Fight Over Soros-Founded Hungarian University Shows US’ Power Vacuum in Europe

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That nature abhors a vacuum is a cliché but also a postulate about the immutable laws of nature. And once again, we’re seeing the unchangeable rules of the physical world being replicated in human action—especially in foreign policy.

Exhibit A is Europe east of the Fulda Gap, where Obama appointees are still dictating American policy and a group of senators have had a testy exchange with the combative leader of Hungary.

To be clear, there is no power vacuum when it comes to hot spots like Afghanistan, North Korea, and Syria, where the Trump Defense Department has acted decisively. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has also personally handled the Russian front.

The world is vast, however, and Tillerson is only one man. The absence of assistant secretaries for Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Western Hemisphere has left these areas with a lack of direction.

The void will be filled by others.

Eleven senators (two Republicans and nine Democrats) on April 19 wrote a letter to Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, expressing their concern about a law they say aims to close Central European University, an accredited U.S. university in Budapest.

“Central European University has become one of the highest-ranked universities in Europe, bringing new opportunities and prestige to Hungarian citizens. … This legislation threatens academic freedom and disregards the longstanding relationship Central European University has with the Hungarian people,” wrote the senators.

What the group of senators—which included such powerful personalities as John McCain, R-Ariz., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.—didn’t mention is the nub of the problem: The university was founded and funded by the U.S. billionaire George Soros, a Hungarian-born hedge funder who uses his vast fortune to advocate progressive causes around the world.

Orban, in his response to the senators, did not mince words about Soros, whom he mentioned six times in a short, one-page letter.

“In our country, laws are passed by elected representatives, based on our constitution,” began the brush-back missive, which I have seen. After reassuring the senators that the Hungarian Constitution guarantees freedom of education and research, the prime minister added, “therefore, any assumption that presumes the breach of these principles by the Hungarian National Assembly is unreasonable.”

“I would like to reassure you that no one wants to close the University of George Soros,” he wrote, adding that “Soros’ network of Central European NGOs are at the heart” of what Orban referred to as an “international disinformation campaign against Hungary.”

“The university is just a pretense,” Orban added. “The real issue,” according to Orban, was Soros’ desire for Hungary to open its borders to immigrants. Hungary, Orban wrote, would soon draw up legislation mirrored on the United States’ Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires agents representing the interests of foreign governments in a “political or quasi-political capacity” disclose this link.

Universities, especially foreign ones, are heavily regulated around the world, and liberals have never shied away from regulating schools, especially religious ones. At the same time, it is true that many U.S. scholars have echoed the senators’ concerns about whether Orban’s moves will have a chilling effect on academic freedom.

Orban himself is hard to pin down. He is rightly trying to salvage Hungarian independence from encroachment by the EU. But he has also flirted with friendship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, an adversary of America and the West.

Backing the left-wing causes advocated by Soros, however, does anger potential U.S. allies. Among other things, Soros supports decriminalizing prostitution and drugs possession and changing Ireland’s constitution to allow abortion.

Being seen on the side of that can and does cannibalize political support from foreign politicians, and cause political parties in these regions to turn increasingly to Putin’s opportunistic diplomacy.

Six GOP senators have written to Tillerson to ask him to investigate whether under President Barack Obama the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development have worked with groups funded by Soros “to push a progressive agenda and invigorate the political left.” Their letter never got to Tillerson and their request for a probe was ignored.

Having an assistant secretary for Europe and Eurasia who can set down the administration’s policies, appoint his own deputy assistants, and transmit information to Tillerson would help all this.

Right now, European policy for this region appears to be run by Hoyt Brian Yee, an Obama-era deputy assistant secretary of state who seems to have gone rogue with regards not just to Hungary but also Macedonia and Albania. He continues to give his support to leftist politicians and causes throughout the region, without the approval or blessing of the White House, the National Security Council or, apparently, even Tillerson.

Appointments appear to be delayed because a reorganization of the State Department is coming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Trump administration told Politico last month that “the president will not name a special envoy for climate change.” So, yes, some of it can be good.

But we need political appointments in top places. Lest we forget, World War I began in the Balkans. (For more from the author of “Fight Over Soros-Founded Hungarian University Shows US’ Power Vacuum in Europe” please click HERE)

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Trump Has Vowed to Eradicate MS-13. What You Need to Know About the Gang.

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In describing its effort to enforce immigration laws aggressively, the Trump administration repeatedly has invoked the threat of MS-13, a violent international gang with ties to Central America.

Responding to a recent surge of violence linked to MS-13 on Long Island, New York—punctuated by the April 13 discovery of four men killed near a public park—U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions visited with local law enforcement late last month, and vowed to eradicate the gang by cracking down on illegal immigration.

