FBI May Have the Wrong Man: No Ricin Evidence Found in Home, Computer or Car of Suspect

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Photo Credit: Dave Robinette

Investigators haven’t found any ricin in the house of Mississippi man accused of mailing poisoned letters to President Barack Obama, a U.S. senator and a local judge, according to testimony Monday from an FBI agent.

Agent Brandon Grant said that a search of Paul Kevin Curtis’ vehicle and house in Corinth, Miss., on Friday did not turn up ricin or ingredients for the poison. A search of Curtis’ computers has found no evidence so far that he researched making ricin.

“There was no apparent ricin, castor beans or any material there that could be used for the manufacturing, like a blender or something,” Grant testified. He speculated that Curtis could have thrown away the processor. Grant said computer technicians are now doing a “deep dive” on the suspect’s computers after initially finding no “dirty words” indicating Curtis had searched for information on ricin.

Through his lawyer, Curtis has denied involvement in letters sent to Obama, Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, and a Lee County, Miss., judge. The letters, bearing a Memphis, Tenn., postmark, were detected beginning April 15.

Curtis’ lawyer said in court that someone may have framed Curtis, suggesting that a former co-worker with whom Curtis had an extended exchange of angry emails may have set him up.

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Democratic Bonanza: Immigration Reform to Change Voting Landscape for Generations

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The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.

Beneath the philosophical debates about amnesty and border security, there are brass-tacks partisan calculations driving the thinking of lawmakers in both parties over comprehensive immigration reform, which in its current form offers a pathway to citizenship — and full voting rights — for a group of undocumented residents that roughly equals the population of Ohio, the nation’s seventh-largest state.

If these people had been on the voting rolls in 2012 and voted along the same lines as other Hispanic voters did last fall, President Barack Obama’s relatively narrow victory last fall would have been considerably wider, a POLITICO analysis showed.

Key swing states that Obama fought tooth and nail to win — like Florida, Colorado and Nevada — would have been comfortably in his column. And the president would have come very close to winning Arizona.

Republican Mitt Romney, by contrast, would have lost the national popular vote by 7 percentage points, 53 percent to 46 percent, instead of the 4-point margin he lost by in 2012, and would have struggled even to stay competitive in GOP strongholds like Texas, which he won with 57 percent of the vote.

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Rand Paul & Boehner Disagree on Whether to Delay Immigration Bill Due to Bombings

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Congressional advocates of comprehensive U.S. immigration legislation were diverted into a sometimes testy debate on Monday over whether the measure should be delayed because of questions arising from the Boston Marathon bombing allegedly carried out by two immigrant brothers.

The idea of holding up the legislation gained some ground with the support of U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a prominent Republican who in the past supported immigration reform. However, the highest-ranking Republican in Washington, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said he saw no reason for the bombings to delay the debate.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican sponsor whose continued support is crucial to the bill’s survival, took a middle-ground position, saying in a statement that he disagreed with “those who say that the terrorist attack in Boston has no bearing on the immigration debate” but he added that immigration reform could and should address any “flaws” exposed by the attack in Boston.

Rubio’s remarks came as some conservative commentators and lawmakers continued to seize on the Boston bombings as evidence that an immigration bill should move more slowly in Congress.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who was captured Friday night and charged on Monday in the deadly marathon bombing, was a naturalized U.S. citizen. His brother, Tamerlan, 26, who died after a shootout with police early Friday, also was in the country legally and had applied for U.S. citizenship. The brothers had immigrated to the United States a decade ago with their family, which is from Chechnya.

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Hill’s Newest Earmarks: Sequester Exemptions

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Sequestration exemptions are shaping up to be Washington’s newest version of earmarks.

Agencies, companies and other groups are on the hunt for Capitol Hill allies with the juice to save their pet issues from the full force of the across-the-board cuts. Some have already been successful.

The campaigns are just one example of Washington slipping back into business-as-usual, where powerful players are open to satisfying special interests, even on sequester — which wasn’t supposed to play favorites.

“This parochial interest nature of Congress is re-emerging in, I think, an unseemly way,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

“We’re moving into some dangerous territory if we just allow every member to pick areas that they think ought to be changed,” added Sen. Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who made a name for himself in the House by ridiculing earmarks in appropriations bills.

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FBI Not Alerted to Suspected Boston Bomber's Russia Trip Because of Misspelling

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The FBI did not know that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older Boston Marathon bombing suspect, took a six-month trip to Russia because his name was misspelled, according to a key Republican senator on national-security issues.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, said Monday that he had spoken to an assistant director at the FBI about the agency’s failure to monitor Tsarnaev after interviewing him in 2011 following a tip from the Russian government that he could be dangerous. Late Friday, the FBI said it found nothing “derogatory” after that initial questioning.

“He went over to Russia, but apparently when he got on the airplane, they misspelled his name, so it never went into the system that he actually went to Russia,” Mr. Graham said.

