Judicial Watch Files Ethics Complaint against Maxine Waters over Incitement and Jury Intimidation

Well, we’ve got to stay on the street and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.

Ms. Waters took an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, which includes the rights accorded to Officer Chauvin to a fair and impartial trial by a jury of his peers and to due process. Ms. Waters’ inflammatory comments that pressure the jury, while encouraging rioters already engaged in rampant destruction of property and attacks on police officers, to “get more confrontational” are irresponsible and dangerous incitement by a Member of Congress.

House Rule 23, Clause 1, of the Code of Official Conduct of the Rules of the House of Representatives states: “A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall conduct himself at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.”

Ms. Waters’ conduct surely does not reflect creditably on the House. By encouraging violence in response to a “guilty” jury verdict, she seeks to undermine the Constitution’s guarantees and protections, and fosters the breakdown of civil society. Such dangerous and reckless rhetoric demands investigation.

More disturbingly still, this behavior by Rep. Waters represents a pattern of conduct. In June 2018, Ms. Waters exhorted protesters to form “crowds” to “push back” on President Trump’s cabinet members, saying, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them! And you tell them that they are not welcome, anymore, anywhere.”

That reprehensible conduct prompted Judicial Watch to file an earlier complaint with OCE, which has been inexcusably ignored.

Rep. Maxine Waters’ comments, in the least, fall under the expansive standard for “incitement” set by the House in its snap impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

Judicial Watch calls upon the Office of Congressional Ethics to launch an investigation into Ms. Waters’ comments immediately.

In one assignment, Flynn’s daughter was asked to consider various “risk factors” and “mitigating factors” that two people – one identified as “white” and the other identified as “black” – purportedly might use to assess each other on a city street. Included among the various factors were skin color, gender, age, physical appearance, and attire. “Black,” “aggressive body language” and “wrong neighborhood” were among the “risk factors” purportedly assessed by the person identified as “white.” “White” and “Police officer” were among the “risk factors” purportedly assessed by the person identified as “black.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has long complained about police in sanctuary cities that fail to honor its detainers, instead releasing serious criminals in the U.S. rather than turn them over to get deported. Now two states are suing the Homeland Security agency for failing to issue detainer requests for convicted felons in the country illegally, forcing local authorities to free them after completing their sentence rather than turning them over to the feds for removal. It seems that the tables have turned under the Biden administration, according to the lawsuit, filed this month by officials in Texas and Louisiana.

The states claim that ICE has reversed a Trump era policy and is not issuing detainer requests for dangerous illegal aliens imprisoned in their jurisdiction. “As a result, many convicted criminal aliens have been released to society after their sentences, contrary to Congress’s mandate that they be detained pending their removal from the United States,” according to their complaint, filed this month in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas Victoria Division. Besides ICE, the defendants include the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and various officials at the DHS agencies. The lawsuit begins by stating that “the Biden Administration is refusing to take custody of criminal aliens despite federal statutes requiring it to do so.” Instead, the document reads, defendants “have issued and implemented unlawful agency memoranda that allow criminal aliens already convicted of felony offenses to roam free in the United States. Such aliens belong in federal custody, as Congress required.”

 

Adding insult to injury, officials in the Lone Star State reveal in the court document that the Biden administration has taken the extra step of revoking ICE detainer requests for a multitude of illegal immigrants convicted of felonies and serving sentences in prisons operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Many were found guilty in a U.S. court of serious drug offenses, including possession, manufacturing, and sale. “President Biden’s outright refusal to enforce the law is exacerbating an unprecedented border crisis,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “By failing to take custody of criminal aliens and giving no explanation for this reckless policy change, the Biden Administration is demonstrating a blatant disregard for Texans’ and Americans’ safety. Law and order must be immediately upheld and enforced to ensure the safety of our communities. Dangerous and violent illegal aliens must be removed from our communities as required by federal law.” In 2019 Texas housed nearly 9,000 undocumented criminal aliens at a cost of more than $152 million, according to the lawsuit.

