90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, May 1, 2022

FBI Nearly Triples Unconstitutional Searches of Americans in 2021

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) nearly tripled their unconstitutional warrantless searches of Americans year-over-year from 2020 to 2021, from 1.3 million warrantless searches to 3.4 million.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released data in a report showing the warrantless searches conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which nearly tripled from 2020 to 2021. A senior FBI official admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the 3.4 million warrantless searches “is certainly a large number,” adding that he would “not going to pretend that it isn’t.”

“For reasons discussed more fully below, these statistics are reported separately from NSA, CIA, and NCTC due to unique variations in FBI’s data, chief among them that FBI does not count the number of unique query terms, but instead counts the total number of queries, which could include duplicate queries of the same term,” the ODNI report stated.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a top civil liberties advocate in Washington D.C., is demanding additional transparency and accountability regarding the startling number of warrantless searches.

“For anyone outside the U.S. government, the astronomical number of FBI searches of Americans’ communications is either highly alarming or entirely meaningless,” Wyden said. “Somewhere in all that over-counting are real numbers of FBI searches, for content and for non-content – numbers that Congress and the American people need before Section 702 is reauthorized.”

“The FBI must also be transparent about the particular circumstances in which it conducted a staggering 1.9 million additional queries in 2021. Finally, the public deserves to know whether the FBI has...

Some months ago, news that the criminal case against Donald Trump in Manhattan was in trouble broke. The prosecution’s top two prosecutors resigned in protest because current DA Alvin Bragg, a far-left Democrat, refused to play into their lawfare fantasies of taking a losing case into the courtroom.

Later, a sympathetic report from The New York Times exposed just how far they were willing to go in their push for political retribution. They claimed that not charging Trump, despite the lack of evidence, would put them on “the wrong side of history” — while also proclaiming it a “righteous case that ought to be brought.” Given the power that prosecutors hold, it’s scary to think that people like that populate district attorney offices across the nation. They can ruin your life over a grudge and not even blink. Bragg, despite having run on nuking Trump, recognized that things had gone too far.

Still, the grand jury in the case remained empaneled, and several weeks after the resignations, fresh rumblings from the DA’s office gave the left new hope. That has now expired, though, with the grand jury ending, no charges being filed, and no reason to think it will be reconvened.

A six-month grand jury that was convened late last year to hear evidence against Donald Trump was set to expire this week, closing a chapter in a lengthy criminal investigation that appears to be fizzling out without charges against the former president, people familiar with matter [sic] said.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who took office in January, inherited a probe launched by his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., who was convinced that there was a case against Trump for crimes related to manipulating the value of property assets to secure tax advantages or better loan rates…

…Still, the expiration of the grand jury — and the departure in February of two senior prosecutors who said Bragg was stalling the inquiry — makes any potential indictment of Trump seem unlikely, legal observers have said. By the time Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne quit, the grand jury had been inactive for weeks, with jurors being told to stay home, a person with knowledge of the issue previously said.

Bragg tried to appease his critics by insisting that other grand juries that are handling other cases could conceivably be called upon to charge Trump, but that wouldn’t make any sense at this point. If his office had the goods, they would have used the grand jury empaneled to deal with the specific case against the former president. In short, this is over, and anyone suggesting otherwise needs to find a better coping mechanism.

Sure enough, The Palmer Report, a far-left social media presence with 462,000 followers took to Twitter to do the exact opposite. Here’s just a taste of the conspiracy theories being spun to explain away why Trump isn’t being frog-marched in handcuffs at this point.

I’ll stop there, but you get the point. These absolute hacks are doing everything they can to create wild scenarios in which Trump somehow ends up charged with criminal offenses. In this case, the suggestion is that NY AG Letitia James will somehow take over the prosecution. That’s not going to happen, though. James is pursuing Trump, but she’s doing so on civil grounds. If she had any criminal case to bring, she’d have brought it long ago.

