Things are getting dicey out there in the United States of Acrimony,
eh? People are pissed. They’re sick of the government … sick of control …
sick of the inequities and absurdities in our land … sick of the man
and the machine … sick of our borders having bigger holes than a fat
woman’s pantyhose after high steppin' a barbed-wire fence; and sick,
hallelujah, of that little priss, Justin Bieber.
It appears as if, ladies and gents, that rebellion/revolution is America’s soup de jour.
Yep, it’s cuckoo time and me likey.
This is what it must’ve felt like in 1773 minus the powdered wigs and small pox.
As we’ve seen this past week in Ferguson, MO, folks are fed up and
ready to break crap if they have to in order to bring about justice; and
I dig that spirit.
However, and this is just my advice: before we starting burning the
mother down, we should make certain that the war we wage, the cause we
champion and the person we support is noble and legit.
Amen? Amen.
With that in mind, herewith are nine things to consider before you burn your neighborhood or city down to the ground:
Check it out: Prior to rioting, looting and pillaging and taking off a
week to trash the place in which you live and risk being tear gassed,
shot and/or run over by Barney Fife’s new army tank, ask yourself these
nine diagnostic questions …
7. Further, before you hinge your freedom on a deceased person, be careful to make sure that the witness you’re banking on wasn’t a part of a robbery that could implicate him and thus cause him to ... uh ... embellish his story.
8. In addition, before you destroy your city, bear in mind your taxes
will probably spike once the dust settles to rebuild what you just torched and ransacked.
9. And finally, ask yourself: "Self, how will your stealing seven bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 bring about justice?”
Left-wing activists and officials within President Barack Obama’s
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), part of
Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ), attempted
this week to reframe Operation Fast and Furious as a problem with
America’s gun laws.
“Stricter U.S. gun measures are needed to stem the flow of guns to
Mexico, where the weapons are fueling violence and leaving people ‘under
siege’ with little hope of help from their government, activists said
Thursday,” according
to Chad Garland of Cronkite News. “In addition to tougher laws, they
called for tougher enforcement by federal officials, who they say have
been reluctant to act since the fallout from Operation Fast and Furious,
the failed ‘gun-walking’ operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives.”
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), a member of the House Committee on Oversight
and Government Reform and a leader of the ongoing congressional
investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, told Breitbart News on
Friday that such an argument is ludicrous. “Restricting the
constitutional rights of law abiding citizens will never serve as a
deterrent for criminals intent on committing future crimes,” Gosar said
in an email.
In Operation Fast and Furious, several “straw purchasers”—people who
work for the Mexican drug cartels’ American-based weapons
smugglers—bought guns in the U.S. which were then smuggled into Mexico.
ATF agents, at the direction of supervisors within the agency, allowed
this to happen and directed gun store owners to allow it to continue—a
practice known as letting the guns “walk.”
As a result of Fast and Furious, Border Patrol agent Brian Terry and
about 300 Mexican nationals have been murdered with the weapons the ATF
allowed to “walk” into Mexico. Many of the weapons have still not been
recovered years later. The congressional investigation that Rep. Darrell
Issa (R-CA), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Sen.
Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, has shown that ATF willingly allowed—and helped
facilitate—cartel-affiliated smugglers in their efforts to purchase
firearms in the United States and then traffic them into Mexico.
Despite having enough evidence and laws already on the books to
arrest and prosecute those so-called “straw purchasers,” documents and
congressional testimony shows that ATF agents were ordered to allow the
straw purchases to continue without making arrests. Even Holder, who has
since been held in both criminal and civil contempt of Congress on a
bipartisan basis for his failure to comply with Issa’s subpoenas for
more documents, has admitted that the tactics employed in Fast and Furious were wrong.
“That was a fundamentally flawed program, fundamentally flawed,” Holder said in a February 2012 budget hearing when
responding to a question about Fast and Furious. “And, I think that I
can agree with some of my harshest critics that there are legitimate
issues that need to be explored with regard in which the way Fast and
Furious was carried out.”
Holder still denies having known about the tactics at the time but will not share all the requested documents with Congress.
Garland quoted an official from ATF, Phoenix-based Special Agent
Thomas Mangan: “By no means are we turning our back or turning a blind
eye... Trying to stem that flood of guns and that iron river of guns…
and trying to keep ahead of the techniques and tactics that these
criminal organizations are using in obtaining guns is ever-evolving.”
Mangan’s comments were in a response to a forum that the far-left
Center for American Progress (CAP) hosted at George Washington
University (GWU) on Thursday. CAP’s Associate Director of Crime and
Firearms Policy, Chelsea Parsons, reportedly said that part of the
reason why things like Operation Fast and Furious happened and the
reason why U.S. guns are found at Mexican crime scenes is because it is
“easy and legal to buy [guns] without a background check.”
“Parsons called for universal background checks and tougher sanctions
on straw purchasers to ‘make it worthwhile’ for law enforcement to
prosecute the ‘little fish’ in gun-trafficking operations,” Garland
explained. “She also pointed to the cartels’ creativity in evading
customs inspections to smuggle guns into Mexico."
In response to left-wing groups now trying to use Fast and Furious to
promote gun control efforts, Gosar ripped CAP for not attempting to
hold Holder accountable for his actions in Fast and Furious and the
subsequent congressional investigation. "It sounds like the agenda of
this forum, and the personal agenda of some of its organizers, was to
talk about the need for stricter gun laws,” Gosar told Breitbart News.
“Where has the Center for American Progress been in the fight to hold
Attorney General Holder responsible for his role in Fast and Furious and
the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans and U.S. Border Patrol Agent Terry?"
“These groups want to have it both ways; call for tougher penalties
for gun crimes then turn a blind eye to the gun crimes committed under
Holder's watch,” Gosar added. “Justice is blind to the partisan agenda
of these gun grabbing groups. The victims' families deserve better.”
Garland also quoted a Jesuit priest from Mexico, Rev. Javier Avila,
who serves as the president of the Commission of Solidarity and Defense
of Human Rights in Chihuahua, Mexico. Avila said violence resulting from
ATF’s gun walking and other cartel activity is brutal in Mexico. “You
lose someone in a terrible way and nothing happens,” Avila said. “Young
people massacred, mothers disappeared, children disappeared, husbands,
wives disappeared.”
Gosar told Breitbart News that he wants “Rev. Avila and the people of
Mexico to know our nation joins theirs to mourn the innocent lives lost
through gun crimes. This is why it is so important we seek justice and
accountability for those responsible for Fast and Furious," he
explained. "Our government armed the violent criminals responsible for
these deaths and no one wants to take responsibility. This is why I
continue to push for Attorney General Holder’s resignation.”
