In September 2017, we filed a FOIA lawsuit on behalf of Jeffrey A. Danik, a retired FBI supervisory special agent, against the U.S. Department of Justice for records concerning McCabe. Danik worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation for almost 30 years. We later filed two additional lawsuits over the FBI’s failure to preserve text messages as federal records and for records of the audit of McCabe’s communications.
In another FOIA lawsuit we made public Justice Department records showing that McCabe did not recuse himself from the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s unsecure, non-government email server until Tuesday, November 1, 2016, one week prior to the presidential election. McCabe had a serious potential conflict of interest in this investigation because Clinton-aligned political groups donated nearly $700,000 (40% of the campaign’s total funds) to McCabe’s wife for her political campaign.
This kind of activity was rampant during the Barack Obama Administration.
Nicaragua Arrests ISIS Terrorists Planning to Enter the U.S.
We have reported for years that those coming across our Southern border aren’t all innocent women and children. Some are hardcore terrorists. Now we have more evidence of this dire threat, as our Corruption Chronicle blog describes.
Four ISIS terrorists planning to enter the United States through Mexico have been captured by the Nicaraguan military in a remote area where the men entered the Central American nation illegally from Costa Rica. Nicaraguan authorities identify the men as two Egyptian nationals—33-year old Mohamed Ibrahim and 26-year-old Mahmoud Samy Eissa—and two Iraqis, 41-year-old Ahmed Ghanim Mohamed Al Jubury and 29-year-old Mustafa Ali Mohamed Yaoob. The men arrived in Panama on May 12 and in Costa Rica on June 9, according to an article published in Nicaragua’s largest newspaper.
It appears they had legal permission to enter Costa Rica, which is why Nicaragua deported them back there. Costa Rica’s national security chief, Michael Soto, confirmed the men entered the country legally and were approved by his country’s immigration control officials “with no problem.” Soto also revealed that “confidential information from an unknown source” later alerted Costa Rican officials of the men’s “criminal” ties. Various Mexican media outlets also reported that authorities there were warned that three—instead of four—ISIS operatives were making their way to the United States through Mexico via Central America. Mexico’s largest newspaper covered a press conference in which President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed receiving an alert from the United States about the ISIS terrorists’ plan to enter Mexican territory to reach the American border.
Not surprisingly, the mainstream media has essentially ignored this disturbing story, which is simply the latest of many involving Islamic terrorists and the southwest border. Judicial Watch has for years uncovered evidence of Islamic terrorists infiltrating the U.S. through Mexico as part of an ongoing investigation into the national security crisis created by the dangerously porous southern border. Judicial Watch has interviewed local, state and federal law enforcement officials as well as U.S. and Mexican military sources and has traveled to remote Mexican border towns to interview American ranchers. When the Central American caravan got started last fall, Judicial Watch deployed an investigative team to the Guatemala-Honduras border after Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales confirmed that nearly 100 ISIS terrorists had been apprehended in the impoverished Central American nation.
Judicial Watch’s reporting has confirmed that ISIS has a training cell just a few miles from El Paso, Texas in an area known as “Anapra” situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. We also verified that Mexican drug cartels are smuggling foreigners from countries with terrorist links to stash areas in a rural Texas town (Acala) near El Paso. Back in 2014 Judicial Watch reported that four ISIS soldiers, who entered the U.S. through the Mexican border, were arrested in McAllen and Pharr Texas. Two years ago, Judicial Watch exposed a plot involving Mexican drug traffickers that help Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the U.S. to explore targets for future attacks. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and at the time lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to information provided to Judicial Watch by high-ranking Homeland Security officials. Khabir trains thousands of men—mostly Syrians and Yemenis—to fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juárez, the intelligence gathered by Judicial Watch’s sources reveals.
