Terrorists in the Mix

CBP agents have caught 70 illegal aliens who are also terrorists on the government’s terrorist watchlist (including one who illegally entered through our northern border). That’s just in the five months of the current fiscal year, and those 70 compare with the 98 caught in the entirety of the prior fiscal year. This year’s pace, according to my third-grade arithmetic, works out to 168 terrorists that might be caught over the full course of this year.

That’s also only the ones we know about. Left uncounted, because unknown, are the number of terrorists in the vast numbers of illegal aliens flowing across our borders that escape CBP capture and detention and those among the vast numbers of illegal aliens flowing across our borders undetected.

Nor do we know how many terrorists are among the illegal aliens that CBP does capture but that the Biden administration orders released under President Joe Biden’s (D) Catch and Release program.

Negative Inference

Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg likes to jet around the country and to overseas locations. He claims to do this while flying coach on commercial airlines, but he’s also taken 23 jet rides at taxpayer expense on private Government-owned jets. Now he’s refusing to supply relevant oversight data for these rides.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) has turned down repeated requests for information related to the taxpayer costs of 23 flights Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his advisers took on government private jets since taking office.
The DOT and the agency’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office both declined to detail how much each flight cost taxpayers over the course of multiple months and in recent weeks.

It’s illegal for Government agencies to refuse to respond substantively to FOIA requests (clearly saying “No” with a clear explanation of the legality for that “No” would constitute such a substantive response).

It’s a common practice in cases before a court for a judge to advise a jury that when a prosecutor’s witness obfuscates during his testimony, or refuses to answer clearly or at all, the jury is free to attach the most negative interpretation to those witness failures during the jury’s subsequent deliberations.

So it is with the man who sits in the Transportation Secretary’s chair. Pete Buttigieg cannot be taken as anything other than both in over his head and dishonest. His words are useless, and the only conclusion possible concerning those flights is that they were done illegally, and that illegality—repeated 23 times—should be a fireable offense.

Perhaps it’s time for Government officials who stonewall to lose access to their office facilities through those facilities’ loss of funding. And this step, also, although it won’t have immediate effect, even were it to get through the Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Senate and White House:

House Republicans plan to vote to defund non-complying witnesses in the government when the new fiscal budget takes effect on October 1.

In the present case, that would mean Buttigieg and the head of his FOIA Office would lose their salaries.

Gun Control

Versus gun rights. And police.

Squatters keep occupying another’s property in Lynnwood, WA, and using it as a stolen vehicle trafficking facility and as a residence. A police SWAT team raided the property and made some arrests. The owner changed the locks on the building. Then the squatters returned and resumed operations and residence.

In response to the reoccupation, Lieutenant David Hayes of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office (Lynnwood’s county) told Fox News Digital that ensuring the squatters don’t return is “largely on the property owner.”

This is what the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party mouthpieces are trying, functionally if not (necessarily) deliberately to prevent: a property owner defending her own property. A disarmed population via those gun “controls,” though, will be helpless against criminals and unable to satisfy their right and their obligation to defend their own property. Instead, they’ll be rendered entirely dependent on Government to for them rather than government’s (sic) local, county, and State police forces acting in assistance of the property owner.

In parallel with this, seemingly contradictorily, exponentially potentiating the police’s inability to support private citizens’ efforts, is the Left’s and Party’s ongoing—still!—efforts to defund and to shrink those same local, county, and State police forces.

It’s no wonder that whenever anyone in Party mounts an effort to disarm us, however seemingly mildly, there’s an increase in gun and ammunition sales.

The FBI Needs to Go

The agency’s management, from Director Christopher Wray on down far too deeply into the organization, is showing its naked bias by relying so heavily—and so exclusively—on Left-wing “sources” for rationalizations for initiating investigations, investigations that pry into mostly average Americans because we stand up for our rights. The FBI also is showing its blatant incompetence even at being dishonest by failing so heavily in those pseudo-investigations:

A dossier alleging Russian collusion funded by a Democrat presidential candidate. A suggestion that school parents were domestic terrorists from a left-leaning school board group. A list suggesting old-fashioned Catholics were extremists from a liberal watchdog on hate speech.

Jason Foster, an ex-US Senate investigator and current Empower Oversight operative who represents FBI whistleblowers, is being generous:

They [the FBI] need to have an understanding that there are folks out there that are looking to manipulate them for political purposes, and every time they fall for it, they’re damaging the reputation of the FBI in a way that is fundamentally harmful to not only the FBI, but to the country[.]

No, there’s no misunderstanding here. The FBI selects very carefully, and FBI personnel are some of the smartest people in our nation. FBI personnel understand very clearly what they’re doing, and far from being manipulated by Left-wing personages, these personnel are active in their ally-ship of the Left-wing.

There is no capability to recover the FBI; it cannot be restored to what it never had in the first place. The agency was untrustworthy under J Edgar Hoover, it never fully recovered, and its performance today would embarrass Hoover.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the Federal Bureau of Investigation needs to be disbanded and the law creating it completely rescinded.

Relocate the agency’s databases, forensics labs, and associated personnel to a newly created independent and small agency whose sole purpose is to maintain law enforcement databases and to conduct the forensics investigations and analyses requested by State and local law enforcement departments. The new agency should be located, in its entirety, in the middle of the US—central Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, for instance.

Transfer the line FBI agents to the Secret Service or the US Marshals Service, or to the private sector—out of Federal government employ—if they choose not to accept reassignment. Transfer every other member of the FBI and civilian employee of the FBI to the private sector—out of Federal government employ—with no option for other transfer.

“Prerogatives”

The Just the News lede lays the matter out clearly and in its most basic terms. In an article centered on FBI whistleblowers blowing the whistle on the FBI’s intrinsic political bias, that lede read

House Republicans think federal agencies have become a weapon against their own apolitical employees and the constitutional rights of Americans. House Democrats think House Republicans have become a weapon against the prerogatives of federal agencies.

There it is in stark terms. Republicans (not just House Republicans) and Conservatives strongly favor limited government. Progressive-Democrats (not just House Progressive-Democrats) and the Left generally strongly favor expansive government.

It doesn’t matter to those Progressive-Democrats and their Leftist supporters that the prerogatives of federal agencies are strictly limited by the bounds of the statutes that create those agencies and that then give them the frameworks within which they engage in their statutorily mandated and limited activities. Neither does it matter to them that the prerogatives of the Federal government are just as strictly limited by our Constitution, which strictly enumerates the powers of government in Article I, Section I, and then creates a wide and deep moat around those enumerated powers with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

The Republicans and Conservatives in the House, far from being a weapon against agency prerogatives, are finding their own voice as the voice of We the People, who as the sovereign in our nation determine what prerogatives our government and any of its agencies may (not can) have and for how long.