Judicial Watch Sues State Dept. for Records
Tied to Alleged Monitoring of Trump Family and Journalists by Amb. Marie
Yovanovitch
Judicial Watch is going to court to uncover details of the alleged
monitoring of President Trump’s family, lawyer and journalists, as
ordered by the since-recalled U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie
Yovanovitch.
The two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits against the State
Department for documents tied to the alleged monitoring of President
Trump's intimate circle and journalists covering him is an extension of our
Judicial Watch investigation,
which began in October 2019, into the alleged monitoring, via CrowdTangle and
other means. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch is alleged to have ordered State
Department entities to conduct the monitoring. The list of the alleged
targets includes:
Jack Posobiec
Donald Trump Jr.
Laura Ingraham
Sean Hannity
Michael McFaul (Obama's ambassador to
Russia)
Dan Bongino
Ryan Saavedra
Rudy Giuliani
Sebastian Gorka
John Solomon
Lou Dobbs
Pamella Geller
Sara Carter
Amb. Yovanovitch reportedly ordered monitoring keyed to the following
search terms: “Biden,” “Giuliani,” “Soros” and
“Yovanovitch.”
As Judicial Watch previously reported, prior to being recalled as
ambassador to Ukraine in the spring, Yovanovitch reportedly created a list
of individuals who were to be monitored via social media and other means.
Ukraine embassy staff made the request to the Washington D.C. headquarters
office of the department's Bureau
of European and Eurasian Affairs. After several days, Yovanovitch's
staff was informed that the request was illegal and the monitoring either
ceased or was concealed via the State
Department Global Engagement Center, which has looser restrictions on
collecting information.
“This is not an obscure rule; everyone in public diplomacy or public
affairs knows they can't make lists and monitor U.S. citizens unless there
is a major national security reason,” according to a senior State
Department official. If the illicit operation occurred, it seems to
indicate a clear political bias against the president and his supporters.
Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who also has led American embassies in
Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, was appointed ambassador to Ukraine by Obama in
2016. She was recalled by the State Department in May and remains a State
Department employee in Washington D.C.
We filed the two FOIA lawsuits after the State Department failed to respond
to October 9 and October 23, 2019 requests for documents about both “the
monitoring of any U.S.-based journalist, reporter or media commentator by
any employee or office of the Department of State” and the CrowdTangle
social media monitoring program.
On October 10, 2019, Congressman Devin Nunes told
Sean Hannity on his program that, “What I've heard is that there were
strange requests, irregular requests to monitor not just one journalist,
but multiple journalists...” Hannity followed this statement by adding,
multiple sources also told him they “believe there is evidence that
government resources were used to monitor communications” of U.S.
journalists and that Yovanovitch may have been involved. Yovanovitch was
questioned on the issue during the impeachment proceeding in the House and
seemed to deny
any illegal monitoring took place.
Q: “Could you help us understand how the embassy and the State Department
back in Washington collects information on social media?”
A: “I can't really answer the question,
because I don't know all the inner details of how the press section works
to gather information. But they provide us with a press summary, or they
used to provide me, I mean. They provide the embassy with a press summary
and it goes out to other people at the State Department as well.”
Q: “And is part of that monitoring social
media accounts from ...”
A: “Yeah. I mean, in today's age, yeah,
social media is really important.”
So, was the Ukraine Embassy illegally monitoring American critics of
Ambassador Yovanovitch? It certainly is disturbing that the State
Department seems to be stonewalling Judicial Watch’s requests for
information on this controversy until after the impeachment of President
Trump.
Also, in November 2019, our Judicial Watch lawyers filed a lawsuit
against the State Department seeking documents related to a reported
“untouchables list” given in late 2016 by Yovanovitch to Ukraine
Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko told
The New York Times that Yovanovitch “pressed him not to
prosecute anti-corruption activists.” Lutsenko reportedly said
earlier the do-not-prosecute list included a founder of the Ukraine group
Anti-Corruption
Action Centre (AntAC), which was funded by Soros foundations, the U.S.
federal government and two members of the Ukrainian Parliament who vocally
supported the Soros group's agenda.
Federal Court Orders Snap Hearing on Awan Brothers, Congressional
Democrat IT Scandal after DOJ Files Document under Seal
Judicial Watch is engaged in an ongoing legal battle with the Justice
Department (DOJ) for documents about the Congressional Democrat IT
(information technology) scandal involving the Awan brothers. It’s been
delay, distraction and stonewall all the way, as Justice comes up with one
excuse after another to avoid producing records we are seeking under a
November 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against
the FBI over two FOIA requests for records related to the Awan brothers.
Well, early Monday morning, U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta ordered
a snap hearing on the matter midweek after the Justice Department submitted
information under seal last Friday following the court’s demand for an
explanation of why no records have been produced in the case.
