DOJ Files Petition That Could Strip Federal Immigration Judges’ Union of Bargaining Power

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The Department of Justice is asking for a determination on whether or not federal immigration judges can legally be part of a union in a petition filed to a federal employment board on Friday.

Under federal law, federal employees can form and join bargaining units — i.e., unions — but not if they are “management officials” who are by definition “employed by an agency in a position the duties and responsibilities of which require or authorize the individual to formulate, determine, or influence the policies of the agency,” a DOJ fact sheet says.

A DOJ spokesman told Blaze Media Friday afternoon that the department is asking the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) whether the bargaining certification for the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) “as the exclusive representative for the bargaining unit of immigration judges, should be revoked because the bargaining unit members are management officials under the statutory definition.”

U.S. immigration courts and judges are under the authority of the Department of Justice, rather than the judicial branch, through the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR). NAIJ is the union that represents 420 of America’s federal immigration judges.

Previously, the NAIJ has pushed back on a 2018 plan to impose quotas and deadlines on judges in response to the courts’ case backlog amid a massive backlog of immigration cases. More recently, the union has lobbied Congress to break its members away from the DOJ oversight.

The DOJ says that the move was to ensure that the department’s employment practices are in line with federal law

“The role and importance of immigration judges in meeting the Department’s mission and determining or influencing its immigration policies have greatly evolved over the past several years,” the DOJ spokesman told Blaze Media via email. “In recognition of that evolution, including changes in the law, the Department of Justice believes appropriate action is necessary to update EOIR’s workforce relations in conformity with the law and to continue to further the Department’s mission.”

From here, the FRLA is expected to open an investigation into the matter with input from both parties, the spokesman added.

This news follows months after the Department of Justice issued a different regulation aimed at streamlining the immigration courts. The rule cemented and codified the attorney general’s power to make binding rulings on immigration cases, in order to make the courts “as efficient or as effective through the process as possible,” a DOJ official said in July. (For more from the author of “DOJ Files Petition That Could Strip Federal Immigration Judges’ Union of Bargaining Power” please click HERE)

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Jeffrey Epstein Found Dead; Fake News Concludes Suicide; Jail Can’t Get Its Story Straight

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Jail Gives Contradictory Causes of Death

By Lucia Sang. Disgraced multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sex trafficking minors, died from an apparent suicide inside in Manhattan jail cell and the FBI is investigating, the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed Saturday.

The 66-year-old Epstein was found unresponsive inside his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City around 6:30 a.m. Life-saving measures were initiated immediately by responding staff. He was transported to the New York Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan Hospital and was dead on arrival, officials said.

Law enforcement sources told Fox News that the initial call to the jail was cardiac arrest. Multiple reports claimed that he hanged himself. (Read more about Epstein found dead HEREHEREHERE)

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Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein Found Dead, Fake News Media Concludes “Suicide”; Jail Contradicts

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First Call Was Cardiac Arrest; Later “Hanging”

By Lucia Sang. Disgraced multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who was accused of sex trafficking minors, died from an apparent suicide inside in Manhattan jail cell and the FBI is investigating, the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed Saturday.

The 66-year-old Epstein was found unresponsive inside his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City around 6:30 a.m. Life-saving measures were initiated immediately by responding staff. He was transported to the New York Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan Hospital and was dead on arrival, officials said.

Law enforcement sources told Fox News that the initial call to the jail was cardiac arrest. Multiple reports claimed that he hanged himself. (Read more about Epstein found dead HERE)

Good Guy With a Gun Appears to Have Stopped a Would-Be Mass Shooter at a Missouri Walmart

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With the recent mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas that left 20+ people dead and scores more wounded, there’s nothing more startling to the public, and especially the police, than an armed man armed with a rifle in the vicinity of…a Walmart. That’s what happened in Springfield, Missouri. Seeing that there are only two reasons for someone to do this: it was either poor judgment, in which the person of interest should know better given recent headlines or this was a planned attack that was stopped by law enforcement. We don’t know what the intent was, but Springfield police said this guy is lucky to be alive and “his intent was not to cause peace or comfort to anybody that was in the business.”