“The MS-13 motto is kill, rape, and control,” Sessions said at the U.S. Courthouse on Long Island. “Our motto is justice for victims and consequences for criminals. That’s how simple it is. Prosecute them, and after they’ve been convicted, if they’re not here lawfully, they’re going to be deported.”

In interviews with The Daily Signal, law enforcement experts who study MS-13—and have been working to help combat it—welcomed President Donald Trump’s tough approach to the gang, but cautioned that the federal government should not lose sight of other violent gangs with footprints in the U.S.

According to the FBI’s most recent statistics, there are about 33,000 active gangs in the U.S., with about 1.4 million members.

“The threat of MS-13 and their violence is real enough, but they are not the only gang in town,” said Wes McBride, the executive director of the California Gang Investigators Association, in an interview with The Daily Signal.

Experts such as McBride, who served 28 years in the gang unit of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office, say that immigration enforcement is only one element of a strategy that the U.S. has waged for decades against MS-13.

“People tend to talk about MS-13 as a gang of illegals, and it sort of is, but a lot of them now were born here, so they are second generation,” McBride said. “This is a long-term problem without a simple solution.”

‘Fertile for Gang Proliferation’

Mara Salvatrucha, known as MS-13, originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s, when thousands of people from El Salvador, a country of Central America’s northern triangle, fled civil war.

A 2008 Congressional Research Service report describes MS-13’s early membership as consisting of former guerillas and El Salvadoran government soldiers with combat experience. Those initial members helped the gang develop a reputation of using unusual methods of violence—most prominently, its choice of machetes as a murder weapon.

Eric Olson, the associate director of the Latin America program at the Wilson Center, said the new arrivals from El Salvador formed MS-13 as a form of self-preservation to compete with other Los Angeles-based gangs.

“The Salvadorans were suddenly confronted with Mexican gangs in the high schools, and African-American gangs, so almost as a self-protection thing, they formed cliques and gangs,” Olson told The Daily Signal.

Olson and other experts say MS-13 expanded when, in the mid-1990s, the U.S. government changed immigration law to hasten deportation of the gang’s members back to El Salvador.

MS-13 became the first street gang to be labeled a “transnational criminal organization”—one that operates internationally—by the U.S. government.

“While many of the gang members eventually got deported, they had to reconfigure themselves in El Salvador, and so you had a very vulnerable population fall back on their larger gang family [there] as a protection mechanism,” Olson said. “MS-13 became bigger and more powerful in El Salvador.”

Nelson Arriaga, president of the International Latino Gang Investigators Association, which provides training to law enforcement conducting anti-gang operations, says the U.S. government did not give proper support to Salvadoran authorities who were ill-equipped to handle the return of their troubled nationals.

“Law enforcement in Central America were completely oblivious to the criminal element being exported from the U.S. to those countries, and to the level of sophistication gang members were bringing with them,” Arriaga told The Daily Signal in an interview.

“Those countries were fertile for gang proliferation.”

As MS-13 grew its ranks from deportees returning from the U.S. to El Salvador, members also migrated back to the U.S.

“When we started deporting them, some would turn around and come right back,” McBride said. “It became a circular problem.”

Enforcement Crackdown

Today, the Justice Department estimates that MS-13 has roughly 30,000 members worldwide and more than 10,000 in the U.S. MS-13 is active in 40 states plus the District of Columbia, the department estimates, with an especially significant presence on the East Coast, in New York, Virginia, and Maryland.

While Trump has blamed the Obama administration’s less strict immigration policies for MS-13’s growth, a Justice Department fact sheet, dated April 18, credits “great progress made” by federal, state, and local law enforcement in “diminishing” and disrupting the gang’s impact during 2009 and 2010.

Indeed, McBride says he does not blame the Obama administration for the spread of MS-13. The California gang expert notes that President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department in 2012 sanctioned the gang as a transnational criminal organization.

In January 2016, the Justice Department indicted 56 MS-13 members in the Boston area on federal racketeering conspiracy charges, some related to murder, conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, and drug trafficking. In March of this year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York indicted more than a dozen MS-13 members in seven killings on Long Island spanning three years, including the deaths of several high school students last year.

The FBI started an MS-13 National Gang Task Force in 2004 to coordinate the investigative efforts of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies against the gang.

Arriaga, a retired sergeant in the Inglewood Police Department who focused on gangs, says the FBI and U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents today are embedded in Central America to help local police in those countries deal with the MS-13 threat.

“The MS-13 threat in Central America is on steroids compared to the threat here,” Arriaga said. “It’s good to see the Trump administration making greater emphasis of MS-13, but the enforcement aspect of this has already been there.”

Threat ‘Stays Here’

Despite these efforts, law enforcement experts acknowledge that MS-13 remains strong.

Gang members in the U.S. have preyed on recent arrivals from Central America, many of them teenagers who traveled here alone in a surge of illegal immigration from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala over the past few years.

