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Biden Plans Expansion Of Feds’ Army Of Snitches In ‘Dollars For Collars’ Program

Via The American Conservative

The Biden administration may soon recruit an army of private snoops to conduct surveillance that would be illegal if done by federal agents. As part of its war on extremism, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may exploit a “legal work-around” to spy on and potentially entrap Americans who are “perpetuating the ‘narratives’ of concern,” CNN reported last week. But federal informant programs routinely degenerate into “dollars for collars” schemes that reward scoundrels for fabricating crimes that destroy the lives of innocent Americans. The DHS plan would “allow the department to circumvent [constitutional and legal] limits” on surveillance of private citizens and groups. Federal agencies are prohibited from targeting individuals solely for First Amendment-protected speech and activities. But federal hirelings would be under no such restraint. Private informants could create false identities that would be problematic if done by federal agents.

DHS will be ramping up a war against an enemy which the feds have never clearly or competently defined. According to a March report by Biden’s office of the Director of National Intelligence, “domestic violent extremists” include individuals who “take overt steps to violently resist or facilitate the overthrow of the U.S. government in support of their belief that the U.S. government is purposely exceeding its Constitutional authority.” Perhaps like setting up a private informant scheme to evade constitutional restrictions on warrantless surveillance?

One DHS official bewailed to CNN: “Domestic violent extremists are really adaptive and innovative. We see them not only moving to encrypted platforms, but obviously couching their language so they don’t trigger any kind of red flag on any platforms.” DHS officials have apparently decided that certain groups of people are guilty regardless of what they say (“couching their language”). The targets are likely to be simply people with a bad attitude towards Washington. That will include gun owners who distrust politicians who vow to seize guns.

The latest fuzzball standards (“narratives of concern”?) fit the post-9/11 pattern of wildly expansive threat definitions. Shortly after its creation in 2002, DHS warned local law enforcement agencies to keep an eye on anyone who “expressed dislike of attitudes and decisions of the U.S. government” as potential terrorists. DHS-funded Fusion Centers have attached the “extremist” tag to gun-rights activists, anti-immigration zealots, and individuals and groups “rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority”—even though many of the Founding Fathers shared the same creed. The Pentagon taught soldiers and bureaucrats that people who attend public protests are guilty of “low-level terrorism.” An Air Force report accused women who wear hijabs of “passive terrorism.” Endless enemies lists come in handy at congressional appropriations hearings.

Federal officials insist that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear. FBI chief Christopher Wray perennially proclaims that the FBI never investigates Americans based solely on their ideas. But, as the Intercept reported in 2019, “Who the Justice Department decides to prosecute as a domestic terrorist has little to do with the harm they’ve inflicted or the threat they pose to human life.” But that claim is belied by the FBI’s beloved “informant loophole.” As Trevor Aaronson explained, “FBI agents must obtain supervisory approval to enter a group or gathering using an undercover agent, and to obtain that approval, the FBI must have a ‘predicate,’ or a factual basis to suspect criminal activity. But neither supervisory approval nor a predicate is required if the work is done by an informant, creating a loophole that allows the FBI to investigate Americans for virtually any reason.”

Any new informants hired by the Biden administration will operate under the same perverse incentives that have long subverted due process. Informants tend to be rewarded based on how much assets they help government seize or how many people they help prosecutors condemn. As a 2019 report by the American Bar Association noted, “The government pays cash for incriminating information and testimony. This is troubling because the financial incentive to make cases against others may be much greater than the personal integrity of the informants.” A report by the Justice Department Office of Inspector General slammed the Drug Enforcement Agency for failing to “document the reliability of informants” who helped the DEA to confiscate billions of dollars of private property. The DEA paid informants $237 million between 2010 and 2015, including $25 million shoveled out to only nine informants. DEA’s best paid informant, Andrew Chambers, Jr., was found to have given “false testimony under oath in at least 16 criminal prosecutions nationwide before he was exposed in the late 1990s,” USA Today reported in 2013. Attorney General Janet Reno banned the DEA from using him as an informant but in 2008, DEA re-hired Chambers and used him for at least the following five years.

Informants have become far more perilous to freedom and decency since the 1970s thanks to the Supreme Court effectively defining entrapment out of existence. Almost anything an informant or undercover government agent does to induce someone to violate the law is considered fair play.

Read the entire article HERE.

Lynch Mob Lawyer

Via FrontPage Magazine

The bigger the riots, the bigger the payout

$27 million in the George Floyd case, $12 million in the Breonna Taylor case, and $1.5 millionin the Michael Brown case. Ben Crump’s business is smearing cops and intimidating cities into offering huge settlements in the hopes of avoiding even more expensive BLM race riots.

Crump, dubbed a “civil rights lawyer” by the media, and the nation’s “black attorney general” by race hoax thug Al Sharpton, is delivering for his clients and, almost certainly, for himself. As Reuters noted, “Crump’s payments have not been made public but plaintiffs’ attorneys frequently receive around a third of the settlement amount.”

Neighborhoods burn, store owners lose their livelihoods, and people die, but Ben gets richer.