Gosar has a resolution
in the House of Representatives calling for Holder to resign his
position over Operation Fast and Furious. Holder remains in both
criminal and civil contempt of Congress, but Holder’s subordinate, U.S.
Attorney for the District of Columbia Ron Machen, refuses to prosecute
Holder on the criminal contempt resolution. As a result, House
Republicans, led by Issa’s committee, have fought against the Obama
administration in court for the release of the documents it is
continuing to withhold from Congress and the American people.
President Obama asserted executive privilege over the documents last
year. Obama is asserting the lower of two executive privilege forms,
deliberative process privilege rather than presidential communications
privilege. If Obama asserted the higher form,
it would have meant that either he or his senior White House staff was
aware of the gun walking tactics employed in Operation Fast and Furious,
something that both Obama and Holder have denied.
A federal judge recently allowed
the House oversight committee’s lawsuit against the administration and
the president’s claim of executive privilege to proceed, despite calls
for dismissal from Holder's DOJ.
Traditionally, deliberative process
executive privilege claims are considered invalid with even the
suspicion of any government wrongdoing. In this case, the administration
has admitted wrongdoing with regards to the tactics employed during
Operation Fast and Furious and in how the Justice Department misled
Congress with a false statement when first confronted about the scandal
in early 2011.
The administration has since withdrawn that false statement and admitted it provided inaccurate information
to Congress.
Sen. Grassley told this reporter last
year that if the federal judge in the case does not overturn the
privilege claim, it would be "the most sweeping abuse of executive
privilege in the history of executive privilege."
The Obama administration has also been reportedly holding up
the publication of ATF Special Agent John Dodson’s tell-all book on
Fast and Furious. Dodson was the original whistleblower who brought this
scandal to the attention of Congress.
Responding to news that explosives from a DOJ grenade-walking
scandal were detected at an attack that killed three Mexican policemen,
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) suggested "the administration really did want
to let bad things happen in the hopes that they would get an 'assault
weapons' ban."
On October 23, Breitbart News reported
that explosives used in a recent attack on Mexican police were traced
to U.S. bomb maker Jean Baptiste Kingery. He is accused of walking
grenade components into Mexico and also of converting semi-automatic
firearms into fully automatic weapons.
Kingery was apprehended in 2009, but the U.S. Attorney in Arizona,
Dennis Burke, did not prosecute him. The DOJ chose instead to secretly
watch Kingery and try to track grenade components once they were in
Mexico, in hopes that they would lead to cartel members.
This endeavor failed, and now three Mexican policemen are dead.
When you have the attorney general's own offices being informed about
a very dangerous person exporting hand grenades and converting AK-47s
into machine guns and they let him continue as part of not, Fast and
Furious, but a completely separate failure, I think what you see is an
administration that I'm beginning to think really did want to let bad
things happen in hopes they would get [an] assault weapons ban. The dots
are being connected more and more to these kinds of actions.
Meanwhile, the clown has been banned for life, the president of the organization that hired him has been forced to resign, and the powerful NAACP is demanding a full investigation.
Earlier this week, on the pages of Politico, a powerful Hollywood director smeared rural whites as racists with the bigoted and provably false claim that they would not see a film with an all black cast.
Three decades ago, a woman who is now 66 years-old and once hosted a cable cooking show, used the N-word.
Today, Lee Daniels can be seen all across the media landscape in
softball interviews asking him about his
Oscar chances with "The
Butler." He has never once been challenged on his bigoted beliefs.
Meanwhile, a national media frenzy has destroyed Paula Deen and everything she worked for.
Last week, a nobody shopgirl was globally defamed after one of the most powerful people in the world publicly accused her of racism.
Meanwhile, the media are too busy talking about Winfrey's Oscar
chances to vindicate this poor shopgirl's honor or to hold Winfrey
accountable for her behavior.
Today, Barack Obama and Al Sharpton are hailed by the media as the
new face of civil rights, even though the fallout of their dishonesty
included dozens of acts of racial violence and lawlessness.
Meanwhile, George Zimmerman has been forced into hiding for fear of his life.
Last year, a sitting president and secretary of state falsely accused
a nobody filmmaker of causing a riot that resulted in four American
deaths at a diplomatic outpost in Libya. An unquestioning media ran with
the story and the filmmaker became a worldwide pariah.
The worldwide notoriety would result in the hapless filmmaker being arrested in the dead of night (on a parole violation).
Today, we know the film had nothing to do with the terror attack in
Libya. We also know that Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton were aware of
that at the same time they were calling for the filmmaker's head.
Obama and Clinton falsely scapegoated an innocent man to cover up
their own incompetence and to win an election. The American media have
responded (with very few exceptions) only by doing everything in their
power to protect them.
Based on history, most media watchers would probably expect NBC News
to win the award for the most shameful coverage of George Zimmerman,
the 29 year-old Florida man recently acquitted for the tragic shooting
of teenager Trayvon Martin. But an objective look at the coverage from
major print, online, and broadcast outlets, makes clear that by a fairly
safe margin, CNN is most deserving of this win.
Before we get to the nominating process, here is some crucial context and background:
Introduction
On February 26, 2012, neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman
fatally shot 17 year-old Trayvon Martin. Almost eighteen months later, a
jury would unanimously acquit Zimmerman after his attorneys made a case
that the shooting was an act of self-defense.
Zimmerman is Hispanic. Martin was black.
Under the mistaken impression (probably based on his last name) that
Zimmerman was white, within a couple of weeks after the shooting, major
media outlets begin to drive the story with a white versus black racial
narrative.
The evidence that shows that the media mistakenly believed Zimmerman was white is convincing:
On March 8, the Associated Press describes Zimmerman as "white." March
13, NBC's Al Sharpton hosts Martin family attorney Benjamin Crump on his
primetime MSNBC show; Crump repeatedly refers to Zimmerman as "white."
That same day, Matt Gutman, the ABC News reporter covering the case for
the network in Florida tweets that Trayvon was killed "bc [because] he was black." March 19, CBS News falsely describes Zimmerman as white.
Apparently, sometime between March 19 and March 22, the media discovered Zimmerman is Hispanic.
The Media's Dilemma
Once it was revealed Zimmerman is Hispanic, the media had a real
problem on its hands. The white vs. black narrative was already in
place. Sharpton was set to hold a high-profile rally in Florida on March
22; and In order to launch the story into the stratosphere, President
Obama would -- without a shred of evidence -- inject race into the story the very next day, March 23.