Of course, there are still other long-shot attempts to put Trump behind bars in places like Georgia, where a local investigation is attempting to show that he tried to force Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to create fraudulent votes following the 2020 election. Anyone that has listened to the tape, though, knows that claim is extremely weak.

Regardless, this witch hunt in New York is done. Still, I’m assured the...

Visage à trois #211

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #383

Biden and the CDC Just Proved Masking Is About Control, Not Public Health

The CDC, drunk on its own power, has asked the Department of Justice to appeal U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s ruling that the mask mandate for public transportation is unconstitutional.

“To protect CDC’s public health authority beyond the ongoing assessment announced last week, CDC has asked DOJ to proceed with an appeal in Health Freedom Defense Fund, Inc., et al., v. Biden, et al.,” the agency said in a statement. “It is CDC’s continuing assessment that at this time an order requiring masking in the indoor transportation corridor remains necessary for the public health.”

Did you catch that? They’re appealing the decision in order to protect the CDC’s authority. They’re furious that they’re losing their power over the lives of 331 million Americans and they’re not going to take it.

“CDC will continue to monitor public health conditions to determine whether such an order remains necessary,” the statement continued. “CDC believes this is a lawful order, well within CDC’s legal authority to protect public health.”

Translation: The mandate ends when WE say it ends. The rules are for the peasants.

Judge Mizelle wrote in her ruling that the CDC masking order “exceeded the CDC’s statutory authority, improperly invoked the good cause exception to notice and comment rulemaking, and failed to adequately explain its decisions.” Therefore, “the Court declares unlawful and vacates the Mask Mandate.”

When the decision came down on Monday, the Biden administration quickly announced that the TSA would no longer enforce the mandate.

But then the crazies started screeching about it on Twitter and the Biden had to do something—which is always the response of bureaucrats on the public dole. It doesn’t matter whether what they do is right or in the public’s best interest, as long as they can be seen as doing something.

Katie Pavlich from our sister site Townhall didn’t mince words about how this will turn out:

A TV doctor at MSNBC is actually encouraging confrontations on planes.

Never forget: This has always been about power rather than public health.

Note to Biden and the CDC:

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Girls With Guns

Visage à trois #210

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Who could have possibly guessed that the person who has been chosen to run Joe Biden’s new “Ministry of Truth” would turn out to be a raving, dictatorial lunatic?

That’s the story this morning after others have begun to dig through Nina Jankowicz’s past social media posts. As RedState reported previously, Jankowicz is set to be the new director of the administration’s new “Disinformation Governance Board,” an Orwellian entity if I’ve ever seen one.

So who is she? Apparently, Jankowicz is a far-left, pro-censorship Karen who believes the government should have absolute power. No, I’m not exaggerating. Read her posts for yourself.

She's a complete lunatic. pic.twitter.com/kU2mIGo7gM
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) April 29, 2022

Jankowicz is (because it’s a requirement on the left these days) a big-time Russia hysteric, spreading false conspiracy theories that the Hunter Biden laptop was a “Russian disinformation campaign.” She was also a huge fan of the Mueller investigation before she turned into a pro-lockdown fanatic. Does that sound like someone who should be put in charge of dictating — from a governmental perch — what is and isn’t true for the Department of Homeland Security?

Think about that. It’d be bad enough if she were part of the FEC as some kind of government finger-wagging experiment. That alone would be insane, but she’s going to be making judgments on disinformation in regards to government targeting of “extremists”? That’s scary stuff, and it should not be understated how dictatorial it is. America is not supposed to have a “Ministry of Truth.” That’s supposed to be reserved for autocracies. America having one now is also flatly unconstitutional, and hopefully, lawsuits are already being prepared as I type this. Such an overreach cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged.

Of course, while Jankowicz is a tyrannical figure who looks at the American populace as serfs, she happens to be flat-out crazy as well.

Meet The Head Of Biden's Ministry Of Truth: Nina Jankowicz

So to recap, the top authority in the nation on what is “disinformation” is a Harry-Potter-obsessed, Soviet-cosplaying Karen who took one too many theater classes. What could possibly go...