“The best way to tackle the problem is to convince young people to stay away from the gangs,” Sessions said during his April 28 speech in Long Island.

While MS-13, which has a decentralized structure with little coordination, is not considered a major player in international drug smuggling, Olson said, the gang uses extortion to control local drug markets.

“Extortion is really their bread and butter, so if you are in a poor neighborhood and your job isn’t paying enough, or you don’t have a job and sell tortillas on the corner, [MS-13] force you to pay a tax,” Olson said. “They are extorting all economic activity. Their control of legal markets and extortion is absolute. And when they are in conflict with one another and the police, they become extraordinarily violent.”

Olson called for a multipronged strategy to defeat MS-13:

It’s not like removing a tumor, where you can cut it out and it’s gone. It stays here. Anti-gang work in the U.S. and in Central America needs to go way beyond simply trying to deport and incarcerate people. I wouldn’t say border security won’t have any impact. It’s already had a big impact. It’s one element of an overall challenge.

(For more from the author of “Trump Has Vowed to Eradicate MS-13. What You Need to Know About the Gang.” please click HERE)

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US May Send Patriot Missile to Lithuania Amid Moscow Threat

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U.S. defense officials said a long-range Patriot missile battery may be deployed to the Baltic region later this year as part of a military exercise. The move, if finalized, would be temporary but signal staunch U.S. backing for Baltic nations concerned about the threat from Russia.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Wednesday declined to confirm the specific deployment, but said, “We are here in a purely defensive stance. Everyone knows this is not an offensive capability. For anyone who says otherwise, I would just say I have too much respect for the Russian army to think that they actually believe there’s any offensive capability.”

At a news conference with Lithuania President Dalia Grybauskaite, Mattis said the U.S. “will deploy only defensive systems to make certain that sovereignty is respected. The specific systems that we bring are those that we determine necessary.” (Read more from “US May Send Patriot Missile to Lithuania Amid Moscow Threat” HERE)

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Comey Dismissal Memo Suggests Turf War Between DOJ, FBI

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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s letter detailing the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) rationale for calling for the dismissal of former FBI Director James Comey is heavy on professional grievance.

The memo, submitted to President Donald Trump on Tuesday, strongly suggests that officials at the Justice Department felt Comey improperly assumed prerogatives that rightly belong to career prosecutors at DOJ, instigating a bureaucratic turf war that left department officials displeased.

The memo opens with Rosenstein’s conclusion that Comey’s press conference on July 5, 2016, where he announced he would not recommend criminal charges over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, “usurped” the authority of his superiors at the Justice Department.

The Director was wrong to usurp the Attorney General’s authority on July 5, 2016, and announce his conclusion that the case should be closed without prosecution. It is not the function of the Director to make such an announcement. At most, the Director should have said the FBI had completed its investigation and presented its findings to federal prosecutors. The Director now defends his decision by asserting that he believed Attorney General Loretta Lynch had a conflict. But the FBI Director is never empowered to supplant federal prosecutors and assume command of the Justice Department.

The use of terms like “usurp” and “supplant” are both arresting and telling, as is Rosenstein’s assertion that Comey effectively “assumed command” of DOJ. This section of the memo argues Comey’s public statements stripped DOJ officials of prosecutorial discretion. In disclosing legal conclusions to the public, the former director foreclosed a number of options for department officials, leaving them little choice but to decline to pursue a case against Clinton. What’s more, the memo also states it was improper for Comey, whose role is restricted to finding facts, to reach any legal conclusions in the first place. (Read more from “Comey Dismissal Memo Suggests Turf War Between DOJ, FBI” HERE)

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A 2016 Election Battleground State Is Investigating Potential Voter Fraud

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New Hampshire’s U.S. Senate race was decided by little more than 1,000 votes in November, while the spread between the top two presidential candidates was fewer than 3,000 votes.

While 458 potentially fraudulent votes aren’t enough to have changed the outcome of either race, the questionable votes prompted an investigation by the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office and legislation to reform the state’s same-day voter registration.

“It’s not enough to change the result of the national level races, but it could impact state or local races that are often decided by just one vote,” New Hampshire Deputy Secretary of State David Scanlan told The Daily Signal.

Though New Hampshire is a small state, its House of Representatives has 400 members—the largest state legislative body in the United States.

While President Donald Trump and some other Republicans have said voter fraud occurred in last year’s elections, it wasn’t a conservative outlet that turned up inconsistencies in New Hampshire.

A public records request by New Hampshire Public Radio determined that 5,903 New Hampshire voters registered on Election Day using an out-of-state ID under the state’s same-day voter registration law.

To register to vote with an out-of-state ID, a person must show documented evidence of living in New Hampshire. In lieu of that, voters may sign a legal document affirming their address, under penalty of prosecution if they lie. For confirmation, election officials send a letter to that address after the election.

