Vaccine/China Ties!



[INSIDE JW]

Judicial Watch Sues Secret Service Over Hunter Biden’s Gun

[[link removed]]

When Hunter Biden gets into trouble, he drags others down with him.
And that includes government agents whose role to protect the
presidential family is perverted.

We filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the
Department of Homeland Security for Secret Service records related to
the investigation of Hunter Biden’s gun, reportedly disposed of in a
dumpster in Delaware (_Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of
Homeland Security_
[[link removed]]
(No. 1:22-cv-02841)).

Judicial Watch sued after the United States Secret Service, a
component of DHS, failed to respond adequately to our March 25, 2021,
FOIA request for records or communications about the reported
purchase, possession, and disposal of a firearm owned by Hunter Biden
found in a Delaware dumpster circa October 2018.

We, like many Americans, want to know whether and how the Secret
Service intervened for Hunter Biden in an incident involving a gun
owned by him.

In October 2020, _The Blaze_ reported
[[link removed]]
that in October 2018, Hunter Biden’s handgun was taken by Hallie
Biden, the widow of then-presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son Beau.
In 2021, _POLITICO_ reported
[[link removed]


Hallie took Hunter’s gun and threw it in a trash can behind a
grocery store, only to return later to find it gone.

Delaware police began investigating, concerned that the trash can was
across from a high school and that the missing gun could be used in a
crime, according to law enforcement officials and a copy of the police
report obtained by POLITICO.

But a curious thing happened at the time: Secret Service agents
approached the owner of the store where Hunter bought the gun and
asked to take the paperwork involving the sale, according to two
people, one of whom has firsthand knowledge of the episode and the
other was briefed by a Secret Service agent after the fact.
The Secret Service and the Biden administration apparently are in
cover-up mode for Hunter Biden. Whether its Hunter Biden’s laptop,
his business practices and travel, or these documents related to the
careless disposal of a gun in a dumpster near a high school, this
administration continues to put up unlawful roadblocks to any effort
to investigate the activities of the Biden family, particularly
Hunter.

We’re pursuing other lines of inquiry involving Hunter Biden.

Through FOIA requests, we have uncovered significant information about
Hunter Biden’s Ukraine connections. He served on the board of
directors
[[link removed]]
for Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings despite having no previous
experience in the energy industry.

In December 2020, we received records
[[link removed]]
from the
State Department tying Hunter Biden’s Burisma Holdings’ lobbying
operation to an influence-peddling operation involving the Clinton
campaign during the 2016 election. We also uncovered State Department
records
[[link removed]]
showing that former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie “Masha”
Yovanovitch had specifically warned in 2017 about corruption
allegations against Burisma Holdings.

In October 2020, we obtained State Department records
[[link removed]]
that
included a briefing checklist of a February 22, 2019, meeting in Kyiv
between then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and Sally
Painter, co-founder and chief operating officer of Blue Star
Strategies, a Democratic lobbying firm, which was hired by Burisma
Holdings to combat corruption allegations
[[link removed])].
The briefing checklist notes that Painter also planned to meet
[[link removed]]
with Foreign Commercial Service (FCS) Officer Martin Claessens
“regarding the Burisma Group energy company.” (Painter was
implicated in the Clinton-era fundraising scandal
[[link removed]]
we
exposed that involved the alleged sale of seats on Commerce Department
trade missions to Democratic National Committee donors.)

In September 2020, we received State Department records
[[link removed]]
that
include a January 17, 2017, email from George Kent, the Obama
administration’s deputy assistant secretary of state in charge of
Ukraine policy, which was copied to then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine
Marie Yovanovitch, highlighting Russia-linked media “trolling” Joe
Biden over “his son’s business.” An email
[[link removed]]
was sent four days prior to the inauguration of President Donald Trump
to a redacted recipient and copied to Yovanovitch with the subject
line “medvedchuk-linked vesti trolls Biden.” Kent writes:
“Burisma – gift that keeps on giving. (With medvedchuk affiliated
Vesti pushing the troll like storyline on visit day)”

In June 2020, U.S. Secret Service records
[[link removed]]
showed that, for
the first five and a half years of the Obama administration, Hunter
Biden traveled extensively while receiving a Secret Service protective
detail. During the time period of the records provided, Hunter Biden
took 411 separate domestic and international flights, including to 29
different foreign countries. He visited China five times.

