What needs to happen when we have the actual hearing on January 6. As you know, the Democrats had their to do about nothing hearing. A left wing love fest that picked seven people who voted for impeachment. Well it actually proved that the left could pick a bunch of biased loons. Nothing else.
Now if the Republicans have a hearing, it should be titled. What really happened and can we please indict the actual criminal? Start off by making an open apology for the last hearing.
Call all the previous committee members plus Pelosi and Schumer. And call the rogue cop and find out why he murdered an unarmed female. I rest my case.
Fidelity - to whom? Bravery - Where? Integrity - Not in years
If only the Federal Bureau of Instigation could find these MOST WANTED in itself
The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.
“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement.“As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.”
Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda.
The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves,” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”
The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The FBI is now, tragically, in a freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.
Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was.
Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself.
While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember, could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax.
Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election.
Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.
Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified.
While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:
As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.
McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.
Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists.
Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”
Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints=—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes.
The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution.
Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s own admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.
Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information.
The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year-old-law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions.
During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed.
Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper.
Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.
The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s own preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.
In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.”
Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy” means of denying Trump the presidency:
I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.
When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.
To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”
“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,” Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.
What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, or mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers?
What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor?
What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence?
What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists?”
The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden Administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption.
Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.
Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI.
There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau.
The three reforms most commonly suggested include: 1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections; 2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or 3) break-up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas.
The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes.
The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax.
Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics. ✪
WASHINGTON, DC – Senate Judiciary Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-IA). (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has neglected to provide in full certain disclosures requested by members of the U.S. Senate relating to the department’s growing role in “counter-disinformation” activities, and this failure is particularly egregious in light of the co-equal roles of the executive and legislative branches of the government, two senators have charged in a Dec. 15 letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) charge the DHS with ignoring or downplaying their “serious concerns” about the DHS’s “growing counter-disinformation efforts” as conveyed previously in a letter of June 7, which formally requested “information necessary to inform our congressional oversight of DHS activities.”
Partly or completely redacted
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has neglected to provide in full certain disclosures requested by members of the U.S. Senate relating to the department’s growing role in “counter-disinformation” activities, and this failure is particularly egregious in light of the co-equal roles of the executive and legislative branches of the government, two senators have charged in a Dec. 15 letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) charge the DHS with ignoring or downplaying their “serious concerns” about the DHS’s “growing counter-disinformation efforts” as conveyed previously in a letter of June 7, which formally requested “information necessary to inform our congressional oversight of DHS activities.”
The senators are deeply concerned about the DHS’s admitted plans to ramp up its efforts to play a role in monitoring and mediating MDM, a common acronym for “mis-, dis-, and mal-information,” disseminated through social media, on topics as varied as the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, race relations in America, and the hasty U.S. pullout from Afghanistan in August 2021.
According to the senators, the DHS’s response to their June 7 letter, which was dated June 29, did not answer any of the ten questions they had posed in their June 7 communication.
Even more seriously, the DHS included with its June 29 letter three “document productions” supposedly intended to allay the senators’ concerns, but the first of these contained documents already in the public domain, and the third featured some 500 pages of information, half of which was partly or completely redacted.
“Based on our review of this material, it appears that many of the redactions are applied to pre-decisional and deliberative process material,” the senators write, before going on to remind Mayorkas that they have advanced their requests as sitting members of Congress whom DHS cannot legally ignore or blow off, given the separate and co-equal character of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches comprising the U.S. federal government.
The Freedom of Information Act applies neither to the requests nor to DHS’s procedures in protocols in responding to them, and the redaction of content—as DHS might do in response to a journalist’s request for information—is not appropriate here, the senators contend.
The senators also take DHS to task for complaining, in its letter of June 29, about Congress’s having made documents available to the senators without getting approval from DHS.
