Tag Archives: FBI

crime news, national news

FBI is now the enemy?

Never did I imagine — not one time in all my years on this good Earth — that we would see the Federal Bureau of Investigation become the target of hate among Americans.

What’s more, the FBI has become the target of a political demographic with a long and eloquent history supporting the agency’s effort to fight organized and other sorts of crime.

We now hear — and this is weird beyond belief — that we need to “de-fund the FBI.” Who’s making that absurd demand? Right-wingers who were so quick to chastise lefties for calling for de-funding the police in the wake of a string of police-involved shootings of Black men and women.

What in the world is happening to us?

The FBI now is a right-wing target because agents obtained a search warrant that enabled them to search the home of a former president of the United States because they had “probable cause” to believe the ex-POTUS had taken highly sensitive material with him from the White House to his home in South Florida.

Earth to right-wingers: That is against the law!

Don’t right wingers believe in the rule of law? That no one is above the law? Didn’t the attorney general, Merrick Garland, pledge to pursue anyone who has broken the law “without fear or favor”?

I must re-state what is obvious to me.

AG Garland followed the letter of the law in seeking a warrant from a federal judicial magistrate.  Federal law does not set a terribly high bar; it asks only that prosecutors can prove “probable cause” that a crime has been committed. The feds made the case to the judge, who then issued the warrant.

Moreover, Donald Trump’s legal team met the agents as they commenced their search. There was no “surprise,” no “siege” at Mar-a-Lago. It was done by the book.

For that the right-wingers want to “de-fund the FBI”?

I have said before that politics at times gets turned upside down and, for good measure, inside out. This is one of those times.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news, legal news

Garland’s stock keeps rising

Merrick Garland’s stock keeps appreciating, in my humble view, as he weathers the storm of criticism being heaped on him by the far-right wing of the political horde that awaits some finality in what the U.S. attorney general determines regarding Donald J. Trump.

We have at least one nutjob member of Congress filing impeachment papers against Garland. Why? Because he ordered the search of Trump’s Florida home for classified papers the ex-president squirreled away … illegally!

Right-wing media hounds keep referring to the search as a “raid,” implying that the FBI agents pounced on the former president’s home, behind his back. Good grief! Garland performed this act by the book. It was legal and totally constitutional.

He is defending the agents and others within the Justice Department who have come under fire by the right-wingers who — were they investigating a Democratic former president — would be the darlings of the conservative media.

And I was struck by a particular phrase he used in defending the agents and other DOJ staffers. He declared his pride in “working alongside them.” Think of that for just a moment. There was no self-aggrandizement in that statement, no sense of “they work for me, therefore I am better than they are.” No. He stands shoulder to shoulder with the men and women he calls “patriotic public servants.”

Garland is a stellar public servant himself. I am glad he’s on the job. I also am grateful that President Biden persuaded this top-notch legal mind to stand firm in the face of criticism he had to know was coming his way.

Stand tall, Merrick Garland … and stay strong. The nation needs you.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news, national news, national security

Hard to grasp consequence of probe

I hereby acknowledge the difficulty I am having in trying to wrap my noodle around the events of this week involving Donald J. Trump and the search that revealed what the world has learned he had squirreled away at his luxurious South Florida digs.

A major part of me wants the Justice Department to proceed with all deliberate speed in determining whether the ex-president committed crimes in taking highly sensitive documents out of the White House. My ol’ trick knee, which I acknowledge has been unreliable at times, is telling me that Attorney General Merrick Garland has the goods on The Donald.

His public statement, brief as it was, this week explaining what he approved and then his stout defense of the FBI and DOJ suggested to me that Garland is riled up.

I will offer an admittedly half-hearted salute to Trump for agreeing to allow the search warrant to be unsealed. He is going to play the victim card and his base is going to scarf it up. The rest of us should be prepared for what might be coming … and possibly sooner than we anticipate.

That would be a criminal indictment against a former president of the U.S.A. The charge? I don’t know. Violation of the Espionage Act is one possibility. So is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

What perhaps is the most glaring mystery to me is trying to determine what in the world Trump expected to do with what the FBI agents recovered. It’s been reported widely that Trump doesn’t read documents. He was infamously impatient with daily national security briefings and never looked — or so we have been told — at the reams of papers his national security staff delivered to him each day.