We are also suing
[[link removed]]
the DHS for Secret Service records on Hunter Biden’s travel and
security costs, and suing
[[link removed]]
the State Department for messages sent through the SMART
[[link removed]]
(State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolkit) system that mention
Hunter Biden.

RECORDS REVEAL PAUL PELOSI INVOKING NANCY PELOSI’S NAME DURING
ARREST

We now know more about the arrest of Paul Pelosi, husband to Speaker
of the House Nancy Pelosi, for suspected drunk driving.

We received records
[[link removed]]
from the
California Highway Patrol (CHP) Public Records Unit that include 44
photos and five hours of audio/video footage depicting the Pelosi’s
misconduct during the arrest. The material shows Mr. Pelosi invoked
his wife’s name and shared his police charity membership with the
officers.

We obtained the records as a result of a June 14, 2022, Public Records
Act request for information regarding Pelosi’s May 28, 2022, arrest
in Napa, CA, for suspected alcohol intoxication while driving.

Video footage from Pelosi’s arrest depicts his interaction with the
CHP officers. He first makes reference to himself as a “high profile
person
[[link removed]
to which an officer responds, “Right. I understand who you are. And
I’m not out here to do anything to draw any negative attention to
you. If you’ve being honest with me, there’s really nothing you
should be worried about.”
Pelosi next invokes his wife’s name, telling the officers that his
“wife, Nancy, is back on the East Coast.”

In response to Pelosi’s invocation, an officer says
[[link removed]],
“I’ll discuss with my supervisor – what he’s willing to do –
just because we know you’re a high-profile person and I’ll consult
with him what he wants to do at that point.”

Next, Pelosi insists that he should be able to call an Uber
[[link removed]]
to pick him up, but the officers explain that releasing a DUI suspect
to an Uber driver is against county policy. But Pelosi insists that he
will “give [the Uber driver] a tip or whatever the hell he needs.”

Pelosi continues to insist that an Uber driver pick him up, but an
officer responds
[[link removed]],
“Sir, we’ve done everything we can to work with you. Now we’re
just dragging it out.” Pelosi replies, “May I speak with your
captain please?” to which the officer says, “No, he already hung
up. We’re going around in circles here.”

When asked for his driver’s license, Pelosi hands the police officer
his donor card from the “11-99 Foundation,” a California Highway
Patrol benevolent charity, along with his California driver’s
license. Photos of Pelosi’s Porsche from the crash scene also show
that his license plate bears the 11-99 Foundation’s logo.

The officer who arrested Paul Pelosi writes the following in his
post-arrest supplemental report
[[link removed]


Throughout my conversation with [Pelosi], I observed the following
objective signs and symptoms of alcohol intoxication: both of his eyes
were red/watery, his speech was slurred, he had a strong odor of an
alcoholic beverage coming from his person, and he failed to provide
logical answers to multiple questions I asked.
A May 29, 2022, email titled “Newsworthy Arrest” from Captain John
Blencowe to Napa County District Attorney Allison Haley explains that
the CHP officers “attempted to cite and release [Pelosi], but he
didn’t want anyone else to be aware of his arrest.”

Kudos to the officers who refused to be intimidated by this “high
profile person.”

COVID-19 VACCINE STUDIES USED BY HHS WERE CONDUCTED IN CHINA

We have to wonder why the Biden administration didn’t want us to
know that key COVID vaccine studies were conducted in China. We now
know they were.

We received 115 pages
[[link removed]]
of records from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
revealing previously redacted locations of COVID-19 vaccine testing
facilities in Shanghai, China. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
had claimed the names and locations of the testing facilities were
protected by the confidential commercial information exemption of the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

We obtained the records through a September 2021 FOIA lawsuit
[[link removed]]
filed after the FDA, the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute
for Allergy and Infectious Disease failed to respond to our June 7,
2021, FOIA request for all biodistribution studies and data for the
COVID-19 vaccines (_Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services_
[[link removed]]
(No. 1:21-cv-02418)).