In August 2019, the Justice Department told the court that it would begin
producing records by November 5, 2019. After producing no records, on
November 13, 2019, the agency told Judicial Watch that it was having
“technical difficulties,” and in a subsequent email claimed that
“difficulties with the production remain.”
In a joint status
report filed on December 5, 2019, our Judicial Watch lawyers
reported to the court that the DOJ claimed in a phone call that it was now
unable to produce any records to either of the FOIA requests “because the
agency was waiting for some unspecified action by Judge [Tanya S.] Chutkan
in some other matter so as to avoid having to produce records in this
case.” In that same report, the DOJ told the court that Judge Chutkan is
“presiding over a related sealed criminal matter” that prohibits the
government from releasing the requested FOIA information.
In the December hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta expressed
frustration and ordered the Justice Department to explain its failure to
produce records by January 10 and to provide Judicial Watch some details
about the delay. Instead, the Justice Department made its filing under seal
and failed to provide Judicial Watch with any details about its failure to
produce records as promised to the court.
At the hearing, the Court disclosed that another court had issued a sealed
order that will impact the production of the records. The Court seemed to
recognize our frustration at the delay, especially as the sealing order
came many months after we first requested (and should have received)
documents.
Imran Awan and his family were banned from the House computer network in
February 2017 after the House’s top law enforcement officer wrote that
Imran was “an ongoing
and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly
threatening the integrity of our information systems,” and that a server
containing evidence had gone “missing.” The inspector general said
server logs showed “unauthorized access” and procurement records were
falsified.
Imran Awan was Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s (D-FL) top information
technology aide. Most lawmakers fired Awan in February, but Wasserman
Schultz kept him on until he was arrested
in July 2017, trying to board a flight for Pakistan.
In July 2018, Imran Awan was given a plea deal, and
pled guilty to federal bank fraud but prosecutors found no
evidence that Awan “violated federal law with respect to the House
computer systems.”
The Awan brothers reportedly “were
not given background checks before being given access to highly sensitive
government information and no explanations have been given as to why.”
Additionally, “If they would have run this background check it would have
found out not only multiple criminal convictions, but $1 million
bankruptcy, a dozen lawsuits … it would have found a whole host of major
red flags and the Democrats didn’t do any of those checks.”
The cover-up of the Awan Brothers Democratic IT scandal shows the FBI’s
and Justice Department’s penchant for dishonesty isn’t just limited to
FISA
abuse. The DOJ’s handling of the Awan Brothers case has long been an
issue of concern, and now we are expected believe some secret investigation
prevents the public from knowing the full truth about this scandal? We are
skeptical but will have to wait longer. The Court ordered the Justice
Department to release more details related to the sealed order and report
next month on what of the over 50,000 pages of documents can be released in
light of the court-ordered secrecy.
Records Show ‘Diversity Workshop’ Instituted by South Bend
Police Department
The City of South Bend, Indiana, and its former mayor, now-announced
presidential candidate Peter Buttigieg, have been under a cloud for years,
and we here at Judicial Watch have been digging to uncover a number of
irregularities under Buttigieg’s tenure. For example: the creation of a
municipal ID
card for illegal aliens and secret police audio tapes of wire
tapped phone calls of conversations that reportedly contain racist
remarks by certain South Bend police officials, which Mayor Buttigieg has
been withholding from the South Bend City Council for seven years.
And, just this week, another South Bend police peculiarity showed up when
we received 127
pages of records from the South Bend Police Department (SBPD)
showing the Department offered diversity training in 2017 that includes a
“cultural competence” rating for personnel, reminiscent of the kind of
social credit score-keeping done by the Chinese communist government. The
training material also names various classes of prejudice, including
“languageism” and “sizeism.” The Mayor of South Bend at that time
was Pete Buttigieg.
The South Bend Police Department training material claims all personnel
have a measurable Cumulative Perceptual Index (CPI) rating, which measure
their “cultural competence.”
“The CPI theory posits that our behaviors and biases today may well be
rooted in our individual measurable CPI rating.” The training material
elaborates further that the CPI theory holds:
We all have been exposed to bigotry and biases at various stages of our
lives. What and with what levels of intensity those exposures took place is
an important variable in our past, current and future interpersonal
interactions. One thing that the CPI theory holds certain is that none of
us were born with prejudices and biases. It also posits that all of us have
had some prejudice or bias get dispelled in some way over time and it is
that factor that can facilitate measurable adjustments in our CPI
ratings.
In SBPD anti-discrimination police training materials, one slide under the
title “The Future of Policing” notes that:
Black lives do indeed mater, but no more, and certainly no less than the
lives of every community within law enforcement’s jurisdictions. The
perceptual proof of that belief is unquestionably not universally present
today because such a Vision is not yet universally shared by law
enforcement.