And did those documents fetched from Mar-a-Lago contain nuclear secrets? If so, then … holy crap!

We know already that some of the documents were of the highest security levels imaginable. And a president cannot just de-classify them because he gives the word.

I maintain my implicit faith in the attorney general’s integrity. What remains to be determined is whether he has the courage to withstand what will be a torrent of rage if he delivers on what I now believe he must … which is a criminal indictment against a former president of the United States.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news, national security

It wasn’t a ‘raid’

One man’s “raid” is another man’s “search,” which of course depends on which side of the great divide you stand.

As I listen to the commentary after the FBI search of Donald Trump’s South Florida digs earlier this week, I am left to presume that the right-wing media have bought wholly and fully into The Donald’s description of the event as a “raid.”

It was nothing of the sort.

The Justice Department sought a search warrant from a federal judge. DOJ officials cited “probable cause” to believe a crime might have been committed. The judge agreed. The FBI entered the glitzy palace … in the presence of one of Trump’s legal advisers.

They left Mar-a-Lago with about a dozen boxes of documents.

It wasn’t a “raid.” Trump’s home was not “under siege,” as the former POTUS said initially. It was all done legally in accordance with federal law and, oh yeah, the U.S. Constitution.

Therefore, I will not refer to the event as a “raid.”

I now will wait — along with the rest of the nation — to learn what the FBI found. That ol’ trick knee of mine tells me they recovered even more evidence that is going to put Donald John Trump into more trouble.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Trump had nuclear secrets? Wow!

Am I hearing this correctly, that some of the documents seized by the FBI in its search of Donald Trump’s Florida digs contained nuclear secrets?

Did the ex-president take this information out of the White House and store them in boxes in the basement of his estate? Were they U.S. nuclear secrets or information about other nuclear powers? Or both?

What in the name of national security would a former president do with this information?

I cannot even begin to wrap my noodle around this bit of news reported today by the Washington Post.

Attorney General Merrick Garland today acknowledged that he gave permission for the FBI to enter Trump’s home. He has also acknowledged that he intends to release the details of the search warrant by the end of the week.

Oh, brother. We all had better hold on with both hands while this matter plays out. This is going to get real ugly.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

AG shows his anger

Merrick Garland doesn’t strike me as an individual who usually wears his emotions on his shirt pocket.

However, today he demonstrated an angry streak that, frankly, I found reassuring. The attorney general took dead aim at those critics on the far right who have leveled bizarre accusations against the FBI, accusing agents of “planting evidence” at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

President Barack Obama wanted Garland to take a seat on the Supreme Court. He nominated the former D.C. Appeals Court judge to the court in early 2016, only to be stymied by Senate Republicans.

Now he’s the nation’s AG and is investigating whether Donald Trump broke the law in seeking to deny the transfer of power from the Trump administration to the administration led by Joe Biden, the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

U.S. Attorney General Garland confirms FBI investigating Trump (msn.com)

Garland is working against considerable blowback by the right-wingers among us. They are threatening him with congressional persecution. They have accused federal agents of planting evidence at Trump’s glitzy resort.

The AG fired back today, reminding us that the men and women who work for the FBI are patriotic professionals and that he will not tolerate the agency’s enemies leveling the kind of accusations they are leveling at the FBI.

Think of the irony. Republicans long have been associated with the belief that law enforcement is the friend of Americans. Now they are vilifying the FBI. Why? Because they are examining whether the far-right’s guru, Donald J. Trump, has broken the law.

The far-right wingers among us are exhibiting a shameful demonstration of hypocrisy as they denigrate the FBI and threaten the attorney general.

AG Merrick Garland should not have felt compelled to defend the men and women who protect us every single day against those who would do us harm, but he did so today … and he made me proud.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

Oh, the irony of it all

The irony in the partisan reaction to the FBI decision to search Donald Trump’s luxurious pad for documents he wasn’t supposed to take from the White House is just too rich to ignore.

