Photo Credit: Daily CallerOn Neil Cavuto’s “Your World” program on the Fox News Channel Tuesday, syndicated radio talker Mark Levin took on President Barack Obama, the Republican leadership in the U.S. House and New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie for the handling of the various scandals surrounding the White House.
In a nearly 10-minute interview, Levin took on the terrorist attack in Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups, and the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program.
“I will tell you this — this president could give a damn about a serious investigation about scandals that are swirling around his administration,” Levin said. “And then his lackeys go on TV, including ‘Fox News Sunday’ and tell us there’s no evidence. Their people plead the fifth. Their attorney general doesn’t conduct investigations. And what’s necessary is for the Republicans in the House to get their act together. We don’t need five committees investigating Benghazi. We need one special investigative committee with former assistant U.S. attorneys, other types of prosecutors, who are serious people, who have the resources necessary, full-time, to pursue these matters and put the information on the table. Same with the Internal Revenue [Service] investigation.”
By Chelsea J. Carter, Ashley Fantz and Larry Shaughnessy. A military judge acquitted Army Pfc. Bradley Manning on Tuesday of aiding the enemy, but convicted him of violations of the Espionage Act for turning over a trove of classified data to the website WikiLeaks, in a case where the soldier has been portrayed variously as a traitor and as a whistle-blower.
The verdict by the judge, Col. Denise Lind, dismissed the prosecution’s argument that Manning released documents — in the largest leak of classified information in U.S. history — that he knew would end up in the hands of al Qaeda. The verdict also found Manning not guilty of unauthorized possession of information relating to national defense.
If he had been found guilty of aiding the enemy, he would have faced life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Manning still faces the prospect of years, if not decades, behind bars. He was found guilty on 20 counts. The sentencing phase of the court-martial begins Wednesday, and Manning faces up to a maximum 136 years in prison.
Among the charges, Manning was found guilty of the theft of more than 700 U.S. Southern Command records, the possession of records pertaining to Afghanistan; the theft of State Department cables and the possession of classified Army documents.
Bradley Manning verdict: cleared of ‘aiding the enemy’ but guilty of other charges
By Ed Pilkington. Bradley Manning, the source of the massive WikiLeaks trove of secret disclosures, faces a possible maximum sentence of 136 years in military jail after he was convicted on Tuesday of most charges on which he stood trial.
Colonel Denise Lind, the military judge presiding over the court martial of the US soldier, delivered her verdict in curt and pointed language. “Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty,” she repeated over and over, as the reality of a prolonged prison sentence for Manning – on top of the three years he has already spent in detention – dawned.
The one ray of light in an otherwise bleak outcome for Manning was that he was found not guilty of the single most serious charge against him – that he knowingly “aided the enemy”, in practice al-Qaida, by disclosing information to the WikiLeaks website that in turn made it accessible to all users including enemy groups.
Lind’s decision to avoid setting a precedent by applying the swingeing “aiding the enemy” charge to an official leaker will invoke a sigh of relief from news organisations and civil liberties groups who had feared a guilty verdict would send a chill across public interest journalism.
The judge also found Manning not guilty of having leaked an encrypted copy of a video of a US air strike in the Farah province of Aghanistan in which many civilians died. Manning’s defence team had argued vociferously that he was not the source of this video, though the soldier did admit to the later disclosure of an unencrypted version of the video and related documents. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-31 04:18:102016-04-11 11:18:04Bradley Manning Acquitted of Aiding the Enemy but Guilty of Espionage Violations (+video)
Photo Credit: FBI.govThe FBI rescued 105 teenagers over the weekend who were forced into prostitution in the largest child sex trafficking sting in U.S. history, which encompassed 76 cities, the agency said Monday.
The youngest child rescued was 13 years old, the FBI said.
The raids resulted in the arrests of 150 ‘pimps’ involved in the sexual exploitation of both adults and children, said Ronald Hosko, assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division.
The FBI said 60 percent of the children rescued were in foster care or group homes when they ran away.
‘With no way to survive on their own they are lured into a life of being trafficked for sex,’ Hosko said.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-30 03:33:222016-04-11 11:18:05105 Children Lured into Prostitution are Rescued by FBI in Biggest Ever Bust of its Type in U.S. History – 150 Pimps in 76 Cities Who ‘Tortured’ Girls as Young as 13 are Arrested (+video)
Photo Credit: Fox NewsWherever Anthony Weiner goes on the streets of New York these days, he’s surrounded by reporters, microphones and cameras – a crush that would ordinarily signal intense interest in a surging campaign. For the beleaguered Weiner, it portends his likely demise.
But he presses on, despite the loss of his campaign manager, blunt face-to-face criticism from tough New Yorkers, and a new Quinnipiac University poll showing him in fourth place. “I’m taking a bet basically that people are more interested in hearing solutions to their problems than hearing about things in my background,” he told one reporter Monday. “And we’ll see if that’s the case.”
Even his wife, in her loyalty to her husband, is now being criticized for risking the presidential hopes of her mentor, Hillary Clinton.
In a “Today” appearance Monday morning, NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell said, “This is getting to the point where it is really splashing up against the Clintons because it’s almost unavoidable that people are making comparisons.”
In a broader sense, the Weiner sex scandal, coupled with those of San Diego mayor Bob Filner and NY comptroller candidate, Eliot Spitzer, now compose a trio of targets for Democratic party elders. Last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, “The conduct of some of these people that we’re talking about here is reprehensible, is so disrespectful of women.”
Photo Credit: APLiberal activist and scholar Dr. Cornel West last week called President Barack Obama “the drone president” for his administration’s controversial use of drone strikes.
“Bush was the capture-and-torture president. Now we’ve got the targeted killing president, the drone president. That’s not progress. That’s not part of the legacy of Martin King,” West said in a July 22 interview on “Democracy Now!”
West said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would not be invited to the 50th anniversary of the slain civil rights leader’s “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, because he would want to talk about drones.
“And you know what the irony is, Sister Amy? Brother Martin would not be invited to the very march in his name, because he would talk about drones,” West said.
“Do you think anybody at that march will talk about drones and the drone president? Will you think anybody at that march will talk about the connection to Wall Street? They are all on the plantation,” West added.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-30 03:29:372016-04-11 11:18:06Cornel West Calls Obama The Drone President (+video)
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)
