Tag Archives: government

FISA Revamp

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Congress may be moving to revamp the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which among other things, creates a secret Federal court that empirically allows the Federal government to spy on American citizens in the United States—one of whom was a representative of citizens of Illinois whom they had elected to Congress—without a warrant.

[Congressman Austin, R-GA] Scott said lawmakers on the committee want to address who in government can query the database, who can be targeted and who must sign off on such warrantless surveillance. He also suggested there is some support for adding lawyers to the secretive process to help defend the rights of Americans who are being surveilled without their knowledge.

The problem with those first three…suggestions…is that there already are limits on who can query, who can be targeted, and who must sign off, and each of those limits have been routinely violated by FBI and intelligence personnel. There’s no reason to believe that new limits won’t similarly be blithely ignored.

The problem with that last is even larger: the secret process still would be secret, the lawyers supposedly defending the targeted Americans’ rights would be secret, they would be appointed by the same government that has been abusing FISA surveillance powers right along, and there would be no way for us American citizens to assess the skill with which those “defense” lawyers defend, or even their level of zeal.

It’s promising that there is finally a recognition that the FISA process is flawed in some way.

However, what’s truly required is to abolish altogether the Star Chamber that is the secret FISA Court. Scott made the case for abolishment—although he didn’t intend that—when he told JtN that there was clear evidence that the law’s past safeguards have been breached by the FBI and intel agencies. Given that, there’s no reason to believe those FBI and intel agency personnel won’t “breach” any new safeguards, also.

Terrorists in the Mix

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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

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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

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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

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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.