[Free Beacon] The House intelligence committee will soon receive top-secret documents that investigators expect to reveal whether private communications of the president-elect and his transition team were improperly gathered.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), chairman of the oversight panel, is pressing ahead with an investigation into unauthorized disclosures of intelligence that revealed the identities of Americans inadvertently caught up in foreign electronic surveillance, congressional aides said.
Nunes this week brushed off harsh Democratic-led criticism of recent briefings he gave to President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) based on disclosures of improper electronic spying provided by an intelligence community whistleblower.
Documents shown to Nunes revealed what appears to be electronic spying on communications of the Trump presidential transition team, including the president-elect, between November and January during a foreign spying operation.
House Democrats and major news outlets have ignored or downplayed the alarming assertions of unauthorized spying and leaks of highly classified electronic intelligence.
Instead, critics who in the past have decried unauthorized electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency have focused on unconfirmed allegations of Russian government collusion with Trump aides during the 2016 election.
#1
House Democrats and major news outlets have ignored or downplayed the alarming assertions of unauthorized spying and leaks of highly classified electronic intelligence.
"Alarming assertions"... or what very soon may become indisputable facts.
Will we soon learn that NSA conducted the collection but Klingon Director Brennan provided the dissemination? The unauthorized release really is the key.
Mr. Barry Soetoro to the white courtesy phone please. Mr. Barry Soetoro.
[WND] WASHINGTON ‐ It didn’t take long for a buzz of electricity to crackle through the glorified shoebox that is the White House press briefing room. It was the news they’d all been waiting to hear.
Network reporters jumped on boxes to do live reports breathlessly passing on the news: The New York Times had just dropped a bombshell. And then they all proceeded to miss the lead.
That was likely because the Times itself had buried the lead 10 paragraphs below the headline, which read: "2 White House Officials Helped Give Nunes Intelligence Reports."
However, the tenth paragraph read: "But the officials’ description of the intelligence is in line with Mr. Nunes’s own characterization of the material."
In other words, the New York Times’ own sources confirmed that the way House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., had described the information in key classified documents was accurate.
And what Nunes had seen may prove President Trump’s claim that former President Obama spied on him and his transition team.
h/t Instapundit
The Senate Intelligence Committee turned down the request by former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's lawyer for a grant of immunity in exchange for his testimony, two congressional sources told NBC News.
A senior congressional official with direct knowledge said Flynn's lawyer was told it was "wildly preliminary" and that immunity was "not on the table" at the moment. A second source said the committee communicated that it is "not receptive" to Flynn's request "at this time."
The Drug Enforcement Administration seized more than $4 billion in cash from people suspected of drug activity over the last decade, but $3.2 billion of those seizures were never connected to any criminal charges. Good work if you can get it
A report by the Justice Department Inspector General released Wednesday found that the DEA's gargantuan amount of cash seizures often didn't relate to any ongoing criminal investigations, and 82 percent of seizures it reviewed ended up being settled administratively‐that is, without any judicial review‐raising civil liberties concerns.
In total, the Inspector General reports the DEA seized $4.15 billion in cash since 2007, accounting for 80 percent of all Justice Department cash seizures. Those figures do not include other property, such as cars and electronics, which are favorite targets for seizure by law enforcement. Enriching themselves at the plebe's expense.
All of this is possible through civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement to seize property if they suspect it's connected to criminal activity, without having to file criminal charges against the owner. While law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture is a vital tool to disrupt drug traffickers and organized crime, the Inspector General's findings echo the concerns of many civil liberties groups, which say asset forfeiture creates perverse incentives for law enforcement to seize property. Civil asset forfeiture is one of the biggest tools our corrupt government uses to basically steal from its population. A sad part of the failed war on Insert stupid idea here
"When seizure and administrative forfeitures do not ultimately advance an investigation or prosecution, law enforcement creates the appearance, and risks the reality, that it is more interested in seizing and forfeiting cash than advancing an investigation or prosecution," the Inspector General warned.
Darpana Sheth, an attorney for the libertarian-leaning nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice, said in a statement that the report's findings "fundamentally undercut law enforcement's claim that civil forfeiture is a vital crime-fighting tool." Vital for their pocket book
"Americans are already outraged at the Justice Department's aggressive use of civil forfeiture, which has mushroomed into a multibillion dollar program in the last decade," she continued. "This report only further confirms what we have been saying all along: Forfeiture laws create perverse financial incentives to seize property without judicial oversight and violate due process." End the ability to seize without charges, reduce significantly or eliminate most of these rogue agencies and end the stupid war on all fucking things. Maybe, just maybe we'll get a partially honest government again.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Free Beacon] The House intelligence committee will soon receive top-secret documents that investigators expect to reveal whether private communications of the president-elect and his transition team were improperly gathered.
The Drug Enforcement Administration seized more than $4 billion in cash from people suspected of drug activity over the last decade, but $3.2 billion of those seizures were never connected to any criminal charges.
