Last week’s news provided more lessons on the use of the public record, and why the existence of the public record is a threat to those who do wrong.
A person’s lawsuits are public record and a good way to get a handle on a person’s background and character.
Over the years, I have found victims or their survivors have filed more than a thousand lawsuits against abortion providers for being hamfisted bunglers or worse. Statistics don’t lie – the average abortion provider gets sued a lot more often than the average OB-GYN. They are lousier doctors, and they sink to doing abortions because the surgery is not hard and they have healthy clients who are vulnerable. Very few females want to disclose they were fooling around, got pregnant, and underwent an abortion. A girl has to tell her parents about malpractice, which may land her in hot water over the pregnancy and the abortion. Abortionists’ defense lawyers essentially play the slut card against women and girls in court. And yet abortionists harm so many girls and young women that they get sued often.
A few days ago, a group of Chinese businesspeople filed suit against Hillary Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe, the outgoing governor of Virginia, and Hillary Clinton’s kid brother Anthony Rodham for a scheme in which they got more than 30 rich Chinese to invest $500,000 apiece into their company that was supposedly going to make electric cars. In exchange, according to the lawsuit filed in Fairfax County, Virginia, McAuliffe and Rodham told the investors as they traveled through China looking for money, they would use their political connections to get the Chinese EB-5 foreign investor visas to come to America with their families.
The firm, GreenTech, made a few crappy low-powered cars, the Chinese charged, and supposedly is about to go bankrupt. Meanwhile, McAuliffe and Rodham didn’t get the Chinese “investor” visas to come into America.
It is not illegal in China for someone to bribe a foreigner. It is illegal for an American to accept bribes. This is something the Justice Department, once they get rid of their Hillary moles, may be interested in. Terry McAuliffe should be happy he let the felons vote when he was governor of Virginia. He might need that courtesy if this lawsuit against him leads to a criminal conviction.
Public expenditure equals (in almost all cases) public record.
It is illegal for a government body to spend money above a certain amount in secret. It is also illegal for them to disguise the full truth from the public about such spending. This is a point any citizen should remember.
Town officials of Bernards Township in northern New Jersey found this out the hard way a few days ago, when residents sued them for deciding to pay $3.5 million to a Moslem group who wants to put a mosque in one of their neighborhoods.
Town leaders at first turned down the project because the lot was way too small for the size of the proposed mosque facility the Moslems wanted to build. The roads and utilities in the neighborhood may not have been adequate for such a large project either.
A Moslem group sued the township to overturn their zoning laws, and town leaders decided to settle out of court. The Moslem group would get the mosque permit in variance of local zoning laws and they would also get $3.5 million of the taxpayers’ money.
Perhaps town officials reached this one-sided settlement because the Obama Justice Department also sued the township in federal court.
According to a report on the matter, the settlement officials reached with the Moslems forbade the mention of Islam or Moslems at the open meeting in which they were supposed to discuss the pros and cons of giving the money and the mosque variance to the Moslems. Why? According to the reporter, a key tenet of Islam’s Sharia law outlaws any negative comments about Islam or Moslems.
But Sharia law isn’t American law. Yet.
The deal the town officials cut with the Moslem group wasn’t kosher under New Jersey law. The town officials had to hold a meeting to discuss the proposed settlement openly, and permit the open discussion of the matter and the presentation of evidence openly before voting on whether to approve the expenditure of so much money.
Township officials did not inform the public about the settlement. They did not allow public comment before voting to pay the Moslems and grant the Moslems an exemption from the zoning laws they impose upon everyone else.
Residents sued the township. They received legal services from the Thomas More Center, a Catholic legal services group in Michigan. A Thomas More Center leader explained, “The settlement agreement prohibits (residents) from describing the many unique features of Islamic worship which will impact design of the building, traffic density, water and sewage, traffic control problems, road construction, and parking arrangements. According to the settlement agreement, (the Moslem group) is permitted to make statements concerning Christians and Jews and their places of worship, but in contrast, the agreement prohibits commentary relating to Islam or Muslims. In fact, (the Moslem group) has previously discussed the Christian and Jewish religions and their places of worship.”
The speaker charitably omitted references to jihadists.
The residents argued the Obama interference was wrongful because the illegal meeting arrangement and the town’s illegal spending of money violated state laws, not federal laws. The Trump administration did not try to defend Obama’s people’s illegal meddling. A federal judge agreed with the residents. So the issue goes back to the state court system, where a Somerset County judge will hear the case.
“The township has been trying to paper over the fact that it held a sham hearing in violation of New Jersey law. Now the New Jersey courts will have the opportunity to address and remedy the township’s violations of state law,” said Richard Thomas, the leader of the Thomas More Center.