In other words, this was already a runaway black vs. white train. But
due to a lack of simple due diligence and fact-checking, the
all-important "white" part was found missing -- but only after it was
too late.
What to do?
It was at this point that the media as a whole entered into an
eighteen month push to prop up a fabricated white vs. black racial
narrative. And before it was over, most every major news outlet in the
country would sully themselves in some way to keep this manufactured
reality alive.
But no outlet, not even NBC, would play as dirty or come out as tarnished as CNN.
Here, and in no particular order, are the six categories (and the
winners in each) that led to CNN winning the award for Most Shameful
Coverage of George Zimmerman:
1. Singling Out George Zimmerman for a Lack of Racial Purity
Due to the fact that a now-unstoppable black vs. white narrative
train was already carrying the entire mainstream media, Al Sharpton,
left-wing civil rights groups, and even the president of the United
States, something had to be done to ensure it didn’t derail based on the
inconvenient fact that Zimmerman is Hispanic.
Enter the term "white Hispanic." The rationale…
Like Barack Obama, George Zimmerman has one white parent. Quite
properly, the president has always been described as black for the
simple reason that he is black. Historically and editorially, racial
purity has never been an issue for the mainstream media when it comes to
describing Hispanics, American Indians, blacks, Arabs, Asians, etc.
That didn't matter, though, and the loophole the media came up with
to deny Zimmerman his racial identity was that he failed a racial purity
test. The white part of him would now be cynically amplified at every
opportunity.
Though Zimmerman is as Hispanic as Obama is black, for the next eighteen months, various news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post,
Associated Press, and CNN, would strip Zimmerman of his identity by
making the previously unheard of editorial decision to describe him as a
"white Hispanic," or some variation of "self-described Hispanic."
Thanks to a recent editorial
by former CNN staffer Roland Martin, we now know that the network's
decision to focus on Zimmerman's lack of racial purity was an
institutional one -- not a decision made on-the-fly by individual
producers or anchors.
Winner: Tie
It is highly likely that the same institutional decision was made at
other news outlets to use a racial purity loophole to artificially prop
up the white vs. black narrative. For that reason, there is no clear
winner in this category.
2. Fabricating Evidence Against George Zimmerman
Three major news outlets are responsible for violating basic
editorial standards in order to frame George Zimmerman as a racist
and/or murderer. The first network guilty of this was CNN.
This irresponsible and premature segment aired the very night before Al Sharpton's high-profile rally in Florida.
After the audio was fully enhanced (something CNN obviously didn't
wait to do before falsely defaming Zimmerman), it became clear that
Martin had either said "fucking cold" or "fucking punks."
More than two weeks would pass before CNN would retract its falsehood.
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.
Here is the actual conversation:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to
no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just
walking around, looking about.
Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?
Zimmerman: He looks black.
After the fraudulent editing was discovered (first by Breitbart News), NBC News issued a full retraction and fired a number of the producers involved.
ABC News:
On March 28, ABC News proved themselves every bit as irresponsible as
CNN by breaking a major story before the evidence was all in. Using
surveillance video that hadn't yet been fully enhanced, ABC claimed that "video taken the night that Trayvon Martin was shot dead shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman."
This premature and completely false accusation would be retracted by
ABC News four days later after a full enhancement of the video clearly
showed lacerations on Zimmerman's head.
Winner: CNN by a mile
Though Zimmerman and his attorneys have filed a lawsuit against NBC
News for the malicious editing of the 911 tape, what CNN did is far
worse.
NBC News was attempting to make Zimmerman look like a racial
profiler. CNN, on the other hand, was attempting to make Zimmerman look
like an enraged outright racist (there was no racial angle in ABC's
fraud). It also took CNN far longer to retract their story than either
NBC or ABC.
Moreover, on its own airwaves, CNN would allow the complete fallacy that Zimmerman had said "fucking coon" to live on.
Which brings me to…
3. Outright Dishonesty
Unfortunately, there simply isn't enough room on the Internet to list
all of the media dishonestly hurled at Zimmerman. To save time, rather
than make a comparison, I will simply focus on the very worst of it,
which undoubtedly came from CNN.
Nothing was more harmful to our country or to Zimmerman personally
than the lie that race somehow was involved in this tragic shooting.
Therefore, the worst of the media's outright dishonesty came from their
zeal to falsely prop up the false narrative that Zimmerman is racist
or that race had anything to do with the shooting.
On two separate occasions (I'm aware of), even though CNN had
retracted the falsehood back in 2012, the inflammatory lie that
Zimmerman had described Martin as a "fucking coon" moments before
shooting him was allowed to live on uncorrected during CNN broadcasts in
July of 2013, when racial tensions were at their highest.
On July 16, 2013, on Erin Burnett's primetime CNN show, guest Safiya Songhai claimed Zimmerman's "on the tape saying F-ing coons."
Burnett did not correct the record.
Even worse, however, is that three days earlier on the 13th, one of
CNN's own employees spread this lie.
As far as I know, Grace has never corrected the record.
Winner: CNN
Again, the dishonesty throughout the media during this affair was
everywhere, and at times staggering. But nothing I know of reached the
heights of a cable news network intentionally allowing racial tensions
to be enflamed by something they knew was an outright lie.
4. Phony Objectivity
It might be a little unfair to declare CNN the winner partly because
of the fact that their phony objectivity is a 24/7 juggernaut, but there
is more to condemn them than just that.
While ABC, CBS, NBC, the Washington Post , AP, etc. were all
on the exact same dishonest narrative track in covering this case, they
are not a 24/7 bullhorn across numerous media platforms. CNN is, and
while it is true that MSNBC is not objective, unlike CNN, MSNBC does not
pretend to be objective.
CNN, therefore, is far more sinister than MSNBC in how it disguises
its leftism as objective truth. And when it came to the Zimmerman case,
the network was especially toxic for all the reasons listed above.
There is, however, one CNN segment of outrageous bias that sticks out like no other.
Even if this particular segment had occurred on the openly left-wing
MSNBC, it would have been worthy of note. But for it to happen on a
network that advertises itself as "objective" made for an extraordinary thirty-minutes of television.