A photo of the suspect shows him armed with what appears to be an AR-15 rifle or some variant of it. He remains in police custody. An off-duty fireman with a concealed carry permit was credited with stopping the suspect, holding him at gunpoint until police arrived. So, a good guy with a gun stopped a possible attack, but I’m sure the anti-gun wingnuts will keep their heads in the sand (via KOLR 10):

According to Lt. Lucas, an off duty fireman who was at the Walmart is to thank in some part for the young man’s arrest.

For now, investigators will review both the Walmart security footage and the armed 20-year-old’s social media profiles.

Lucas says there may have been a Facebook live posted by the man. Officers plan to watch the video and learn his intentions.

(Read more from “Good Guy With a Gun Appears to Have Stopped a Would-Be Shooter at a Missouri Walmart” HERE)

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Trump Lashes out at Gay Shepard Smith, Says Fake News CNN Is Better, OANN Is Best

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President Trump on Wednesday renewed his criticism of Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, arguing that “Fake News CNN is better” and saying that he now tunes in to the conservative news outlet One America News Network whenever he gets the chance.

“Watching Fake News CNN is better than watching Shepard Smith, the lowest rated show on @FoxNews,” Trump tweeted on a day when he visited first responders and survivors of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. “Actually, whenever possible, I turn to [One America News Network]!”

It was not immediately clear what Trump’s tweet — which came during Smith’s daily program and while Trump was aboard Air Force One to El Paso — was referencing. . .

Trump has repeatedly denounced the media during his presidency, often referring to it as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” But he has consistently praised Fox News and network hosts such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. He has taken a different view of Smith, though. . .

Smith has consistently taken a critical view of Trump during his two-plus years in the White House. Among other things, he fact-checked Trump’s prime-time address on border security in January during his daily news program. (Read more from “Trump Lashes out at Gay Shepard Smith, Says Fake News CNN Is Better, OANN Is Best” HERE)

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Ivy League Economist Interrogated by American Airlines for Being Smart

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On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse. . .

The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater – a look he would later describe as “simple elegance” – but something about him didn’t seem right to her. . .

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism. . .

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

They might even have discovered that last year he was awarded the prestigious Carlo Alberto Medal, given to the best Italian economist under 40. That’s right: He’s Italian, not Middle Eastern, or whatever heritage usually gets ethnically profiled on flights these days. (Read more from “Ivy League Economist Interrogated by American Airlines for Being Smart” HERE)

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Report: Mueller May Have Lied to Congress

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Congressional Republicans say Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller may have lied during his testimony before the House Intel and Judiciary Committees last month, and a new report shows there is evidence to back up the claim. . .

Reporter Paul Sperry provided newly-released court documents indicating that Mueller might have made his brief press conference in May “as damage control after a federal judge privately threatened to hold his team in criminal contempt of court over what she called misleading language in his final report about Russian government interference in the 2016 election.”

Indeed, the day before Mueller made his public appearance on May 29, Judge Dabney Friedrich scolded the special counsel for implying that accused “trolling” firms run by Russian citizens were linked to the Russian government without providing evidence for such a link. . .

During Mueller’s press conference he emphasized that the indicted Russians were “private” entities. According to RealClear Investigations, that apparently satisfied Friedrich. The judge wrote in a July 1 opinion “that Meuller had ‘demonstrated’ the government had complied with her order with his statements to the media.” . . .

McClintock told RealClearInvestigations of Meuller’s answer, “It certainly doesn’t pass the smell test,” adding “If he lied, he’s guilty of perjury and lying to Congress. I think this would be of interest to the U.S. attorney investigating misconduct in this matter and the inspector general’s office.” (Read more from “Report: Mueller May Have Lied to Congress” HERE)

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Only Liberals Do This: Mom Might Cut off Her Kids’ Contact With In-Laws Because They Support Trump

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. . .There’s a disturbing number of families that are nuking their relationships over politics, despite the fact that Republicans and Democrats have been elected and re-elected president of the United States for years. The point is, I’m sure a lot of people were disappointed with either of those outcomes in the long list of elections we’ve had—and yet, I don’t remember hearing families going berserk over George W. Bush winning—twice.

