#hunter biden is a threat to national security | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

contemplatingoutlander · 8 months ago

Text

The House GOP is a circus. The chaos has one source.

Republicans spent two years sabotaging the U.S. House. Another two years would be ruinous.

Dana Milbank does a masterful job of describing just how dysfunctional the House GOP members have been in the past two years.

This is a gift🎁link for the entire article. Below are some highlights:

The Lord works in mysterious ways. Six weeks after his improbable rise from obscurity to speaker of the House in late 2023, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson decided to break bread with a group of Christian nationalists. [...] “I’ll tell you a secret, since media is not here,” Johnson teased the group, unaware that his hosts were streaming video of the event. Johnson informed his audience that God “had been speaking to me” about becoming speaker, communicating “very specifically,” in fact, waking him at night and giving him “plans and procedures.” [...] Today, Johnson’s run looks anything but heaven-sent. In the first 18 months of this Congress, only 70 laws were enacted. Calculations by political scientist Tobin Grant, who tracks congressional output over time, put this Congress on course to be the do-nothingest since 1859-1861 — when the Union was dissolving. But Johnson’s House isn’t merely unproductive; it is positively lunatic. Republicans have filled their committee hearings and their bills with white nationalist attacks on racial diversity and immigrants, attempts to ban abortion and to expand access to the sort of guns used in mass shootings, incessant harassment of LGBTQ Americans, and even routine potshots at the U.S. military. They insulted each other’s private parts, accused each other of sexual and financial crimes, and scuffled with each other in the Capitol basement. They screamed “Bullshit!” at President Joe Biden during the State of the Union address. They stood up for the Confederacy and used their official powers to spread conspiracy theories about the “Deep State.” Some even lent credence to the idea that there has been a century-old Deep State coverup of space aliens, with possible involvement by Mussolini and the Vatican.

The above article was adapted from Dana Milbank's (2024) book: Fools on the HILL: The Hooligans, Saboteurs, Conspiracy Theorists, and Dunces Who Burned Down the House.

[See more below the cut.]

And this is on top of the well-known pratfalls: The 15-ballot marathon to elect a speaker, the 22-day shutdown of the House to find another speaker, the routine threats of government shutdowns and a near-default on the federal debt that hurt the nation’s credit rating. They devoted 18 months to a failed attempt to impeach Biden, which produced nothing but Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly displaying posters of Hunter Biden engaging in sex acts. One “whistleblower” defected to Russia, another worked with Russian intelligence and is under indictment for fabricating his claims, and still another is on the lam, evading charges of being a Chinese agent. As soon as Biden withdrew his candidacy, they promptly forgot their probe of Biden’s “corruption” and rushed to launch a new series of investigations into Kamala Harris (over her record on border security) and Tim Walz (over his military service and “cozy relationship” with China). After a number of failed attempts, they did impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (the first such action against a Cabinet officer since 1876) without identifying any high crimes or misdemeanors he had committed; the Senate dismissed the articles without a trial. House Republicans created a “weaponization committee” under the excitable Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), but it was panned even by right-wing commentators when it produced little more than a list of conspiracy theories from the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. They lapsed repeatedly into fits of censure resolutions, contempt citations and other pointless acts of vengeance. In all of its history, the House had voted to censure one of its own members only seven times; in the two weeks after Johnson became speaker, members of the House tried to censure each other eight times. [...] In lieu of consequential legislating, they passed bills such as the Refrigerator Freedom Act, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards (SUDS) Act. On the House floor, the Republican majority suffered one failure after another, even on routine procedural votes. Seven times (and counting), House Republicans voted down their own leaders’ routine attempts to begin floor debates — something that hadn’t happened once in the previous 20 years.

#republicans #house gop #mike johnson #fools on the hill #118th congress #dana milbank #the washington post #gift link

72 notes · View notes

dreaminginthedeepsouth · 2 months ago

Text

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 2, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 03, 2025

On February 28, the same day that President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance took the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin against Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Martin Matishak of The Record, a cybersecurity news publication, broke the story that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stop all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.

Both the scope of the directive and its duration are unclear.

On Face the Nation this morning, Representative Mike Turner (R-OH), a strong supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Ukraine, contradicted that information. “Considering what I know, what Russia is currently doing against the United States, that would I’m certain not be an accurate statement of the current status of the United States operations,” he said. Well respected on both sides of the aisle, Turner was in line to be the chair of the House Intelligence Committee in this Congress until House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) removed him from that slot and from the intelligence committee altogether.

And yet, as Stephanie Kirchgaessner of The Guardian notes, the Trump administration has made clear that it no longer sees Russia as a cybersecurity threat. Last week, at a United Nations working group on cybersecurity, representatives from the European Union and the United Kingdom highlighted threats from Russia, while Liesyl Franz, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international cybersecurity, did not mention Russia, saying the U.S. was concerned about threats from China and Iran.

Kirchgaessner also noted that under Trump, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which monitors cyberthreats against critical infrastructure, has set new priorities. Although Russian threats, especially those against U.S. election systems, were a top priority for the agency in the past, a source told Kirchgaessner that analysts were told not to follow or report on Russian threats.

