First USAG to be held in contempt of Congress has an opinion of something.

First USAG to be held in contempt of Congress has an opinion of something. 🤔 https://t.co/dKdYLZEp1l

— Aslan's Friend (@N9ZF) July 1, 2018

This is the reason the swamp creatures are fighting so hard.

They don't call them the Ruling Class for nothing.

Via the Daily Mail

Attorney General and FBI chief spend $11MILLION flying in luxury jets bought for counter-terrorism missions between 2007 and 2011

Attorney General Eric Holder, his predecessors Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzales, and FBI director Robert Mueller went on nearly 700 'non-mission' trips over the period

The bulk of the flights were taken on the FBI's two Gulfstream V jets and cost on average $16,285

Luxury jets were bought to be used for conducting a variety of counter-terrorism, intelligence, and criminal surveillance activities

A quarter of the pricey 'non-mission' travel was personal, though the officials paid back a fraction of the cost on these occasions

This is the sort of thing that comes with reaching the top of the swamp. You get to ride around in limos and jets at the taxpayer's expense, without having to do any real work. 

Mueller, Comey and Rosenstein implicated in Russian bribery investigation

All this occurred while Obama was president, and Holder was Attorney General.

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews....

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

And:

This was known early in the Obama administration, but Holder’s Department of Justice hushed up Russia’s crimes and hid the scandal.

Ironies abound: who supervised the Russia investigation? Rod Rosenstein. Who was the FBI director when the Russia probe began in 2009? Robert Mueller. Who was running the FBI when the case ended with a whimper and an apparent cover-up? James Comey. How any of these people can participate with a straight face in an investigation into President Trump’s purportedly nefarious (but, as far as we know, nonexistent) relationship with the Russian regime is beyond me.

This story belongs on the front pages of every newspaper in the country. But it won't be for the same reason that everyone in the press knew that Harvey Weistein was a pervert and a rapist. He was a Democrat and the role of the Press is to provide cover for Democrats.

Law enforcement as it was practiced.

This Is Why Real people Hate the Media - and Rightly So.

Sonny Bunch at the Washington Free Beacon..

As a decadent Beltway establishment RINO in good standing, I have to say: I don’t really have a problem with the White House Correspondents Dinner as a concept. [The way it's a meet-and-greet opportunity for the Ruling Class] Still. The parties beforehand, the parties after, mingling with people you would otherwise never get a chance to mingle with, hearing the president tell a few jokes. Good times!

However. Treating this evening as if it’s something the rest of the country should care about is, at best, tone deaf. Does anyone really care if the president tells a joke to a room filled with journalists who wish they were pretty enough to be celebrities and celebrities who wish they were smart enough to hold forth on the political issues of the day? Of course not. [The assumption that "journalists" are smart is one of those bits of self-puffery that's self-evidently stupid]

Which brings me to last night, when CNN was providing red carpet coverage (!) and interviewing president Obama’s joke writers and former body men while Baltimore—a city that’s about a half-hour away from D.C., sans traffic—burned. [It didn't burn, it was just a good old fashioned race riot brought to you by Obama/Holder] ...

Those of us who saw, say, this:

It’s a CNN host telling the audience to go f—k itself if they want to get news about riots in Baltimore, that they can check out local news reports or hop on Twitter to find out what was going on or wait until the morning. They were going to stick on “most powerful man in the world” who was going to tell some (awful) jokes.

Justice corrupted

Daniel Henninger begins his piece on Eric Holder thusly:

History will ill-serve Eric Holder if it does no more than echo the view common in the wake of his resignation that his tenure as Attorney General was "controversial." Mr. Holder's more than five years as the nation's chief legal officer were consequential.

In tandem with Barack Obama 's White House, Mr. Holder pushed the authority of the federal government and its administrative agencies beyond the edge of the Constitution and law. They did so not in one or several controversial instances, as with past presidencies, but repeatedly and across the breadth of the federal government.

Holder’s official duties are to be the country’s chief law enforcement officer. In reality he was Obama’s “enforcer.” He was there to give a legal gloss to what Obama wanted done. In many cases what Obama wanted Holder to do was nothing.  To hold the line, to hide the truth, to obstruct justice.  He was the goalie past whom no investigation of corruption or malfeasance was allowed to pass. He was Obama’s “stone wall.”