Deep down, yes, there’s more that unites us as a country, but it’s the Left who is just unwilling to discuss that. They want a divorce. And in an era where Left and Right don’t understand one another, I guess that’s where it can become easier to sever ties with your family members over a political disagreement. Let’s take this Huffington Post guest writer who says that her uber-Catholic, pro-Trump in-laws might cause her to cut her kids’ ties with their grandparents (via Huffington Post):

. . .Actually, it isn’t just racism that muddies the water in my relationship with my in-laws. It’s sexism and homophobia, too. Sometimes, it’s even veiled anti-Semitism. (Note to non-Jews everywhere: Telling a Jewish person how much you love Jewish people is, on its face, a message of marginalization.) My father-in-law once had to leave the room when two men kissed on TV. “Disgusting,” he whispered under his breath, within earshot of my son.

[…]

Their hatred is expanding, and it’s expanding quickly. These days, it manifests itself through conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, antifa and Black Lives Matter. My in-laws oppose abortion in any and all circumstances, but they appear unbothered by the idea of migrant kids in cages at the country’s border. The media sources they ingest, of course, are intentionally dishonest, and our conversations with them reveal a view of the world that’s disturbingly removed from reality.

[…]

My own family, who long ago branded me a hothead, advised me to do no more than limit the contact my children have with their grandparents. How much damage could be done in small doses? they posited. That’s not really a solution, of course; it’s more or less a way of continuing to avoid the problem. Our friends have been mostly noncommittal. Mostly people shake their heads sympathetically or pat my shoulder. They don’t know what to say. What advice would I give to someone else, after all? What advice would I offer myself? Would it be to cut all ties? And how does one even go about doing that?

(Read more from “Only Liberals Do This: Mom Might Cut off Her Kids’ Contact With In-Laws Because They Support Trump” HERE)

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FBI Kept Using Steele Dossier for FISA Applications Despite Documenting Ex-Spy’s Bias

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The FBI formally documented the anti-Trump bias of British ex-spy Christopher Steele months shortly after the November 2016 presidential election, yet continued to use his unverified dossier in multiple Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrant application renewals, records obtained by Fox News show.

The partially redacted documents, first obtained by Judicial Watch, also revealed that top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr maintained contact with Steele for at least six months after Steele was fired by the FBI for unauthorized media contacts in November 2016. . .

The summaries of FBI interviews with Ohr, known as 302s, showed that Ohr knew by September 2016 — a month before the initial FISA application to surveil the Trump campaign — that Steele was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being the U.S. President.”

Nevertheless, the FISA warrant application went through in October 2016 with multiple renewals. While the FISA records are heavily redacted, it does not appear that the FBI’s documentation about Steele’s bias was ever shared with the FISA court.

Proceedings before FISA courts are ex parte, meaning defendants are not aware of them or able to attend in any capacity. The FBI has a legal and procedural obligation to reveal exculpatory evidence to the FISA court on its own. (Read more from “FBI Kept Using Steele Dossier for FISA Applications Despite Documenting Ex-Spy’s Bias” HERE)

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Disgraced Former FBI Deputy Director: I’m Suing Trump

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Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe has sued the Trump administration for what he calls his “unlawful” termination, arguing that his firing last year was the result of improper political interference by the president.

“It was Trump’s unconstitutional plan and scheme to discredit and remove DOJ and FBI employees who were deemed to be his partisan opponents because they were not politically loyal to him,” the complaint alleges.

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions dismissed McCabe in March 2018, only hours before his 50th birthday, when his full law enforcement pension would have vested. McCabe’s filing argues that he is “entitled to his full law enforcement pension and all other benefits, privileges, and rights currently being withheld.”

In explaining the firing in April 2018, the Justice Department cited a “lack of candor” in McCabe’s interviews with investigators looking into a 2016 media leak in the waning weeks of the presidential campaign. . .

McCabe has said those allegations were a pretext to get rid of him after months of abuse from President Trump, who had singled him out as a political scapegoat in the 2016 campaign. After McCabe’s dismissal, Trump wrote on Twitter that it was a “great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI.” (Read more from “Disgraced Former FBI Deputy Director: I’m Suing Trump” HERE)

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