Just a few weeks ago a captured ISIS fighter provided alarming details of a plot in which jihadists enter the country through the southern border to carry out an attack. The terrorists begin their journey in Central America (like the four recently captured in Nicaragua) and exploit vulnerabilities in the Mexican border to reach the U.S., according to Abu Henricki, an ISIS soldier captured by the Syrian Democratic Forces in Rojava, Syria. Henricki and 160 of his fellow terrorists were interviewed at length by a research group called the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism. The nonpartisan organization published its findings recently in an alarming report that includes a video of the interview with the captured terrorist, who is Canadian and has dual Trinidadian citizenship.
“They were going to move me to the Mexican side [of the U.S. southern border] via Puerto Rico,” Henricki says about the ISIS plot. “This was mastermind[ed] by a guy in America. Where he is, I do not know. That information, the plan came from someone from the New Jersey state from America. I was going to take a boat [from Puerto Rico] into Mexico. He was going to smuggle me in,” Henricki explains. “I don’t know where I’d end up.” In the report, the researchers reveal that the ISIS fighters were to travel from Syria to penetrate the U.S. southern order by infiltrating migration routes. “Whatever one thinks of President Donald Trump’s heightened rhetoric about the U.S.- Mexico border and his many claims that it is vulnerable to terrorists, ISIS apparently also thought so, as knowledge of this ISIS plot came from the mouth of a now-repentant ISIS cadre,” the report states.
What happens at the border affects the safety of you and your family.
What Does the CIA Know About The Mena Controversy?
A decades-old scandal involving drug smuggling out of an Arkansas airport is the stuff of a Hollywood thriller – in fact, two years ago Tom Cruise starredin “American Made” which was based on the story.
That film prompted several journalists who had written about the airport in the 90’s to recallit. Among them is our own chief investigative reporter Micah Morrison, who wrote for The Wall Street Journalat the time.
Nobody in government wants to talk about the airport or the drug smuggling, which of course makes us even more curious.
We have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the CIA seeking the CIA Inspector General’s November 1996 report related to a drug-running, arms smuggling and intelligence operation involving Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport in Arkansas.
The airfield in Mena was alleged to have been used in the 1980s by the CIA during the Reagan administration to smuggle arms to rebels in Nicaragua. A central figure in the operation was Barry Seal, a pilot and drug smuggler for Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel who became an undercover agent and informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
In November 1996, then-CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz absolved the CIA of involvement in the operation.
Hitz at the time said that “no evidence has been found to indicate that the CIA or anyone acting on its behalf participated in, or otherwise had knowledge of, any illegal or improper activities in Mena, Arkansas or the area north of Mena known as Nella, Arkansas.”
We sued the CIA in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia after the agency failed to respond to a June 29, 2018, FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. Central Intelligence Agency (No. 1:19-cv-00672)). We are seeking:
The CIA Inspector General’s report issued in November 1996 relating to a drug-running, money laundering and intelligence gathering operation involving an airport in Mena, Arkansas.
In an October 18, 1994, editorial feature for The Wall Street Journal titled “The Mena Coverup,” Micah Morrison wrote: “What do Bill Clinton and Oliver North have in common, along with the Arkansas State Police and the Central Intelligence Agency? All probably wish they had never heard of Mena.”
Morrison noted that Seal, who by 1984 was a DEA informant, “flew at least one sting operation to Nicaragua for the CIA.” Seal was murdered in 1986 by Colombian hit men in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
For more than 20 years, the CIA has stonewalled the release of information we are now seeking. So let’s see what we might find out.
I fear we are failing current and future generations as our nation’s elites ignore, misstate, and suppress the truths of our nation’s founding. One way to combat this is to the read the documents from the era, especially the Declaration of Independence. I reprint it for you below read and share:
In Congress, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Here is a helpful link (https://www.archives.gov/files/founding-docs/declaration_signers_gallery_facts.pdf) to a document from the National Archives that provides basic information on the Founders who risked everything in signing the Declaration of Independence.
I’d like to think the Founding Fathers who led the American Revolution would love Judicial Watch’s mission of holding corrupt government officials accountable to the rule of law.
Accept our best wishes for safe, joyful, and patriotic Independence Day!
God bless America!
Until next week,
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