In 2012, and before there was a shred of proof race had anything to do with anything, President Obama injected race
into the Martin shooting. His cynical goal was obvious: In a
swing-state crucial to his upcoming reelection, Obama sought to turn a
tragic local story into a national media obsession that would galvanize
his Florida base via racial division
Post-verdict, what Obama did last week was even worse. After the
trial and a thorough FBI investigation, the president knew that race had
absolutely nothing to do with the shooting. Regardless, on July 19, the
president made a surprise appearance in the White house briefing room
and delivered the kind of racially divisive remarks unheard of from a sitting president in my lifetime.
CNN's reaction from its "objective" anchor Brooke Baldwin and four
"objective" analysts (Gloria Borger, Jessica Yellin, Sonny Hostin, and
Candy Crowley) can only be described as orgasmic. The surreal segment is
described in detail here.
The topper, though, was when "objective" CNN anchor Don Lemon joined the celebration by breaking down into tears.
Winner: CNN
5. Outright Racism
The mainstream media's decision to single out George Zimmerman for
his lack of racial purity was without question a shameful and bigoted
act. But the only moment of outright virulent racism occurring in the
mainstream media came from CNN's Nancy Grace during her HLN primetime
show.
With racial tensions at their peak as America awaited a verdict, a
sneering Grace lashed out at the Hispanic Zimmerman with a racial tirade
about him enjoying a life of "driving through Taco Bell every night,
having churros" as Trayvon Martin lies dead.
--
--
In my two decades of watching the mainstream media, I have never once
seen any media personality use this kind of open racism on the air. The
fact that the rest of the media have ignored Grace's statement is
depressing. The fact that Grace still has a job is outrageous. The fact
that neither CNN nor Grace have even acknowledged or apologized defies
explanation.
In 2010, CNN fired Hispanic anchor Rick Sanchez for falsely accusing Jon Stewart of racism.
In 2013, a CNN anchor is using CNN's own airwaves to hurl racism at a Hispanic, and there have been absolutely no consequences.
Winner: CNN not only wins this category, "The Most Trusted Name In News" stands alone.
6. Lies of Omission
The media almost made a game of not reporting proven facts
inconvenient to their phony white vs. black racial narrative. This is a
form of lying known as lying through omission. There are almost too many lies of omission to count, but let us focus on this:
Winner: Tie
Every mainstream media outlet in America shamefully downplayed these facts.
--
Of these six categories, CNN tied in two and handily won four.
In a vast ocean of reprehensible media behavior surrounding the
coverage of George Zimmerman, CNN -- once one of the most respected and
trusted news outlets in the world -- stood alone as a bright, beaming
lighthouse of falsehoods, racism, and fabrications.
Welcome to Trayvongate, where the President of the United States used
both the bully pulpit, the Department of Justice and sly media
manipulation to gin up charges of racism in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon
Martin shooting. Now that the trial is almost finished and the only act
of racism mentioned so far came from the victim--Martin called
Zimmerman 'a creepy ass cracker' according to testimony--the cynical and
repeated use of the race card by the White house is even more
abhorrent.
Judicial Watch revealed
documents today that proved what Breitbart News reported in April,
2012: that Eric Holder's Department of Justice took an active role in
racially charged rallies in Sanford, Florida and that the Community
Relations Service helped force the temporary resignation of Sheriff Bill
Lee. That resignation made it appear that Sanford authorities were
suspect and possibly complicit in covering up something.
Some of my reporting at the time was based on interviews with
numerous public officials in Sanford who wanted to remain anonymous out
of fear of retribution from the Obama administration. They described a
situation where the CRS team took over and forced decisions while
clearing a path for protests and rallies that heightened the appearence
of racial tensions.
The CRS is a small unit within the Department of Justice and
ostensibly it serves a legitimate purpose; attempting to cool down tense
situation. As its website says:
The Community Relations Service is the Department's "peacemaker" for
community conflicts and tensions arising from differences of race,
color, and national origin. Created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, CRS
is the only Federal agency dedicated to assist State and local units of
government, private and public organizations, and community groups with
preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, incidents, and
civil disorders, and in restoring racial stability and harmony.
However, under the highly politicized Holder Department of Justice,
the CRS has acted as 'spies and muscle' according to a source familiar
with the unit. In the Zimmerman case, they ended up as doing nothing to
facilitate 'racial stability and harmony ', instead acting a heavy thumb
on the scales of justice and helping to force events that gave the
nation an impression that Martin's death was racially motivated.
Not just George Zimmerman, but the police and the entire town were
targeted in rallies that saw people being bused-in for protests. We now
have proof via the Judicial Watch release that these rallies were
facilitated by the Obama administration. They were also highly racially
charged. Close Obama ally Al Sharpton, along with Jesse Jackson, led the
charge. As CBS Miami reported:
“We live in the middle of an American paradox,” Rev. Sharpton told
the crowd. “We can put a black man in the White House but we cannot walk
a black child through a gated neighborhood.
We are not selling out,
bowing out or backing down until there is justice for Trayvon.”
“This is not about a hoodie, it’s about racial profiling,” Jackson
said. “We will use our marching feet, civil disobedience and every
weapon in our non-violent arsenal until justice is served.”
However, much of the rhetoric surrounding the Zimmerman story was
violent. Many will remember that the New Black Panther party actually
offered a $10,000 bounty for the 'capture' of George Zimmerman. As the Orlando Sentinal reported:
New Black Panther leader Mikhail Muhammad announced the reward during
a protest in Sanford Saturday. And when asked whether he was inciting
violence, Muhammad replied defiantly: "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a
tooth."
The bounty announcement came moments after members of the group
called for the mobilization of 10,000 black men to capture Zimmerman,
who shot Trayvon in a gated Sanford community on Feb. 26.
Muhammad said members of his group would search for Zimmerman themselves in Maitland
— where the 28-year old worked before the shooting, employees there
told the Orlando Sentinel. He declined to say when the group would begin
their search.
J. Christian Adams knows the New Black Panther Party well; he
resigned his position at the DOJ over the refusal to prosecute the
Panthers for the now infamous Philadephia voter intimidation actions during the 2008 election. Adams outlined the crimes committed by the NBPP in Sanford:
Let’s start with solicitation to kidnap. In announcing a reward for
the seizure of Zimmerman, the New Black Panthers may have violated
Florida Code 787.01. It makes it a felony to “by threat, confining or
abducting, or imprisoning another person against his . . . will without
lawful authority with intent to . . . terrorize.”
Merely soliciting someone else to do this is also a felony in Florida
under Florida Code 777.04. “A person who solicits another to commit an
offense prohibited by law and in the course of such solicitation
commands, encourages, hires, or requests another person to engage in
specific conduct which would constitute such offense or an attempt to
commit such offense commits the offense of criminal solicitation.”