“Russia and China are our biggest adversaries,” the source told Kirchgaessner. “With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this.” “People are saying Russia is winning,” the source said. “Putin is on the inside now.”

Another source noted that “There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems.” “Russia is at least on par with China as the most significant cyber threat, the person added. Under those circumstances, the source said, ceasing to follow and report Russian threats is “truly shocking.”

Trump’s outburst in the Oval Office on Friday confirmed that Putin has been his partner in politics since at least 2016. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia… Russia, Russia, Russia—you ever hear of that deal?—that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And he had to go through that. And he did go through it, and we didn’t end up in a war. And he went through it. He was accused of all that stuff. He had nothing to do with it. It came out of Hunter Biden’s bathroom.”

Putin went through a hell of a lot with Trump? It was an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.

Trump has made dismissing as a hoax what he calls “Russia, Russia, Russia” central to his political narrative. But Russian operatives did, in fact, work to elect him in 2016. A 2020 report from the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed that Putin ordered hacks of Democratic computer networks, and at two crucial moments WikiLeaks, which the Senate committee concluded was allied with the Russians, dumped illegally obtained emails that were intended to hurt the candidacy of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Trump openly called for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails.

Russian operatives also flooded social media with disinformation, not necessarily explicitly endorsing Trump, but spreading lies about Clinton to depress Democratic turnout, or to rile up those on the right by falsely claiming that Democrats intended to ban the Pledge of Allegiance, for example. The goal of the propaganda was not simply to elect Trump. It was to pit the far ends of the political spectrum against the middle, tearing the nation apart.

Fake accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook drove wedges between Americans over issues of race, immigration, and gun rights. Craig Timberg and Tony Romm of the Washington Post reported in 2018 that Facebook officials told Congress that the Russian campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million on Instagram.

That effort was not a one-shot deal: Russians worked to influence the 2020 presidential election, too. In 2021 the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that Putin “authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President [Joe] Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical division in the US.” But “[u]nlike in 2016,” the report said, “we did not see persistent Russian cyber efforts to gain access to election infrastructure.”

Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded.

In October 2024, Matthew Olsen, head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, warned in an interview with CBS News that Russia was bombarding voters with propaganda to divide Americans before that year’s election, as well. Operatives were not just posting fake stories and replying to posts, but were also using AI to manufacture fake videos and laundering Russian talking points through social media influencers. Just a month before, news had broken that Russia was funding Tenet Media, a company that hired right-wing personalities Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, Tayler Hansen, and Matt Christiansen, who repeated Russian talking points.

Now back in office, Trump and MAGA loyalists say that efforts to stop disinformation undermine their right to free speech. Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the second Trump administration, denied that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election—calling it “a Clinton campaign dirty trick”—and called for ending government efforts to stop disinformation with “utmost urgency.” “The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth,” it said.

On February 20, Steven Lee Myers, Julian E. Barnes, and Sheera Frenkel of the New York Times reported that the Trump administration is firing or reassigning officials at the FBI and CISA who had worked on protecting elections. That includes those trying to stop foreign propaganda and disinformation and those combating cyberattacks and attempts to disrupt voting systems.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas broke the story that two members of the “Department of Government Efficiency” are now installed at CISA: Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old known as “Big Balls,” and Kyle Schutt, a 38-year-old software engineer. Kim Zetter of Wired reported that since 2018, CISA has “helped state and local election offices around the country assess vulnerabilities in their networks and help secure them.”

During the 2024 campaign, Trump said repeatedly that he would end the war in Ukraine. Shortly after the election, a newspaper reporter asked Nikolai Patrushev, who is close to Putin, if Trump’s election would mean “positive changes from Russia’s point of view.” Patrushev answered: “To achieve success in the elections, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. And as a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.”

Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #Kremlin #Russia Russia Russia #US Cybercommand #Cybersecurity #traitors

21 notes · View notes

1americanconservative · 7 months ago

Text

About Those Trump and Harris National Security Endorsements

Military and national security endorsements speak volumes about the competence of the Trump/Vance ticket versus the ineptitude of the Harris/Walz ticket.

Mark Alexander

"There is a rank due to the United States, among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness." —George Washington (1793)

Over the last almost eight years, we have written about Donald Trump's considerable and well-documented record of domestic and foreign policy successes. This record stands in stark contrast to the Biden/Harris regime's abysmal record of domestic and foreign policy failures.

And again this week, Joe Biden declared that Kamala Harris was fully on board with his policies, saying, "She was a major player in everything we've done."

With "friends" like Joe Biden...

Harris affirmed that assessment when asked this week if she would "have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years." Harris replied, "There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of, and I've been a part of, of, of most of the decisions that have had impact."

Really, "not a thing"? This from the "change" candidate?

The Biden/Harris mounting record of failures is precisely why the Harris/Walz ticket has nothing else to run on other than vilifying their opponent as a "threat to democracy."

Harris has established herself as a pathological liar, which is to say she tag teams well with Tim Walz, who, on top of his stolen valor record, also has a chronic problem with the truth.

In fact, this is precisely why, since Harris booted Biden to the curb, she has not held a press conference. Instead, she has been running a scripted campaign of deception, including mostly softball fan-base interviews.

