90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, May 8, 2019

As Democrats Threaten Barr, a Look Back at What Happened With Holder’s Contempt Charge

Some Democratic lawmakers threaten to handcuff and lock up Attorney General William Barr, but holding someone in contempt of Congress rarely is more than a censure vote.

The most relevant comparison: In a bipartisan vote, 17 House Democrats joined the Republican majority in 2012 to hold then-Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt of Congress for not providing thousands of pages of documents regarding Operation Fast and Furious, a serious scandal for the Obama administration.

More Democrats, a total of 21, joined Republicans to find Holder in civil contempt. Two Republicans voted against the criminal contempt citation.

Fast and Furious, a Justice Department program, allowed hundreds of American guns to flow to Mexican drug trafficking organizations.

However, the Justice Department lost track of the guns. In late 2010, one was found at the scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder.

The House at the time was under Republican control, and the criminal and civil contempt citations originated in the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, under Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif.

Democrats now control the House, and one of Barr’s harshest critics is Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y.

Democratic lawmakers gave Barr a deadline of Monday to provide a completely unredacted copy of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign and potential ties to President Donald Trump.

Barr responded that he has provided as much of the report that he is allowed to provide by law because it contains grand jury information and material that potentially could jeopardize an ongoing investigation.

By contrast, the contempt vote on Holder was legitimate, said Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department lawyer and co-author with journalist John Fund of the 2014 book “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”

“Here, [Barr] has given Congress complete access to the report except for some parts,” von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. “Holder refused to provide information on Fast and Furious.”

“He was trying to cover up the most reckless Department of Justice ever, which led to the death of a Border Patrol agent,” von Spakovsky said of Holder. “The improper thing in the Barr case is that they want to hold him in contempt for following federal law.”

Von Spakovsky said he doubts a contempt citation for Barr would have the same bipartisan backing that the Holder citation drew.

The unredacted Mueller report already is available in a...

HUMAN TRAFFICKERS, CORRUPT CLERGY TARGET PAKISTANI CHRISTIAN GIRLS FOR CHINESE GROOMS

Illegal marriage brokers began targeting Pakistani Christian girls to sell into marriages with older Chinese men in late 2018 in order to meet the rising demand for foreign brides in China, human rights groups said.
Christian activists, pastors, and government officials claim the brokers pay corrupt clergy to find brides from among poor Christian families.
They also said Chinese immigration officials ignore the practice by indiscriminately issuing visas.

Human traffickers are paying corrupt clergy to lure impoverished Christian girls from Pakistan to China in order to sell them into marriages with older Chinese men, human rights groups said.

Pastors, Pakistani government officials, and brides who escaped their Chinese husbands said “marriage brokers” began targeting girls from poor Christian families in Pakistan in late 2018 in response to a mounting demand for foreign brides in China, according to The Associated Press.

Traffickers have sold up to 1,000 Pakistani girls into sexual slavery thinly veiled as marriage since October of 2018, aided by what activists claim is the apathy of immigration officials and the greed of corrupt priests.

“This is human smuggling,” Ijaz Alam Augustine, human rights and minorities minister for the Punjab province of Pakistan, told the AP. “Greed is really responsible for these marriages … I have met with some of these girls and they are very poor.”

Human traffickers have enlisted the help of corrupt clerics who offer poor Christian families thousands of dollars in exchange for allowing their daughters to be sold into marriage to Chinese men who, they are told, are wealthy converts to Christianity. The lure is especially enticing to Pakistani Christian families, as Christians in Pakistan have little political support and are among the poorest people in the country.

Pakistani custom holds that a bride’s family must pay a dowry to the groom. The husband and his family will often mistreat the bride if her family is unable to pay what they believe to be an adequate dowry. Daughters, therefore, are often seen as burdens to Pakistani families, especially those in poverty. The offer from a rich, Christian, foreign national to pay for all wedding expenses, along with the recommendation of a local priest or pastor, appears too promising for poor Pakistani Christian families to deny.

Muqadas Ashraf, who said she was 16 years old when her family sold her into marriage, said the offers aren’t true.

“It is all fraud and cheating. All the promises they make are fake,” Muqadas told the AP.

Her mother, Nasreen, said she has yet to see a penny of the approximately $5,000 she was offered to allow Muqadas to be married to a Chinese groom.

Local Christian activist and journalist Saleem Iqbal claimed human traffickers have sold an estimated 750 to 1,000 Pakistani girls into marriages with older, often abusive Chinese grooms since October 2018. Iqbal also runs a refuge that provides shelter to brides who escape their...

Boy-oh-boy is the damn now breaking on much of the Obama-Clinton Spygate scandal.

Read on to learn the latest which in this case directly implicates both the Clinton campaign and Obama administration (including but not limited to the Obama FBI) in not only weaponizing federal agencies to harm a political opponent, but also working with foreign government operatives to do so—two VERY BIG crimes.
The Hill:

If ever there were an admission that taints the FBI’s secret warrant to surveil Donald Trump’s campaign, it sat buried for more than 2 1/2 years in the files of a high-ranking State Department official.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec’s written account of her Oct. 11, 2016, meeting with FBI informant Christopher Steele shows the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded British intelligence operative admitted that his research was political and facing an Election Day deadline.

And that confession occurred 10 days before the FBI used Steele’s now-discredited dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s ties to Russia.

Steele’s client “is keen to see this information come to light prior to November 8,” the date of the 2016 election, Kavalec wrote in a typed summary of her meeting with Steele and Tatyana Duran, a colleague from Steele’s Orbis Security firm. The memos were unearthed a few days ago through open-records litigation by the conservative group Citizens United.

Kavalec’s notes do not appear to have been provided to the House Intelligence Committee during its Russia probe, according to former Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). “They tried to hide a lot of documents from us during our investigation, and it usually turns out there’s a reason for it,” Nunes told me. Senate and House Judiciary investigators told me they did not know about them, even though they investigated Steele’s behavior in 2017-18.

One member of Congress transmitted the memos this week to the Department of Justice’s inspector general, fearing its investigation of FISA abuses may not have had access to them.

Nonetheless, the FBI is doing its best to keep much of Kavalec’s information secret by retroactively claiming it is classified, even though it was originally marked unclassified in...

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Former Clinton and Obama Adviser Found Dead by ‘Suicide’ in March

An economist with close ties to the Clintons and Barack Obama committed suicide in March, according to reports.

Professor Alan Krueger, a family man known for his smile, was found dead in his home, according to Princeton Police.

According to a statement released by his employer Princeton University, the professor took his own life.

Krueger served as a senior adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. In June his long awaited book Rockonomics is set to be released.

The 58-year-old committed suicide, his family said in a separate statement released by the school Monday, New York Post reports.

“It is with tremendous sadness we share that Professor Alan B. Krueger, beloved husband, father, son, brother, and Princeton professor of economics took his own life over the weekend,” the statement said. “The family requests the time and space to grieve and remember him.”

Krueger served as a Labor Department economist under Clinton, then as a top Treasury official for Obama. From 2011 to 2013, he was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

However, some people are speculating that the Clinton associate’s death is “suspicious.”