That's only part of the list. The New Black Panther's outrageous,
illegal call for vigilante justice happened on March 24th. According the
records obtained by Judicial Watch, the Department of Justice deployed
to Sanford the next day: March 25th, 2012. However, the DOJ did not go
to Sanford to make arrests against the New Black Panthers. Instead,
according the the written record, obtained by Judicial Watch, they
"deployed to Sanford, FL, to work marches, demonstrations, and rallies
related to the shooting and death of an African-American teen by a
neighborhood watch captain."
Once again, the Holder Department of Justice failed to prosecute the
New Black Panther Party. They actually helped facilitate mass rallies
against Zimmerman and the City of Sanford.
These actions are made even more scandalous by the direct insertion
of the President of the United States into the story. President Obama
made his famous "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon"
remark at the White House, but what got considerably less press was the
fact that Obama had a prior relationship with Martin's attorney
Benjamin Crump. Obama worked with him on another racially charged case
when he was a Senator.
Breitbart News reported on the Obama connection
to the 2006 story of Martin Lee Anderson. Attorney Crump said publicly
that he was following the same media 'playbook' as the Anderson case.
Tactics included using a photo of Anderson as a child, the same way the
media used the Crump-supplied photo of Trayvon Martin as child. This story from 2006
shows the involvement of Senator Obama (who did not end up appearing at
the rally), Sharpton and Jackson as well as other usual suspects from
the far left.
A rally will be taking place in Tallahassee Friday, April 21
regarding the ongoing investigation into the death of 14-year-old Martin
Lee Anderson. Anderson died Jan. 6 at a Panhandle boot camp after being
kneed and punched by Bay County Sheriff's boot camp guards.
Students from Florida State University, Tallahassee Community College
and Florida A&M University have been involved in the planning and
organization of the event at which Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton
will be making appearances.
Charlie and Martin Sheen, who donated $10,000 to the cause, are also
reportedly planning to attend Friday, along with former TLC member
Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins and Afeni Shakur, mother of the murdered rapper
Tupac Shakur. According Samantha Greer, an FSU student and volunteer for
the Coalition for Justice for Martin Lee Anderson, Sen. Barack Obama of
Illinois may also make an appearance. Greer stressed that the Coalition
is still looking for volunteers and that anyone is welcome to join the
cause.
What we saw in 2012 was the Obama administration using taxpayer
resources to ratchet up racial tensions in a local crime case and
literally creating key story points in the narrative, such as forcing
the sheriff to temporarily resign. At the same time, the President
himself made an emotional statement about the victim with direct
reference to his race, without revealing that he had worked with the
victim's attorney a few years earlier in a similar case. At the same
time, Obama media ally (and Sharpton employer) NBC outrageously edited the Zimmerman audio
to make Zimmerman appear racist. All these manipulative and deceptive
uses of the race card--pushed along by the Holder DOJ at taxpayer
expense--happened just months before the 2012 presidential election.
The only reason this isn't a major scandal already is the media hasn't ever done its job and declared it one.
Call
it living in Upside-down Land or the realization of the Bible's
prediction of a time when bad will be called good and good, bad, but
once again innocent schoolchildren have been persecuted for, well, just
being children. This time the offender was Chase Lake Elementary School (CLES) in Edmonds, WA, where some kids were suspended for using Nerf guns on school
grounds. And it's an all-too-common story. A child will be punished for
drawing a gun, shaping his fingers as one and saying "bang!" merely talking about guns or some other innocuous action. And recently there was a case of a five-year-old boy who brought a cap gun to school to show a friend and then was interrogated for two hours until he wet his pants. It's all very bizarre and very twisted.
In the Edmonds case, the children were told that they could bring the toys to school, but I'm not interested in individual details but deeper matters. And make no mistake, something deeper is afoot here.
To
introduce this, let's start with another common thread in these cases:
the reaction of the persecuted children's parents. While they're always
upset about the relatively draconian punishment visited upon their kids,
their comments often reflect those of Edmonds mother Stacey Leidholm,
who addressed her son's suspension and marred permanent record and said
"I do understand that they definitely need consequences, but not that
harsh of a consequence."
Let's
stop right there. Why do they "need consequences"? This isn't a matter
of simply having to respect the rules even if you disagree with them,
since "with toy or facsimile guns, discipline is handed out at the
discretion of the principal," writes
KomoNews.com. Moreover, consequences imply a transgression, but what's
wrong with playing with toy guns? It's not as if these brightly-colored
toys could be mistaken for real guns, and playing with them is certainly
less likely to cause injury than is playing baseball or most any other
sport. So what danger is posed by the possession of toy guns on school grounds?
Before I get to that, a bit of history. Not that long ago it was common for boys to bring guns to school,
as they might have target shooting afterwards; this was even the case
in New York City in the 1940s and '50s, where kids would often ride the
subways with their guns. And while this no longer occurred when I
attended school in the Bronx in the '70s, no school official even batted an eye at our bringing toy guns to school.
That was just what little boys did. Clearly, something has changed in
society -- and it isn't the availability of guns or little boys' desire
to play with them.
The obvious answer here is that the last two decades' school
shootings and our civilization's general moral decline have changed the
equation. But while this would explain the desire to keep students with
real firearms off school grounds, there is no logical reason to apply this to toy guns. Saying otherwise is like claiming that because you wouldn't trust an 11-year-old to drive the family car to school,
you won't let him bring toy cars with him, either; or that he won't be
allowed to possess toy airplanes because he isn't ready to pilot a 747
for Delta. The same applies to the argument that bringing toy guns to school
makes the leap to bringing real ones that much shorter; it's as
nonsensical as saying that junior is more likely to steal the family
sedan if you let him play with Matchbox cars.
Of course, there is the paranoia explanation: the school
shootings have made people so fearful that anything smacking of
firearms is reflexively rejected. And I'm sure this is a factor -- but
I'm also sure there's more to it. What is it?
Conditioning.
Many
have posited the theory that the goal here is to raise generations
amenable to strict gun control by instilling the young with negative
attitudes toward firearms. And how better to do this than with swift and
sure punishment for anything that evidences even the thought of a gun?
Doodle a firearm, point your fingers like one -- anything at all -- and,
bang!, you suffer for your wrong thinking. Think doubleplusgood
thoughts, little boy, about flowers and kittens and rainbows and what
gender you want to be -- and be a good subject. And should a child be a
tad recalcitrant, nothing creates negative associations with firearms
like a two-hour, pants-wetting interrogation at the age of five.