Another way we determine the integrity of the Trump/Vance ticket versus the Harris/Walz ticket is to consider their endorsements. No, I am not talking about Elon Musk's endorsement of Trump or Taylor Swift's endorsement of Harris, though such endorsements do matter.

I am referring specifically to endorsements from military and national security officials and what those endorsements say about the respective candidates.

In September, Harris announced that a consortium of leftist deep state hacks issued an endorsement letter backing her. All you need to know about the integrity of that collective endorsement is that nine of the former top intelligence officials who signed on for Harris also signed the letter claiming, just weeks before the 2020 election, that Hunter Biden's laptop was actually a "Russian disinformation" subterfuge.

That letter was used by Biden's Leftmedia publicists as justification for the biggest pre-election media blackout in modern history. The purpose, of course, was to cover up the ChiCom and Ukrainian pay-to-play influence-peddling schemes involving the "Big Guy." That subterfuge suppressed what would have otherwise been an election-altering "October Surprise."

Ultimately, of course, it was determined that the laptop and the incriminating information on it did belong to Hunter, but not until the FBI had sat on the laptop for nearly a year.

As the Washington Examiner's Jerry Dunleavy reported in August 2022, "The FBI slow-walked its investigation into Hunter Biden's laptop, including telling some bureau employees not to look at the hard drive belonging to President Joe Biden's son, according to reported whistleblower disclosures made public by a top Senate Republican." That senator is Wisconsin's Ron Johnson, the ranking member of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Notably, the aforementioned deep state signatories and others also seeded the fake "Trump/Russia collusion" conspiracy.

The Harris endorsement letter is built on the same fake Biden/Harris/Walz claims about Trump being a threat to democracy. But what is abundantly clear from the hacks endorsing Harris is this: She and Walz are a perilous threat to both Liberty and national security.

Demonstrating her profound ineptitude, when asked this week to name our most dangerous foreign adversary, Harris responded: "I think there's an obvious one in mind, which is Iran. Iran has American blood on their hands."

That would be the same Iran to which Barack Obama, Biden, and Harris have kept shoveling money. Recall that Obama/Biden loaded up a 747 freight liner with $400 million in palleted cash as part of their $1.7 billion nuclear appeasement (read: "empowerment") in the wake of the perilous Obama/Biden nuke deal.

For the record, obviously, the correct answer to the question regarding our most dangerous adversary is China. But to call out Iran and mention "blood on their hands" is astounding given this administration's bloody record in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Israel. The slaughter of thousands of men, women, and children in those countries is on Harris's hands.

But she keeps reminding everyone, "I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed."

The implications for our national security are nothing short of catastrophic.

On the other end of the national security competence spectrum, this week more than 200 former high-ranking military officers joined hundreds of other former national security and foreign policy officials (and, notably, Gold Star families) in endorsing Donald Trump in a public letter.

The letter affirms: "From a world at peace under President Trump, we are closer to a third world war than ever before under the Biden-Harris Administration. With multiple escalating wars around the world, an open border that allows terrorists to flood into the American homeland, and malign actors like China operating unabated, U.S. national security has been profoundly damaged by the failed policies of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden."

The letter also included 40 former U.S. ambassadors and hundreds of officials from prior Republican administrations.

However, if you want to read the strongest and most reasoned condemnation of Harris and affirmation of Trump, see "An Election Open Letter to All Americans" from Gen. B.B. Bell, U.S. Army (Ret.). Bell, who is also a signer of the Trump endorsement letter, is a longtime member of The Patriot Post's National Advisory Committee, and he served in uniform for almost four decades, including extended deployments overseas in both peace and war. He warned in summation, "For freedom's sake, please reject this Marxist march to insanity and thus the destruction of these United States."

Indeed.

For those contemplating casting a vote for the Harris/Walz ticket, as their body count mounts, this will be your last chance to wash the blood from your hands.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

10 notes · View notes

misfitwashere · 2 months ago

Text

March 2, 2025

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAR 3

Both the scope of the directive and its duration are unclear.

Putin went through a hell of a lot with Trump? It was an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.

Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”

—

#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

3 notes · View notes

darkmaga-returns · 6 months ago

Text

“The National Security Divisions of the DOJ and FBI are the greatest domestic threats to the American people and the concept of Constitutional rule of law today.” — Scott Ritter

James Howard Kunstler

Nov 22, 2024

Okay, you’ve had enough post-election euphoria. Time to wake TF up. Rats from inside the walls of the Deep State are trying to gnaw their way into the Trump cabinet. Ever hear of an outfit called Cipher Brief? Of course not. Cipher Brief is sort of the McKinsey of blob-world (a.k.a. the “national security” network), a combination Human Relations / Public Relations firm, totally spooked-up with former CIA officers. Quite a few of the spooks who signed the infamous letter in October 2020 that said Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” are contractors there. They all knew the heinous laptop was genuine, though, and they did it anyway to queer the election for “Joe Biden.” Why? Because. . . Trump.

One Cipher Brief operative is a character named Dan Hoffman, a retired CIA “clandestine service” officer who ran the agency’s Middle East Bureau, among other things. He’s now a sometime talking head on Fox News. Hoffman has scuttled his way to the sidelines of the Trump transition team, trying to punk them on personnel. I received my own intel about Dan Hoffman and his current operations.