The newly unredacted documents reveal the following Pfizer/BioNTech
COVID-19 vaccine studies’ locations:

* A document
[[link removed]]
with the filename, “ s_r_IND 19736 0 105 2.6.5
pharmkintabulated-summary” identifies all in vitro metabolic
stability studies of ALC-0315 and ALC-0159 (synthetic lipids in the
vaccines) were conducted at Medicilon Preclinical Research LLC
[[link removed]],
a testing facility
located in Shanghai, China. Studies within this record indicate work
was done in August 2020.
* A document
[[link removed]]
with the filename, “s_r_IND 19736-0-253 Section 2.6.5
pharmkintabulated-summary” identifies that all in vitro metabolic
stability studies of ALC-0315 and ALC-0159 were conducted at Medicilon
Preclinical Research LLC, a testing facility located in Shanghai,
China. Studies within this record indicate work was done in August
2020.

Additionally, Study 18350 was conducted at a Charles River testing
facility in Tranent, UK

* A document
[[link removed]]
with the filename, “s_pharmkin-tabulated-summary.pdf” notes that
all in vitro metabolic stability studies of ALC-0315 and ALC-0159 were
conducted at Medicilon Preclinical Research LLC, a testing facility
located in “Shanghai, China.” Studies within this record indicate
work was done in August 2020.

The document adds that Study 18350 was conducted at a Charles River
testing facility in Tranent, UK.

* A document
[[link removed]]
titled “FINAL REPORT” with the filename, “s_r_185350.pdf” and
the logo, “Charles River” lists the TESTING FACILITY as “Charles
River Laboratories Edinburgh Ltd. Elphinstone Research Centre Tranent,
East Lothian EH33 2NE, UK” Studies within this record indicate the
work was conducted in July 2020.

The Biden administration’s stonewalling and shell games about the
COVID vaccines further undermine public confidence in these
controversial drugs. Americans are now going to want to know why did
the Biden operation try to hide COVID vaccine ties to China!

This is just part of our investigation into the government’s
handling of the pandemic.

In July 2022, National Institutes of Health (NIH) records
[[link removed]]
revealed an FBI “inquiry” into the NIH’s controversial bat
coronavirus grant tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The records
also show National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID) officials were concerned about “gain-of-function” research
in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2016. The Fauci agency was
also concerned about EcoHealth Alliance’s
[[link removed]]
lack of compliance with reporting
rules and use of gain-of-function research in the NIH-funded research
involving bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.

Previous disclosures from this lawsuit include:

* HHS records revealed that from 2014 to 2019, $826,277
[[link removed]]
was given to the
Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research by the NIAID.
* NIAID records showed that it gave nine China-related grants to
EcoHealth Alliance
[[link removed]]
to research
coronavirus emergence in bats and was the NIH’s top issuer of grants
to the Wuhan lab itself. The records also included an email from the
vice director of the Wuhan Lab asking an NIH official for help finding
disinfectants for decontamination of airtight suits and indoor
surfaces.
* HHS records included an “urgent for Dr. Fauci
[[link removed]]
” email chain,
citing ties between the Wuhan lab and the taxpayer-funded EcoHealth
Alliance
[[link removed]].
The government emails
also reported that the foundation of U.S. billionaire Bill Gates
worked closely with the Chinese government to pave the way for
Chinese-produced medications to be sold outside China and help
“raise China’s voice of governance by placing representatives from
China on important international counsels as high level commitment
from China.”
* HHS records included a grant application for research involving
the coronavirus that appears to describe “gain-of-function
[[link removed]
research involving RNA extractions from bats, experiments on viruses,
attempts to develop a chimeric virus and efforts to genetically
manipulate the full-length bat SARSr-CoV WIV1 strain molecular clone.
* HHS records showed the State Department and NIAID knew immediately
in January 2020 that China was withholding COVID data
[[link removed]],
which was
hindering risk assessment and response by public health officials.

