Judge Says the FBI Can’t Keep Refusing to Confirm or Deny the Existence of Social Media Monitoring Documents

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The ACLU is one step closer to obtaining documents detailing the FBI’s use of social media monitoring tools. The FBI replied to the ACLU’s FOIA request with a Glomar and a denial.

First, it neither confirmed nor denied it had responsive records. Then it said even if it did have some, it still wouldn’t release them. According to the FBI, releasing documents about the government’s well-known use of social media monitoring software would somehow allow criminals to take a peek at super-secret law enforcement tools. It made these assertions despite the fact it publicly secured contracts for social media monitoring tools.

The ACLU sued. And now, it’s obtained at least a partial victory. The court says it’s not quite accurate to say the DOJ has already publicly acknowledged use of social media monitoring tools. Citing the ACLU’s victory in an FOIA lawsuit over drone strike documents, the court points out the bar to clear first is whether it can be said the DOJ — not the FBI — has made it clear it’s in the social media monitoring business. . .

But that’s not the end of the discussion. The FBI works with several other federal agencies and the documents requested would cover any secondhand use of monitoring tools. So, is it public knowledge other federal agencies engage in social media monitoring?

Given the wide array of evidence indicating (1) that other agencies engage in social media monitoring in the immigration and transportation contexts, and (2) that those agencies cooperate, coordinate, and share information with the FBI, the Court also considers whether such evidence makes it possible to impute, for purposes of applying Exemption 7(E), social media monitoring in the immigration and transportation contexts to the FBI. The ACLU presents extensive evidence that the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (“CBP”), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), and the Department of State (“DOS”) engage in social media monitoring.

(Read more from “Judge Says the FBI Can’t Keep Refusing to Confirm or Deny the Existence of Social Media Monitoring Documents” HERE)

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Did the Navy’s Top SEAL Show Contempt for Trump?

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His pay grade restored by President Donald J. Trump on Friday, Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward “Eddie” Gallagher has filed an inspector general’s complaint against the Navy’s top SEAL, accusing him of uttering contemptuous statements about the commander in chief.

In the works for four months, the move came hours before a Wednesday morning meeting with Naval Special Warfare superiors in California, who are expected to inform Gallagher that Naval Special Warfare commander Rear Adm. Collin Green has convened a Trident Review Board on Dec. 2 to take the coveted SEAL qualification pin away from the special operator.

Green seems to have mustered the support of his uniformed chain of command to administratively punish Gallagher, 40, even if it’s perceived as defiant to the White House. . .

Based on the documents provided to Navy Times, it remains unclear what, if any, comments were made by Green about the president. But a potential showdown between Trump and Green, his fellow admirals and their civilian overseer, Spencer, could set a bad precedent in civil-military affairs, Gallagher’s legal team said.

“The president has spoken on the punishment of Eddie Gallagher,” said the SEAL’s civilian attorney, Timothy Parlatore, a former surface warfare officer. “A two-star admiral should not be stepping in to substitute the judgment of his commander in chief. “This is a terrible precedent to send and the commander in chief should take swift and decisive action against Rear Adm. Green. (Read more from “Did the Navy’s Top SEAL Show Contempt for Trump?” HERE)

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Feds: Teenage Drug Smuggler Tried to Move Meth Across the Border with Remote-Control Car

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A 16-year-old American citizen was arrested by federal authorities for allegedly trying to smuggle methamphetamine across the southern U.S. border with a remote-control car, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

A Tuesday press release from CBP’s offices in San Diego says that, over the weekend, a Border Patrol agent saw someone with two duffle bags walking along a section of border wall and “ducking in and out” of view and called for more agents to respond to the area.

One of the agents found the suspect hiding in some brush near the border with a remote-control car and two duffle bags. Upon searching the bags, authorities found 50 packages of meth with an estimated street value of over $100,000.

(For more from the author of “Feds: Teenage Drug Smuggler Tried to Move Meth Across the Border with Remote-Control Car” please click HERE)

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Improper Medicaid Payments Top $75B

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$75 billion.

That is not the cost of Medicaid. That is merely the cost of improper payments from the Medicaid program, accounting for roughly 20 percent of the total program tab, according Brian Blaze and Aaron Yelowitz writing in the Wall Street Journal. Prior to the Obamacare expansion of Medicaid incentivizing states to flood their rolls with Medicaid recipients, the improper payments accounted for roughly six percent. Now, just the official fraud and waste of Medicaid amount to more than the entire cost of the food stamp program!