Tsarnaev, 26, died early Friday morning after a gunfight with police in Watertown, Mass. Younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was taken into custody Friday night and is in as hospital being treated for gunshot wounds.

The revelation that the FBI looked into Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s possible link to terrorist groups but gave him a clean bill of health, has drawn several days of criticism from lawmakers and now the promise of congressional probes.

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Boston Bomb Suspect Linked to Unsolved Triple Murder in 2011

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By Tim McLaughlin and Aaron Pressman. Authorities are investigating whether the Boston Marathon bombing suspect who died after a shootout with police had any connection to an unsolved triple homicide in suburban Boston in 2011, a spokeswoman for prosecutors said on Monday.

The 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, identified by the FBI as one of two brothers suspected in last Monday’s blasts, was a close friend of one of three men who were stabbed in the neck in an apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts in September, 2011.

At the time, the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office said it appeared that the victims knew their assailant or assailants and that the attacks were not random.

Tsarnaev’s potential connection to the case surfaced after the website Buzzfeed.com reported that some of his former associates suspect he may have been involved in the murder. Read more from this story HERE.

Did Boston bomber murder his ‘only American friend’ in horrific triple killing in 2011?

By SIMON TOMLINSON and JAMES NYE. Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have murdered his ‘only American friend’ in an unsolved triple killing two years ago, it emerged today.

Brendan Mess had his ‘throat slit’ alongside two other men in a Massachusetts apartment in 2011 in what police described as a ‘very graphic crime scene’.

Former associates of the Chechan immigrant didn’t initially suspect him of carrying out the gruesome attack, but thought it was strange he didn’t attend his friend’s funeral.

Now one man who knew Tamerlan through the gym where they trained said some of their social circle ‘without even speaking about it beforehand have all been thinking’ he could be involved.

The friend, who gave his name only as Ray, told BuzzFeed Politics: ‘At the time, none of us would have thought it was Tam. Read more from this story HERE.

Rubio Spokesman Compares Illegal Immigrants to . . . Slaves?

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A spokesman for Senator Marco Rubio yesterday compared the status of illegal immigrants in the United States under current law to that of slaves prior to emancipation.

In a Twitter exchange with Washington Examiner columnist Conn Carroll, Rubio press secretary Alex Conant said, “We haven’t had a cohort of people living permanently in US without full rights of citizenship since slavery.”

@conncarroll We haven’t had a cohort of people living permanently in US without full rights of citizenship since slavery.
— Alex Conant (@AlexConant) April 21, 2013

Conant’s remark elicited an immediate response . . .

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DeMint: Taxpayers Would Pay for Amnesty

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Now that the “Gang of Eight” has introduced a comprehensive immigration bill in the U.S. Senate, the cost to taxpayers of implementing amnesty for an estimated 11 million unlawful immigrants has come into focus.

The core problem with amnesty is clear: It encourages more unlawful immigration in hopes of future amnesties, and it treats unlawful immigrants more favorably than more than 4 million law-abiding people who wait outside our borders, following the rules, for their chance to come to contribute to the economic and social well-being of America.

A properly structured lawful immigration system would help our economy. This is why Heritage and conservatives have long argued for reforming the legal immigration system to make the process more efficient, more merit-based. We need an immigration process that attracts high-skilled workers and encourages patriotic assimilation to unite new immigrants with America’s vibrant civil society.

Amnesty for unlawful immigrants is totally different. Amnesty would impose significant tax burdens on Americans that are completely unnecessary to capture the positive economics that would be associated with a properly reformed lawful immigration system.

The Heritage Foundation is one of the only organizations looking at this cost to taxpayers. Our expert, Robert Rector, is one of the nation’s leading authorities on government social programs, and he is currently calculating what amnesty will cost taxpayers over the long term. It is based on a methodology also used by the National Academy of Sciences.

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Manipulating Growth: Data Shift to Lift US Economy 3%

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The US economy will officially become 3 per cent bigger in July as part of a shake-up that will see government statistics take into account 21st century components such as film royalties and spending on research and development.

Billions of dollars of intangible assets will enter the gross domestic product of the world’s largest economy in a revision aimed at capturing the changing nature of US output.

Brent Moulton, who manages the national accounts at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, told the Financial Times that the update was the biggest since computer software was added to the accounts in 1999.

“We are carrying these major changes all the way back in time – which for us means to 1929 – so we are essentially rewriting economic history,” said Mr Moulton.

The changes will affect everything from the measured GDP of different US states to the stability of the inflation measure targeted by the Federal Reserve. They will force economists to revisit policy debates about everything from corporate profits to the causes of economic growth.

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Boston Bombers: FBI Hunting 12-Strong Terrorist “Sleeper Cell” Linked to Brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

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The FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers.

Police believe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were specially trained to carry out the devastating attack.

More than 1,000 FBI operatives were last night working to track down the cell and arrested a man and two women 60 miles from Boston in the hours before Dzhokhar’s dramatic capture after a bloody shootout on Friday.

A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.

“They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.”

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