But he had help in what he did: the Democrats in Congress. When the cover-up surrounding the Watergate break-in was revealed, members of Richard Nixon’s own party went to the White House to tell the President that he should resign or face impeachment. These men put the country ahead of their party. Nixon, rather than fight impeachment in the House and a trial in the Senate, resigned, sparing the country much trauma and a Constitutional crisis. There is reason to think that Nixon could have taken the route that Clinton did years later, with the same effect. The Republicans who went to the White House to confront Nixon - the Republican Senate and House leadership - also understood their critical responsibilities assigned to them by the Constitution.  They were the checks and balances.  Congress was there not just to make laws but to make sure that the President did not overstep his bounds.  They viewed Congress as a separate and co-equal branch of government, transcending party loyalty. The Senate under the leadership of Democrat Harry Reid is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Obama administration. Without Reid and Pelosi, Holder could not hold the line. It is inconceivable that any action by Obama could cause a Democrat revolt. To take an extreme example, can anyone see Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi confronting Obama if he would announce that, because of a national emergency, the election of 2016 will be postponed indefinitely?

The comparison of Obama to Nixon is apt because both Presidents committed unconstitutional acts. But only one paid a price for it. Compare Eric Holder to John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General. Because Mitchell aided Nixon in attempting to cover up Watergate he was indicted and sent to prison. Unless there is a dramatic change of attitude by Democrats in Congress, Holder will never be held to account for helping Obama obstruct justice in, for example, the IRS scandal or Fast & Furious. I put the onus on Democrats because it is difficult to imagine Republican leaders such as John Boehner or Mitch McConnell having the will or courage to stand up against the Democrats or (in Glenn Reynolds' memorable phrase) the "Democrats with bylines" in the media.

When you realize that the thing that separates us from a South American caudillo-style government is not the constitution, but lethargy on the part of the President, you become worried about the future.

Eric Holder, Living Like A Billionaire On Your Dime

Eric Holder wanted to see the third leg of the Triple Crown of horse racing recently, the Belmont Stakes. Taking along his bodyguards, two daughters and their boyfriends.


Holder, family and friends boarded a government owned Gulfstream V and flew to Elmont, NY.

Gulfstream V is an all-weather, long-range, high speed aircraft powered by two Rolls-Royce BR 710-A2 turbofan engines with thrust reversers. The aircraft has an executive compartment with accommodations for six passengers and a staff compartment with accommodations for eight passengers.

The trip cost you, the taxpayer, $14,400. It cost Holder $955. That $955 was the coach airfare for his family and friends.  Here is what the government rule (A-126)  says about the use of government aircraft and, specifically, reimbursement.

Full coach fare means a coach fare available to the general public between the day that the travel was planned and the day the travel occurred.

That looked like a pretty good deal on airfare, so I decided to check what it would cost me to fly from Washington, DC to JFK Airport (near Elmont, NY) round trip the same day.   The lowest discounted airfare I found via Kayak  was $401 per person which meant that Holder should have paid $1604 for his daughters and their dates.

Or he could have watched the race on TV and save you, the taxpayer, $13,445.  But when you're $17 trillion dollars in debt, what difference, at this point, does it make?

H/T The Daily Caller

NIXON WAS A PIKER.

IRS: Lois Lerner's emails likely gone forever...




HARD DRIVES DESTROYED

What are your going to do. He can't be impeached, he's half Black.

An FBI Just As Tainted And Untrustworthy As The IRS

The FBI was once regarded as America's best law enforcement organization; professional, non-political and clean.  Oh sure, there were cases that blemished their escutcheon - the FBI crime lab is an example - but you were not supposed to fear the FBI if your politics was either Liberal or Conservative.

No longer.

The FBI says it won't prosecute anyone at the IRS for its admitted targeting of the president's political foes. This just as the agency claims the law is no longer its main mission. So it's a political goon squad now.

According to a leak to the Wall Street Journal, the Federal Bureau of Investigation "didn't find the kind of political bias or 'enemy hunting' that would amount to a violation of criminal law." And so, nobody was likely to be prosecuted for the most blatant politicization of a federal agency within memory.

All the Bureau found was a "mismanaged" agency that enforced rules "it didn't understand." In other words, nothing to see here, move along.

That's strange stuff for an agency whose most implicated regulator, Lois Lerner, invoked her Fifth Amendment rights against self incrimination in congressional testimony last year. That she came to congressional attention was only because of her calculated announcement that the IRS had in fact targeted Tea Party groups for special scrutiny — that's right, admitted to breaking the law — in a preemptive attempt to paint her abuse of power as a customer service problem.

