Has the Impeachment Circus Reached Its
Final Act?
Will the nation learn anything from the spectacle of the Pelosi-Schiff coup
cabal abusing the Constitution with their impeachment circus? As with the
Judge Kavanaugh lynching, the impeachment of President Trump was always a
house of cards built on abuse of power, distortions and dastardly lies.
The fact that the president has had to expend so many resources is terrible
for the country. Schiff should never have been allowed to get a Senate
trial. And every minute of every day wasted on this is a distraction from
dealing with the issues we ought to be dealing with – like putting people
who illegally spied on the President in jail or the Coronavirus
emergency.
I discussed this with Lou Dobbs, and you can watch the interview here.
Meantime, we are in court with dozens of lawsuits to uncover the terrible
corruption behind the illegal spying and abuse targeting President Trump
and our constitutional republic.
(Thanks to our friends at the Daily
Caller, Judicial Watch is providing a feed of the trail so you can
watch the proceedings directly. The live feed is available here,
here,
here,
and here.)
Judicial Watch Sues on the Biden-Burisma Scandal and the So-Called
‘Whistleblower’
We just filed two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits against the
Department of State relating to Burisma Holdings. The first seeks records
of communications from the U.S. embassy in Kyiv related to Burisma. The
second seeks records related to a January 19, 2016, meeting at the White
House that included Ukrainian prosecutors, embassy officials and CIA
employee Eric Ciaramella ( Judicial
Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:20-cv-000229)) and
( Judicial
Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:20-cv-000239)).
Ciaramella reportedly worked on Ukraine issues while on detail to both the
Obama and Trump White Houses. He is widely
reported as the person who filed the whistleblower complaint that
triggered the impeachment proceedings. His name reportedly was “raised
privately in impeachment depositions, according to officials with direct
knowledge of the proceedings, as well as in at least one open hearing held
by a House committee not involved in the impeachment inquiry.”
Last month we sued
for Ciaramella’s CIA emails and for information on his links to the
FBI/DOJ Russiagate investigation. We also sued
for records about the firing of Ukraine’s top prosecutor after
then-Vice President Joe Biden threatened to withhold aid.
The Senate, through Chief Justice Roberts, has effectively banned mention
of Ciaramella’s name during the Trump impeachment trial, but the politics
of cover-up won’t stop Judicial Watch.
We filed the new suits after the State Department failed to respond to FOIA
requests for:
• All cables/teletypes or e-mails sent or
addressed to any official, employee, or representative of the Department of
State stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv containing the term
“Burisma.”
• All records regarding the January 19,
2016, meeting at the White House that included State Department Ukrainian
Resident Legal Advisor Jeff Cole and U.S. Embassy Kyiv employee Svitlana
Pardus.
• All records of communication between
State Department Resident Legal Advisor Jeff Cole and National Security
Council staffer Eric Ciaramella.
• All records of communication between
U.S. Embassy Kyiv employee Svitlana Pardus and National Security Council
staffer Eric Ciaramella.
• All emails sent by or addressed to
State Department Resident Legal Advisor Jeff Cole and/or U.S. Embassy Kyiv
employee Svitlana Pardus between January 10, 2016 and January 30,
2016.
In April 2014, Hunter Biden joined
the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings. He served on
the board until early 2019. Burisma, which was under investigation by the
Ukrainian government stated
at the time of his hiring that Biden would, be “in charge of the
Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among
international organizations.” Biden had no previous energy experience.
In November 2019, through analysis of Obama-era White House visitor logs,
we broke
the story of Ciaramella’s White House meetings. Ciaramella was
detailed to the Obama White House in 2015 and returned to the CIA during
the Trump administration in 2017. The list of persons Ciaramella met with
includes, but is not limited to, Daria Kaleniuk, co-founder and executive
director of the Soros-funded Anticorruption Action Center (AntAC) in
Ukraine; Gina Lentine, formerly the Eurasia program coordinator at Soros
funded Open Society Foundations; and former Assistant Secretary of State
Victoria Nuland, who had extensive involvement with Clinton-funded dossier.
The logs also reveal that that Alexandra
Chalupa, a contractor hired by the DNC during the 2016 election who
coordinated with Ukrainians to investigate President Trump and his former
campaign manager Paul Manafort, visited the White House 27 times.
On January 22, 2020, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham reported
that New York Times journalist Ken Vogel was investigating the January 19,
2016, meeting at the White House. Vogel had contacted the State Department
via email for comment, specifically mentioning concerns about Hunter
Biden’s position with Burisma:
“We are going to report that [State Department official] Elizabeth
Zentos attended a meeting at the White House on 1/19/2016 with Ukrainian
prosecutors and embassy officials as well as … [redacted] from the NSC
… The subjects discussed included efforts within the United State
government to support prosecutions, in Ukraine and the United Kingdom, of
Burisma Holdings … and concerns that Hunter Biden’s position with the
company could complicate such efforts.”
