90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, September 15, 2022

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #651

SWAT Team Raids Innocent Elderly Couple, Destroys Their Home Because Their Power Bill Was Too Low

“The deputies believed the defendants were stealing power to grow marijuana because their power consumption was low."

Riverside County, CA — Even in states with legal marijuana, law enforcement's addiction to the drug war still lingers like a dark cloud over over the land of the ostensibly free. Even in California, who has paved the way in legalization of cannabis, police officers still violently, and with extreme prejudice, lay waste to the rights of innocent people who dare grow, use, or sell this most beneficial plant.

Because of their addiction to the war on drugs, cops in Riverside County have just cost the taxpayers of their town $136,000. The money was paid to Chen-Chen Hwang, 67, and her husband, Jiun-Tsong Wu, 75, to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging that their two homes were broken into by armed agents of the state and ransacked as officers looked for non-existent marijuana plants.

According to Alex Coolman, the attorney who filed the suit on behalf of the elderly couple, police were monitoring power bills of town residents and used the low amount of the couple's bill as reason to believe they were growing marijuana.

“This was a very strange and frightening incident,” Hwang said in a release from Coolman's office. “We did nothing to deserve this, and it made us feel unsafe in our own homes.”

The raid unfolded on August 5, 2021 and caused thousands in damage to the couple's home.

Apparently police in Riverside County monitor power consumption and when they see low power usage, they automatically assume that people are stealing power to grow marijuana.

“The deputies believed the defendants were stealing power to grow marijuana because their power consumption was low, and they said as much,” Coolman told the Press-Enterprise.

But the couple was not growing marijuana and their power consumption was low because they used solar power and were "thrifty," according to Coolman.

According to the lawsuit, on on August 5, 2021, a SWAT team, using a battering ram, broke down the door to the couple's home in their quiet subdivision. Nobody was home and for several hours, deputies ransacked the home, destroying their property in the futile search for a plant — which they never found.

After not finding anything at this house, deputies then turned their attention to the couple's second home — which couldn't have possibly used power from their other address but was targeted nonetheless — and raided it too. According to the lawsuit, however, they had no warrant for the second and also entirely...

Joe Biden’s CIA Director William Burns previously led an elite Washington, D.C. think tank that had undisclosed Chinese Communist Party-linked employees, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) on Monday. The report prompted Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) to demand Burns address his alleged “strong ties” to China.

DCNF revealed in August that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had at least 20 undisclosed members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) working for the organization under Burns’ leadership between February 2015 and November 2021. In a letter shared with DCNF, Gooden expressed concerns over Burns’ ability to lead the CIA after heading the CCP-influenced think tank.

“The vast influence the CCP had at Carnegie during your tenure as president and the continued influence they have today — despite claims you made at your confirmation hearing that you had ended the CCP’s influence — presents a significant lapse in judgment and brings into question your ability to identify and mitigate national security risks,” Gooden’s letter stated.

Gooden called on Burns to address when he realized the CCP was targeting Carnegie, the number of CCP-linked employees that worked at Carnegie, and if he believes CCP members should be permitted to work on federal grants.

This isn’t the first time Burns has come under fire for his connections to the Chinese Communist Party. During his CIA confirmation hearing in Feb. 2021, Burns told Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) that shortly after he became president of Carnegie, he ended the group’s relationship with the CCP-backed China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF).

“This is a relationship that I inherited when I became president of Carnegie, and that I ended not long after I became president, precisely for the concerns that you just described, because we were increasingly worried about the expansion of Chinese influence operations,” Burns testified.

However, CUSEF continued to provide Carnegie with hundreds of thousands of dollars while Burns was president, DCNF discovered.

“The evidence would suggest Director Burns lied under oath during his confirmation hearing or was...

Visage à trois #469

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #650

New Durham bombshell: FBI paid Russian accused of lying as a confidential informant against Trump

Prosecutor says Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the discredited Steele dossier, was paid by FBI as confidential human source for three years despite prior concerns he was tied to Russian intelligence services.

In a bombshell revelation, Special Prosecutor John Durham revealed Tuesday in court filings that the FBI paid a Russian businessman as a confidential human source in the investigation of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign even though it had prior concerns that businessman was tied to Moscow's intelligence services.

Durham persuaded the federal judge in the upcoming trial of Igor Danchenko to unseal a motion revealing that Danchenko, the primary source of the now-discredited Steele dossier, was paid by the FBI as a confidential human source for more than three years until the fall of 2020 when he was terminated for lying to agents.

Danchenko is charged with five counts of lying to the bureau during that relationship and faces trial next month in federal court in the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C.

"In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI," Durham's unsealed court filing disclosed for the first time. "The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020. As alleged in further detail below, the defendant lied to FBI agents during several of these interviews."
File: gov.uscourts.vaed_.515692.81.0.pdf

The revelation means that the FBI first fired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the author of the Hillary Clinton-funded dossier, as a human source in November 2016 for having unauthorized contacts with the news media. And it then turned around a few months later and hired Steele's primary informer to work with the bureau even after determining some of Danchenko's statements in the Steele dossier were uncorroborated or exaggerated.

Even more stunning, Durham confirmed that the FBI had concerns about Danchenko's ties to Russian intelligence a decade earlier, opening up a counterintelligence probe on him after learning he was trying to buy classified information from the Obama administration.

"As has been publicly reported, the defendant was the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation from 2009 to 2011," Durham wrote. "In late 2008, while the defendant was employed by a prominent think tank in Washington, D.C., the defendant engaged two fellow employees about whether one of the employees might be willing or able in the future to provide classified information in exchange for money.

"According to one employee ('Employee-1'), the defendant believed that he (Employee-1) might be in a position to enter the incoming Obama administration and have access to classified information. During this exchange, the defendant informed Employee-1 that he had access to people who would be willing to pay money in exchange for classified...

PODESTA IN... CASH PROFIT.

The White House quietly loosened Trump-era restrictions on the sharing of U.S. technology with firms blacklisted for their ties to the Chinese Communist Party, including the controversial Huawei, The National Pulse can report.

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued a revision to a Trump-era Export Administration Regulations (EAR) newly authorizing the release of certain technology and software for the alleged purpose of “standards setting and development in standards organizations.”

THE QUIET REVISION TO TRUMP-ERA RULES.

The move, which applies to firms that have been blacklisted by the U.S. government, was advertised as addressing confusion over whether American companies need a license to share “low-level”technology with sanctioned parties.

Notably, Huawei Technologies Co. – which was included in the original export ban, as telecommunications firm has extensive links to the Chinese Communist Party – will now be able to receive certain technologies from American companies.

Labeled a “national security threat” by the Trump administration and a decades-long Chinese military collaborator by the U.S. Department of Defense, Huawei routinely provides the regime backdoor access to its products, networks, and devices.

The State Department has also emphasized that the Chinese Communist Party uses Huawei as an “instrument not only for making money but also for pursuing the Party-State’s agenda and fulfilling its strategic objectives […] deeply enmeshed in Beijing’s system of...