Category: crime and punishment

Lying to Liars

Peter Strzok,Licensed to Lie, CIA, deep state,

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its awards, the presenters say, “And the Oscar goes to . . .”

We should hand out an award for lying in government — and name it after President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. On March 12, 2013, Clapper lied to Congress about NSA collection of data on U.S. citizens.

Clapper roams free, while Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn ran afoul of lying to the FBI, in his bizarre case. Flynn seemed merely to misremember, yet being caught in a flub was enough to leverage a plea deal.

Now The Epoch Times adds a wrinkle to the story. “The prosecutors handling the case of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said they mixed up notes from the FBI interview that served as a basis for making Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI,” we read in the November 7-13 paper edition. The jumbled notes in question were those of the infamous Peter Strzok and his assistant.

“It’s now impossible to take [the DOJ’s and FBI’s] word for anything,” says Sidney Powell, Flynn’s lawyer.

A former prosecutor herself, Ms. Powell has written a relevant book, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.

In her motion for Flynn, she argues that a formal FBI summary of the Flynn interview contains information not in the notes, yet it formed the basis for the prosecution.*

On November 5, prosecutors apologized for their error, which they admit “caused some confusion.”

In a just world, their flub would be called a lie and they’d face major consequences.

As it is, the Clapper goes to them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* It gets worse, if murkier, with apparent editing of the notes to implicate Flynn and the allegation that Clapper himself directed a reporter to “take the kill shot.”

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crime and punishment property rights U.S. Constitution

Injustice Blocked

asset forfeiture, theft, police, corruption,

Civil asset forfeiture is one of those government practices that good people, when informed of it, often express, at first, incredulity. How can something like that exist in these United States?!?

Good question.

One reason seems to be that very incredulity. Normal Americans trust their government not to be evil. When shown that it regularly engages in actual highway robbery, then denial — ‘this cannot be happening.’

But it is.

Another reason it exists? It is so profitable.

For those in government, anyway. They get to fill their department coffers without having to ask for tax hikes. They — and by ‘they’ I mean ‘the police’ and government attorneys at state and local levels — just take the wealth.

Indeed, police routinely “keep whatever they can grab off anybody they arrest, claiming it’s all proceeds or property connected to criminal activities,” writes Scott Shackford at Reason, “and using it to line their own pockets. This incentivizes police to look for people who have assets that can be seized.”

In South Carolina, Shackford reports, police agencies “across the state had seized more than $17 million in assets across three years. In one-fifth of the cases, nobody was charged or even arrested for a crime.”

Fortunately, there is good news. “Circuit Judge Steven H. John has ruled that the South Carolina’s civil asset forfeiture regulations violate the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights of the citizens.”

Unfortunately, the fight against this evil practice is far from over.

But maybe the judge’s ruling will inspire citizens to petition their government and place politicians’ greed into check.

And might not this judge inspire other judges around the country?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment Popular

Less Hate

Post author By Redactor
Post date July 11, 2019
1 Comment on Less Hate

hate crime, Seattle, statistics, propaganda,

Just how awful are Americans? Racist and sexist “hate crimes” are all said to have ramped up since the election of Donald Trump.

Wilfred Reilly took a close look, in Quillette, at the hate crime cases in Seattle, which had been reported as having increased “by 400 percent since 2012.” What he discovered throws cold water on the heated assertions. It turns out that “most of the situations contained in the 500-plus documented incidents for 2018 turned out not to be hate crimes at all.”

As you might expect, defining “hate crime” isn’t easy, and Seattle has “remarkably broad municipal hate-crime policies” which go far beyond “attacks motivated by racial or sexual animus.” Crimes relating to issues such as “marital status, political ideology, age and parental status” also count.

But for there to be a “hate crime” there must first be a crime. Looking for the “archetypal Seattle hate incident” in the data, what Wilfred Reilly found was “a mentally ill homeless man yelling slurs at someone.” What this really suggests is that Seattle has a homelessness problem.

Which it does.

Behind the panic? We see mis-reporting, based on a need for generating clicks, as well as mis-perceptions, often based on availability bias — where we judge trends by a few ready-at-hand examples, not with careful attention to full data sets.