Our new lawsuits could confirm that President Trump had every right to
be concerned about Ukraine and Biden corruption – and that the
impeachment against him was a shameful attempt to cover up these
scandals.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys ‘Blown Away’ by Clinton’s
‘Fabulous Party’
We have consistently reported the chummy relationship between President
Obama’s Justice Department and Hillary Clinton.
Now we have more evidence in seven
pages of heavily redacted emails from the Department of Justice
relating to Assistant U.S. Attorneys Alana Robinson and Emily W. Allen, who
attended an August 2015 fundraiser in California for then-presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton.
The two San Diego-based prosecutors played a leading role in prosecuting
former Congressman Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA) and Hunter’s wife on 60
separate criminal charges relating to the misuse of campaign funds. Hunter
pled guilty to one count of criminal conspiracy on December 3, 2019, and
resigned from Congress on January 7, 2020. He is scheduled to be sentenced
on March 17, 2020.
In June 2019, Hunter filed a
motion seeking to dismiss the charges against him or, in the
alternative, recuse the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego on the
grounds that Robinson and Allen had a political conflict of interest due to
their attendance at the Clinton fundraiser.
In response,
the prosecutors represented to the San Diego federal court where the
criminal case is pending that Robinson and Allen were asked to attend the
Clinton fundraiser “in the event of a protective security related
incident where immediate prosecutorial guidance would be necessary.” The
statement did not elaborate on what kind of incident might require
prosecutorial guidance. An earlier letter from Executive Office for United
States Attorneys General Counsel Jay Macklin represented that the
prosecutors were at the event “in their official capacity assisting law
enforcement.”
The new records, obtained in response to a Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) lawsuit ( Judicial
Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:19-cv-03578)), raise
serious questions about these responses and whether prosecutors misled the
court.
In an
email obtained through the lawsuit, sent on the date of the Clinton
fundraiser, August 7, 2016, with the subject line “Photo,” a U.S.
Attorney’s office official, whose name is redacted, sends a note to
another U.S. Attorney’s office official, whose name is also redacted
saying, “Thank you so much for the invitation to this morning’s event!
I was blown away by your incredible hospitality and can’t thank you
enough for allowing us to crash that fabulous party. It was a really
memorable morning.”
In another email
on the same date and with the same subject line, one U.S. Attorney’s
office official, whose name is redacted, sends a note to another official,
whose name is also redacted saying, “[Y]ou totally downplayed that
amazing invitation! I had no idea it would be so spectacular. I didn’t
even realize we’d be invited in! I am so grateful for the invitation,
thank you.”
Robinson and Allen, both registered Democrats, took photos with Clinton at
the fundraiser, held at the home of Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and
his wife, Joan. Within months of the fundraiser, Hunter became the first
sitting member of Congress to publicly endorse Clinton’s opponent in the
2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump. Robinson became acting U.S.
Attorney in January 2017, and her office commenced its investigation of
Hunter and his wife the following month.
The Hatch Act generally prohibits federal employees from participating in
political activities while on duty, and Department of Justice regulations
impose further restrictions on prosecutors. Rules of professional conduct
prohibit attorneys from knowingly making false statements of material fact
to a tribunal or failing to correct such statements. They also require
truthfulness in statements to others.
These emails are yet more evidence of potential political bias at the
Justice Department. Thorough investigations by the Office of Special
Counsel, DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility, and other competent
authorities are necessary to get to the bottom of this and the great many
other recurring instances of seeming political bias at Justice.
U.S. Funding of Islamist ‘Charity’ Groups Triples Under
Trump
Why would the Trump administration be giving more taxpayer dollars to
radical Islamist organizations than the Obama administration? Our
Corruption Chronicles blog has the alarming details:
The amount of American taxpayer dollars that go to Islamist
organizations has drastically increased under the Trump administration,
which has doled out millions to radical nonprofits, including a recent
allocation to a terrorist front group named as an unindicted co-conspirator
in a terrorism financing trial.
Between 2017 and 2018 the U.S. government more than tripled its
funding to organizations either influenced or controlled by Islamist
activists from $4
million to $13.5 million, according to an analysis conducted by a think
tank dedicated to protecting Western values from Middle Eastern
threats.