The New Hampshire Secretary of State’s Office sent out a total of 6,033 letters to people who voted in New Hampshire without proof of a domicile in the state (including but not limited to same-day registrants), according to a follow-up report by NH1 News Network.

Of those, 458 letters came back as undeliverable. This is the evidence of potential voter fraud. New Hampshire has 984,920 registered voters.

In a phone interview with The Daily Signal, Scanlan said that after the letters came back as undeliverable, the office sent the matter to the state Attorney General’s Office for investigation as required by law.

“Just because these were undeliverable doesn’t mean they were illegal votes. We’re seeking further investigation to find out,” Scanlan said.

No update is available, New Hampshire Assistant Attorney General Brian Buonamano told The Daily Signal, and the office continues to review the information.

Attorney General Joseph Foster and Secretary of State William Gardner both are Democrats.

The Republican-controlled state Senate passed a measure 14-9 on March 30 reforming the same-day voter registration system.

The legislation would require a same-day registrant to provide a document showing he or she lives or plans to live in New Hampshire for more than 30 days.

Documentation could include real estate contracts, leases, school enrollment forms, or utility service agreements. A false statement could lead to a fine of up to $5,000.

If passed, the bill would continue to allow people to vote without proof, but they would have to fill out an affidavit promising to provide proof within 10 days. This shifts some of the burden to the voter who lacked necessary ID, rather than local election officials who currently have to send the confirmation letter within 90 days of the election.

“The thrust of this bill does not change same-day voter registration,” state Sen. James Gray, R-Rochester, vice chairman of the Election Law and Internal Affairs Committee, told The Daily Signal. “This is about making sure folks who vote here do live here.”

Under the legislation, the local election supervisor would seek to verify a voter’s address. The official would first use available public documents. If the official is unable to verify the voter’s location, the official will remove the name from the voter rolls and send the matter for review by the Secretary of State’s Office.

Republicans control the state’s House of Representatives, and Gov. Chris Sununu also is a Republican, so the political climate favors the legislation. However, the bill faces opposition from national groups.

Amy Busefink, a national voter registration director for Project Vote, an organization opposing voter ID laws, wrote that the bill “will make registering to vote more difficult for students and low-income people.”

Busefink said the bill “proposes steep penalties and issues the threat of criminal investigations that can deter or intimidate voters—especially those who may not have physical proof of domicile because they recently moved—from registering and voting.”

The legislation clearly is needed given what’s known about New Hampshire elections, argued Logan Churchwell, spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an organization that advocates stronger voter integrity measures.

“Those votes were cast and still count. That 458 [questionable votes] only reflects the addresses that were undeliverable, it doesn’t reflect the potential fake names that might have been provided,” Churchwell told The Daily Signal. “There could be more who gave a good address and name, it just wasn’t theirs. How many voters might have come from Massachusetts? We don’t know.” (For more from the author of “A 2016 Election Battleground State Is Investigating Potential Voter Fraud” please click HERE)

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Veteran Justice Department Officials Weigh Need for Special Prosecutor in Russia Probe

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President Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey gave more fodder to Democrats, many of whom were already calling for a special prosecutor to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Matthew Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, is unsure this case measures up to past cases involving special prosecutors.

“Usually, there is some intractable conflict where the Justice Department is unable to do its job,” Whitaker, now the executive director for the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a watchdog group, told The Daily Signal.

“It’s not so much about the level of evidence or the sensibilities of the case,” he continued. “It’s about the confidence in the system.”

In the past, administrations have named special prosecutors that could conduct an investigation independent of the Justice Department, which is part of the executive branch. This is usually the case when there is consensus that the Justice Department cannot objectively investigate a matter, or can’t assure public trust that the probe was done without bias.

Under President Bill Clinton, an independent counsel was named to investigate the Whitewater matter, which eventually led to the investigation of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. After President George W. Bush took office, and the independent counsel statute had expired, the administration named a special prosecutor to investigate the alleged leak of a CIA operative’s name.

Whitaker said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is highly respected. Rosenstein, who recommended to Trump that Comey be fired, will ultimately oversee any Justice Department probe into the Trump campaign and Russia because Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from any investigation that could relate to the 2016 election.

However, Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor who worked for special prosecutors Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski, believes this case is ripe for an independent view.

“This is a classic example for the need of a special prosecutor,” Akerman, who later became the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, told The Daily Signal. “It’s extremely serious when there is Russian interference in an election and the possibility that one of the candidates was in cahoots with the Russians.”

Democrats and critics of the Trump administration allege that the firing came as a result of Comey stating the FBI is investigating potential Russian ties to the Trump campaign.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Wednesday that every investigation that was going on Monday is going on today.

“There is no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,” Sanders told reporters.

While Sanders said the administration welcomes the investigation, she said a special prosecutor isn’t necessary because the House, the Senate, and the Justice Department are all separately investigating the matter.