In many ways, the entire Medicaid program is one big fraud perpetrated on the American taxpayer, designed to serve as a cash cow for the insurance cartel and major hospital and health care administrator networks. When Republicans cowered from repealing Obamacare or at least reforming Medicaid in 2017, it wasn’t in response to a million-man march of poor people. It was in response to the health care mafia, which is the biggest lobbyist at both the state and federal levels.

Many people forget that most of Medicare and Medicaid are not purely “public.” These programs are managed by “private” companies that line their pockets with unconstitutional government interventions and then use their status in the market to demand more subsidies lest they threaten higher prices. In many respects, our system of venture socialism is worse than single-payer, because it combines socialism with some of the motives of capitalism, while government shields the private entities from market forces. It guarantees them an endless flow of public funds, consumer mandates, and regulatory favors (no antitrust laws, but onerous coverage burdens to keep out new competitors) to remove any need to innovate and compete.

As of 2016, roughly 73 percent of all Medicaid enrollees were being managed by the insurance cartel and health care providers, aka managed care organizations (MCOs). That trend has exploded since Obamacare and is likely even higher today. States like Kentucky, California, and West Virginia, which have particular problems with Medicaid eligibility fraud, have over 80 percent of their enrollment population run by MCOs.

Now you can appreciate why the industry loved Obamacare so much and went ballistic when it was feared that Republicans would repeal it. 84 percent of all coverage increases under Obamacare were from Medicaid. When millions of people were thrown onto Medicaid, it flooded the health care industry with free money.

As Blaze and Yelowitz explain in their WSJ piece:

Higher overall Medicaid payments came with benefits for state-level interest groups that profited from maximizing enrollment. Insurers have reaped substantial profits from the Medicaid expansion—owing in part to large government payments for people who are enrolled but don’t go to the doctor or use much medical care.

Since states view the Medicaid expansion as a cash cow, they have generally failed to conduct proper eligibility reviews. One federal audit by the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general found that more than half of sampled enrollees in California’s Medicaid program were either improperly enrolled or potentially improperly enrolled. Whether out of greed or incompetence, many states neglect to obtain proper documentation and fail to verify income eligibility and citizenship.

This is why since the passage of Obamacare we’ve seen the endless construction in urban hospitals and the prolific mergers and acquisitions across the entire spectrum of insurance and health care administration. Isn’t there a better way to take care of people who are truly poor without creating artificial monopolies, degrading health care, and inducing $75 billion in annual fraud?

It’s very simple. Cut out the middleman. In 2017, I proposed a simple idea to restructure Medicaid in the mold of food stamps, whereby qualified low-income families would be given regulated health care accounts. Rather than having $600 billion annually pumped into the cartel monopoly, the money would go directly into these accounts to purchase any mix of insurance, out-of-pocket, concierge medicine, or health-sharing ministries of their choice.

The best way to give a handout is to actually give a handout, without enriching cronies in the “private” sector. The true reason why we have such political difficulty reforming these destructive programs is not due to a groundswell of lobbying from the poor but because of those who become wealthy by administering this program (or riding the wave of market distortions it leaves in its wake).

By empowering every individual, including those with lower means, to take charge of his own health care, we will finally prevent the insurance cartel and the lobbyists from impeding medical progress in this country. (For more from the author of “Improper Medicaid Payments Top $75B” please click HERE)

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DOJ Details ‘Security Violations’ by ‘Anti-Trump’ Agent Strzok

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In government documents released Monday, Peter Strzok — the famous “anti-Trump” FBI agent who was a central figure in the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server and the early stages of the Trump-Russia “collusion” probe — is accused by the Department of Justice of several “security violations” and “unprofessional conduct.”

Strzok sued the Justice Department in August for what he says was an unfair, politically motivated firing that was a result of, as one of his lawyers put it, “President Trump’s unrelenting retaliatory campaign of false information” against him.

“The decision to fire Special Agent Strzok in violation of his Constitutional rights was the result of a long and public campaign by President Trump and his allies to vilify Strzok and pressure the agency to terminate him,” reads the complaint filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. on August 6. The Justice Department, Strzok claims, attempted to smear him in part by disclosing hundreds of text messages revealing his political bias and adulterous affair with FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

The Justice Department, however, maintains that Strzok has no case, its filing Monday intended to hammer home that message by outlining a series of flagrant offenses committed by the agent — “including his alleged practice of keeping sensitive FBI documents on his unsecured personal electronic devices, even as his wife gained access to his cellphone and discovered evidence that he was having an affair with former FBI attorney Lisa Page,” as reported by Fox News. . .