Her minions lied that it was only the work of low-level bureaucratic bumblers in Cincinnati. And after that sleazy string of favors that coincidentally benefited her president, she was permitted to retire on a full pension.

The reality is, the acts reeked of political targeting, the most illegal of acts, a corrupt use of government power, and a worthy target of checks and balances provided by the FBI in the name of law and order.

But for some reason, the FBI has neither interviewed the Tea Party activists targeted for intrusive scrutiny, nor has it noticed anything amiss in light of the White House's rabid attacks on Tea Party activists. It hasn't noticed the Tea Party's demonstrable political strength in its large gatherings during the most intense period of its political targeting, nor noted the president's record of "joking" about investigating political opponents.

I wonder how the FBI agents at the local level feel about this?   How does the field FBI agent feel about being part of a political goon squad?

OBAMA DONOR TO HEAD IRS TEA PARTY TARGETING INVESTIGATION

Via Breitbart

Rep. Issa noted that current and former IRS officials revealed Barbara Bosserman, a trial attorney within the IRS's Civil Rights Commission, is leading the internal investigation.

Bosserman's leadership raises all sorts of questions about the investigation's fairness. Rep. Issa's investigations revealed that she has been a loyal financial backer of the DNC since 2004 and has donated multiple times personally to President Obama's two campaigns. Her personal donation total reaches $6,750 to both the party and President Obama.

So what are members of Congress going to do about it?

Armed agents seize records of reporter, Washington Times prepares legal action

At one time the news media would be outraged.  Freedom of the press and all that.  Today it's either ignored or applauded by those same people.

Maryland state police and federal agents used a search warrant in an unrelated criminal investigation to seize the private reporting files of an award-winning former investigative journalist for The Washington Times who had exposed problems in the Homeland Security Department's Federal Air Marshal Service.

Reporter Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for Homeland's Coast Guard service, took her private notes and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of her family home on Aug. 6.

How many questions will paid liar Jay Carney get about this at the next White House press briefing?  Any?  Will there be outrage?  Wanna bet?  And what can the courts do?  Who will enforce a court order against this administration? 

The documents, some which chronicled her sources and her work at the Times about problems inside the Homeland Security Department, were seized under a warrant to search for unregistered firearms and a “potato gun” suspected of belonging to her husband, Paul Flanagan, a Coast Guard employee. Mr. Flanagan has not been charged with any wrongdoing since the raid.

The warrant, obtained by the Times, offered no specific permission to seize reporting notes or files.

It sounds like the American Gestapo used a bogus search warrant to seize her files and identify whistleblowers.  It's the Chicago way.  Would you be a whistleblower if you worked for the government and saw wrongdoing, knowing that your press contacts can have their records seized using a search warrant for some unrelated subject? 

 

Here's a thought, whistleblowers.  Use the "new" media.  Leak to Rush Limbaugh (use his e-mail) or Glenn Reynolds or any other blogger, even me.  It will eventually even get into the old government-loving press and your tracks will be covered.  And if it doesn't, it will get around to anyone with a computer or a radio and that means just about everybody.  That's how it's done in other repressive countries.  

Glenn Reynolds comments:

It’ll be interesting to see how other media organizations respond to this rather Putinesque episode.

If they ignore it Glenn, it will tell you a lot. If they don't ignore it, how the Obama administration reacts will tell you even more. Congressional hearings were once a way of bringing a wayward administration to heel.  The hearings before Congress during the Obama administration have seen a long line of witnesses that have both stonewalled and shown a level of contempt for Congress that is unprecedented in my lifetime. Does anyone really think that Eric Holder will prosecute any miscreant in this administration? Holder's job is to protect Obama by any means necessary.

Holder loses court fight fight to hide "Fast & Furious" documents

The illegal gun running operation intended to  "prove" that US gun laws are responsible for Mexican violence, often and incorrectly referred to by the lackeys in the media as a "botched" operation, may see some more damning evidence of high Department of Justice collusion if Holder loses the suit and complies with the court order.  Of course he will not, not without a fight. 

In a ruling Monday night, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson turned down the Justice Department’s request to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after President Barack Obama asserted executive privilege to prevent some records about the administration’s response to the “Operation Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal from being turned over to Congress.

The order will not force Holder to produce the documents, however, since it only says that the court will not dismiss the lawsuit. Now it can go forward, meaning that Holder can let the clock run down.