When Trump met with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the White House, a reporter asked, “Why did you fire Director Comey?”

Trump responded: “He wasn’t doing a good job. Very simply. He was not doing a good job.”

He was also asked if this affected his meeting Wednesday at the White House with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He answered, “Not at all.”

During the press briefing, a reporter asked a question about Trump meeting with Kissinger and a Russian official at a time when Democrats are talking about Russian ties and making President Richard Nixon comparisons. Sanders said the two meetings were planned well in advance.

Previous administrations, including independent counsel Ken Starr during the Clinton administration and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald during the George W. Bush administration, expanded their investigations beyond the original topic of inquiry.

Both former federal prosecutors say that doesn’t have to be the case.

“The more narrow, the better,” Akerman said. “The scope of this shouldn’t expand beyond possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”

Whitaker said past precedents demonstrate why an administration would be concerned about naming a special prosecutor to any case.

“The investigations can go far afield if the prosecutor is outside the regular chain of command, so, that’s viewed as a risky proposition,” Whitaker said. “But the investigation can be narrowly focused.”

This isn’t a matter that needs an independent investigation if the FBI has the proper resources to look into the matter, said Ron Hosko, a former FBI assistant director.

“What would make me feel better is knowing that the FBI will get every tool they need to explore the scope of Russian interference,” Hosko, now the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, told The Daily Signal. “I think Congress is a pile of politics and hypocrisy and is incapable of investigating this.” (For more from the author of “Veteran Justice Department Officials Weigh Need for Special Prosecutor in Russia Probe” please click HERE)

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Senate Confirms Trump’s Nominee to Lead Food and Drug Administration

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The Senate confirmed Dr. Scott Gottlieb to lead the Food and Drug Administration Tuesday, filling in the list of presidential appointments at the Department of Health and Human Services.

President Donald Trump’s nominee for commissioner of food and drugs was confirmed by a vote of 57-42.

As commissioner of the FDA, Gottlieb, a physician, will report to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and oversee the regulatory and approval process for new drugs.

Gottlieb was a senior FDA administrator under former President George W. Bush, and has advised the Department of Health and Human Services on health IT policy. He has written extensively on drug and health reform topics for a variety of journals and newspapers, and practiced internal medicine for many years.

Like other Trump nominees, Gottlieb has criticized the agency he will now lead. He once decried the “harmful culture” as damaging to the agency’s core mission. (For more from the author of “Senate Confirms Trump’s Nominee to Lead Food and Drug Administration” please click HERE)

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Colossal Pedophile Ring Busted, 900 Arrests, 300 Kids Saved — Corporate Media Ignores It

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After a nearly two-year investigation, 870 suspected pedophiles have been arrested across the world, and least 259 sexually abused children have been identified in the wake of major underground online global pedophilia network being taken down, according to the FBI and European authorities.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Europol announced the arrests on Friday, only days after a court sentenced Florida-based Steven Chase, founder of the so-called Playpen pedophilia network, to 30 years in prison.

The arrest of Chase in December 2014 was the impetus for a global probe into the users of the members-only forum, which culminated in the nearly 900 arrests.

Unsurprisingly, this massive pedophile bust has failed to crack the pervasive US media censorship regime, as not a single mainstream corporate media source in the United States has reported on this story. Perhaps, within those 900 sickos, there are some folks who have enough power not to let their names out.

According to a report by German media conglomerate, Deutsche Welle:

Playpen was accessible in what is known as the “darknet,” where internet users can engage in illegal activities using encryption and anonymity software in an effort to hide their identities. The secret network allowed anonymous users to engage in a forum where they could share photos and videos showing the sexual abuse of children.

As part of its investigation, called “Operation Pacifier,” the FBI managed to use to malware to seize the Playpen website and server, which allowed authorities to track and identify Playpen users.

Law enforcement authorities then took over the network and operated the pedophile site for several weeks – technically making them facilitators of child pornography themselves — hacking and tracking users of the site by installing malware onto their computers.

And while virtually everyone applauds the arrest of pedophiles, civil libertarians have pushed back as to the legality and manner in which the FBI operated, rightly claiming that a single search warrant should not allow law enforcement to hack into and search over 1,000 computers, according to comments made by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) regarding “Operation Pacifier.”

“The warrant here did not identify any particular person to search or seize. Nor did it identify any specific user of the targeted website,” the EFF said. “It did not even attempt to describe any series or group of particular users.”

In a statement Friday, Steven Wilson, head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Center, said the case demonstrated how law enforcement needs to use such methods to fight criminals who can hide behind online anonymization and encryption programs.

“We need to balance the rights of victims versus the right to privacy,” he said. “If we operate by 19th century legal principles then we are unable to effectively tackle crime at the highest level.”

Essentially, Wilson is trying to claim there is virtue in giving up liberty for safety – a complete and utter fallacy of the highest order – but which underpins the rise of the ever-growing global police state that is built upon a framework of an unflinching military-intelligence-industrial complex with imperial ambitions.