Construction inspection records are also public records.
It turns out construction inspection records in California indicate there are cracks in the Oroville Dam, which construction people repaired …… earlier this year!
In a letter made public a few days ago, Federal Energy Regulation Commission officials asked California state water officials what they intended to do about the cracks in the newly-repaired portions of the dam. The Oroville Dam is a hydroelectricity producer.
Northern California got record rain and snow last winter – the most in 100 years. Runoff water into the watershed replenished Lake Oroville, the huge reservoir behind Oroville Dam, by February, long before the end of the snow season and the spring thaw in the High Sierras. This should have been good news for the state, which has been in a drought almost since Jerry Brown’s second eight years in office began in 2011. Problem is the dam has had problems that were known when Governor Moonbeam began his first eight years as California governor back in 1975. No governor did anything about it, however. Nor would he or any of his successors order construction of a concrete emergency spillway in case of a threat to the dam’s main spillway in the middle of the dam.
The dam, when working properly, can hold in Lake Oroville more water than any other reservoir in the state except Lake Shasta. It can hold drinking water for millions of people and for thousands of square miles of irrigated farms. However, the main spillway of the dam suffered massive damage and threatened to gave way in February. This forced state officials to order the evacuation of almost 200,000 people. Dam workers also had to use the earthen emergency spillway to release and throw away much of the water the huge dam and lake had captured for the relief of thirsty California residents, livestock, and field crops so the entire dam wouldn’t break.
In short, they let fast-flowing water down a dirt hillside, not a concrete emergency spillway that would have stopped soil erosion. Predictably, the release of water on dirt eroded the hillside and threatened to undercut the dam. The muddy water also partially destroyed a state fish hatchery downstream. The state’s salmon population, already diminished somewhat due to illicit stream rerouting by the state’s “independent” marijuana growers, will drop further. The Three Stooges would have called the California leaders knuckleheads and imbeciles.
Over the past few months, construction workers rebuilt the concrete main spillway and made other repairs to the dam and the damsite. The bill so far is north of $600 million. But the repairs may not be good enough. Cracks have formed in the newly-poured concrete, which some say could lead to its early failure. Hence, the concern of the feds.
California water officials say they expected the cracks. But they didn’t appear to release any evidence to support their argument the dam is safe. UC Berkeley construction engineering expert Robert Bea said otherwise. In an e-mail, he noted concrete cracks will let in water to rust out the steel rebar structure of the spillway. If the rebar weakens enough, he wrote, then the structure could fail, much like the original spillway failed.
Yet it appears there will still be a soaking – of the taxpayers who will have to pay for further repairs and cost overruns.
Now, out of California comes another pointer that might keep some people out of trouble.
If you are a convicted felon, you can’t possess a firearm.
Illegal alien Jose Garcia Zarate aka Juan Lopez Sanchez , a seven-time felon for multiple drug offenses and for entering the US multiple times as an illegal alien, shot Kate Steinle in San Francisco in 2015. The pistol he used someone had stolen from a car a US Bureau of Land Management goof was using. The fed failed to secure the weapon, it ended up in the hands of a criminal illegal, and the illegal killed an innocent victim.
Zarate was in San Francisco wandering freely because the town is a sanctuary city with a law against the police co-operating with federal immigration officials, and because the county sheriff of San Francisco County when Zarate decided to stay there is a goof who puts a local law that is illegal above a federal immigration law that is legal. In this regard, the now-former sheriff is much like Southern sheriffs in the 1960s who obeyed illegal laws in their states to victimize blacks.
Zarate knew this and chose to stay in the City by the Bay. He picked shrewdly. Jurors chosen from a jury pool including large numbers of deviates, stoners, released mental patients, and other San Francisco wildlife a few days ago acquitted Zarate of all charges related to the death of Miss Steinle. They did convict him of having a firearm while being a felon.
This is a federal law as well as a state law. Feds are looking at whether to charge Zarate and put him in a federal pen based on the felon firearms possession count, and whether to charge Zarate for felony re-entry of the US or violating the terms of his previous release from federal custody.
When I was a reporter in the 1980s, I covered the case of a mountaineer who was charged with beating his girlfriend with a shotgun, then using it to vent her Ma and Pa’s home, where all four of them lived. He served as his own attorney and got a jury to convict him on lesser charges, which drew him a sentence of a few months in a Virginia county jail.
