Photo Credit: CNNA judge on Monday ordered the release of sealed documents and transcripts from court proceedings related to the murder case of Chandra Levy, a Washington intern whose disappearance in 2001 drew national headlines and damaged a U.S. congressman’s political career.
D.C. Superior Court Judge Gerald Fisher ruled that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia should release the transcripts of secret conversations between the lawyers and the judge at the judge’s bench in hearings from earlier this year.
The case of Levy, whose body was found in a Washington park in 2002, is back in court because defense attorneys for the man convicted of her murder have called into question the testimony of a key prosecution witness.
Ingmar Guandique, 31, was sentenced in 2011 to two concurrent 60-year sentences for murder with kidnapping and murder with attempted robbery in Levy’s death. He was in court Monday wearing an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs.
By Daniel Strauss. Real estate mogul Donald Trump on Monday blasted former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), saying there was something “mentally wrong” with the New York City mayoral candidate.
“He’s a disaster. He’s a sick guy; he shouldn’t be running,” Trump said Monday on Fox News.
“He’s gotta drop out at some point, but perhaps he won’t. He’ll go through the process,” he predicted.
By Charles C. Johnson. Anthony Weiner may have violated federal law when he failed to disclose his lavish six-figure wedding in his financial disclosure forms, says a government accountability group.
Ethics watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center examined the federal Financial Disclosure Reports for both Weiner and long-suffering wife Huma Abedin for 2010, the year of their wedding.
The cost for the ceremony was at least $100,000 but probably ran closer to $250,000 including all accommodations, clothing and extras. Neither Weiner nor Abedin had the resources to pay for the ultra-expensive wedding, yet neither recorded gifts on their Financial Disclosure Reports for that year.
Even though there is an exemption for gifts from personal friends, the Ethics in Government Act requires written permission from the House Ethics Committee for any Congressman getting gifts worth more than $250. Weiner had no such written permission.
NLPC was preparing a complaint to the House Ethics Committee in 2011 against Weiner for filing a false Financial Disclosure Report when Weiner resigned from Congress after the first of his many sexting scandals, leaving the Committee without jurisdiction to take up an investigation. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-30 03:00:242016-04-11 11:18:09Massive Explosions Rock Propane Plant; Watch Raw Video Here
Photo Credit: ABCToday on “This Week,” Glenn Greenwald – the reporter who broke the story about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs – claimed that those NSA programs allowed even low-level analysts to search the private emails and phone calls of Americans.
“The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years,” Greenwald told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “And what these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things. It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future.”
Greenwald explained that while there are “legal constraints” on surveillance that require approval by the FISA court, these programs still allow analysts to search through data with little court approval or supervision.
“There are legal constraints for how you can spy on Americans,” Greenwald said. “You can’t target them without going to the FISA court. But these systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents.”
“And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst,” he added.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-29 02:01:182016-04-11 11:18:09Another Shocking Revelation of NSA Snooping: Powerful Tool Exists to Give Low-Level Analysts Immediate Access to all Your Email, Phone Calls (+video)
Photo Credit: ReutersBy Matt Williams. The wheels of Anthony Weiner’s increasingly shaky campaign for the New York mayoralty wobbled further Sunday, as a key aide quit following a week of lurid revelations about the candidate.
The resignation of campaign manager Danny Kedem will come as a further blow to the embattled Democratic politician, who is facing increased calls to pull out of the race for the city’s top job.
It comes amid a near-daily onslaught of negative headlines in New York regarding Weiner’s continued sending of pictures of his penis to women over the internet, even after he was forced to resign from Congress over an earlier such incident.
The impact the latest revelations has had on his chances of replacing Michael Bloomberg as mayor were laid bare in a poll released on Thursday, which showed a 14 percentage-point swing from Weiner to his closest Democratic rival, Christine Quinn.
His favourability rating also plunged from 52% to 30%. Having seemingly shrugged off the initial sex scandal to enter the mayoralty race, many are now wondering if Weiner can ride out the latest focus on his proclivities rather than his policies. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: SplashAnthony Weiner spent more than $45K on private detectives to investigate his own 2011 lie that his Twitter account had been hacked
By Michael Zennie. Anthony Weiner brazenly spent more than $45,000 from his Congressional campaign funds to hire private detectives to investigate his own lie that his Twitter account was hacked in 2011, it has been revealed.
Weiner paid T&M Protection Services with his campaign donors’ funds and ordered the investigators to track down the ‘hackers’ who ‘broke into his Twitter account’ and sent lewd photos.
Weiner’s story about his account being hacked was, of course, a lie and he knew it at the time. For a week and a half, he maintained that he did not send the suggestive pictures posted to his Twitter account in May 2011.
The New York Daily News reports that Weiner hired the private investigators in an attempt to cover his tracks – spending $43,100 from his campaign warchest on a wild goose chase.
He also paid law firm BakerHostetler to investigate the matter – though the exact amount spent on the bogus hunt. He paid the firm more than $93,000 for legal services between January 2010 and December 2012, but not all of that money went to the sexting investigation. Read more from this story HERE.
By Bob Cusack. Former Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry said Anthony Weiner is a “good Democrat” who should be talking more about his accomplishments in Congress.
In an interview Saturday night on Geraldo Rivera’s show on Fox News, Barry said, “One bit of advice to the congressman: I’d stop talking so much about now and start talking about what you did for seven terms while he was in the Congress. He’s a good Democrat.”
A couple weeks ago, Barry said he can “identify” with what Weiner is going through.
Earlier in the interview, Barry and Rivera clashed about the ex-mayor’s past brushes with the law. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-29 01:48:402016-04-11 11:18:10Anthony Weiner’s Campaign Manager Quits as the “Good Democrat” Faces Calls to Drop Out (+video)
Photo Credit: Fox News By Chris Stirewalt. It may come as some unwelcome news to the families of the nearly 60,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam War that the whole thing was just a misunderstanding.