(By
the way, it's funny how leftists who would outlaw a 30-second spanking
will then commit horrendous psychological and emotional child abuse.
Hey, nothing convinces a situational-values libtard of the value of
punishment like a person in need of reeducation.)
To buttress this theory, please consider this 1990s video of our beloved attorney general, Eric Withholder.
He outlines a plan for combating violence and says:
What we need to do is change the way people think about guns -- especially young people -- and make it something that's not cool;
that it's not acceptable, it's not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the
way that we've changed out attitudes about cigarettes. ...Over time we
changed the way people thought about smoking, so now we have people who
cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don't want
to admit it. And that's what I think we need to do with guns. ...I've
asked that the creative community in Washington... devote [their] talent
in a more constructive way, so we can get at the minds of these young
people. .... People who have credibility with young people should be on
the television, on the radio...and telling these youngsters that it's
wrong to carry a gun.... I've also asked the school board to make a part of every day some kind of anti-violence, anti-gun message; every day, every school
at every level. One thing that I think is clear with young people, and
with adults as well, is that we have to be repetitive about this.... We
need to do this every day of the week and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way [emphasis added].
Now,
I don't imply this is a grand conspiracy. It doesn't have to be when
you have millions of like-minded people who, being fellow travelers, all
act in similar ways quite instinctively. Sure, there are puppet masters
in the vanguard of these movements who create policy (like the
zero-tolerance nonsense) and who purposely effect Machiavellian designs,
but they are mere catalysts. Of course, there are many others --
teachers and administrators (mostly women) -- who instinctively dislike
guns, or fear them, and for this reason are inclined to carry out these
policies and punish a wrong-thinking child harshly. But theirs is more
an emotional reaction, as opposed to the colder, more insidious,
Luciferian motives of the world's Withholders.
But
then there are millions of other sheeple, caught in the Matrix, who
simply enforce these rules because they exist. As to this, I called CLES
and asked someone in community relations the following: "How does the
possession of toy guns on school grounds pose a threat?" After giving me a non-answer and then my having to rephrase the question once or twice, the school
official seemed genuinely flummoxed and said that she would have to
consult the literature and get back to me. An unthinking drone.
But
the question is, are the rest of us going to be sheeple as well? If
not, there are things we can and should do to counter the schools' war on guns and tradition. First, parents should organize, pick up their children from an offending school with toy guns in hand, and play a visible shoot-'em-up game on school
grounds. I'm serious. It's called desensitization. Moreover, it tells
the children in the strongest way possible that there is nothing wrong
with toy-gun play. And if the schools are trying to condition your kids the wrong way, why not condition them the right way?
Then there is the stick. The reason insanity keeps occurring at schools
and elsewhere is that leftists are never held accountable. But here we
must take a leaf out of their book. When someone transgresses against
their politically correct code -- think Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder, Don
Imus, or James Watson here -- an apology won't suffice.
The left wants the person destroyed.
So
follow suit. Don't be like a certain popular cable-news host who is
wont to say "I don't want to see the ____ (the tyrant du jour) lose his
job." Make sure a school official who commits leftist abuse upon a child
never works again. Go for the jugular, for the kill shot; give no
quarter. Go Roman. It's only when thousands of the thought police's
decaying corpses of careers are lining the Apian Way that those in
darkness will see the light. The Culture War is just that -- a war. And
if you want to turn it around, this must be your mindset -- every day,
every way, every school, at every level.
Via the Right Scoop, a video companion to Jillian Kay Melchior’s must-read
today at NRO about the Kafkaesque government gauntlet run by “True the
Vote,” a nonprofit devoted to training people to be election monitors.
Why might an org like that attract federal scrutiny? Catherine
Engelbrecht, the group’s founder, thinks it’s because she’s an active
tea partier who founded another nonprofit devoted to discussing
“personal and economic freedoms” known as — ta da — King Street
Patriots. The “P word” was, of course, on the IRS’s list of verboten
nonprofit names whose applications for tax exemption needed extra
scrutiny. So far, so bad. What’s unusual about Engelbrecht’s story is
that the government’s interest in King Street Patriots seemingly bled
over into scrutiny of True the Vote and even the Engelbrechts’ family
business, with Texas state environmental regulators eventually roped in
because they received a mysterious “complaint” from someone about the
business’s HQ. You need to read Melchior’s piece to grasp the extent of
it; three years later, King Street Patriots and True the Vote still have
yet to receive nonprofit approval from the IRS.
And pay attention to
what Kevin Williamson
rightly flags as a key subplot, namely the ability of federal and state
regulators to find costly infractions even among a well run, reputable
business. If the state wants to make your life difficult, there’s a
galaxy of laws out there it can use to do it. The process, as Mark Steyn says, is the punishment.
Three points. One, very broadly: If the IRS’s big problem circa 2010
was that it was overwhelmed with nonprofit applications (or so the
agency falsely claims),
why did that lead to unusually onerous demands for information? The
typical government response to unmanageable workloads is to cut corners,
yet the agency ended up asking Engelbrecht to send them copies of every
Facebook post and Tweet that she ever sent, amid hundreds of other
questions. That’s odd, no? You would think the big scandal to come out
of a glut of tax-exempt petitions is that those petitions were being
approved unusually quickly and with little scrutiny.
Instead the
opposite happened. Go figure. Two, obviously: Have any other
conservative nonprofit chiefs found themselves targeted by multiple
federal agencies? Nothing would surprise me at this point, but unless I
missed a big story, Engelbrecht’s the only person talking — right now —
about systemic scrutiny after filing for nonprofit status. Third: What’s
going on in this passage in Melchior’s story?
In July 2010, Catherine filed with the IRS seeking tax-exempt status for her organizations. Shortly after, the troubles began.
That winter, the Federal Bureau of Investigation came knocking with questions about a person who had attended a King Street Patriots event once.
Based on sign-in sheets, the organization discovered that the
individual in question had attended an event, but “it was a come-and-go
thing,” and they had no further information on hand about him.
Nevertheless, the FBI also made inquiries about the person to the office
manager, who was a volunteer.
Who were they looking for? And was that, rather than the nonprofit
application, the real trigger for the feds’ subsequent inquisitiveness?
Even if the mystery attendee was a criminal of some sort, that’s no
reason for the ATF and OSHA to be picking through the Engelbrechts’
place of business; there’s no evidence that they’re anything but
upstanding citizens. But I’d be curious to know why the FBI is sniffing
around a tea-party group’s attendance sheet.