“Hoffman talks the talk,” I’m informed. “He was involved in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. He is 100-percent Deep State. They think he is a brother-in-arms. He is not. Hoffman and the people around him are in direct contact with Tulsi Gabbard [DNI-designate] and John Ratcliffe [CIA Director-designate]. Remember, agency ops officers are trained to be all things to all people, to manipulate them, detect their vulnerabilities, and exploit them. Their game vis-a-vis Donald Trump? To kneecap his attempts to lower tensions world-wide, stop efforts to reduce and reform the intel and defense communities, push a generally Globalist policy agenda, keep the American ‘empire game’ running so they can cash out, and keep non-Beltway Americans from having any say in our foreign policy.

4 notes · View notes

dertaglichedan · 11 months ago

Text

Biden DHS Board Painted Trump Supporters, Military And Religious People As Terror Threats, Docs Show

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) advisory board characterized supporters of former President Donald Trump, as well as those who are in the military and religious people, as posing potential domestic terrorism risks, according to internal documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL).

The board, called the “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group,” was created in September 2023 to provide DHS with “expert” analysis on subjects such as terrorism and fentanyl trafficking. The panel included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan and former CIA Operations Officer Paul Kolbe, all of whom signed an October 2020 letter casting doubt on the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop and suggesting its release was a Russian disinformation ploy.

Internal documents obtained by AFL show the board characterizing “supporters of the former president” as constituting “most of the Domestic Terrorism threat” in the United States. The documents also classified traits such as having served “in the military” and being “religious” as “indicators of extremists and terrorism,” citing unnamed research.

Military personnel are less likely to be supporters of radical political causes than other Americans, according to a 2023 RAND Corporation study. Nevertheless, suspicions of extremism in the military were popular among Democrats in the wake of the Jan. 6 riots, as 15 Democrat lawmakers signed a letter in 2021 urging Inspector General Sean O’Donnell to “take action on this wave of violent extremism” in the military.

AFL on Thursday released the first collection of documents that detailed the committee’s desire to increase information collection on Americans, including getting “mothers” and “teachers” to report on children suspected of extremism under the pretext of “public health.” The committee cited the model of the “See Something, Say Something” campaign after 9/11, which was an initiative by the DHS to encourage American citizens to report potential terror threats.

5 notes · View notes

justinspoliticalcorner · 11 months ago

Text

Elie Mystal at The Nation:

There has probably never been a president who was more ignorant of the government, the Constitution, and the laws of this country than Donald Trump was in 2017. The man came to power with a child’s understanding of civics and a mob boss’s understanding of power. Instead of using the power of government to effectuate his agenda, he thought he could simply bend the law to his will. Trump was wrong, and the Department of Justice showed him why. Trump fired FBI director James Comey (whose decision to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails happened to be one of the proximate causes of his election in the first place) for his lack of loyalty. That led the DOJ to investigate Trump’s abuse of power. Trump likely assumed that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a longtime senator and an early supporter of Trump’s vile candidacy, would put a stop to the inquiry. But to Trump’s surprise, Sessions followed department rules and norms and recused himself from the case, leaving Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to handle the investigation. Rosenstein eventually appointed former FBI director Bob Mueller as a special counsel, and while Trump was never held accountable for this crime, he learned that the Justice Department could be a threat to his lawless abuse of power.

It’s a lesson he will not have forgotten if he wins or steals a second term. Mandate for Leadership, the Project 2025 blueprint for an eventual authoritarian takeover of the federal government, contains a lot of dangerous proposals for how Trump and his ruling conservatives can remake the executive branch. The authors’ ideas for the Department of Justice reflect not only their lust for unchallenged power, but also a deep fear of the DOJ’s independence—and, more particularly, the way that independence might be used against them if the DOJ is not brought to heel. Put simply: The conservatives hope to use the DOJ to make their darkest desires legal, while at the same time taking away the best legal means to stop them. As a first step, the Project 2025 Mandate recommends hollowing out the FBI. Why the FBI? Think of it this way: If Project 2025 is basically a conservative heist plot, then the chapter on the DOJ is the part where the plotters explain how they plan to take out the security cameras and floodlights so they can proceed under the cover of darkness.

The chapter begins like the Seinfeld holiday of Festivus: with an airing of grievances that the conservatives have against the FBI, including its alleged attempts to “convince social media companies and the media generally that the story about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was the result of a Russian misinformation campaign.” There are also entire paragraphs dedicated to railing against the FBI and the DOJ for trying to halt the spread of lies about the 2020 election—and, again, if you understand who these people are, you can see why stopping the government from policing their lies is a key goal. In order to accomplish this, Project 2025 proposes pushing Congress to demote the FBI, and its director, to a lower rung on the DOJ’s organizational chart and make the director report to a political functionary. It also wants Congress to eliminate the 10-year term of the FBI director to make it easier for the president to replace the director at will, like most other political appointees. Again, Trump got burned for firing Comey, and this proposal would make sure any future FBI director is sufficiently loyal.