What is frustrating is that this political operation lead to the deaths of thousands of Mexicans, killed by American guns just to "prove" a lie and designed to pass laws restricting American's right to buy guns. There is a tremendous amount of blood on Holder and his boss - Obama's - hands and the Democrats - in and out of the media - are fine with it. The government has killed a lot of people over the years, some by accident and some with malice, but I don't recall a US government operation that was deliberately designed to kill thousands of people for political purposes, to gin up outrage so that a law would be passed limiting a right of a free people.

Holder and FBI admit lying about data released before election last year

More Obama administration lies.

In their efforts to promote the re-election of Barack Obama, our nation’s premier law enforcement agencies presented false data to the American public about a “crackdown” on mortgage fraud. Fox News reports:

The Justice Department and FBI have quietly acknowledged they grossly overstated the scope of a mortgage fraud crackdown, which the administration heralded with much fanfare a few weeks before last year’s presidential election.

According to a memo circulated by the FBI and a correction posted online by the Justice Department, the number of defendants, the number of victims and the size of the losses are, in reality, a fraction of what officials claimed last October.

Attorney General Eric Holder and other law enforcement officials claimed in early October that the initiative charged 530 criminal defendants on behalf of 73,000 victims who suffered over $1 billion in losses. The so-called Distressed Homeowner Initiative, which targeted fraud schemes against distressed homeowners, was highlighted in a press release and press conference at the time.

Holder, talking to the cameras on Oct. 9, called it “a groundbreaking, year-long mortgage fraud enforcement effort.”

The real numbers, it turns out, were far smaller. The feds now admit that the number of criminal defendants charged was more like 107, not 530. The number of victims was 17,185 — still a large number, but roughtly one fourth the size of the original headcount. And the losses totaled $95 million — not $1 billion, as originally claimed.

The mortgage meltdown of 2008, which served (and continues to serve) as a bludgeon for Democrats to blame George W. Bush, Republicans, and free markets for all the economic misery stands as one of the great, deceptive propaganda triumphs of American history. The low and medium information voting public does not know that banks were bludgeoned by regulators into giving mortgages to people who could not afford them. And now we have the admission that they were served up false information to make it appear as though Obama and the DoJ were doing something to improve things.

President Asterisk.

Holder says that Zimmerman can't have his gun back.

Not because he's guilty of murder, he was acquitted.  But it's "evidence."  Of what?  This is just harassment for the sake of appealing to  Holders "people" as he would put it. 

 

As a side note, Jay Carney made a snot nosed comment after he was asked by a 16 year old intern at the White House press briefing if the government was doing anything about protecting Zimmerman and his family in view of the widespread death threats they were receiving.   Much of the Obama Press Corps piled on to young man.  "You can't ask questions, this is the press room."

US Government Reveals Criminal Conspiracy Against Christine O’Donnell.

The phone message earlier this year shocked the battled-scarred candidate, a tea party favorite who knocked off Republican mainstay Michael Castle in the primary before losing in a bid to win Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s former seat.

“Ms. O'Donnell, this is Dennis Martel, special agent with the U.S. Department of Treasury in Baltimore, Md. … We received information that your personal federal tax info may have been compromised and may have been misused by an individual,” he said in the January message left on her cellphone.

For Ms. O'Donnell, the message immediately raised red flags.

On March 9, 2010, the day she revealed her plan to run for the Senate in a press release, a tax lien was placed on a house purported to be hers and publicized. The problem was she no longer owned the house. The IRS eventually blamed the lien on a computer glitch and withdrew it.

Now Mr. Martel, a criminal investigator for the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration, was telling her that an official in Delaware state government had improperly accessed her records on that very same day.

Now here's where it becomes a criminal conspiracy:

But the Justice Department has declined to prosecute any of the offenders. Treasury officials have refused to give Mr. Grassley any specifics on the cases or to describe the disposition of Ms. O'Donnell’s case, claiming even people who improperly access tax records have an assumption of privacy under federal tax laws.

Christine O’Donnell was mercilessly mocked and her candidacy was pummeled by everyone on the Left and in the media (but I repeat myself) including the Ruling Class in the Republican Party. But she was apparently considered enough of a threat to have her tax records searched by political criminals.

So what’s a private citizen to do when their tax records are illegally searched and they are told about it, but nothing will be done?

“Hi, I’m from the IRS. We let somebody comb through your tax records looking for damaging information. Oh, no, we’re not going to tell you who it is. Have to protect their privacy. And we’re not going to do anything about it. Have a nice day.”