The latest facts coming out about President Obama’s administration
seem to confirm accusation leveled against them for some time. What just
a few months ago was dismissed as conspiracy nonsense is now admitted
fact. Something that is making many take a second look at what has been
happening under the President’s watch.
Conservative Jewish and Hispanic
groups, pro-life organizations, and the Tea Party were singled out for
scrutiny by the IRS. Undergoing audits that involved unimaginably
intrusive questioning. Questions like who did you vote for, what does
your group pray about
and even what the leaders had posted on their personnel twitter
accounts were common. Associates, participant and donor lists were also
prime targets for IRS auditors.
Even more chilling than the selective auditing of conservative groups
was the singling out of individuals. People who were on Obama’s
campaign site enemies list were subject to audits as were reporters, conservative personalities and anyone else who dared raise their profiles too high. Even Governor Romney’s tax records
were illegally funneled to the press during the campaign. Things that
had gone on for years before the Inspector General’s brought the group
audits to light. During this time the agency leadership knew about the
illegal actions and did little to nothing to stop it. If not in
collusion they were at a minimum co-conspirators by virtue of their silence.
The IRS was not the lone participant in this outlandish behavior.
Businessmen who were hit by punitive IRS audits often saw the Department
of Labor show up at their door as well. The truth is conservatives have
been bearing the brunt of a fall frontal assault by the Obama
administration for awhile. Homeland Security wanted to mark pro-life
supporters and other conservatives as potential terrorist. Evangelicals and Catholics were deemed extremist
by the Army. The military is even threatening Christians with Court
Marshall if they dare practice their most basic tenant, that of sharing
their faith. HHS has similarly singled out conservative Catholics with
its birth control mandate and the EPA waived fees to access information for liberal groups but refused to do the same for conservative ones.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Truth is there is a culture of
arrogance and condescension that permeates the entire Obama
administration. It is on display in every news conference and
congressional hearing. It oozes out in Obama’s speeches and the
dismissive tone he shows his critics. It is this culture that has shown
itself to be a fertile ground for the abusive use of power from the
beginning. The Administration’s first year alone it was involved in
backroom union deals of the GM bailout, lost billions in Green Energy stimulus boondoggles and used unethical congressional shortcuts to pass ObamaCare.
The scandals piling up the President’s doorstep are a result of who
he put in positions of power and a culture he encouraged. If an
organizations leader does not respect legal limits why should those
under him. Last year nine state Attorney Generals made a list of twenty-one
examples of the Obama administration ordering agencies to break the
law. When the Justice Department seized AP phone records in a massive
fishing expedition it was following a precedent of consistently
outrageous behavior. Its mass confiscating of private data was like
searching every home in a small town to find out who stole Grandma’s
ring. It was also recently revealed the IRS confiscated the medical
records of sixty million people while exercising a warrant for the financial records of just one person. HHS Secretary
Kathleen Sebelius efforts to strong arm insurance companies into giving
money to help implement ObamaCare are also symptomatic of the corrupt
culture Obama has created. Then there is of course Benghazi.
The State Department arrogantly withdrew security when the Libyan
Embassy was begging for more. They followed that by denying assistance
when their Benghazi post
was under attack. When question about it all, their answers dripped
with condescension and lies. Blaming it on a video when they knew the
real truth; that it was a terrorist attack they had been warned would
happen. A story of death and dishonor that still begs for full
disclosure.
All these scandals swirling around the Administration are simply a
reflection of a darkness that permeates to its very soul. Its arrogance
and condescension have been shown to be not just character flaws but a
prelude to evil. Fooling itself into believing it has a right to control
others as it sees fit. This is the state of the present Administration.
An administration that begrudgingly acknowledges limitations only when
it is forced to. An attitude that those under him have taken a liking
to.
Attorney General Eric Holder faces new questions about racial bias
at the Department of Justice (DOJ), as well as about the veracity of his
testimony before Congress, as the result of a new Inspector General
report and documents obtained by Judicial Watch.
The Inspector General’s report, covered
extensively by former DOJ official J. Christian Adams, reveals that
many Civil Rights Division attorneys do not believe that the Voting
Rights Act ought to be enforced to protect white victims as well as
black victims, and that black employees who were willing to help
prosecute black defendants--such as the New Black Panther Party--were
subject to alleged threats and intimidation by DOJ officials.
The Judicial Watch documents
suggest that political appointees at DOJ were involved in the decision
to drop the case against the New Black Panther Party, contrary to
Holder’s sworn testimony before Congress, in which he said: “The
decisions made in the New Black Panther Party case were made by career
attorneys in the department. And beyond that, you know, if we’re going
to look at the record, let’s look at it in its totality.”
The documents also contradict the testimony of Assistant Attorney
General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez, who claimed that there was no
political intervention in the case.
Perez is currently considered
the frontrunner to be President Barack Obama’s next Secretary of Labor,
despite a controversial history that includes heavy involvement with
the pro-amnesty group La Raza as well as the New Black Panther Party
case.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton, who fought the DOJ in court for
access to the documents, called for “an independent investigation into
whether Messrs. Holder and Perez committed perjury in testifying under
oath about the Black Panther controversy.”
Attorney General Eric Holder and his Department of Justice have asked
a federal court to indefinitely delay a lawsuit brought by watchdog
group Judicial Watch. The lawsuit seeks the enforcement of open records
requests relating to Operation Fast and Furious, as required by law.
Judicial Watch had filed, on June 22, 2012, a Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) request seeking all documents relating to Operation Fast and
Furious and “specifically [a]ll records subject to the claim of
executive privilege invoked by President Barack Obama on or about June
20, 2012.”
The administration has refused to comply with Judicial Watch’s FOIA request, and in mid-September the group filed a lawsuit
challenging Holder’s denial. That lawsuit remains ongoing but within
the past week President Barack Obama’s administration filed what’s
called a “motion to stay” the suit. Such a motion is something that if
granted would delay the lawsuit indefinitely.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said that Holder’s and Obama’s
desire to continually hide these Fast and Furious documents is “ironic”
now that they’re so gung-ho on gun control. “It is beyond ironic that
the Obama administration has initiated an anti-gun violence push as it's seeking to keep secret key documents about its very own Fast and Furious
gun walking scandal,” Fitton said in a statement.
“Getting beyond the Obama administration’s smokescreen, this lawsuit is
about a very simple principle: the public’s right to know the full
truth about an egregious political scandal that led to the death of at
least one American and countless others in Mexico. The American people
are sick and tired of the Obama administration trying to rewrite FOIA
law to protect this president and his appointees. Americans want answers
about Fast and Furious killings and lies.”