“In its filing, the DOJ included an August 2018 letter to Strzok from the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which said in part that Strzok had engaged in a ‘dereliction of supervisory responsibility’ by failing to investigate the potentially classified Hillary Clinton emails that had turned up on an unsecured laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner as the 2016 election approached,” Fox News explains. “The situation became so dire, OPR said, that a case agent in New York told federal prosecutors there that he was ‘scared’ and ‘paranoid’ that ‘somebody was not acting appropriately’ and that ‘somebody was trying to bury this.’” (Read more from “DOJ Details ‘Security Violations’ by ‘Anti-Trump’ Agent Strzok” HERE)

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FBI Investigating “Criminal Enterprise” in Epstein Death; Arrested Prison Guards Were Just 15 Feet from Suicided Epstein; More Damning Evidence of Clinton With Epstein Revealed

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By Fox News. A woman who came forward with accusations of child sex abuse against Jeffrey Epstein on Monday described a disturbing encounter with the now-deceased sex offender. She said she took former President Bill Clinton’s seat on the “Lolita Express,” described bizarre bedroom floors made of mattress foam and said she was encouraged to cry after sex with the disgraced money man.

The accuser, who goes by the name Jane Doe 15, has enlisted high-powered attorney Gloria Allred, who held a news conference Monday in Los Angeles.

The accuser was 15 when Epstein preyed upon her and she was seeking compensatory and punitive damages as a result, Allred said. . .

Jane Doe 15 said Epstein began grooming her when she was in New York for a school trip and eventually found herself on the “Lolita Express,” his private jet.

“When I chose a seat on the jet, Jeffrey told me that is where his good friend Bill Clinton always chose to sit,” Jane Doe 15 said. (Read more from “More Evidence of Bill Clinton’s Involvement with Pedophile Epstein Revealed” HERE)

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Is this Even Remotely Believable? Guards Just 15 Feet from Epstein When He Supposedly Killed Himself

By TMZ. The feds claim Noel and Thomas were 2 of the guards on duty on August 10 from 12 AM to 8 AM, and during their watch, they were supposed to conduct 5 scheduled checks on Epstein.

The 2 guards allegedly completed slips stating they made those checks, but the feds say not a single one was actually carried through. According to the indictment, Noel and Thomas were at their desks in the common area using computers … just 15 feet from Epstein’s cell. BTW, they weren’t doing work either … the feds allege they were shopping for furniture and hunting down motorcycle deals and sports news.

The feds claim for a period of approximately 2 hours, the guards were sitting at their desks “without moving, and appeared to have been asleep.” (Read more about what the investigation of Epstein revealed HERE)

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Jeffrey Epstein Prison Guards Charged with Falsifying Records

By CBS News. Two correctional officers responsible for guarding accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein the day he died by suicide have been charged with falsifying prison records, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday. The guards, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, surrendered to federal authorities Tuesday morning.

Epstein was found unresponsive in his cell August 10 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York while awaiting trial on charges he sexually abused a number of underage girls. The medical examiner’s office ruled his death a suicide by hanging on August 16, but the death raised questions about how he could have died under supervision.

Epstein was put on suicide watch the month before he died after he was found with a strip of bedsheet around his neck on July 23, according to the indictment. Epstein was placed on suicide watch for about 24 hours and then on psychological observation for a week before he was placed into a high-security housing unit where he was supposed to be checked on every 30 minutes. The guards are accused of failing to conduct the checks as required and falsifying jail records claiming they had, the indictment says. (Read more from “Jeffrey Epstein Prison Guards Charged with Falsifying Records” HERE)

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Prince Andrew Loses Corporate Sponsors Following Jeffrey Epstein Scandal

By USA Today. Britain’s Prince Andrew is facing fallout over his controversial link to former friend, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. . .

Cisco Systems told USA TODAY it cut ties with Prince Andrew’s networking program in April 2019. The company’s final work with the program was in June.

Accounting firm KPMG terminated its sponsorship with the duke in October, according to CNN and Sky News. (KPMG declined to comment to USA TODAY.)

Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca may follow suit. USA TODAY has confirmed the company’s partnership with Pitch@Palace is due to expire at the end of the year, and is currently being reviewed. (Read more from “Prince Andrew Loses Corporate Sponsors Following Jeffrey Epstein Scandal” HERE)

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FBI Investigating Possibility of ‘Criminal Enterprise’ in Jeffrey Epstein Death, Prisons Chief Admits

By Fox News. FBI investigators probing the death of Jeffrey Epstein are looking into whether a “criminal enterprise” may have played a role, the Bureau of Prisons’ director revealed Tuesday during testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, who described the death as a “black eye on the entire Bureau of Prisons,” made the admission when questioned by Sen. Lindsey Graham.

“With a case this high profile, there has got to be either a major malfunction of the system or criminal enterprise at foot to allow this to happen. So are you looking at both? Is the FBI looking at both?” the South Carolina Republican asked.

“The FBI is involved and they are looking at criminal enterprise, yes,” Sawyer responded. (Read more from “FBI Investigating Possibility of ‘Criminal Enterprise’ in Jeffrey Epstein Death, Prisons Chief Admits” HERE)

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Google Confirms Android Camera Security Threat

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The security research team at Checkmarx has made something of a habit of uncovering alarming vulnerabilities, with past disclosures covering Amazon’s Alexa and Tinder. However, a discovery of vulnerabilities affecting Google and Samsung smartphones, with the potential to impact hundreds of millions of Android users, is the biggest to date. What did the researchers discover? Oh, only a way for an attacker to take control of smartphone camera apps and remotely take photos, record video, spy on your conversations by recording them as you lift the phone to your ear, identify your location, and more. All of this performed silently, in the background, with the user none the wiser. . .

The security research team at Checkmarx has made something of a habit of uncovering alarming vulnerabilities, with past disclosures covering Amazon’s Alexa and Tinder. However, a discovery of vulnerabilities affecting Google and Samsung smartphones, with the potential to impact hundreds of millions of Android users, is the biggest to date. What did the researchers discover? Oh, only a way for an attacker to take control of smartphone camera apps and remotely take photos, record video, spy on your conversations by recording them as you lift the phone to your ear, identify your location, and more. All of this performed silently, in the background, with the user none the wiser. . .

When the Checkmarx security research team began researching the Google Camera app, on the Pixel 2XL and Pixel 3 smartphones that were to hand, they found several vulnerabilities. All of these were initiated by issues allowing an attacker to bypass user permissions. “Our team found a way of manipulating specific actions and intents,” Erez Yalon, director of security research at Checkmarx said, “making it possible for any application, without specific permissions, to control the Google Camera app. This same technique also applied to Samsung’s Camera app.” The implications of these vulnerabilities, given the footprint of Google and Samsung smartphones alone, presented a significant threat to hundreds of millions of users.

The vulnerabilities themselves (CVE-2019-2234) allowed a rogue application to grab input from the camera, microphone as well as GPS location data, all remotely. The implications of being able to do this are serious enough that the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) specifically has a set of permissions that any application must request from the user and be approved before enabling such actions. What the Checkmarx researchers did was to create an attack scenario that abused the Google Camera app itself to bypass these permissions. They did so by creating a malicious app that exploited one of the most commonly requested permissions: storage access. “A malicious app running on an Android smartphone that can read the SD card,” Yalon said, “not only has access to past photos and videos, but with this new attack methodology, can be directed to take new photos and videos at will.” (Read more from “Google Confirms Android Camera Security Threat” HERE)

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Outlets Retract Stories After Realizing Report Actually Cites How Many Children the Obama Administration Detained

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Multiple outlets deleted entire stories Tuesday after falsely reporting the number of children in migrant-related U.S. custody.

Outlets including Reuters, Agence France-Presse (AFP), NPR and Aljazeera jumped on a report from the United Nations, writing Monday that the country has the world’s highest rate of detained children. The outlets reported that there are currently more than 100,000 children in immigration-related custody, which violates international law.

A day later, Reuters and AFP deleted their stories after the U.N. clarified the numbers were from 2015, when former President Barack Obama was in office. AFP did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why it no longer felt the numbers were newsworthy after being informed they were from 2015.

“Reuters decided to withdraw its story after the United Nations issued a statement on November 19 saying the number of children in detention was not current but was for the year 2015,” a Reuters spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. . .