If the conservatives simply wanted to destroy the FBI, I might agree with them. Even a cursory knowledge of the bureau’s history shows that the FBI is problematic: a dangerous tool of the surveillance state that, more often than not, has been deployed against civil liberties, civil rights, and social progress.

The problem with Project 2025 is that it doesn’t actually want to destroy the FBI; it wants to get rid of its independence—while keeping all of the FBI’s jackbooted thuggery so that it can hurt the “right” people. The Project 2025 Mandate calls for renewing the bureau’s focus on “violent” crime—and that word choice is important, because it leaves out nonviolent crimes like bank fraud, tax evasion, bribery, and document theft—you know, all the things that Trump or his business or donor-class friends are accused of doing. The document further suggests stripping the FBI of its legal workforce—the 300 or so attorneys employed by the bureau—which would turn the FBI into an even blunter weapon than it already is, completely untethered from the Constitution or civil rights. In line with the mission of hurting the “right” people, Mandate’s chapter on the DOJ details big plans for resuming Trump’s campaign against immigrants. Those plans include deploying the power of the Justice Department against Democrats who govern in “sanctuary cities.” Indeed, there’s a whole paragraph devoted to the wild idea of using the DOJ to sue district attorneys who use their discretion in ways that the conservatives don’t like—including, though hardly limited to, refusing to help deport immigrants.

[...] Toward that end, this chapter proposes transforming the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ into a tool to fight for white supremacy instead of against it. It aims to do this by using the division to prosecute institutions and organizations that promote diversity as violating the civil rights and equal protection of whites, and it’s the logical conclusion of the conservative assault on affirmative action and DEI programs. [...]

Using the DOJ to sue companies that hire people of color or women is meant to dissuade companies from hiring people of color or women, because according to conservative whites, anytime a person of color or a woman is hired for anything, it is because of affirmative action or DEI. This section is an attempt to whitewash America through force of law, since “the market” has rejected white supremacy (at least superficially) as a sound business practice.

When you break down what Project 2025 wants to do with the Justice Department, it’s chilling and terrifying, and yet I’m also struck by how petty and mean-spirited the tone of the document is. These people are consumed by their personal grievances (against Black people, against the media, against Hunter Biden and his laptop). There are multiple passages devoted to complaining that the DOJ has prosecuted people who threaten abortion clinics and parents who threaten school boards, as if being vile and hateful toward pregnant people and schoolteachers is their most precious “freedom.” Giving these people the DOJ is like giving a chimpanzee a gun: It’s inherently dangerous even when the chimp wields it like a crooked club.

Next time, Trump will not be handing the DOJ to people like Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr—people who wanted to use the department to further the MAGA agenda but felt bound by the rule of law. Next time, Trump will let someone like Stephen Miller, a ghoul who wants the law to promote bigotry instead of eradicating it, run the Justice Department. He’ll hand it to a devout loyalist and unreconstructed racist who wants to weaken the DOJ so it can’t hurt Trump, while weaponizing it against Trump’s enemies and the vulnerable communities he has decided to harass and terrorize. Project 2025 is telling us exactly how the conservatives plan to take away the rights of women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. I beg the American people to believe them. This dystopian future isn’t a threat, it’s a certainty, should we give these people power again.

Elie Mystal wrote in The Nation that the DOJ under a 2nd Trump term would be the legal wing of the MAGA movement. The extreme MAGA movement must be crushed at all costs.

See Also:

The Nation: June 2024 Issue

#Project 2025 #Donald Trump #US Department of Justice #FBI #Jeff Sessions #Rod Rosenstein #James Comey #Christopher Wray #DOJ Civil Rights Division.#The Nation #Elie Mystal

4 notes · View notes

darkeagleruins · 11 months ago

Text

2 notes · View notes

sawbuckplus · 5 months ago

Text

#biden crime family #the msm are democrat operatives with press passes #biden bribery #biden corruption #hunter biden is a threat to national security #joe biden mental decline

187 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 1 year ago

Text

The meeting between top US election officials and their cybersecurity partners from the federal government almost went off without a hitch. Then Mac Warner spoke up.

Warner, West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state, didn’t have a mundane logistical question for the government representatives, who were speaking at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State in Washington, DC, on February 8. Instead, Warner lambasted the officials for what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks.

“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” Warner told the officials from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who watched him impassively from the stage. “You all need to clean up your own houses.”

Neither of the officials responded to Warner, and the NASS meeting—a semiannual confab for the nation’s election administrators that deals with everything from mail-in voting to cyber threats—quickly moved on to other business. But Warner, who attended an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory and is now running for governor on a far-right platform, isn’t a fringe voice in the GOP. His impassioned speech reflected a growing right-wing backlash to the election security work of agencies like CISA and the FBI—one that now threatens the partnership that the federal government has been painstakingly building with state leaders over the eight years since Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

CISA plays a critical role in helping states run secure elections, but its work alerting social media companies to misinformation has earned it special contempt from conservatives. While most GOP secretaries of state are holding their fire about CISA’s efforts to combat online lies, Democrats and nonpartisan experts worry that that could change in the coming years. With national Republicans increasingly turning against CISA—investigating its activities and voting to slash its budget—the agency’s partnerships with GOP leaders in the states are more vulnerable than ever before.