The only justification Holder uses to ask the court to indefinitely
delay Judicial Watch’s suit is that there’s another lawsuit ongoing for
the same documents – one filed by the U.S. House of Representatives.
Judicial Watch has filed a brief opposing the DOJ’s motion to stay.
As the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was voting
Holder into contempt of Congress for his refusal to cooperate with
congressional investigators by failing to turn over tens of thousands of
pages of Fast and Furious documents, Obama asserted the executive
privilege over them. The full House of Representatives soon after voted
on a bipartisan basis to hold Holder in contempt.
There were two parts of the contempt resolution. Holder was, and
still is, in both civil and criminal contempt of Congress. The criminal
resolution was forwarded to the U.S. Attorney for the District of
Columbia Ronald Machen–who works for Holder–for prosecution. Despite
being technically required by law to bring forth criminal charges
against Holder, under orders from Holder’s Department of Justice Machen chose to ignore the resolution.
The second part of the contempt resolution–civil contempt of
Congress–allowed House Republicans to hire legal staff to challenge
President Obama’s assertion of the executive privilege. That lawsuit
remains ongoing despite Holder’s and the DOJ’s attempt to dismiss it and
settle it.
It’s unclear what’s in the documents Obama asserted privilege over,
but the president’s use of the extraordinary power appears weak. There
are two types of presidential executive privilege: the presidential
communications privilege and the deliberative process privilege. Use of
the presidential communications privilege would require that the
president himself or his senior-most advisers were involved in the
discussions.
Since the president and his cabinet-level officials continually claim
they had no knowledge of Operation Fast and Furious until early 2011
when the information became public–and Holder claims he didn’t read the
briefing documents he was sent that outlined the scandal and how guns
were walking while the operation was ongoing–Obama says he’s using the less powerful deliberative process privilege.
The reason why Obama’s assertion of that deliberative process
privilege over these documents is weak at best is because the Supreme
Court has held that such a privilege assertion is invalidated by even
the suspicion of government wrongdoing. Obama, Holder, the Department of
Justice, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and
virtually everyone else involved in this scandal have admitted that
government wrongdoing actually took place in Operation Fast and
Furious.
In Fast and Furious, the ATF “walked” about 2,000 firearms into the
hands of the Mexican drug cartels.
That means through straw purchasers
they allowed sales to happen and didn’t stop the guns from being
trafficked even though they had the legal authority to do so and were
fully capable of doing so.
Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of Mexican
citizens–estimates put it around at least 300–were killed with these
firearms.
As new information emerges regarding Friday’s resignation of CIA
Director David Petraeus, not only does the story begin to crystallize,
but so does the timeline of the FBI investigation that sparked it. In
light of the news that officials in the Department of Justice
apparently knew about the investigation for months, it now appears that
they may have prolonged the release of information to appropriate
parties, including to the director of national intelligence.
Details surfaced late Friday that the woman with whom Petraeus engaged in an affair was in fact his biographer, Paula Broadwell. Ultimately, it was the harassing emails
Broadwell sent to another woman connected to Petraeus, and whom sources
say Broadwell perceived as some sort of rival, that prompted the FBI to
initiate its investigation this spring. There has not
been any evidence to suggest that the relationship between Petraeus and
the other unidentified woman was romantic in nature.
Investigators initially thought the CIA Director’s personal Gmail
account had been hacked and pursued the matter as a potential
cybercrime. Instead, they discovered the affair through
the course of examining emails between Broadwell and Petraeus, some of
which were sexual in nature.
In a Wall Street Journal
article published late Saturday evening, it was revealed that Attorney
General Eric Holder himself was aware of the investigation for some
time.
The FBI and prosecutors in Florida and
North Carolina began investigating the possibility of email hacking,
because at least some of the emails sent by Ms. Broadwell to the other
woman included contents of messages that appeared to come from Mr.
Petraeus's own account, these people said. The Justice
Department and high-level officials, including Attorney General Eric
Holder, were aware of the investigation for months, having to approve
certain parts of the investigation.(emphasis added)
In an earlier article published by Newsmax,
Ronald Kessler – author of several books on the CIA, FBI and the Secret
Service – indicated that FBI agents working on the case notified
officials about the matter and were not pleased with the delayed timing
of Petraeus’ resignation.
FBI agents on the case were aware that
such a decision had been made to hold off on forcing him out until after
the election and were outraged.
“The decision was made to delay the
resignation apparently to avoid potential embarrassment to the president
before the election,” an FBI source says. “To leave him in such a
sensitive position where he was vulnerable to potential blackmail for
months compromised our security and is inexcusable.”
It is standard protocol for committees in Congress to be informed of
such investigations, which draws even further scrutiny to the timing of
the resignation. According to sources, no such notification occurred, as reported by CNN.
According to a congressional aide
familiar with the matter, the House and Senate intelligence committees
weren't informed that there was an FBI investigation into Petraeus until
Friday.
"The committees are required to be kept
informed of significant intelligence activities," the aide said
Saturday. "If there was an official investigation that was looking, at
least in part, at information that was compromising the CIA director,
then I think there's a solid argument to say that the committee
leadership should have been notified to at least some level of detail."
However, officials familiar with the investigation maintain that the
investigation was related to a potential cybercrime, and therefore not a
matter that typically falls under such protocol. The Wall Street Journal article indicates that FBI agents interviewed Petraeus in the past two weeks, during which he admitted to the affair.
Reports indicate
that the Justice Department informed James Clapper of the results of
the investigation on election night, which prompted the director of
national intelligence to speak with Petraeus the same day.
Clapper then spoke with Petraeus and
urged him to resign, notifying the White House the next day. That
sequence has become a source of controversy, raising questions among
some members of Congress about why key intelligence committees were not
notified earlier and why the FBI waited before informing the
administration about a probe that had stumbled onto embarrassing details
about the CIA chief.
While investigators ultimately determined that no security breach
occurred with respect to any cybercrime, concerns remain regarding the
broader issues of security and the potential for risks such as
blackmail, had the relationship between Petraeus and Broadwell not been
inadvertently discovered in the process. Equally
concerning is the fact that the Department of Justice and Attorney
General Eric Holder apparently saw no reason to make the director of
national intelligence or any members of Congress aware of the
investigation - even in part - until this week, despite having knowledge
of it for months. It may have begun as a cybercrime investigation, but clearly it turned out to be far more involved than that. Just imagine - had Petraeus not actually resigned, most might never have known about the situation at all.