Here, too, Grassley and Hawley charge DHS with having misconstrued the nature of its relationship to other branches and having falsely assumed that DHS enjoys the right to apply executive branch designations such as “Predecisional,” “Deliberative,” and “For Official Use Only,” and thereby limit what documents and materials the senators may obtain by means of lawful whistleblower disclosures and oversight requests. In the case referenced in DHS’s June 29 letter, the senators state they did not unconditionally release all the material provided to them and included limited redactions of their own where appropriate.
“We make such decisions independently, based on our assessment of what will be in the best interest of transparency and the public interest. Moreover, DHS should learn a lesson in accountability and transparency when patriotic whistleblowers provide full and complete records in contrast to DHS failing to follow that standard and instead providing improperly redacted records,” Grassley and Hawley write.
Overstepping Bounds
The senators convey their considerable “alarm” at public reports that illuminate DHS’s growing role in “counter-disinformation activities.”
“These efforts stretch well beyond DHS’s seriously misguided effort to establish a Disinformation Governance Board (DGB),” they write, pointing to a document prepared by Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and released by The Intercept, which states that “CISA has a burgeoning MDM effort” that includes “directly engaging with social media companies to flag MDM.”
The same Intercept article also quotes a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review stating that in coming years DHS will aggressively combat what it sees as bogus information on a range of topics including “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
The senators conclude by making two formal requests to Mayorkas, namely, full and complete answers to all questions raised in the senators’ June 7 letter, along with unredacted copies of the documents provided in DHS’s initial response; and a detailed account of DHS’s policy for replying to congressional oversight requests, specifying how DHS makes decisions about redacting material that members of Congress have asked for.
Raphael Warnock’s campaign called US Veteran and homeless advocate Dom Lucre this weekend and asked him to vote for far left Senator Warnock in the December runoff election. Dom Lucre lives in Tennessee.
And Dom recorded the entire call. The caller had the nerve to feed Dom the liberal lies about Republicans and their power and dark money, blah-blah-blah… Dom shot back that Democrats control everything. They control Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the media and all Republicans have is FOX News.
In a country where the authorities valued integrity, honesty, and fairness, this call would immediately be investigated and Warnock’s campaign would be punished. But we don’t have that today in the United States. You can commit any criminal act of voter fraud if you are a Democrat and it will not even be investigated.
Liz Wheeler wrote, “If Apple & Google boot Twitter from their app stores, @elonmusk should produce his own smartphone. Half the country would happily ditch the biased, snooping iPhone & Android. The man builds rockets to Mars, a silly little smartphone should be easy, right?” https://twitter.com/Liz_Wheeler/status/1596222793388945408?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1596268804413476864%7Ctwgr%5Eff8546a879b1ae3687ce73fc28500373ecc27f4d%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthepostmillennial.com%2Fbreaking-elon-musk-says-he-will-make-an-alternative-phone-if-apple-google-ban-twitter
Musk replied, “I certainly hope it does not come to that, but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone.”
On Friday, Taylor Lorenz used her latest column in the Washington Post to call for Apple and Google app stores to pull Twitter from their stores. This came after Musk announced that there will be a general amnesty for all banned accounts, following a poll of Twitter users..
Lorenz complains that Musk brought back conservative Christian satire site The Babylon Bee, who was banned by noting that Rachel Levine is a biological male. After Time Magazine awarded Levine “woman of the year,” The Babylon Bee awarded Levine “man of the year.”
On November 18, Musk noted how Apple and Google through their vertical integration have a duopoly on the market and wrote, “App store fees are obviously too high due to the iOS/Android duopoly. It is a hidden 30 percent tax on the Internet.”
“Responding to misinformation is my day job. My night job is RUNNING ELECTIONS.” – CISA document 6/22/22. Name redacted, emphasis added.
Here is a disturbing story. It demonstrates intrigue, corruption, and disdain for American principles at the highest level.
Perhaps the saddest thing about this story is that you probably won’t be surprised. Especially if you’ve been paying attention for the past few years.
The story is this: Twitter and other social media platforms have been cozy with the Department of Homeland Security to squelch what DHS calls “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation,” or “MDM,” according to an investigative report published Monday by The Intercept.