Through FOIA, we have uncovered a substantial amount of information
about other important COVID-19 issues:

* May 2022: University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) records
[[link removed]]
show the former director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the
University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), Dr. James W. Le Duc
[[link removed]]
warned Chinese
researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of potential
investigations into the COVID issue by Congress.
* May 2022: HHS records regarding biodistribution studies and
related data for the COVID-19 vaccines show a key component of the
vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs),
were found outside the injection site
[[link removed]],
mainly the liver, adrenal glands, spleen and ovaries of test animals,
eight to 48 hours after injection.
* April 2022: Records from the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP)
reveal safety lapses
[[link removed]]
and violations at U.S. biosafety laboratories that conduct research on
dangerous agents and toxins.
* March 2022: HHS records include emails
[[link removed]]
between National Institutes of Health (NIH) then-Director Francis
Collins
[[link removed]]
and Anthony
Fauci, the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases (NIAID), about hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19.
* March 2021: HHS records show that NIH officials tailored
confidentiality forms
[[link removed]]
to China’s terms
and that the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted an unreleased,
“strictly confidential” COVID-19 epidemiological analysis in
January 2020.
* October 2020: Fauci emails
[[link removed]]
include his approval of
a press release supportive of China’s response to the 2019 novel
coronavirus.
* An October 2021 lawsuit uncovered
[[link removed]]
that over a 10-year period, Fauci and others at NIH received more link
to than $350 million in secretive “royalty” payments from drug
companies and other third parties

THE CHEERFUL, COURAGEOUS KEN STARR

For years we watched the Bill and Hillary Clinton skirt the law and
propriety time and again, and they are still at it. Among those who
tried to rein them in, one person stands tall – Kenneth Starr, the
brilliant jurist who served as independent counsel looking into their
misdeeds. Our chief investigative reporter, Micah Morrison, knew him
personally and in this special Judicial Watch _Investigative Bulletin_
looks back
[[link removed]]
at the
man and his cheerful courage.

Funeral services for former Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr
will be held Saturday in Waco, Texas. Starr died September 13 in
Houston. He was 76, a son of Texas. Coverage of his passing was
entirely predictable: the media, the Left, and the academy vilified
him in death precisely as they had vilified him in life.

A representative story, from _POLITICO_, sets the tone. It’s
headlined “Ken Starr: the Man who Created the Lewinsky Scandal.”
The subhead: “His colorless exterior masked an inner zeal that left
an indelible mark on U.S. politics.” Writes David Greenberg, a
professor of history at Rutgers University: Starr was “a motive
force” behind the Lewinsky Affair, “the man who turned what should
have been a dispassionate legal inquiry into a frenzied political
inquisition.”

You get the idea. And the truth is, the smear, engineered by the
Clinton White House, was wildly successful. The popular image, the
cultural shorthand, the “Ken Starr” trope—to anyone who lived
through the 1990s, the first picture that comes to mind, even today,
is Starr the zealot, the humorless prig, the Javert
[[link removed]]
bent on
destroying Jean Valjean.

But to anyone who knew Ken Starr—and I knew him pretty well—the
popular image is pure character assassination. Politics is a rough
business and in Washington, as another casualty of the Clinton era,
Vincent Foster, once said, “ruining people is considered sport.”
Ken Starr knew that. He was no babe in the Washington woods. And yet,
at least in the early years of the Whitewater probe, Starr often
seemed taken aback by the level of vitriol coming from the White House
and its allies, and he was always on the lookout for the better angels
in the nature of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this time they would
cooperate, maybe this time they would tell the truth, produce the
documents, stop the stonewall. But it was not to be. Mrs. Clinton,
with her continual evasions and obfuscations, her repeated failures of
memory, her missing billing records
[[link removed]],
was a particular disappointment.

Monica Lewinsky came late to the Whitewater investigation, when the
independent counsel had scored some important wins and suffered some
big losses. After more than four years of high-pressure prosecutions,
Starr was looking to wrap it up. But once the facts began to emerge in
the Lewinsky case, he did not—he could not—turn away.