“The hard and necessary work of securing our elections should not be a partisan issue,” says US representative Chris Deluzio, a Pennsylvania Democrat and former cyber policy scholar. “So I am very concerned that some Republican secretaries of state might undermine that work just to serve their selfish partisan interests.”

Stumbling Into Controversy

The federal program that earned Warner’s wrath began as a response to the rampant mis- and disinformation that has spread online since the 2016 election.

Determined to avoid another contest marred by viral false claims about voting processes, CISA in 2018 began coordinating conversations with social media companies and other federal agencies about the best ways to counter dangerous and destabilizing lies. During the 2020 election, through a process known as “switchboarding,” CISA alerted social media firms to complaints from state and local election officials about online misinformation, such as posts advertising incorrect voting times and locations.

It was in this spirit that FBI officials met with Twitter and Facebook executives in the lead-up to Election Day 2020 and advised them to be wary of Russian disinformation operations involving fake documents. That warning later led both companies to suppress posts about a controversial New York Post story about the contents of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden.

Silicon Valley’s response to the Hunter Biden laptop story outraged conservatives, who began accusing tech companies and their federal partners of conspiring to censor speech in an effort to rig the election. In subsequent investigations, CISA found itself squarely in the crosshairs. The agency had already earned the ire of former president Donald Trump and his allies for reassuring the public about the integrity of the 2020 election, but the new controversy practically made it a pariah on the right.

In June 2023, a House Judiciary Committee report blasted CISA as “the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.” A few months later, a federal appeals court partially affirmed a district judge’s ruling that placed limits on CISA’s ability to communicate with tech companies, finding that the agency’s work to fight disinformation “likely violated the First Amendment.”

Stunned by the intense backlash, CISA stopped working with social media platforms to combat mis- and disinformation. The FBI, too, scaled back its interactions with those companies, halting briefings about foreign interference activities. “The symbiotic relationship between the government and the social media companies has definitely been fractured,” a US official told NBC News.

CISA has staunchly avoided acknowledging the reality that its reputation has been damaged.

“CISA’s election security mission is stronger than ever,” says Cait Conley, a senior adviser to director Jen Easterly who oversees the agency’s election work. “We remain engaged with election officials in all 50 states and will continue to conduct all of our work in an apolitical and nonpartisan manner.”

A GOP Split

As the controversies have eroded CISA’s bipartisan brand, Republicans who run elections have split into two camps over whether to keep working with the agency to fight hackers, online falsehoods, and polling-place threats.

West Virginia’s Warner is the indisputable flag-bearer of the anti-CISA camp. “I’ve pulled away from them,” he tells WIRED at the NASS conference, a few hours after venting his frustrations to the federal officials. “I’m not attending their briefings, because I haven’t found anything useful out of them.”

Warner says he’s proud of the “tremendous advances” that federal and state officials have made together on election security since 2016, but he warns that CISA and the FBI will continue losing conservatives’ trust until they investigate their roles in the controversies of 2020. “I’ve brought this to the attention of CISA officials,” he says, “and there’s no effort there to do this.”

Warner argues that CISA’s warnings about foreign disinformation, AI-powered deep fakes, and death threats to election officials are “distractions from the real threat to American democracy” posed by censorship.

It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA.

“The agency has been beneficial to our office by providing information and resources as it pertains to cybersecurity,” says JoDonn Chaney, a spokesperson for Missouri’s Jay Ashcroft.

South Dakota’s Monae Johnson says her office “has a good relationship with its CISA partners and plans to maintain the partnership.”

But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution.

Idaho’s Phil McGrane says CISA is doing “critical work … to protect us from foreign cyber threats.” But he also tells WIRED that the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), a public-private collaboration group that he helps oversee, “is actively reviewing past efforts regarding mis/disinformation” to determine “what aligns best” with CISA’s mission.

Mississippi’s Michael Watson says that “statements following the 2020 election and some internal confidence issues we’ve since had to navigate have caused concern.” As federal and state officials gear up for this year’s elections, he adds, “my hope is CISA will act as a nonpartisan organization and stick to the facts.”

CISA’s relationships with Republican secretaries are “not as strong as they’ve been before,” says John Merrill, who served as Alabama’s secretary of state from 2015 to 2023. In part, Merrill says, that’s because of pressure from the GOP base. “Too many conservative Republican secretaries are not just concerned about how the interaction with those federal agencies is going, but also about how it’s perceived … by their constituents.”

Free Help at Risk

CISA’s defenders say the agency does critical work to help underfunded state and local officials confront cyber and physical threats to election systems.

The agency’s career civil servants and political leaders “have been outstanding” during both the Trump and Biden administrations, says Minnesota secretary of state Steve Simon, a Democrat.

Others specifically praised CISA’s coordination with tech companies to fight misinformation, arguing that officials only highlighted false claims and never ordered companies to delete posts.

“They’re just making folks aware of threats,” says Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, Adrian Fontes. The real “bad actors,” he says, are the people who “want the election denialists and the rumor-mongers to run amok and just spread out whatever lies they want.”