Job one for Musk was to not only fire CEO Parag Agrawal but also Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and the individual responsible for booting former President Donald Trump off the platform and for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election.
You probably remember a few months ago when DHS rolled out what it called its Disinformation Governance Board, designed to go after “MDM” on social media. A firestorm of bad publicity meant the Biden administration had to quickly yank it offstage.
But the concept is still around and Gadde has been part of it.
Gadde is a member of an advisory committee of the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). In June, the committee put out a report that essentially outlined a need to get around the First Amendment to stop “MDM” since it “poses a significant risk to critical functions like elections, public health, financial services and emergency response.”
Also, The Intercept reported on DHS documents saying the agency is going after “MDM” on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
In other words, DHS wants to push the Biden administration’s line on many of the controversies Americans might be discussing on social media, and attack or suppress other views that oppose it.
And Twitter has been right there in the middle of it.
Lee Fang, one of the authors of The Intercept article, tweeted that Gadde had met monthly with DHS to discuss censorship and, along with Facebook, Twitter “created special portals for the government to rapidly request takedowns of content.”
The emails and documents show close collaboration b/w DHS & private sector. Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde (fired by @elonmusk last week) met monthly with DHS to discuss censorship plans. Microsoft exec texted DHS: “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t”
In March, top officials of Twitter and JPMorgan Chase met with Laura Dehmlow, section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Dehmlow said subversive information on the internet could undercut support for the U.S. government, according to notes of the meeting reported by The Intercept.
In a statement for The Intercept report, a Twitter representative said the company does not “coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions,” following, rather, its own rules in such situations.
Still, Twitter joined other tech companies in monthly meetings with the FBI, CISA and other government agencies to determine how to handle misinformation leading up to the 2020 elections, according to NBC News.
In 2018, DHS began notifying social media companies of what it described as voting disinformation appearing on their platforms. The following year, DHS developed the Foreign Influence and Interference Branch which morphed in 2020 to track communication regarding COVID-19, The Intercept said.
Varied U.S. intelligence agencies moderated social media surrounding the 2020 election and leading up to the November voting there were regular emails among officials of Twitter, DHS and the Center for Internet Security regarding takedown procedures for social media postings.
And while the Disinformation Governance Board was scrapped, DHS in August published a document titled “DHS Needs a Unified Strategy to Counter Disinformation Campaigns.”
In it, DHS intones “such campaigns may aim to erode public trust in our government and the Nation’s critical infrastructure sectors, negatively affect public discourse, or even sway elections.”
Sway elections? You think? Hasn’t that been a major aim of Silicon Valley?
Of course, DHS does not address a key foundational principle which allows for pesky ideas that the Department of Homeland Security considers “MDM.”
It’s contained in the document that proclaims, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The Founders, ever conscious of man’s corruption, knew what’s now called “MDM” would be protected by the First Amendment, but, as in other parts of the Bill of Rights, they also knew liberty was more important than government convenience.
Twitter, as The Intercept report shows, clearly has been involved in the federal government’s attempts to outsource censorship and suppression of dissent.
Musk, Twitter’s new owner, has publicly declared himself to be a “free speech absolutist.”
Clearly, something has to give.
There’s no telling where the company will go now that Musk is in charge, but he was right about one of his first major personnel moves.
New York – In Richmond County Supreme Court, Judge Ralph Porzio, has ruled that the vaccine mandates issued by the New York City Health Commissioner are unconstitutional and violate the separation of powers.
The ruling permits city employees to return to work effective immediately and orders back pay.
According to attorney Chad Laveglia, the judge ruled “the commissioner’s order mandating private and public employees get vaccinated was arbitrary and capricious.”
“Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19,” the judge stated.