Start with—to summon a phrase from a later era—start with a #MeToo
fact: the president of the United States had coerced—is there any
other word for it? —a 24-year-old intern, Ms. Lewinsky, into nine
sexual encounters, including oral sex.

Add the legal fact: in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by a former
Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, President Clinton had lied under
oath, denying that he had sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky.

Add the evidentiary fact: a former White House employee brought Starr
prosecutors tape recordings of Lewinsky discussing her affair with the
president, including illegal attempts to cover it up.

Starr stayed silent about the Whitewater probe for decades. But in
2018, he published a memoir, “Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton
Investigation
[[link removed]
In it, he wrote, “I deeply regret that I took on the Lewinsky phase
of the investigation. But at the same time, as I still see it 20 years
later, there was no practical alternative to my doing so.”

President Clinton was impeached in the House of Representatives in
1998 for lying under oath and obstructing justice, only the second
impeachment of a president in U.S. history. He was acquitted at trial
in the Senate. A federal judge later found him in contempt of court
[[link removed]]
for giving “intentionally false testimony.” And in a deal to avoid
prosecution after leaving the presidency, Clinton agreed to surrender
his law license for five years and pay a $25,000 fine for giving false
testimony in the Jones case.

Back in Arkansas, the Whitewater investigation—a sprawling federal
probe centered around the Clintons’ relationship with the owners of
a corrupt savings and loan—Starr succeeded in a sweeping corruption
cleanup. He obtained fourteen convictions, including from Mr.
Clinton’s successor as governor, Jim Guy Tucker, S&L owners James
and Susan McDougal, and Mrs. Clinton’s former law firm partner,
Webster Hubbell, who had come to Washington with the Clintons to serve
as associate attorney general.

But the Clintons themselves proved elusive. The Starr team, after much
deliberation, concluded they did not have enough evidence to convince
a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Mrs. Clinton was guilty of
financial crimes and obstruction of justice in the Whitewater affair.
(In 2016, Judicial Watch released 246 pages of previously undisclosed
Office of Independent Counsel internal memos
[[link removed]]
revealing the possible criminal charges against Hillary Clinton and
Webster Hubbell.) The independent counsel drew up a draft indictment
of Mrs. Clinton—a document that remains under seal in the National
Archives, despite years of Judicial Watch legal actions
[[link removed]]
to bring it
to light. The Clinton Whitewater case was never brought to trial.

To prosecutors, there were six key insiders who could provide
significant information about allegations of corruption against the
Clintons regarding the Whitewater land deal (a McDougal-Clinton
partnership connected to the McDougals’ corrupt Madison Guaranty
S&L); billing records under subpoena that had mysteriously vanished
from Mrs. Clinton’s law firm; and other apparent illegal loans and
payoffs.

The six key insiders were Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, James and Susan
McDougal, Webster Hubbell, and Vincent Foster.

All fell silent.

The Clintons refused to talk. Hubbell, facing jail time, promised
cooperation in exchange for a reduced sentence, but as funds from
allies of the Clintons flowed to the beleaguered Arkansas insider, his
cooperation with federal authorities dried up. Susan McDougal
defiantly refused to testify before a grand jury and served a lengthy
jail sentence for contempt; later, President Clinton pardoned her.
James McDougal, convicted for corruption in a Starr prosecution,
agreed to cooperate with the independent counsel, but died in prison
before he could make good on his promise. Vincent Foster, another
Hillary Clinton law firm partner and deputy White House counsel, died
by his own hand shortly after coming to Washington with the Clintons.

The Starr team played a key role in answering questions about the
Foster death, as well as the Travel Office affair, and “Filegate.”


Foster’s body was discovered in a small federal park near Washington
with a gunshot wound to the head in July, 1993. His death touched off
a storm of controversy in Washington. News soon emerged that files had
been removed from Foster’s White House office by Clinton loyalists.
Questions swirled. Had Foster really committed suicide, or was he
murdered?

Initial inquiries by the Park Police and Robert Fiske—a federal
prosecutor who led the Whitewater probe before Starr’s
appointment—were deemed unsatisfactory by the media and Congress.
Starr took over the death probe, brought in the FBI and outside
forensic experts, and eventually issued a painstakingly detailed
report
[[link removed]]
addressing
all the issues surrounding the Foster suicide, largely putting the
matter to rest.