You can usually spot Ben Crump at press conferences, raising a fist next to Sharpton, or the family of whichever robber or drug dealer was the latest to die while struggling with a cop.

A list of Crump’s clients also often happens to be a map of race riots, hateful protests, and a nation divided by racist incitement. From Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown to George Floyd to Daunte Wright, Crump is on the ground, raising a fist, and vowing to fight until the check clears.

“This historic $27 million settlement is PROOF that Black lives will no longer be written off as trivial, unimportant, or unworthy of consequences,” Crump declared in March after the Floyd payout. Despite all those millions, Crump is still showing up to sue anyone he can..

Crump’s best weapon is histrionics. His book is titled, “Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People”. He demanded first-degree murder charges against Derek Chauvin, the officer who was restraining Floyd when the career criminal died of what medical experts determined was a heart attack caused by a drug overdose. “Driving while Black continues to result in a death sentence,” Crump falsely claimed over the death of Daunte Wright who in addition to driving had a warrant out for his arrest for choking a woman and robbing her at gunpoint.

Crump is not shy about admitting that he’s not really making legal arguments, he’s feeding lynch mobs with lies.

Read the entire article HERE.

Bill Barr threatened to quit if Trump tried to fire Christopher Wray

Via The Washington Examiner

Former Attorney General Bill Barr threatened to quit if then-President Donald Trump fired Christopher Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to a new report.

Barr learned of plans to dismiss Wray when Johnny McEntee, a top Trump aide, introduced him to Bill Evanina, a top counterintelligence official in the administration who was reportedly being considered as a potential replacement for Wray, according to Business Insider. When told of plans to replace Wray, as well as swapping then-Deputy FBI Director David Bowdich with Trump national security advisor Kash Patel, Barr threatened to quit, a person briefed on the matter told the outlet.

Barr, described by a former Justice Department official as “a force of nature and pure id,” cultivated a close relationship with Wray, to the point that the pair had weekly lunches as the departments they helmed continued to work closely together, the outlet reported.

Trump’s administration was marked by high turnover rates, with several Cabinet-level officials departing the administration during his four years in office. That trend accelerated after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, with a handful of officials, including then-first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff and special envoy to Northern Ireland Mick Mulvaney, resigning in protest of Trump’s actions preceding the siege.

The former president had an oft-contentious relationship with Wray, who assumed the role of FBI director on Aug. 2, 2017. Wray publicly warned about Russian and Iranian election meddling, the threat posed by white supremacist violence, and the danger of a rising communist China that seeks to become the world’s sole superpower “by any means necessary.”

Wray’s refusal to open a federal investigation into Hunter Biden’s former business dealings or to remove bureau officials connected to the Russia investigation reportedly earned Trump’s ire, and Trump periodically criticized Wray, including last May, when he asserted that Wray was actually “appointed by” former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Trump said that “the jury is still out” on Wray, and “let’s see what happens with him,” while noting that he would leave Barr to decide Wray’s fate.

Read the entire article HERE.

Pfizer Expects Vaccine Will Be “Durable Revenue Stream” As It Seeks Approval For Children 2 To 11

Via True Pundit

Yesterday, Pfizer released a strong earnings report (surpassing Wall Street’s elevated projections), and also revealed that it’s both on the cusp of securing regulatory approval in the US for minors between the ages of 12 and 15 to receive the vaccine (setting off another wave of demand as the Biden Administration heaps pressure on states to get their vaccination numbers up).

During a call with analysts and reporters, CEO Albert Bourla revealed that Pfizer is in talks with “basically all the governments of the world” about providing shots and booster shots through 2024.

The key number is that Pfizer expects sales of its coronavirus jab to hit $26 billion by the end of this year, a milestone that would make the vaccine the company’s biggest-selling pharmaceutical product, eclipsing Humira, the popular rheumatoid arhtritis drug made by Abbvie. Also, Pfizer said it intends to use its mRNA technology underpinning its COVID-19 jab for other therapies and vaccines. For example, the company is working on creating seasonal flu shots using the same RNA lipid nanoparticle technology.

Bourla has already primed the public to expect to receive at least one additional shot within a year of their second dose, while also teasing the likelihood that the world might require annual booster shots – something that would be a boon to Pfizer’s bottom line as it moves to grow its COVID-19 vaccine division into a major, and permanent, line of business.

To help make its product more durable (and thus increase demand in poorer countries) the company said it is studying whether doses ould be stored at standard refrigerator temperatures.

Regardless, Bourla expects “durable demand” for vaccnes, similar to the flu vaccine.

“It is our hope that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will continue to have a global impact by helping to get the devastating pandemic under control and helping economies around the world not only open, but stay open,” Bourla said in prepared remarks.

That’s bad news for the rag-tag band of emerging-market economies pushing a proposal at the WTO to waive IP rights when it comes to vaccine technology. If Washington were to back such a move, it would supercharge the “open vaccine” movement, and represent a major threat to Pfizer’s latest profit stream. That effort is being led by India and South Africa, yet Bill Gates and Washington lobbyists have continued to insist that respecting IP and letting Big Pharma handle global distribution (as Covax dramatically lags expectations), which means the status quo is likely safe

Read the entire article HERE.

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