Make no mistake that this is just the latest case to emerge in what is now being dubbed #PedoGate. #PedoGate refers to the increasingly common recognition of international pedophile rings, which has previously been steadfastly covered up by the Western fourth estate.

Speaking to the scope of the problem, after President Trump held a press conference in February, in which he detailed his plans to go after the victims of the “human trafficking epidemic,” former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney weighed in on the subject, noting that going after child predators will lead to the downfall of both Republicans and Democrats in the United States — as this problem goes all the way to the top.

As the Free Thought Project has consistently pointed out, pedophilia among the global power-elite is rampant.

In February, the Free Thought Project reported that the police chief recently came forward and confirmed that the former Prime Minister of England, Sir Edward Heath, had raped dozens of children. The department also noted how those within the government helped cover up these crimes.

We previously reported on the high-profile elite pedophilia scandal that gripped the U.K. – with its thousands of victims – being unceremoniously swept under the rug, which is indicative of the scope and breadth of the actual problem. In fact, the problem is so rampant in England that officials issued an order last month to stop naming streets and landmarks after local heroes and politicians because they could later be exposed as pedophiles.

In the case of the U.K. Inquiry, historical abuse of thousands of children by politically connected elites, celebrities, and politicians was brought to light — with an official inquiry being started — only to have the inquiry “crumble” after heavy pressure was exerted by highly placed power brokers within the U.K. establishment.

This was almost the exact same scenario as what took place in the United States in what became known as the Franklin child sex ring coverup — which involved high-level Republicans during the George H.W. Bush administration. Once the FBI took over the investigation from state authorities, it turned into a witch hunt to persecute the child victims – going so far as to charge them with perjury in a successful attempt to scare the other 70+ victims to recant their testimony regarding the child sex ring.

While the story received a small measure of newspaper coverage, there was a complete blackout of the scandal by the mass media, thus most Americans have never heard about this scandal that reached all the way to the White House.

Domestically, there are relatively few high-level arrests, as anytime ‘the elite’ are mentioned alongside the term ‘pedophile,’ the Praetorian guard, aka the corporate media, shout down all those who dare pose any questions about those in power abusing the most vulnerable among us.

For example, former U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, a known serial child rapist, was never charged for his numerous crimes against children, which the FBI knew about, and had evidence of, for over a decade.

According to FBI whistleblower and Newsbud Editor-in-Chief, Sibel Edmonds:

Since 1996 the FBI has had tons of information on Hastert which was gathered in Chicago by the FBI’s Chicago Field Office. The incriminating criminal evidence in those files range from bribery, extortion, fraud, money laundering and embezzlement, to sexual crimes against minors and participation in foreign-operated drug operations.

Since 1997 the FBI has had much hard evidence on Hastert gathered by the FBI’s Washington Field Office. The documented deeds range from espionage to foreign bribery.

But that’s not all. The FBI also has had hard data on Hastert’s sexual violations outside the United States. The involved countries include Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey and Morocco, among others. This also included sexual favors as means of foreign bribery. Interestingly, the CIA had been documenting those sexual activities for many years, and not only on Hastert but on many others; elected and appointed.

Edmonds has noted that the intelligence apparatus utilizes the damning information they maintain on these public officials’ pedophilic activities as a means controlling public policy decisions from the shadows. The fact that Hastert rose to Speaker of the House, when it his activities were well documented by the FBI and CIA highlights precisely to how intelligence services utilize total information awareness to influence and control elected officials.

Additionally, NSA whistleblower Russell Tice, who was a key source in the 2005 New York Times report, which blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping, has publicly confirmed the targeting – and blackmailing – of top government officials and military officers, including Supreme Court Justices, highly-ranked generals, Colin Powell and other State Department personnel.

In an appearance on Edmond’s Boiling Frogs Post blog, Tice stated that he held NSA wiretap orders targeting numerous members of the U.S. government, including one for a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.

In the summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a forty-some-year-old senator from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives now would you? It’s a big White House in Washington D.C. That’s who the NSA went after. That’s the President of the United States now.

Tice added that he also saw orders to spy on Hillary Clinton, Senators John McCain and Diane Feinstein, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Gen. David Petraeus, and a current Supreme Court Justice.

How much information on pedophilia and child pornography does the deep state have on all these politicians like they had on Hastert? Is it not possible, indeed, likely, that the shadow state maintains this information on individuals for the sole purpose of controlling them?

Make no mistake that illegal spying and wholesale collection of American data allows for that very control system whereby the elected officials, who appear to be in control of our state apparatus, are nothing more than a puppets who are blackmailed over their depraved pasts and bribed by the unelected power centers that pull the strings from the shadows. (For more from the author of “Colossal Pedophile Ring Busted, 900 Arrests, 300 Kids Saved — Corporate Media Ignores It” please click HERE)

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When Prosecutors Cheat Justice to Protect Aliens

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There’s an outrageous new phenomenon in the criminal justice system: local prosecutors giving special treatment to illegal (and legal) aliens.