That was the impression President Obama gave on Thursday when he spoke to the press after his meeting with Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang. Sang brought Obama a copy of a letter sent to President Harry Truman from Ho Chi Minh in which the communist dictator spoke hopefully of cooperation with the United States.
Obama, striking a wistful tone, observed that it may have taken 67 years, but the United States and Vietnam were finally enjoying the relationship that Ho once wrote of. After all, Obama said, Ho had been “inspired by the words of Thomas Jefferson.”
The message here was that if only we might have bridged our differences then – if only Ho and Truman could have done what Obama and Sang did this week, so much unpleasantness might have been avoided.
While Jefferson did get pretty fired up about “the blood of tyrants,” it’s hard to see how the Sage of Monticello inspired the murderous career of the Vietnamese dictator. Ho famously slaughtered his opponents, including the infamous butchery of peasant farmers who resisted his brutal taxation in the early days of Ho’s regime. Not particularly Jeffersonian.
By Silvio Canto, Jr. First, it is true that we have diplomatic relations with Vietnam. We are doing business with them. We may be allies in the region. Vietnam is obviously looking for foreigners to invest and use their cheap labor. Their current leadership would rather see more “Made in Vietnam” stuff at WalMart than any discussion of Ho’s ideas!
Second, every despot in the world, including Castro in Cuba and Chavez in Venezuela, has quoted George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They do it to enhance their arguments while they practice the exact opposite of what those wonderful men stood for.
Third, and most important, doesn’t President Obama understand that 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam?
And millions living served there? Some are disabled veterans! Some still live with the memory of watching their buddy killed in action.
Didn’t it occur to President Obama that such a remark might hit a few people the wrong way? Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-28 03:44:212016-04-11 11:18:12Obama Says Vietnamese Mass Murderer Ho Chi Minh Inspired by Founding Fathers – UPDATED
Photo Credit: Immigration DepartmentPrime Minister Kevin Rudd says asylum seekers who arrive by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees.
Mr Rudd has confirmed a deal that will see asylum seekers sent to Papua New Guinea for assessment, and if they are found to be refugees, they will be resettled there…
“I understand this is a very hard-line decision. I understand the different groups in Australia and around the world will see this decision in different ways,” he said.
“But our responsibility as a government is to ensure we have a robust system of border security and orderly migration on the one hand, as well as fulfilling our legal and compassionate obligations under the Refugees’ Convention on the other.”
A New York business owner was targeted by local police after they became suspicious of his store. As a result, they sent in an undercover informant on two separate occasions who ultimately hurt them a lot more than he helped.
On the second visit, the informant allegedly planted and photographed crack cocaine, which led to the arrest of store owner Donald Andrews Jr.
Andrews operates a “smoke shop” in Scotia that sells incense and other smoking paraphernalia that can easily be used for other illicit activities.
Andrews’ attorney, Kevin Luibrand, narrated a video that was shot by in-store surveillance cameras that appears to show the informant planting and photographing the crack.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-27 04:13:312016-04-11 11:18:16Undercover Informant Plants Crack Cocaine In Store of NY Businessman (+video)
photo credit: fibonacci blueBy Todd Beamon. The federal employees who will be responsible for administering Obamacare for the American people don’t want it for themselves.
The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents workers at the Internal Revenue Service, is asking its members to write letters to Capitol Hill saying they are “very concerned” about legislative efforts requiring IRS and Treasury employees to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges.
“I am a federal employee and one of your constituents,” one letter begins, Forbes blogger Avik Roy reported on Friday. “I am very concerned about legislation that has been introduced by Congressman Dave Camp to push federal employees out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) and into the insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).”
Camp, the Michigan Republican referred to in the letter, is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, whose members oversee tax legislation in the House of Representatives. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that Obamacare’s insurance subsidies are technically tax credits, falling under the authority of the IRS.
Camp introduced legislation in April to put all federal employees on the healthcare exchanges in response to news reports that members of Congress and their staffs were seeking to be exempt from the Obamacare requirement that they enroll in the exchanges. Read more from this story HERE.
Krauthammer: Effort to defund Obamacare ‘really dumb’
By Jeff Poor. On Friday’s “Special Report,” Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer went against the conventional wisdom of some in the conservative movement by arguing efforts to defund President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care legislation at the expense of shutting down the federal government was “really dumb.”
“Never issue a threat you’re not prepared to in the end honor and deliver on,” Krauthammer said. “And if the Republicans imagine they’re going to either stop the funding of the government or refuse the raising of the debt ceiling, they’re out of their minds. It would be a catastrophe in the end. All the president has to do is wait and they’re going to cave. This happened on January 1 of this year. It happened with the debt ceiling. We know the end game. Why would you threaten something and demand in return something you know the president will never do? It’s his signature legislation. It would be repudiation of his entire first term. The only alternative is to go over a cliff. It is really dumb.” Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-27 04:11:552016-04-11 11:18:16IRS Workers Want Out of Obamacare (+video)
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is ripping libertarians — including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — for challenging government surveillance programs and failing to understand the dangers of terrorism.
“This strain of libertarianism that’s going through parties right now and making big headlines I think is a very dangerous thought,” the New Jersey GOP governor said on Thursday at a Republican governors forum in Aspen, Colo. “You can name any number of people and (Paul is) one of them.”
Christie, a potential 2016 candidate who appeared on the panel with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, said lawmakers who are questioning government surveillance programs should hear from the families affected by the Sept. 11 attacks.
“These esoteric, intellectual debates — I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have,” Christie said.
