90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, September 1, 2022

Trump Legal Team Blasts DOJ for ‘Leak,’ ‘Unprecedented Behavior’

Former President Donald Trump’s legal team blasted the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI for scattering documents seized from Mar-a-Lago across the floor “for dramatic effect” in its latest court filing on Wednesday.

“Even yesterday, the Government’s Response gratuitously included a photograph of allegedly classified materials, pulled from a container and spread across the floor for dramatic effect,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

Wednesday’s filing by Trump’s attorneys came in response to the DOJ’s Tuesday filing opposing Trump’s request for a special master to conduct an independent review of the documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago in early August.

Trump’s legal team blasted the government’s opposition motion, calling it an “extraordinary document” that suggested “the DOJ, and the DOJ alone, should be entrusted with the responsibility of evaluating its unjustified pursuit of criminalizing a former President’s possession of personal and Presidential records in a secure setting.”

“Now, the Government twists the framework of responding to a motion for a Special Master into an all-encompassing challenge to any judicial consideration, presently or in the future, of any aspect of its unprecedented behavior in this investigation,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

In the DOJ filing, counterintelligence chief Jay Bratt said the government found “evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”

The DOJ’s response to Trump’s request for a special master also included photos of documents the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago scattered across the floor, leading some to assume that is how Trump kept the documents.

“There seems to be confusion as to the ‘picture’ where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when they broke into my home,” Trump posted on Truth Social hours before his legal team submitted its latest filing. He continued:
Wrong! They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet, making it look like a big ‘find’ for them. They dropped them, not me – Very deceiving…And remember, we could have NO representative, including lawyers, present during the Raid. They were told to wait outside.
Trump’s attorneys also criticized the federal government’s justification for its criminal inquiry into the former president. Trump attorneys said:
The purported justification for the initiation of this criminal probe was the alleged discovery of sensitive information contained within the 15 boxes of Presidential records. But this ‘discovery’ was to be fully anticipated given the very nature of Presidential records. Simply put, the notion that Presidential records would contain sensitive information should have never been cause for alarm.
Although the DOJ argued a special master is no longer necessary because its “filter team” had already conducted a preliminary review of the seized documents, Trump’s legal team blasted the DOJ’s Privilege Review Team for not contacting them and argued the review was...

Federal law enforcement officials have identified a high number of individuals with Middle Eastern names traveling with Mexican passports, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Since the beginning of 2022, nearly 30,000 Mexican passport holders were flagged as part of the investigation into passport fraud, the memo states, adding that each identified individual will be further evaluated. A senior official at DHS who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the agency will likely investigate whether any of the individuals have traveled to the United States and whether there are any other patterns in their travel.

The concern over fraudulent passports comes as a surge of illegal migrants at the southern border overwhelms the immigration system. With hundreds of thousands of migrants attempting to enter the country each month, Border Patrol and other law enforcement agencies often lack resources to properly vet who is entering the country. DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last year that the United States risks losing its "first line of defense" because of the "unsustainable" amount of illegal immigration at the border.

There are fears that terror groups such as al Qaeda could take advantage of the strained immigration system. Last April, for example, two Yemeni nationals on the terrorist watch list were apprehended at the southern border. Law enforcement officials appear concerned that bad actors could abuse the legal travel system to enter the country with passports obtained from Mexico, and enter the United States legally. Roughly 20 million Mexican citizens easily travel to the United States as tourists each year, according to the U.S. Travel Association.

"This investigation highlights that criminals often use legal travel to facilitate criminal activity," the senior DHS official told the Free Beacon. "The nexus to Mexico should cause the public and lawmakers to reflect on how a porous border can be even more dangerous."

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

The concerning passports were identified by the agency's National Targeting Center, the memo states. The lesser known subagency, created shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, "works quickly and quietly to identify people and products that pose potential threats to our Nation’s security, and to stop them from entering the United States," according to a 2014 public memo.

The National Targeting Center also assists Immigration and Customs Enforcement with deporting money launderers and child predators, the senior DHS official said. The National Targeting Center regularly partners with other agencies on investigations involving terrorism or global criminal networks.

The agency uses naming conventions specific to different regions to automatically pinpoint the most likely nationality of individuals—in Mexico, for example, individuals typically keep two surnames, one from each parent. In much of the Arab world, individuals can be given much longer names which often include an entire chain of ancestors on...