Aljazeera updated its article, which is now headlined “UN expert corrects claims on children in US migration.” The article notes that the data is from the Obama administration, but a large portion of it is still dedicated to scrutinizing illegal immigration under Trump. (Read more from “Outlets Retract Stories After Realizing Report Actually Cites How Many Children the Obama Administration Detained” HERE)

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Claim: Obama Staffers Left Behind Hateful Notes to Trump Aides

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White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham revealed this week that when President Donald Trump took office, his aides found hateful notes left behind by President Barack Obama’s staffers. . .

Speaking to WHKT-AM at the White House on Tuesday, Grisham — whose first role in the Trump administration was press secretary for First Lady Melania Trump — said, “We came into the White House — I’ll tell you something, every office was filled with Obama books. And we had notes left behind that said, ‘You will fail,’ ‘You aren’t going to make it.’ And in the press office, there was a big note taped to a door that said, ‘You will fail.'”

Former Obama administration alums were quick to accuse Grisham of lying, including Obama’s former Ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice.

But The Daily Mail’s David Martosko reported that he spoke with “four former Trump officials who were there on day one,” who “all confirm” Grisham’s claims.

One former Trump aide told Martosko, “It was a mess that first week. Yeah, there were mean notes left in odd places. One in a deputy press secretary’s office, one inside a desk drawer in upper press, another on a bathroom mirror. They were all about how we were doomed for failure.”

(Read more from “Claim: Obama Staffers Left Behind Hateful Notes to Trump Aides” HERE)

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Impeachment: Democrats’ New Star Witness Was Drinking Wine, Didn’t Take Notes; MORE Contradictions Surface in Testimony

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By Breitbart. David Holmes, the political officer at the U.S. embassy in Ukraine who has emerged as the Democrats’ new star witness in the “impeachment inquiry,” admitted he had been drinking wine at the time he claimed to overhear the president on the phone.

Holmes claimed to have overheard a conversation between U.S. Ambassador Gordon Sondland and President Donald Trump on a mobile phone on July 26, the day after Trump spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Holmes told the House Intelligence Committee in a closed-door hearing last Friday that Trump asked Sondland whether Zelensky would “do the investigation,” and Sondland said that Zelensky “loves your ass.” . . .

What the media did not report were other details that became clear Monday, when the transcript of Holmes’s testimony was released, on the eve of a second week of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry.

One detail was that Holmes, and Sondland, were drinking at the time of the conversation in question:

The four of us went to a nearby restaurant and sat on an outdoor terrace. I sat directly across from Ambassador Sondland, and the two staffers sat off to our sides. At first, the lunch was largely social. Ambassador Sondland selected a bottle of wine that he shared among the four of us, and we discussed topics such as marketing strategies for his hotel business.

(Read more from “Impeachment: Democrats’ New Star Witness Was Drinking Wine, Didn’t Take Notes” HERE)

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Democrats’ Make-Or-Break Week of Impeachment Hearings Kicks Off, as Contradictions Surface in Testimony

By Fox News. Beginning Tuesday morning, in a rush of five hearings ahead of the Thanksgiving recess, eight witnesses — including several who have provided inconsistent accounts of key events — are set to testify over three days in what could be a make-or-break week in House Democrats’ impeachment investigation.

Less than 24 hours before the proceedings are set to be gaveled in at 9 a.m. ET, President Trump floated the idea of testifying, rather than tweeting, during the inquiry. A top Republican called for a last-minute postponement, citing secretive new developments behind closed doors. And, the Trump campaign has pointed out apparent inconsistencies in some witness testimony already on the record.

Though he’s not slated to testify until Wednesday, the key witness expected to come up throughout the week is Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, the wealthy donor who has bragged about his proximity to President Trump — and who repeatedly has frustrated Democrats’ narrative by contradicting several other key witnesses in the probe.

For example, Sondland previously testified behind closed doors that Trump explicitly told him there were to be “no quid pro quos of any kind” with Ukraine, and that he didn’t recall any conversations with the White House about withholding military assistance in return for Ukraine helping with the president’s political campaign. Democrats have alleged that Trump held up the aid to ensure a public probe into the Ukraine business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Then, William Taylor, the U.S. chargé d’affaires for Ukraine, told lawmakers that Sondland himself said “everything” — a White House visit for Ukraine’s new leader and the release of military aid to the former Soviet republic — was contingent on a public announcement of investigations into the 2016 election and into Ukraine gas company Burisma. Hunter Biden sat on its board. (Read more from “Democrats’ Make-Or-Break Week of Impeachment Hearings Kicks Off, as Contradictions Surface in Testimony” HERE)

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