In the Travel Office affair, Starr investigated allegations that
federal crimes were committed related to the firings, apparently at
Mrs. Clinton’s behest, of the seven-member White House team that
handled bookings for presidential-related travel. Mrs. Clinton wanted
the Travel Office team replaced with Clinton cronies. The head of the
Travel Office, Billy Dale, was accused of misdeeds and indicted by a
federal grand jury. He was swiftly acquitted at trial. Starr’s
conclusion? The behavior by the White House in the Travel Office
affair was “mean-spirited” but “did not amount to a federal
crime,” he wrote in his memoir. But it “certainly revealed
Hillary’s character and her contempt for regular order.”

“Filegate” centered around the Clintons’ inappropriate
requisition of FBI files, supposedly for background checks of
potential incoming personnel. “Forbidden files from the FBI’s
vaults had landed” in a White House personnel office, Starr wrote.
Somebody should have smelled a rat and raised questions. No one did.
Extensive forensic analysis showed that neither of the Clintons had
handled the FBI files. Filegate, Starr wrote, revealed that the White
House was “cavalier in its approach to staffing a hypersensitive
position within the Executive Office complex.” But, he noted,
“exercising poor judgment…is not a crime.”

Starr had come a long way. His father was a hardscrabble Church of
Christ minister and part-time barber, his mother a homemaker. He grew
up in the remote north Texas town of Vernon, but was not destined to
stay. Brilliant, outgoing, he made his way to law school at Duke, and
to a clerkship with Chief Justice Warren Burger. He rose fast, moving
from private practice in Los Angeles to serve as aide to William
French Smith, who had been named attorney general at the Reagan
Justice Department. In 1983, at age 37, Starr was appointed to the
prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He
made no secret of his ambition: a seat on the Supreme Court—not out
of reach for an ambitious young conservative who had landed on the DC
circuit court. In 1989, he accepted President George Bush’s offer to
become solicitor general. In 1993, with the Bush loss to Bill Clinton,
he returned to private practice.

Then the Special Division of the Court of Appeals came calling, asking
if he would accept appointment as independent counsel in the
Whitewater matter. After a few days of consideration, he accepted the
offer.

“Ever the optimist,” Starr wrote, “I anticipated taking six
months to wrap things up. From the outside, the Whitewater case looked
like nothing more than a failed land deal in Arkansas.”

Of course, it turned out to be much more than that. The months turned
into years, the attacks grew, the controversies multiplied.
Whitewater, Foster, Travel Office, Filegate, Lewinsky. Increasingly
beleaguered, in conversations and statements Starr continually
returned to notions of duty and the rule of law. These were no longer
abstract notions, but life principles—his Whitewater destiny. It
came at considerable cost. He stepped down as independent counsel in
1999. Gone was any chance for a seat on the Supreme Court. Gone was
any chance to return to the DC circuit court, a job he loved.

Life took a different path, not always easy. In 2016, he stepped down
as president and chancellor of Baylor University in Texas when a
sexual assault scandal
[[link removed]]
swept the school. “The captain goes down with the ship,” he said
at the time, though he was not personally implicated in any
wrongdoing. His resignation, he said, was “a matter of
conscience.”

“He was a very courageous man,” recalled Hickman Ewing Jr., the
famed Memphis federal prosecutor who served as Starr’s deputy
independent counsel. Ewing, like Starr, is a man of strong Christian
faith. During the Whitewater probe, “Starr often had his faith
ridiculed,” Ewing said, “it was not pleasant,” but it did not
change his essential nature. “He liked to call himself ‘a joyful
optimist,’ and I think that’s correct,” Ewing said. “He was a
man, in the words of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, steeped in
‘the Fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.’ That was the real
Ken Starr.”

IMMIGRATION COURTS DISMISS ‘HISTORICAL RECORD’ CASES, WILL TRIPLE
LAST YEAR’S

Our southern border has essentially collapsed, and all too often the
federal government is no longer even trying to pretend to
“adjudicate” cases according to law, as our _Corruption
Chronicles_ blog reports
[[link removed]].