Team Obama is a corrupt Southern Sheriff in the Jim Crow South … in blackface.

HOLDER ORDERS SKYPE TO ALLOW NSA SURVEILLANCE

Via Slate

June 2008: Skype, while owned by eBay, goes on record saying it can’t help law enforcement agencies eavesdrop on users’ conversations because of its “peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques.”


[Unknown month, 2008: Secretly, Skype initiates an internal program called “Project Chess” to explore how it could make Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials, according to the New York Times.]


September 2009: Skype is purchased by an investor group including two U.S. private equity firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz in partnership with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.


[November 2010: Work begins on integrating Skype into the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program, according to the Guardian.]


[Feb. 4, 2011: Skype is served with a directive to comply with NSA surveillance signed by the U.S. attorney general, according to the Guardian.] [That would be Attorney General Eric Holder]


[Feb. 6, 2011: Skype joins the PRISM program and the NSA begins spying on Skype calls. The agency reports that "feedback indicated that a collected Skype call was very clear and the metadata looked complete," according to the Guardian and the Washington Post.]


May 2011: Microsoft announces it is purchasing Skype for $8.5 billion.


June 2011: Microsoft obtains a patent for “legal intercept” technology designed to be used with services like Skype to “silently copy” communications.


[July 2012: The NSA boasts that a new capability has tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through PRISM, according to the Guardian.]


July 20, 2012: Skype refuses to answer repeated questions about whether it can or cannot comply with government surveillance.


July 26, 2012: Skype’s Mark Gillett writes a blog post dismissing media reports about Skype eavesdropping, which he says “we believe are inaccurate.”


March 2013: Microsoft publishes a transparency report claiming that it handed over the content of zero Skype communications in 2012. The company also claims that “Skype continues to operate under Luxembourg law.”


June/July 2013: The Guardian, the Washington Post, and the New York Times expose the extent of Skype’s collaboration with the U.S. government on surveillance.

Slate makes Microsoft the focus, completely ignores Eric Holder's key involvement.

Holder misses deadline to clear up testimony on reporter surveillance

Attorney General Eric Holder has missed the deadline set by Republicans to personally explain questionable testimony he gave on reporter surveillance, as lawmakers threaten to subpoena Holder if necessary.

Holder: "... a howling conflict of interest."

How does Holder survive?

Michael A. Walsh calls him Obama's alter ego. Holder says and does things that the president can't say.

By turns whiny, shifty, obfuscatory, petulant, insulting and arrogant, Holder has become a fixture before congressional investigating committees, fending off one Obama scandal after another, while proclaiming that he — the nation’s top cop — doesn’t know anything about anything and highly resents any implication that he does.

Indeed, all the Obama scandals — the murderous gunrunning scheme called Fast and Furious, the secret monitoring of the Associated Press and Fox News reporter James Rosen (personally approved by Holder), even the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups for special scrutiny — find their nexus at the top of the Justice Department.

That's true but there is a much bigger reason. Holder is more than Obama's trigger man, he's holding Obama up. There are too many bodies buried by Holder to allow someone else, perhaps with a higher threshold of corruption, to take over Justice. Obama can't take the chance that the truth of Fast and Furious, the IRS, the internal spying, come out during his administration.

Without Holder, Obama becomes vulternable to the law. Glenn Reynolds: Holder is also protection

Breaking: Holder Justice Department Also Tapped House of Representatives Cloak Room

From the Hugh Hewitt show.

HH: The idea that this might be a Geithner-Axelrod plan, and by that, the sort of intimation, Henry II style, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest, will no one rid me of these turbulent Tea Parties, that might have just been a hint, a shift of an eyebrow, a change in the tone of voice. That’s going to take a long time to get to. I don’t trust the Department of Justice on this. Do you, Congressman Nunes?

DN: No, I absolutely do not, especially after this wiretapping incident, essentially, of the House of Representative. I don’t think people are focusing on the right thing when they talk about going after the AP reporters. The big problem that I see is that they actually tapped right where I’m sitting right now, the Cloak Room.

HH: Wait a minute, this is news to me.

DN: The Cloak Room in the House of Representatives.

HH: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

DN: So when they went after the AP reporters, right? Went after all of their phone records, they went after the phone records, including right up here in the House Gallery, right up from where I’m sitting right now. So you have a real separation of powers issue that did this really rise to the level that you would have to get phone records that would, that would most likely include members of Congress, because as you know…

HH: Wow.