NY State Supreme Court reinstates all fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay, says the state violated rights, acted arbitrary & capricious, notes:“Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19.”https://t.co/nvOsWfa56Spic.twitter.com/WhH4wje2bQ
While Laveglia was representing members of the Dept. of Sanitation in New York (DSNY), this ruling will impact the FDNY, NYPD, Dept. of Corrections and all other city employees who were shut down and forced to resign for refusing to cave in to an experimental emergency use vaccine. The Gateway Pundit has previously reported on closures of firehouses in New York City that couldn’t remain open due to personnel shortages. The Gateway Pundit also reported on a mass exodus of NYPD officers; although this was not exclusively related to the vaccine, it does pose a serious problem when the department’s numbers were already impacted greatly by the forced resignations earlier on.
The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health; it was about compliance.
The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health; it was about compliance.
The defendants, of course, filed a Notice of Appeal. In New York, there are 62 courts, one for each county, representing the Supreme Court. Despite the name, the Supreme Court in New York is not the highest court. That position reigns with the New York Court of Appeals. It appears as though there is still the possibility of one last battle for the DSNY employees and Mr. Laveglia.
The City of New York is represented by the New York City Law Department. This means that the tax-payers of New York City are funding the fight to take away their own rights to work despite their personal decisions not to take an experimental vaccine that has numerous documented health implications in comparison to all other vaccines since the VAERS system began tracking adverse events.
“Did Supreme Court err in granting the petition, granting declaratory relief, and denying respondents’ cross-motion to dismiss, where, among other things, the petition is time-barred and the underlying employee vaccination requirements are entirely lawful and rational, as multiple courts have held”
In the decision from the Richmond Supreme Court, Judge Porizio writes:
“An administrative agency usurps the authority of the legislative branch when it promulgates a rule that the legislature did not delegate it the authority to make in the first instance“
As you read the following, specifically the bold print, remember that the New York City Law Department is expending tax payer dollars to appeal this decision while costing the DSNY employees exorbitant legal fees to fight the appeal. New York is no longer under a state of emergency, Joe Biden declared the pandemic over, and CDC guidelines for vaxxed vs unvaxxed are the same.
“It is clear that the Health Commissioner has the authority to issue public health mandates. No one is refuting that authority.
However, the Health Commissioner cannot create a new condition of employment for City employees. The Health Commissioner cannot prohibit an employee from reporting to work. The Health Commissioner cannot terminate employees. The Mayor cannot exempt certain employees from these orders. Executive Order No. 62 renders all of these vaccine mandates arbitrary and capricious. Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid19.
As of the day of this Decision, CDC guidelines regarding quarantine and isolation are the same for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. The Petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves. We have learned through the course of the pandemic that the vaccine against Covid-19 is not absolute. Breakthrough cases occur, even for those who have been vaccinated and boosted. President Joseph Biden has said that the pandemic is over. The State of New York ended the Covid-19 state of emergency over a month ago.
As this Court stated in its decision in the Rivicci matter, this is not a commentary on the efficacy of vaccination, but about how we are treating our first responders, the ones who worked day-to-day through the height of the pandemic.They worked without protective gear. They were infected with Covid-19, creating natural immunity. They continued working full duty while their exemption requests were pending. They were terminated and are willing to come back to work for the City that cast them aside.
The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health; it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for vaccination for all residents. In a City with a nearly 80% vaccination rate, we shouldn’t be penalizing the people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down.
pResident Joe Biden’s warning about a nuclear “Armageddon” drew a rebuke from French President Emmanuel Macron.
Biden was thought to be speaking ‘off the cuff’ when he said that Vladimir Putin was ‘not joking when he talks about the use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons,’ at the end of a Democratic fundraising event on Thursday night when he spoke of the potential for Russian leader Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons in his invasion of Ukraine. “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Biden said according to The New York Times.
He suggested the threat from Putin is real “because his military is — you might say — significantly underperforming.”
Macron said nuclear war is too delicate a subject to be spoken of carelessly, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
“We must speak with prudence when commenting on such matters,” he said.
“I have always refused to engage in political fiction, and especially … when speaking of nuclear weapons. On this issue, we must be very careful,” he said.
Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin had a response to Biden’s Thursday rumination about how Putin can be given an “off-ramp” to end the war.
“The way out of this conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine. That is the way out of the conflict,” she said.
European Council President Charles Michel said leaders there take “every escalation very seriously.”
“Threats will not intimidate us. Instead, we are going to remain calm. We are going to keep cool heads and we will, each time, denounce the irresponsible character of these threats,” he said, according to the Daily Mail.
Kori Schake, the foreign and defense policy studies director at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said Biden’s comment helped no one, according to the Washington Examiner.
“It undercuts deterrence for the president to sound anxious about Russian nuclear threats,” said Schake, a former National Security Council and State Department official, the outlet reported. “That incentivizes nuclear proliferation and encourages efforts at nuclear blackmail.”
Schake also said the time was not right for Biden to make an ad-lib about nuclear war.
“If he wants to prepare Americans for the danger, he shouldn’t do that via leaked off-the-record comments at a private political fundraiser; he should give a public national address,” she said.
Former national security adviser John Bolton also took issue with Biden’s comments, according to CBS News.
“I think any time we contemplate the potential use of nuclear weapons, we’ve got to take it seriously,” Bolton said, according to CBS. “But I also think we’ve got to be very clear-eyed about it. And I think the president’s comment overstated the gravity of the situation we’re in right now.
“I was particularly disturbed when he said, ‘you know, I can’t imagine the use of a tactical nuclear weapon that doesn’t lead to Armageddon.’ And it’s that chain of causality from one demonstration use of a tactical nuclear weapon that Vladimir Putin is currently threatening all the way up to an exchange of nuclear salvos between Russia and the United States,” he said.
“It is not inevitable. But Putin would like us to think it’s inevitable. He’d like to see people nervous. He’s trying to deter us. He has done this several times already after his invasion of Ukraine. He’s been bluffing each time. There is a risk here of the use of nuclear weapons.
“I don’t think we’re in the circumstances where it’s going to happen, although we watch it carefully,” he said. “But it’s very important for the West not to be deterred by Putin’s use of this nuclear threat.”
Bullet points:
Macron rebukes Biden over his warning that Putin could start ‘Armageddon’
White House tried to walk comments back and blamed “Russian irresponsibility”
US officials scrambled to assure allies they had no specific intel on Putin’s plans
Macron spoke of the need to speak with care on the nuclear threat from Putin
Finnish PM also rebuked Biden over his comments that Putin needs an ‘off ramp’
Is it a real news site -- or is it propaganda in disguise instead
Democrat operatives have set up websites disguised as innocent local news to disseminate leftist propaganda and boost blue candidates in swing states ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
As of October, Local Report Inc., an organization formed just last year, created more than 50 websites masquerading as online news media outlets to influence “local” coverage of key races and issues.
A closer look by Axios found that these sites are also associated with and sometimes even manned by writers from The American Independent, a progressive media group founded by the same Democrat operative, David Brock, who created the leftist propaganda machine Media Matters for America.
For those who remember, Media Matters for America trained a large group of individuals to troll and disrupt conservative websites during the runup to the 2016 presidential elections, and David Brock was behind it — TPR
The websites target voters in swing states such as Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin with stories that look like news but are actually designed to boost Democrats’ midterm priorities.
That includes amplifying pro-abortion candidates and their unpopular baby-killing agenda, celebrating Democrats’ embrace of the crisis-plagued Biden Administration, and penning hit pieces that target Republican candidates in tight races.
In some cases, Local Report’s websites went so far as to copy the work of other legitimate news organizations and were still rewarded with the attention of Democrats such as Stacey Abrams.
Not blaming @staceyabrams, but there are some issues here.
1. “The Columbus News/colonews.org” is not a Columbus, GA news source, and this website stole/didn’t properly credit my reporting. It’s also twisting the story a little. #gapolhttps://t.co/4rWDHx41Di
In fact, Axios reports that “Local Report stories have popped up in communications from the Democrat Parties of Georgia and Michigan, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state and independent political groups such as Color of Change and the Democratic Coalition.”