This guy had a little history. He was a person of interest in the beheading of a young Virginia woman. He was convicted of shooting a guy to death in Kentucky. He didn’t find the state pen to his liking, so he escaped and celebrated his freedom by stabbing a man to death in an Ohio tavern. He drew a 7-25 year sentence for voluntary manslaughter in Ohio. The murderer appealed his Kentucky sentence, and a judge threw out his conviction on a technicality. He pled guilty to the lesser charge of hindering prosecution (he hindered prosecution of an assault charge by shooting the guy he assaulted) and received some time, which they allowed him to serve concurrently (at the same time) with his Ohio prison sentence. He got out of prison, returned to the Cumberland Gap area of Virginia, and settled down, sort of. At least his latest girlfriend didn’t lose her head – literally.
Federal judge Glen Morgan Williams, who held court in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, found it interesting that the murderer had access to a shotgun. So when a federal prosecutor, a hulking mountain man, won a conviction of the guy for possession of a firearm while a felon, Judge Williams hit him with a 46-year sentence.
When I asked the judge what was his reasoning for the sentence, he replied given the man’s previous behavior, feds might well parole him after serving 15 years. “Then he’ll be in his mid 50s and will maybe have slowed down a bit,” Judge Williams said in so many words.
A federal hit will cost Zarate more years than the state could hit him. Zarate was eligible for release in California because he had waited two years for his trial in jail, and the maximum sentence for a felon possessing firearms in California is only three years. The feds are in the process of revising Zarate’s plans for the next few years.
The Zarate case has construction implications even bigger than the Oroville dam. Zarate’s escape from a murder conviction while in a sanctuary city whose officials protected vermin like him guarantees President Trump will not back away from building a border wall, and he will have a lot more help in Congress than before.
And, if you use the public record to determine which states and cities are friendly to illegals so you can avoid them on all vacations till they change their ways, you could do so. This could cost such places hundreds of millions of dollars. After all, how fun is a vacation that winds up with you or someone you love being shot, stabbed, raped, or robbed by a bandito or a jihadist?
Center for Immigration Studies, a group whose people advocate enforcement of immigration laws, has done such research. If you search on line for their report “Sanctuary Cities, Counties, and States,” you will see they have determined California, Oregon, New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Rhode Island, and Vermont are by proclamation or action sanctuary states, and New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are in that neighborhood. Plan your trips accordingly. Spend your money in places where the local politicians treat Americans better than illegals.
Now for some civics lessons.
General Michael Flynn on Friday pled guilty to lying to the FBI. He did not break any laws in talking to members of any foreign government as a transition team member if directed to do so. Flynn may not have disclosed he was working as an agent of the Islamist regime of Turkey. If Flynn had worked illegally on anyone’s behalf in contacting Russian officials before Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, he would have had to plead guilty of being part of a conspiracy in connection with cutting a plea deal. This he did not do.
Understand lying to the FBI is a no-no.
What about when the FBI lies to the public? Or when they lie to FISA judges so they can illegally wiretap the winner of a presidential election who they oppose?
Let’s pick the low-hanging fruit first. Las Vegas. The victims are still dead, and the FBI is still silent, hoping we’ll go away. They are essentially lying by putting out the single shooter claim. How much evidence are they suppressing? Who else was involved? Was it an FBI sting gone wrong? Did the FBI try to provoke a conspiracy to shoot up a bunch of innocent people, then negligently fail to stop it, like what they did with the Oklahoma City bombers? Or worse? From the FBI, nothing but the sounds of silence.
Now for the weekend report.
Meet Peter Strzok. He was the FBI’s “Deputy Head of Counterintelligence.”
But his other head got in the way. Strzok was in the briefs of FBI lawyer Lisa Page. Literally. They were cheating with each other on their respective spouses.
They weren’t that discreet either. When Peter wasn’t Strzoking Lisa, the adulterous couple would send each other text messages about their love for Hillary and their hatred for Mr. Trump. Lisa, by the way, worked for FBI Number Two Andrew McCabe. McCabe’s wife, a Democrat candidate for a state senate race in Virginia, got hundreds of thousands of campaign contribution dollars thru Friend of Hillary Terry McAuliffe (see above). And McCabe didn’t declare his wife’s income or the campaign money on his own financial disclosure statement, which is a public record.
Peter Strzok is almost the perfect name for a lecher.
Adultery, even with a capital A, is a sin but not a crime.
However, discrimination in favor of a criminal or against a target is at the very least a disciplinable offense, and at worst it can lead to a conviction for corruption or dereliction of duty on the one hand, and deprivation of civil rights or abuse of authority on the other hand.
It came out over the weekend that Strzok was in on the “interview” of Hillary, in which FBI agents didn’t put her under oath, didn’t provide a transcript, and didn’t record her answers to their questions. Obviously, with no recording and no transcript, the FBI committed criminal negligence in giving Hillary an out to deny she lied if they ever try to claim she did. It also came out he told Comey Hillary was negligent but not criminal.