The Quillette article does not discuss a more ominous possibility, where some folks yearn for the worst, the better to hate their political opponents. Though Reilly addresses this sort of hate-generated “hate crime” panic in his book, Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War, published earlier this year.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob

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crime and punishment

Pedo Plane Perv

jeffrey epstein, pedophile, sealed, box, case, tape, government, cover up,

If you are like me, you react to news about billionaire and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein by trying to retain some composure. His recent arrest on sex trafficking charges was a long time coming, sure; and the accusations swirling around him are disgusting and alarming. But I try to remember that accusations still need to be proved.

Further, most of us are so understandably exercised against pedophiles and the sex slave trade of minors that we can easily be manipulated by mere accusations.

But the Epstein case sure looks the opposite, like he had been previously protected, not framed, by government insiders.

How so? Well, his previous plea deal regarding the “Lolita Express” “rape plane,” when compared to the swirl of accusations, seems awfully . . . light. And the evidence was illegally sealed.

Suspicious? Yes.

Which is why guerrilla publicity maven Mike Cernovich filed suit to unseal and make public the evidence in Epstein’s 2007 prosecution.

And that lawsuit is why the ground-to-a-halt gears of government justice eventually became unstuck, and new charges filed — based on old evidence.

This could be a hot potato in the upcoming election, for both President Trump and former President Clinton had relationships with Epstein.

Clinton denies what recent reports confirm: that he was a frequent flyer on the “Lolita Express.”

Trump once said Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do” — but later had a falling out with him.

Newsweek chose to adorn its story with a photo of Epstein and companion next to Donald and Melania. And on Wikipedia, Bill Clinton’s flight log information was stricken, and a typically loopy Trumpian statement inserted.

Secret upper echelon pedo rings have so far just been rumor. Soon we may have facts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment

Guilty. Guilty! Guilty?

“No responsible prosecutor,” Alan Dershowitz writes in The Hill, “should ever suggest that the subject of his investigation might indeed be guilty even if there was insufficient evidence or other reasons not to indict.”

Don’t I know it.

The world-famous lawyer takes issue with the “statement by special counsel Robert Mueller in a Wednesday press conference that ‘if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.’”* Dershowitz makes a good case that the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ principle requires the government not merely to refrain from imposing punishment before obtaining a lawful conviction, but also to hold back from punishing people by making loud public claims about their supposed guilt.

Which brings to mind my own experience at U.S. Term Limits. In 1994, we ran radio ads and sent mail to citizens in two Oklahoma congressional districts and one in Kentucky. We did not urge a vote for or against anyone, but merely provided information on where the candidates stood.

Yet, prompted by a complaint from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which prefers ignorant to knowledgeable voters, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigated.

As if to foreshadow current prosecutorial proclivities, the FEC abandoned its witch hunt after two long years. Relieved the agency’s harassment was finally over, I remember opening an Oklahoma newspaper and discovering a story headlined, “Term Limits Group Violated Law in State, U.S. Agency Charges.”

This problem goes well beyond Mr. Mueller and President Trump. Government agencies that cannot prosecute, should not persecute.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Dershowitz calls Mueller’s comments “worse than the statement made by then-FBI Director James Comey regarding Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

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crime and punishment

Prisoners All

drug war, prison, jail, prohibition, ban, freedom,

The logic for drug prohibition is direct: to keep people from hurting themselves with recreational drugs, we must prevent them from accessing those drugs.

Voilà!

There are a number of things wrong with that, though, and one is this: governments cannot even keep illegal drugs out of prisons.

In California, nearly 1,000 men and women overdosed last year in “an alarming spike in opioid use by those behind bars,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

Steven Greenhut, writing in Reason, notes that confinement centers are “among the most tightly controlled environments on Earth, yet correction officials can’t figure out how to deal with dramatic spikes in the number of inmates who are dying from drug overdoses and alcohol poisoning.”

Doesn’t this make the prohibitionist “solution” absurd?

“If they can’t keep heroin off of death row,” Greenhut concludes, “then maybe they should rethink their ability to control the rest of us.”

There is a problem, here, though — it is easier to control “the rest of us.”

As with gun control laws, it is the law-abiding folks who fall in line. It is the edgier, less civic-minded people who tend to rebel.

But the two issues remain distinct: generally lawful and level-headed citizens still need to defend themselves from criminals, but do not feel a need to take drugs that can be deadly even in innocent hands. Thus the War on Drugs seems a bit less obviously tragic than gun control.

Which is why conceiving of the War on Drugs as unworkable prison policy writ large remains important.

Why would we want to make our society more like drug-ridden prisons?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.