The record-breaking number—more than 2 million and counting—of
illegal immigrants that have entered the U.S. through Mexico this year
has inevitably received considerable media attention lately, but there
is another alarming figure that deserves coverage. Federal immigration
courts have closed a “historical record” 375,000 cases in the
first 11 months of fiscal year 2022, which ends in September, thanks
to Biden administration policies largely dictated by leftist open
border groups. The nation’s immigration court system is on pace to
triple last year’s case closures, according to a report
[[link removed]]
published this month by Syracuse
University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC),
which documents the unparalleled accelerated rate in which immigration
cases are being dismissed.

In fact, under Biden the number of illegal immigrants granted asylum,
removal waivers and other types of deportation relief has increased
significantly, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
figures obtained by TRAC, a nonpartisan data research center dedicated
to studying the inner workings of the federal government. The
administration’s lax policies have already resulted in a 50%
increase in dismissed immigration cases this year over the previous
high in 2019 under President Donald Trump, TRAC found. The New York
university research center predicts that at this rate an additional
hundreds of thousands of cases will be closed by the end of the fiscal
year. “The pace of closures has also been accelerating
month-by-month since October of 2021,” TRAC researchers write.
“During the past four months, monthly closures blew past 40,000 and
topped 50,000 during May and June. If average closures during these
past four months of 48,721 continue, this would represent an
annualized rate approaching 600,000.”

The biggest growth in immigration case closures occurred in three key
areas, according to TRAC: the much higher numbers of cases that are
terminated, the higher number of cases in which the government never
filed a Notice to Appear (NTA) for the illegal immigrant and the Biden
administration’s implementation of prosecutorial discretion to shut
down cases that are not a priority for deportation. An NTA alleges
that DHS has reason to deport an individual and asks an immigration
judge to issue a removal order, but there has been a big jump in cases
immediately dismissed because DHS failed to file the required
paperwork, the government figures show. “The number of cases closed
by termination where the underlying charges against the immigrant are
not upheld grew 86 percent between FY 2017 and FY 2022,” TRAC
writes. “Many of these cases were quite old, indeed some stretching
back to the earliest still pending cases going back to 1996. These
appear to represent cases where the circumstances have changed so that
the basis for a removal are no longer present if they even once
existed. Terminating these cases helped to clear out the Court’s
backlog.”

Earlier this year TRAC reported a “dramatic increase
[[link removed]
(one out of every
six) in new cases DHS initiates in immigration court being dismissed
because Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials are not filing
NTAs with the court. Researchers call it a worrying component in the
increase in court dispositions but point out that much more is going
on that is contributing to the rapid rise in immigration case
completions. For instance, TRAC reveals that dismissals jumped in June
2021 following an Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)
directive
[[link removed]]
allowing cases to be dismissed based on prosecutorial discretion. The
order says Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attorneys will
determine which cases are enforcement priorities and which are not by
exercising discretion based on individual circumstances.

While a record number of immigration cases get dismissed in federal
court, the nation keeps getting crushed with a staggering flow of
migrants, more than 2 million with the fiscal year not even over yet.
In May, Border Patrol agents shattered a monthly record
[[link removed]]
with nearly 240,000 encounters along the Mexican border. Nevertheless,
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Biden administration’s border
czar, recently insisted in a national news broadcast that the border
is secure
[[link removed]].

Until next week …






[Contribute]
[[link removed]]


<a
href="[link removed]"
target="_blank"><img alt="WU01"
src="[link removed]"
style="width:100%; height:auto;" /></a>

[32x32x1]
[[link removed]]

[32x32x2]
[[link removed]]

[32x32x3]
[[link removed]]

[32x32x3]
[[link removed]]

Judicial Watch, Inc.
425 3rd St Sw Ste 800
Washington, DC 20024

202.646.5172



© 2017 - 2022, All Rights Reserved
Manage Email Subscriptions
[[link removed]]
|
Unsubscribe
[[link removed]]

View in browser
[[link removed]]