The actions of Strzok and the other FBI Barneys meshes predictably with then-FBI chief James Comey deciding to clear Hillary in 2016 before his agents even talked with her.
It also came out over the weekend that Strzok was the FBI honcho in charge of the “Russia tampering” investigation, which featured the discredited Christopher Steele dossier.
Russian agents, promised cash by Steele, told a number of salacious lies about Donald Trump’s behavior on a business trip to the Motherland. Steele wrote the lies down, paid the Russkies, and sold them at markup to Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm Hillary’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for by laundering millions of dollars thru the Perkins Coei law firm.
The Steele dossier was so laughably false that Hillary and the Democrats didn’t dare own it openly. Hillary’s people and/or DNC people approached the FBI with the Steele dossier. Obama’s FBI officials, and probably people in the CIA (then led by Obama appointee and CIA apparatchik John Brennan, who voted for a Communist while a member of the CIA) and/or the National Security Agency (then led by long-time federal payroller and Obama appointee James Clapper), used the defamatory dossier to get Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants illegally to wiretap an eavesdrop on Trump through his associates.
FBI officials admitted having a monetary deal with Christopher Steele, but claim they later backed off. Unless FBI officials cooked their expenditures records, a Freedom of Information Act request may well show how much money Comey and his homeys like Strzok paid Christopher Steele.
Under congressional pressure, Fusion’s attorneys at Perkins Coei, smelling possible punishment, spilled the beans. They finally told the truth and revealed Hillary’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid Fusion for the Steele rotten dossier. Financial records the lawyers released showed the law firm also paid several journalists for unspecified reasons.
Fingers are now pointing at Strzok for possible involvement with this obviously illegally gotten FISA warrant.
None of Strzok’s incompetent or corrupt acts he committed on the job got him reassigned.
The existence of the commo between Strzok and Ms. Page got him transferred. Mueller had Strzok reassigned in the summer of 2017, and Ms. Page left the investigation for reasons unstated two weeks earlier. Mueller, who has a team of more than a dozen prosecutors, half of them large Hillary donors, on the case, allegedly didn’t want to show bias. The FBI and Mueller did not comment on why Strzok got reassigned, or why Mueller hired all the Hillaryites.
Did the FBI put Strzok on garbage detail because he got caught by the FBI’s inspector general’s people?
FBI inspector general investigators charged with checking on the FBI’s poor excuse for their Hillary probe found out about the evidence of, errr, multiple exchanges of DNA between Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page. The IG investigators also found out about the exchanges of anti-Trump and pro-Hillary messages between the lustbirds.
Any agency’s Inspector General reports are public record. It is possible Mueller had Strzok put on personnel file duties and got Ms. Page to go elsewhere because of the fact the IG’s knowledge of the situation would eventually become public knowledge. The FBI’s IG report on the investigation into the Mueller team is due out in a few weeks. Again, the public record law’s existence forced some of the truth to come out that otherwise would have been hidden.
President Trump’s many enemies call him a cartoon figure. Trump is actually the ultimate reality star, playing for a real prize – the return of America to greatness. Trump is half Daddy Warbucks and half Eliot Ness. Like Toto, he pulls the curtain back routinely. Like George Burns with his spying TV set, Trump uses all kinds of sources to check out the scheming of others.
Every day brings new civics lessons in government corruption, government obstruction, and the fact that the public record laws exist to protect us from those who hold public offices and government jobs. Buckle up for the ride.
SHERLOCK JUSTICE
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
END NOTES
On McAuliffe:
Breitbart, 11/30/2017
Daily Caller, 11/28/2017
On Moslems and New Jersey:
World Net Daily, 12/1/2017
On California’s Oroville dam:
AP, 11/29/2017
Daily Mail, 12/1/2017
Wikipedia (for some facts about the dam)
On the illegal killer:
Fox News, 12/1/2017, 12/3/2017
Washington Post, 12/1/2017
Breitbart, 11/30/2017
On Strzok (and Comey and McCabe):
AP, 12/3/2017
Washington Post, 12/2/2017
New York Times, 4/22/2017
Fox News, 12/4/2017, 3/15/2017
Daily Mail, 7/8/2016
On the other aspects of the Clinton and Russia investigations:
New York Post, 6/22/2015 CC, 10/25/2017, 10/26/2017
Fox News, 10/26/2017
Washington Post, 10/24/2017
Mollie Hemingway, 10/25/2017
PJ Media, 10/26/2017
CNN, 4/18/2017, 9/19/2017
New York Times, 10/25/2017
Vanity Fair, 9/27/2017
Mother Jones, 10/31/2016
National Review, 10/20/2017