In Louisiana ICE is not removing individuals subject to mandatory deportation, the complaint says, causing convicted felons incarcerated in state facilities to be released in local communities throughout the Bayou State. Louisiana, more than any other state, has greater risk due to the large number of local jails that are used to house detainees prior to removal, according to Attorney General Jeff Landry. “The President’s refusal to enforce the law only worsens an already dire border crisis,” Landry said. “Law and order must prevail; dangerous and violent criminal aliens must not be allowed to roam free in our communities.” Both states assert that the administration is violating binding agreements with DHS to assist in immigration enforcement and national security missions as well the Constitution, Immigration and Nationality Act and Administrative Procedure Act, which require the government to post proposed substantive rule changes in the Federal Register and allow the public to comment on them before enacting them.

For years ICE has slammed sanctuary cities nationwide for refusing to honor a local-federal partnership known as 287(g) that notifies the agency of jail inmates in the country illegally so that they can be deported after serving time for state crimes. Before Biden became president, ICE repeatedly issued statements reminding sanctuary cities and states that when law enforcement agencies fail to honor immigration detainers and release serious criminal offenders onto the streets, it undermines its ability protect public safety and carry out its mission. The agency even launched a billboard campaign seeking the public’s help in capturing felons released by one state’s sanctuary policy.

Democrats in Congress want the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to block the sale of a tiny south Florida radio station because the new owner fired a Hillary Clinton fundraiser who once served as mayor of a local city. The politician turned radio host, Raul Martinez, was the Spanish-language station’s top host before a conservative media conglomerate bought it and changed the liberal-leaning programming. The deal received sparse local media coverage but earned national attention when lawmakers in Washington D.C. asked a federal agency to reject the sale for what appears to be political reasons.

It all seems to be connected to Democrats blaming conservative local Spanish media for losing two key south Florida congressional seats in the 2020 election. In the state’s District 27, political newcomer Maria Elvira Salazar, a Cuban-American journalist, upset incumbent Donna Shalala, who served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. In the 26th District, Carlos Gimenez, also Cuban-American and the two-term mayor of Miami-Dade County, ousted incumbent Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a native of Ecuador. Democrats blamed it on misinformation—specifically false threats of socialism—promoted by local Spanish-language media outlets that tend to have politically conservative programming. “It was a McCarthyism type of pounding,” Shalala said in a news article after her shocking loss to a largely unknown candidate who lacks her name recognition.

In the aftermath of the losses a trivial Spanish-language radio station, Caracol 1260 AM, is receiving peculiar attention over a programming shift from federal lawmakers more than 1,000 miles away. The news-talk station is being purchased by conservative America TeVe for $350,000. The new owners immediately replaced Martinez, the former mayor of Hialeah, with a conservative journalist named Juan Manuel Cao, who escaped Communist Cuba after serving time as a political prisoner. The Cuban-born Martinez is a prominent liberal commentator and Clinton friend who hosted a fundraising event at his home for Hillary’s 2007 presidential campaign. His son, Raul Martinez Jr., worked as Clinton’s Florida director of coalitions. In the 1990s the elder Martinez was convicted of extortion and racketeering for accepting $1 million in cash and property from land developers. The conviction was reversed on appeal and in 1993 he supposedly won an election that a judge threw out because of voter fraud.

This week the Congressional Hispanic Caucus called on the FCC to reject the radio station’s sale to prevent what Democrats view as a progressive broadcast station from airing conservative viewpoints in Miami’s Hispanic community. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, blasted the lawmakers in a statement posted on the agency’s website. “This attempt by Democrats in Congress to pressure the FCC into blocking the sale of a Spanish-language radio station based on the political viewpoints that it would broadcast to South Florida’s Hispanic community crosses a line drawn by the First Amendment,” Carr said. “The FCC has no business doing the Democrats’ bidding or using our regulatory process to censor political opinions that Democrats do not like.” He continues to accuse the congressional delegation of treating the FCC as an arm of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), expressly pressuring the agency to take action that will increase party’s electoral odds in Florida.

Indeed, Mucarsel-Powell, who lost her congressional seat after one term, responded to a news magazine story on the radio station sale and programming change by posting on social media: “To win in 2022 this must stop!” In a separate news article a former Obama administration official called the sale of the station to conservatives “a problem for the party.” Another Obama administration official characterized the station’s programming change as “another expanding tentacle in the right-wing media ecosystem that is trying to implant itself in south Florida by having ideological control of the airwaves that Hispanic voters most listen to.” Carr, the Republican FCC commissioner, calls Democrats’ request “a deeply troubling transgression of free speech and the FCC’s status as an independent agency.”