The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1128

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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1828

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.

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Girls With Guns

Visage à trois #442

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Why Gen. Mark Milley should be court-martialed

The most egregious examples of treasonous subversion by a commissioned officer since Benedict Arnold

Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be subject to an Article 32 Hearing under the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for his conduct and statements as memorialized in the Bob Woodward book “Peril,” and the Aug. 8, 2022, New Yorker magazine excerpt of a forthcoming book by Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker.

An Article 32 Hearing is the military equivalent of a civilian grand jury, and should probable cause of the commission of a crime be established, it would lead to Gen. Milley’s court-martial. The Army has an affirmative duty to maintain good order and discipline, especially with regard to senior leader misconduct.

History provides an example of a senior officer engaged in misconduct. Assistant Chief of the Army Air Service Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell was court-martialed in 1925 for remarks to the press concerning two deadly military aviation accidents.

Mitchell made the following offending statements: “These incidents are the direct result of the incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the national defense by the Navy and War Departments,” and “The bodies of my former companions in the air molder under the soil in America, and Asia, Europe and Africa, many, yes a great many, sent there directly by official stupidity.”

On Dec. 17, 1925, Mitchell was found guilty of “conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the military service.” The court suspended Mitchell from rank, command, and duty, with the forfeiture of all pay and allowances for five years. Mitchell resigned from his commission as an Army officer on Feb. 1, 1926. Some would say that history vindicated Mitchell, with the coming of World War II. Nonetheless, Mitchell paid the price for press statements outside the scope of his authority and for his insubordination.

Gen. Milley called his communist Chinese military counterpart in October 2020 and January 2021 with unauthorized promises and assurances of advanced warnings of U.S. military intentions and actions. America learned of these contacts through the book “Peril,” authored by Mr. Woodward and Robert Costa. In the book, Gen. Milley is quoted as saying, “General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be OK. We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.” And then, reportedly, Gen. Milley said this: “General Li, you and I have known each other for five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

Gen. Milley admitted to making the calls. A spokesman for Gen. Milley stated that Gen. Milley acted within his authority as the senior military adviser to the president and the secretary of defense, yet Gen. Milley failed to consult any civilian authority, a fact confirmed by...

Columnist Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History, said colleagues and peers of his — whose judgment he trusts — speculate that the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, FL, was a search for documents related to its “Russiagate” surveillance operation of the 45th president.

“I think the best way to understand this is in the context of a six-year-long operation targeting Donald Trump, Donald Trump’s aides, and Donald Trump’s supporters,” Smith said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak. “I have different colleagues and people whose insight and whose wisdom I trust very much, and they believe that what the FBI was looking for were documents related to … what the FBI called the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, but what most most of the rest of us know as the Russiagate operation meant to target candidate Trump, then President-elect Trump, and then President Donald J. Trump.”

Smith said the people whose speculation he was relaying “have much more insight” and “much more knowledge” about the FBI’s operations than he.

Smith noted that many of the FBI agents organizing the raid on Mar-a-Lago have been involved in the FBI’s ostensible investigation of Trump for years. He recalled a report from RealClearInvestigations titled, “FBI Unit Leading Mar-a-Lago Probe Earlier Ran Discredited Trump-Russia Investigation.”

He said political observers should view the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago “as part of something that started in the spring and summer of 2016 … or perhaps earlier.” He added, “This was the effort to get Donald Trump.”

The FBI’s surveillance of Trump, Smith maintained, must have been known to former President Barack Obama given its launch during the Obama administration.

“We need to remember these [are] intelligence agencies that Hillary Clinton was using to spy on the Trump campaign and to smear the Trump campaign,” he remarked. “This was in the Obama administration. There is no way that any of this happened without the White House knowing about it.”

Smith said it was “good news” that whistleblowers within the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) provided information to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) office about political and partisan internal efforts to suppress information about Hunter Biden.

The existence of whistleblowers within the FBI and DOJ, Smith surmised, could lead to some restraint among the bureaucracies’ worst “anti-Trump” operatives due to fear of exposure.

He remarked, “Thanks to the whistleblowers — and to thanks to Charles Grassley’s letters — now we have anti-Trump operatives at the DOJ and the FBI worried about who they can trust. Under our circumstances at present, that’s very important, and it’s very good news, because we want them looking at each other. We want them fearful of each other. We want them...