Kemp supports loan forgiveness for himself, but not for hardworking families — he had $38,000 in PPP loans forgiven and has gotten loans from a bank he has special connections to.
Why does Kemp not want working Georgians to get loan relief like he did?https://t.co/dnSgmERHpS
While serving in the state house “in the wake of the Michigan State University gymnastics scandal involving Larry Nassar,” @TudorDixon‘s right hand Shane Hernandez “repeatedly opposed bipartisan efforts to expand protections for sexual assault victims.”https://t.co/a2eMm60JLD
The 2020 election @JocelynBenson oversaw had MI’s highest voting rate in 60 years — largely because she sent absentee ballot applications to all registered voters to make voting safer during COVID-19.
By manufacturing “news” websites to influence voters, Local Report joins the efforts of other Democrat propaganda groups including the George Soros-linked Courier Newsroom, which prides itself on disguising leftist narratives as local news. The supervisor tasked with overseeing the launch of Courier admitted in a 2020 interview with Vice that “it’s more effective to create ‘news content’ than to simply run ads for Democratic causes.”
Seeing as Democrats’ top issues such as abortion and climate change aren’t faring well with voters, who are more concerned about inflation, economic recession, and rising crime, it’s no surprise that they feel the need to hide their shady campaigning behind inconspicuous sites.
Axios calls these actions a “ploy.” Contrast that characterization with a report from Politico, which called GOP efforts to restore the balance in news in the 2018 election cycle “fake” news. Sham fact-checking website Snopes and Harvard’s media arm Nieman Lab used similar framing in the 2020 election cycle when it smeared Republicans for entering the world of media and said their presence was just going to “exacerbate polarization.”
The press is certainly not unfamiliar with harnessing its control of information to influence elections. During the 2020 elections, the corrupt corporate media tried to memory-hole the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell by claiming it was Russian disinformation. Other outlets such as NPR went so far as to pledge not to cover the issue at all. ✪
By Cristina Laila For Gateway Pundit Published September 12, 2022
Biden’s corrupt Justice Department seized phones of two top Trump advisors in the past week.
The Justice Department issued at least 40 subpoenas over the last several days seeking information related to January 6 and Trump’s Save America PAC.
Trump’s top advisors Stephen Miller, Brian Jack and Dan Scavino all received subpoenas.
“Among the recipients of subpoenas from a grand jury sitting in Washington are relatively junior aides from the White House and Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign. While the subpoenas asked for information concerning the Save America PAC, they also sought communications with several pro-Trump lawyers — like Kenneth Chesebro — who helped devise the electors plan.” – The New York Times reported last week.
According to a new report from The Times, Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman had their phones seized by the DOJ.
The Justice Department has issued about 40 subpoenas over the past week seeking information about the actions of former President Donald J. Trump and his associates related to the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to people familiar with the situation.
Two top Trump advisers, Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman, had their phones seized as evidence, those people said.
Among those the department has contacted since Wednesday are people who are close to the former president and have played significant roles in his post-White House life.
Those receiving the subpoenas included Dan Scavino, Mr. Trump’s former social media director who rose from working at a Trump-owned golf course to one of his most loyal aides and has remained an adviser after Mr. Trump left office. Stanley Woodward, one of Mr. Scavino’s lawyers, declined to comment.
The Justice Department also executed search warrants to seize electronic devices from people involved in the so-called fake electors effort in swing states, including Mr. Epshteyn, a longtime Trump adviser, and Mr. Roman, a campaign strategist, according to people familiar with the events. Federal agents made the seizures last week, the people said.
Recall, Trump’s election lawyer John Eastman said the FBI searched and seized his phone in June.
FBI ambushes John Eastman outside restaurant
John Eastman was exiting a restaurant with his wife and friend in New Mexico when FBI agents ambushed him and “forced” him to unlock his phone.
The federal agents then took Eastman’s iPhone 12 Pro.
The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.