If Republican officials begin disengaging from CISA, their states will lose critical security protections and resources. CISA sponsors the EI-ISAC, which shares information about threats and best practices for thwarting them; provides free services like scanning election offices’ networks for vulnerabilities, monitoring those networks for intrusions and reviewing local governments’ contingency plans; and convenes exercises to test election officials’ responses to crises.

“For GOP election officials to back away from [CISA] would be like a medical patient refusing to accept free wellness assessments, check-ups, and optional prescriptions from one of the world’s greatest medical centers,” says Eddie Perez, a former director for civic integrity at Twitter and a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonprofit group advocating for improved election technology.

Worse, some CISA projects will become less effective as they lose participants. The EI-ISAC’s information-sharing initiative is only as valuable as the information that state and federal agencies submit to it.

Even if most states stick with CISA, it would only take a few holdouts to create systemic risk. “America's election security posture is only as strong as its weakest jurisdiction,” says David Levine, the senior elections integrity fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Cautious Optimism Despite ‘Strain’

Election security experts and Democratic officials express cautious optimism that there won’t be a GOP exodus from CISA this year.

“I have faith Republican secretaries of state will continue to prioritize their voters and collaborate with CISA to ensure a secure 2024 election,” says Mississippi representative Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee.

Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program, notes that some of CISA’s new regional election security advisers “have worked in recent years as or for Republican officeholders,” giving them credibility with GOP leaders.

According to Minnesota’s Simon, “the vast majority of secretaries find these partnerships valuable.”

Still, Warner says some secretaries quietly support his pushback against CISA and other aspects of the Biden administration’s election security strategy. “There [is a] meeting of the minds by some of the secretaries, especially on the right, with some of these similar concerns,” he says, even if “they’re not as outspoken as I am.”

That shared skepticism of CISA means that, even after Warner leaves office next year, the agency will remain on precarious footing with some of its Republican partners. For now, CISA’s allies are left hoping that the agency’s time-tested bonds will prove stronger than pressures from conservative activists.

“You can have strain in some areas of a relationship and still have a strong relationship,” says Arizona’s Fontes. “That’s what being a grown-up is about. And I think most of us are doing that pretty well.”

1 note · View note

bllsbailey · 2 months ago

Text

Trump Revokes U.S. Secret Service Detail For Hunter And Ashley Biden

President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he is revoking U.S. Secret Service detail protection for Hunter and Ashley Biden, the son and daughter of former President Joe Biden.

“Hunter Biden has had Secret Service protection for an extended period of time, all paid for by the United States Taxpayer. There are as many as 18 people on this Detail, which is ridiculous,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

“He is currently vacationing in, of all places, South Africa, where the Human Rights of people has been strenuously questioned. Because of this, South Africa has been taken off our list of Countries receiving Economic and Financial Assistance. Please be advised that, effective immediately, Hunter Biden will no longer receive Secret Service protection. Likewise, Ashley Biden who has 13 agents will be taken off the list,” he added.

@POTUS announces Hunter Biden and Ashley Biden will no longer receive Secret Service protection. Less than 3 hours after the press alerted Trump to the fact that Hunter Biden had 18 secret service agents protecting him, the President took action by removing the crackheads… pic.twitter.com/7G0yorIvuX— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) March 17, 2025

The Biden family is the latest to lose their taxpayer-funded Secret Service protection, following former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — among others.

When asked about Fauci and Bolton’s revocations, Trump responded: “They all made a lot of money. They can hire their own security.”

“You can’t have a security detail for the rest of your life because you worked for government,” Trump added.

President Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, responded to the news in late January, expressing that he is: “Disappointed, but not surprised that President Trump has decided to terminate the protection previously provided by the United States Secret Service.”

Bolton, a foreign policy hawk, claimed that Secret Service protection was necessary for him due to a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard attempting to hire a hitman to target him, in response to his role leading up to the 2020 drone strike — which killed Iranian general Qassim Suleimani.

“Notwithstanding my criticisms of President Biden’s national-security policies, he nonetheless made the decision to extend that protection to me in 2021. The Justice Department filed criminal charges against an Iranian Revolutionary Guard official in 2022 for attempting to hire a hit man to target me. That threat remains today, as also demonstrated by the recent arrest of someone trying to arrange for President Trump’s own assassination. The American people can judge for themselves which President made the right call,” Bolton added.

Stay informed! Receive breaking news blasts directly to your inbox for free. Subscribe here. https://www.oann.com/alerts

0 notes

yourreddancer · 2 months ago

Text

Heather Cox Richardson

March 2, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 3READ IN APP

Both the scope of the directive and its duration are unclear.

Putin went through a hell of a lot with Trump? It was an odd statement from a U.S. president, whose loyalty is supposed to be dedicated to the Constitution and the American people.

Now back in office, Trump and MAGA loyalists say that efforts to stop disinformation undermine their right to free speech.

Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the second Trump administration, denied that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election—calling it “a Clinton campaign dirty trick”—and called for ending government efforts to stop disinformation with “utmost urgency.” “The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth,” it said.

Today, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a reporter: “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely aligns with our vision.”

0 notes

sandibebop · 4 months ago

Text

WASHINGTON — For those who may have crossed President Donald Trump, the message is sinking in: Payback is coming, and coming fast.