The Philadelphia-based nonprofit, Middle East Forum (MEF), reviewed
millions of dollars in government grant data and found that the Trump
administration is dedicating a lot more to radical Muslim groups than the
Obama administration, which gave Islamist-linked organizations an average
of $1.7 million annually. A big chunk of the money, around $8.7 million,
has gone to the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a surrogate of the
south Asian paramilitary group Jamaat-e-Islami, which was recently banned
by the Indian government under anti-terrorism laws. An ICNA subsidiary
known as Helping Hand for Relief and Development has openly partnered with
the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was involved in
the 2008 Mumbai terror attack that killed 164 people. The $8.7 million was
delivered in 2018 for “disaster assistance projects,” according to the
government data obtained by MEF.
Other radical groups whose coffers have been filled by the Trump
administration include Islamic Relief ($800,000), which is closely tied to
the Muslim Brotherhood and has been designated as a terror-financing
organization by Israel and the United Arab Emirates; the Islamic Institute
of Knowledge, which is linked to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and
the Iranian regime, has received $780,000 from the U.S; the Muslim American
Society, identified by MEF as the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading activist
organization in the U.S., got $160,000 from Uncle Sam. The group’s
Philadelphia branch recently broadcast a
disturbing video of kids at its center singing about chopping off the heads
of Jews. Dar al-Hijrah, an extremist mosque in Virginia that the U.S.
government says operates as a front for Hamas, received $100,000. Al Qaeda
leader Anwar
al-Aulaqi was the imam at the Falls Church mosque and two of the 9/11
hijackers attended his sermons as well as Nidal Hassan, the Ft. Hood
terrorist sentenced to death for murdering 13 and wounding dozens of others
at a Texas Army base.
Just a few months ago, another $100,000 went to the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) via a Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) grant program. CAIR is a terrorist front group that was named as a co-conspirator in
a federal terror-finance case involving the Hamas front group Holy Land
Foundation. For more details read a Judicial Watch special
report on Muslim charities. CAIR was founded in 1994 by three
Middle Eastern extremists (Omar Ahmad, Nihad Awad and Rafeeq Jaber) who ran
the American propaganda wing of Hamas, known then as the Islamic
Association for Palestine. The Obama administration allowed CAIR to
transform the way U.S. law enforcement agencies conduct anti-terrorism
training by permitting the group to bully agencies at the local, state and
federal level to alter materials determined to be discriminatory against
Muslims. This includes getting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to
purge anti-terrorism training curricula of material coined “offensive”
to Muslims. Judicial Watch uncovered that scandal, obtained the FBI
records and published an in-depth report.
CAIR also got several local police departments and the U.S. military
to eliminate anti-terrorism
training materials and instructors deemed anti-Muslim.
The Trump administration seems to have maintained a cozy relationship
with CAIR, recently joining forces with the group by suing
a Michigan suburb for rejecting a Muslim organization’s zoning request to
construct a mosque within city limits.
New York City Mayor De Blasio’s Suspect Crime
Statistics
The Left has undertaken a massive, national effort to weaken our criminal
justice system. This has resulted in rising crime and reduced public
safety. Our chief investigative reporter, Micah Morrison, has the latest
for Judicial Watch’s Investigative Bulletin:
Mayor Bill de Blasio tells anyone who will listen that New York is
“ the
safest big city in America.” And for a long time, that appeared to be
true. But signs of rising
urban disorder lately have been sending a different message. And
increasingly, the mayor’s own safe-city crime statistics seem
suspect.
De Blasio stakes his safe-city claim on CompStat,
the NYPD’s vaunted policing technology. CompStat is the computer age
meets crime fighting: a high-tech, data-driven approach to gathering
statistics and deploying resources to drive down crime. The CompStat
approach has been adopted by cities around the country and abroad—so
trouble with the system could have national and even international
implications.
In New York, doubts
about CompStat have been rising. For years, journalists have heard
rumors of trouble: that the mayor’s office wields too much control over
shaping the data; that precinct commanders under-report incidents to keep
their numbers down; that patrol cops are encouraged not to report certain
crimes; that the stats are rigged.
The spin around the most recent CompStat numbers is a case in point.
“New York City recorded an increase in murders, shootings, robberies and
assaults in 2019,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Domestic
violence is up, with last year’s 8% increase in murders due in part
to intimate-partner homicides. Hate crimes, including anti-Semitism, are
up. CompStat has not
even counted them until this year. Subway
crime is up. But City Hall says that because of a big decrease in
burglaries, and declines in rapes and larceny, “serious crime” in New
York City is down, dropping one percent last year.
Got that? Murders, shootings, robberies, assaults, domestic violence,
subway crimes and hate crimes are up, but serious crime is down.
Mark Twain famously noted there are “lies, damned lies, and
statistics.” It’s time for an independent review to sort out which it
is at CompStat.
Until next week …
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