The SBPD’s diversity workshop creators have deemed the term “deaf and
dumb” to be offensive, “implying that if an individual lacks the sense
of hearing, they are therefore intellectually deficient.” This definition
completely ignores the historical meaning of the word “dumb” in this
context, which is “mute” or “unable to speak.” Another supposedly
“inappropriate” and “offensive” term is “hearing-impaired,”
which apparently implies that “their hearing is broken, and needs to be
fixed.” The term “racism/colorism” is, per their definition, “an
attitude, action, or practice” emphatically “backed by institutional
power.”
We obtained the records in response a June 27, 2019, Access to Public
Records Act (APRA) request for:
- Complaints against the SBPD related to bias of any kind (racial,
religious, sexual orientation, etc.) from 2015-present.
- SBPD policy documents relating to discrimination on any basis, and
training materials used by SBPD relating to discrimination of any
kind.
These documents show how South Bend police under Mayor Buttigieg had to
contend with politicized “training” that had nothing to do with public
safety.
Mexican Police Chief Unfazed by U.S. Alert; Arrival of Middle
Easterners Going North is ‘Normal’
The “open borders” crowd would have you believe that border security
isn’t an issue worth worrying about. Never mind the illegal alien crime
or the sheer numbers overwhelming our government (and taxpayer) capacities.
We at Judicial Watch have had an eye out on the disturbing trend of
unvetted immigrants from terrorist nations filtering through our border,
and this week’s Corruption Chronicles highlights our latest
discovery:
A January 8 U.S. Customs and Border Protection Intelligence Alert
warning Mexico of armed Iranians planning to enter the country through its
southern border didn’t faze a busy Mexican border city’s police
chief, who confirms the region is full of Middle Easterners, Africans and
Asians heading north toward the United States. In a Latin American news
report published shortly after the U.S. issued the bulletin,
Mexicali Police Chief María Elena Andrade Ramírez said, matter-of-factly,
that the arrival of people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia as well as
the rest of the Americas is “normal” in her California border city of
about a
million residents. Nevertheless, the chief, who affirmed receiving the
U.S. government bulletin, said she planned to cooperate and coordinate with
state authorities to “reinforce security.”
The alert was issued last week by the Department of Homeland Security
(DHS) and largely ignored by the American and Mexican mainstream media.
Only a few conservative media outlets in the United States reported about
the warning after one obtained a DHS
document outlining the threat. The document, issued by the Border
Patrol’s regional intelligence operation center in Arizona, says that a
Guatemalan national may try to smuggle five Middle Easterners—including a
suicide bomber—into the United States through Mexico. The smuggler and
four other men and a woman transited through Guatemala and Belize before
reaching Veracruz, Mexico, according to the bulletin. The Guatemalan, whose
name is redacted in the government document, was deported from California a
year ago. The Spanish-language article linked above elaborates that
American intelligence officials received the threat after picking up
recordings distributed via social media. A Mexicali news story
cites Mexican authorities downplaying the situation by assuring citizens
that the arrival of people from the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia and
the rest of the Americas is “something
normal.”
This new norm creates a serious national security crisis along the
famously porous Southern Border, though Islamic terrorists have long been
present in Mexico. We have investigated and reported on it for years,
uncovering several operations involving Mexican drug cartels joining forces
with Islamic terrorists to enter the U.S. and carry out attacks.
Back in the spring of 2015, we here at Judicial Watch broke a story about
an ISIS training facility just a few miles from the U.S. border near Ciudad
Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. At the time, sources including a
Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector,
confirmed that “coyotes” engaged in human smuggling—and working for
the Juárez Cartel— help move ISIS terrorists through the desert and
across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New Mexico. A few
months later we exposed a
separate scheme in which Mexican cartels smuggled foreigners from countries
with terrorist ties into a small Texas rural town near El Paso, Texas.
A few years ago, we obtained State
Department documents showing that the government has long known
that “Arab extremists” are entering the country through Mexico. Among
them was a top Al Qaeda operative wanted by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) during his cross-border jaunts. More recently, federal
statistics show that unprecedented numbers of migrants from terrorist
nations, labeled Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the government, are
entering the United States via Mexico. A congressional
probe completed in early 2019 found an astounding 300% increase in
Bangladeshi nationals attempting to sneak into the country through Texas
alone. Bangladesh is a south Asian Islamic country well known as a
recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda Indian
Subcontinent (AQIS). Before the year ended, Mexico confirmed that
large groups of migrants from terrorist nations are in Tapachula awaiting
asylum in the United States, and federal authorities in Houston arrested a
Mexican-based Bangladeshi smuggler and charged him with bringing in 15
fellow countrymen through the Texas-Mexico border.
When the Central American caravan got started in the fall of 2018,
Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales confirmed that nearly
100 ISIS terrorists had been apprehended in the impoverished
Central American nation. Guatemala has long been known as a major smuggling
corridor for foreigners from African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries
making their way into the United States like the Iranians identified
recently by the feds. No wonder Mexican authorities are unfazed.
Until next week …
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