John Bolton, a former White House national security adviser who wrote a damning book about Trump's first term, lost the Secret Service detail assigned to protect him from assassination threats from Iran.

Also losing his detail was Anthony Fauci, the public health scientist whom Trump called a "disaster" over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and who has been a target of far-right anger ever since. (Fauci has hired his own private security team in response.)

A portrait of Mark Milley, the former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who broke with Trump over a photo-op at a church during the George Floyd racial justice protests, was abruptly removed from the walls of the Pentagon. Defense officials said they have no idea who ordered it taken down or why.

And Trump yanked the security clearances of dozens of former national security officials who'd signed a letter during the 2020 campaign opining that emails from a laptop belonging to Joe Biden's son Hunter had the "classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."

All that happened within days of Trump's inauguration — and in some cases, hours.

A question that loomed over Trump's 2024 campaign was whether he'd use presidential powers for retribution against his perceived political foes. For some, the answer has arrived.

"There are plenty of early warning signs that confirm the worst fears of people who were concerned about a second Trump administration and what it would mean for the rule of law," David Laufman, a former senior Justice Department official under Republican and Democratic administrations, said in an interview. "The real question remains what checks and balances will there be to prevent the creeping establishment of an authoritarian state in the United States."

The White House did not respond to a question about whether Trump personally ordered these actions to be taken, or whether the motive was reprisal. Talking to reporters in recent days, Trump defended canceling Secret Service details for Fauci, Bolton and others.

"I thought he was a very dumb person," Trump said of Bolton, adding that the government can't pay for people's Secret Service protection in perpetuity. (Ex-presidents receive lifetime security details.)

"When you work for government, at some point your security detail comes off," he told reporters. "And you know, you can't have them forever."

A White House spokesman, meanwhile, said the former national security officials deserved to lose their security clearances.

"By abusing their previous positions in government, these individuals helped sell a public relations fraud to the American people," said Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. "They greatly damaged the credibility of the Intelligence Community by using their privileges to interfere in a presidential election. President Trump's action is restoring the credibility of our nation's institutions."

Trump's comments on whether he'd engage in retaliatory acts can give an observer whiplash. In an interview last month with NBC News' "Meet the Press" moderator Kristen Welker, Trump was asked if he would look to punish his predecessor, President Joe Biden.

"I'm not looking to go back into the past," he said. "I'm looking to make our country successful. Retribution will be through success."

He is plainly aggrieved, though, about the way he believes he's been treated by the courts, prosecutors and Democratic officials.

In an Oval Office interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity last week, Trump said: "I went through four years of hell by this scum that we had to deal with. I went through four years of hell. I spent millions of dollars in legal fees and I won, but I did it the hard way. It's really hard to say that they shouldn't have to go through it also. It is very hard to say that."

The Trump administration's moves thus far impose varying levels of hardship for those on the receiving end. Milley's portrait had been unveiled 10 days before Trump's swearing-in. Its abrupt disappearance from a wall dedicated to the Joint Chiefs of Staff may serve as a warning to future chiefs that they, too, can be erased from Pentagon history if they fall out of favor with the commander in chief.

Bolton said he's taking private safety measures now that he's lost his Secret Service detail. In 2022, the Justice Department charged a member of Iran's feared Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in a plot to murder Bolton, likely in retaliation for the Trump administration's killing of an Iranian general two years earlier.

Biden first provided Bolton with a security detail in December 2021, and it had been renewed every six months since then — most recently last month, Bolton told NBC News.

"This is part of the retribution campaign," Bolton said.

"It doesn't really matter to him [Trump] the level of seriousness," he added. "Each thing he can do makes him feel a little bit better."

Members of the U.S. intelligence community told him in the days before Trump's swearing-in that the threat of assassination remained unchanged and had not gone away, he said.

"They are playing with his life, not merely damaging his professional opportunities, but they're putting a man's life at risk in order to punish him for criticizing Donald Trump," said Rosa Brooks, a former senior Defense Department official in the Obama administration and a co-leader of the Democracy Futures Project hosted by the Brennan Center for Justice.

Should Iran harm Bolton in some way, that could compel the U.S. to respond militarily, escalating tensions and drawing the two nations closer to war.

Denying security clearances to those who co-signed the Hunter Biden letter can create financial distress for some who are now in the private sector and need them to fulfill government contracts.

One person whose security clearance was taken away said in an interview, "They are now being hurt financially — and also the country is being hurt — because these are people with decades of experience who continue to serve the government after they retire."

"There's no legitimate policy purpose that this serves," this person continued, speaking on condition of anonymity. "From the standpoint of freedom of speech and our rights as U.S. citizens, we have every right to warn the American people that the Russians continue to engage in these information operations to influence American politics and elections."

Still, it's not clear how much thought the new administration gave in announcing the punishment. Mark Zaid, an attorney who represents some who signed the letter, said in an interview that most of the people no longer possess a security clearance.

The executive order that pulled the the security clearances also covered Bolton, saying his was being taken away for publishing "sensitive information drawn from his time in government" in his memoir "The Room Where It Happened."

Bolton said he doesn't know if he even had a security clearance to lose.

"For me it has no effect at all," he said.

#donald trump #what a traitor #maga morons

0 notes