Michael Daly graphically illustrates the problem of prosecutors failing to prosecute in his Daily Beast story about Abhishek Gattani, an alien computer industry executive in Silicon Valley. Despite repeated, iPhone-recorded domestic abuse of his wife, Gattani got a special deal from local prosecutors. Why? According to the prosecutor in the case, Steve Fein, it is because his boss, Santa Clara County district attorney Jeff Rosen, wants to ensure that Gattani doesn’t get deported because of his immigration status.

This is the same Santa Clara County that sued the Trump administration and obtained a district court injunction to prevent the administration from enforcing its new rules that bar giving Justice Department and Homeland Security grants to sanctuary jurisdictions like Santa Clara County. Apparently, the county really wants to make sure that domestic abusers and other criminals stay in Santa Clara County rather than get sent back to their home countries.

Gattani was facing his second felony domestic violence charge. He was arrested the first time when a postman saw him punching his wife outside their home and called the police. More recently, his wife and victim, Neha Rastogi, actually recorded the audio of her beating on her iPhone.

It makes for painful listening. One can hear Gattani repeatedly calling his wife a “bitch” and repeatedly hitting her in the presence of their infant daughter. Rastogi also has a second recording, made a month later, in which Gattani tells her he would like to see her murdered.

Gattani pleaded “no contest” to the charge. Yet the prosecutor reduced the charge from felony assault to accessory after the fact, along with a misdemeanor charge of “offensive touching.” Fein tried to defend his actions by claiming that being an accessory after the fact was still a felony charge and therefore a fair resolution of the case. But because this is not a charge involving violence, it would no longer put Gattani at risk of being deported back to India. In fact, according to Fein, if Gattani carried out the very light terms of his sentence recommended by Fein – only 30 days in custody, served on weekends, and three years of probation, even the felony charge will get reduced to a misdemeanor with no objection from the prosecutor.

The Daily Beast reports that his victim is not at all happy about this “resolution.” Rastogi wonders how someone who is arrested for a crime can be charged with being an accessory after the fact without being charged with the crime itself. And she is particularly offended that being beaten was treated as only “offensive touching.” In her victim statement, she said she felt “FOOLED, disgraced and ridiculed as a victim.”

Prosecutors are charged with administering justice objectively and without bias. That includes taking into account the severity of the crime and the injuries suffered by a victim. Reducing the charges against a criminal because of who he is in society, as opposed to the exact circumstances surrounding the crime, is morally wrong and offensive to the rule of law.

We would all think it wrong if two criminals who committed the exact same crime and inflicted the exact same injuries were treated differently because one was a poor, working-class individual and another was a white-collar executive at a big company.

What is happening in Santa Clara is just as bad.

The county powers that be are giving a domestic abuser a break because he is not a citizen. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently criticized such behavior when it was reported that the acting district attorney in Brooklyn, New York, Eric Gonzalez, issued similar instructions to his prosecutors to avoid leveling charges that might lead to deportation. The chief deputy state’s attorney in Baltimore, Michael Schatzow, the Baltimore Sun reports, has also given such a directive to his prosecutors, telling them to think twice before they charge aliens with non-violent crimes in order to prevent “potential collateral consequences” – like deportation.

Sessions found it disturbing that prosecutors would “openly brag about not charging cases appropriately – giving special treatment to illegal aliens to ensure these criminal aliens aren’t deported from their communities.” Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., called it shameful that the Baltimore prosecutor “is unwilling to enforce the law against illegal aliens who commit crimes in the United States.”

These prosecutors are deliberately discriminating against American citizens. As Sessions said, they are “advertis[ing] that they will charge a criminal alien with a lesser offense than presumably they would charge a United States citizen. It baffles me.”

Unfortunately, these are not isolated incidents. A well-connected former career prosecutor recently told me that he has been hearing complaints from his prosecutor friends around the country. They have been prohibited from notifying federal immigration authorities about felons they are prosecuting who happen to be illegal immigrants, prohibited from speaking to the media about recidivist illegal immigrant felons, and in some cases prohibited from requesting immigration removal proceedings to commence against convicted felons who are in the country illegally.

The consequences of this kind of reckless behavior are all too predictable. Aliens will have criminal charges reduced or eliminated for purely political reasons. They will be let loose back into society even sooner, with the repeat offenders among them able to victimize even more residents of their community.

And that is all but guaranteed to happen. A 2011 GAO study reviewing the criminal histories of 251,000 criminal aliens in federal, state, and local prisons found they had been arrested nearly 1.7 million times – for close to three million criminal offenses.

Apparently, prosecutors in Santa Clara County, Baltimore, and Brooklyn want to make sure that this crime spree continues. (For more from the author of “When Prosecutors Cheat Justice to Protect Aliens” please click HERE)

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LA Times: Ignore Insurance Death Spiral, Trump Is Fearmongering

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The mainstream media continue to live in a fantasy world of its own making, where Obamacare works great and the evil Republicans, led by President Trump, are trying to take people’s health insurance away.

A Friday headline from Brian Bennett, reporting for the Los Angeles Times, reads “’Death spiral!’: Trump is stoking fear that the Obamacare markets will collapse if Congress doesn’t act.”

“Stoking fear,” eh? Last week, the president tweeted about Aetna’s exit of the Obamacare insurance markets, exclaiming “Death Spiral!”

“Many health care experts and industry officials believe the marketplaces need to be tweaked, and the withdrawal of insurers has left consumers in some parts of the country with few options,” Bennett reported, before denying that the “death spiral” exists.

“That said, health care experts have not seen signs of a so-called ‘death spiral’ for the exchanges, and have seen enrollment on the marketplaces remain relatively steady, even with recent premium hikes.”

So, according to the L.A. Times, Trump is fearmongering. But the truth is, the president has repeatedly claimed, correctly, that Obamacare is imploding; premiums continue to increase and individuals are unwilling to pay the higher prices, driving insurers out of the marketplace.

When United Health Care announced last year it would withdraw from the Obamacare exchanges, Conservative Review contributor Logan Albright explained how Obamacare has created the insurance death spiral Trump is talking about.

The death spiral works like this: When the pool of people who sign up for health insurance is older and sicker than insurance companies expect, costs end up being higher than projected. Companies have to raise their prices (premiums) in order to make a profit. Higher prices cause some people to drop their plans as being too expensive, and the people most likely to do this are the ones who need insurance the least. This makes the remaining pool still more costly than before, and the cycle begins again, until nobody can afford insurance anymore.

While Bennet writes that “health care experts have not seen signs” of the death spiral, in Maryland:

This Washington Post article by Carolyn Y. Johnson, published the same day as Bennet’s piece in the Times, quotes health care expert Chet Burrell, chief executive of CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield, stating that the Obamacare marketplaces “were in the early stages of a death spiral.”

“The head of the largest insurer in the Mid-Atlantic region warned Thursday that the Affordable Care Act marketplaces were in the early stages of a death spiral, a statement that came as the company announced its request for massive, double-digit premium increases for next year.” (Emphasis added)

CareFirst, which The Washington Post reports insures about 215,000 people thorough the Obamacare exchanges, has lost $600 million since entering the marketplaces four years ago. They are asking Obamacare regulators to approve a more than 50 percent premium rate hike in Maryland to cover their costs.

“What we’re seeing is greater sickness levels. The pool of beneficiaries is becoming sicker, in part because healthier people are not coming in at the same level we hoped,” said Burrell.

The explanation is straight from the definition of a death spiral. Obamacare’s insurance mandates and “consumer protection” regulations have driven up the cost of insurance plans, pricing healthy people out of the market. Without those people paying in to subsidize the sick, insurance costs must increase to make up the difference. The resulting higher premiums and deductibles price more people out of the market, and the cycle repeats ad nauseam.

“We were hoping for more stability. The factors that I have described to you today lead to instability and to a spiral, and we think we are in the beginning of that,” Burrell explained to the Post.

Obamacare is collapsing. Insurers in the health exchanges are indeed in a death spiral, and the president is telling the truth. The Los Angeles Times is being dishonest with the American people about the failure of Obamacare by accusing President Trump of “stoking fear.”

Campaigning against Obamacare’s visible failures has been a winnings strategy for Republicans in every election since the bill’s passage. Unfortunately, the Republican American Health Care Act, as passed by the House of Representatives, does not solve the problem.

“As a Marylander who know pays three times more for premiums in order to get less coverage and be subject to a $13,100 deductible, I can say this is an issue that fully resonates with residents of the state,” Conservative Review Senior Editor Daniel Horowitz said. “The problem is that Trump continues to promote a bill that accepts that premise of Obamacare that is causing these rising premiums.”

That premise is the continued demand for protective regulations for individuals with pre-existing conditions, community rating, and the insurance mandates from the federal government that micromanage what coverage insurance companies are permitted to offer to consumers. Those elements of Obamacare are preserved in the GOP reform bill, not repealed whole cloth as was promised.

“It takes talent, at a time when Obamacare is making families pay another mortgage, for Republicans to take the focus off the ills of Obamacare and transfer it to the ACHA,” Horowitz said.

“Yet, this is what happens when they focus on half-baked replace instead of repeal.” (For more from the author of “LA Times: Ignore Insurance Death Spiral, Trump Is Fearmongering” please click HERE)

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