There once was a time when Republicans were seen as belonging to the party of law and order. Yep, the GOP once cheered the cops’ efforts to root out crime. The party once took no prisoners. It said “hang ’em high.”

So, what’s happened in the day or two since the FBI search? Republicans are now accusing the feds of planting evidence. They accuse the FBI and the Justice Department of conspiring to make up a pretext to send the former president to jail in leg irons.

What the hell … ?

The FBI obtained a search warrant using legal means. It persuaded a federal judicial magistrate that it had “probable cause” to believe a crime had been committed. The judge issued the warrant. The G-men and women went to Trump’s glitzy joint and left with about a dozen boxes of documents.

Republicans formerly cheered the feds when they performed these duties. Now they have rallied behind a cult figure and are leveling preposterous allegations against the FBI.

Astonishing, man!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

What-about-ism on full display

1 Comment

The noted right-wing blowhard Glenn Beck has been quoted suggesting that if the FBI felt compelled to search Donald Trump’s home for evidence relating to alleged criminal activity, then it should have done the same thing to Bill Clinton during an impeachment inquiry of the 42nd president.

Sheesh! Well, as usual, the Beckster has gone far afield in trying to attach moral equivalence to what Clinton supposedly did and what might await The Donald.

President Clinton got caught messing around with a young woman who was working in the White House as a temporary employee during a government shutdown. A special prosecutor got wind of it and then summoned Clinton to testify before a federal grand jury. The panel asked Clinton about the affair. He lied about it.

Thus, he broke the law by committing perjury. Therein rested the Republican Party’s pretext to impeach the president. He went to trial. The Senate acquitted Clinton.

What’s happening now is, shall we say, far more egregious.

Donald Trump is under investigation for a series of allegations: seditious conspiracy, violating the Presidential Records Act, dereliction of duty, a violation of his oath of office.

I might throw in treason, but that’s a bit of a stretch. So, I won’t go there.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is conducting a serious probe into whether Trump broke the law. The FBI obtained a warrant to conduct a search of the ex-POTUS’s home. Trump said it is unprecedented. He is right. Then again, so are the crimes for which Trump might be indicted. Right there is all the moral equivalence anyone should need to justify why the FBI did what it did.

As for any notion that another former president’s home should have been searched for evidence … well, there was nothing to seek. It was on the record with his grand jury testimony. Yeah, it was a phony and lame excuse to impeach a president, given what we’ve witnessed so many years later through the conduct of POTUS 45.

As for Glenn Beck’s assertion, I’ll just take it for what it’s worth, which is not a damn thing.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

crime news

Reaction puzzles me

The initial Republican Party reaction to the FBI agents’ search for records within Donald J. Trump’s glitzy south Florida mansion has me a little bit puzzled.

I don’t hear much defense of the ex-POTUS’s conduct coming from the GOP faithful. Who out there is willing to say that it’s all right for a president to squirrel away classified documents taken from the White House? Who is willing to say it’s OK for a president — as it has been reported — to flush documents down the toilet or burn ’em in a fireplace?

No, we’re hearing instead are accusations about “weaponization” of the Justice Department and the FBI. Some GOP lawmakers are suggesting that Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to either resign or be impeached. For what? For following up on his pledge to ensure that “no one is above the law”? When the AG says “no one,” he means, well, no one, not even a former president of the United States.

The hysterical reaction from the hysterical right wing, though, is laughable … except that it ain’t funny.

What does make me chuckle — but only a little bit — is that the right-wingers just aren’t going to say that Donald Trump didn’t do anything wrong.

The man is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.

As for the Justice Department’s search for wrongdoing, it would be foolish to believe that DOJ — at this juncture of the probe — is going to go easy on what appears to be a mountain of evidence that implicates the man who once took an oath to protect the Constitution, but who in reality launched an all-out attack on it.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

FBI isn’t ‘weaponized’

I need to set the record straight in a brief response to one of the criticisms being leveled at the FBI in the wake of its searching Donald Trump’s Florida home for evidence of criminality.

It’s this idiotic notion that the FBI is being “weaponized” to hunt for crimes that allegedly don’t exist. I happen to believe they do exist and that the federal judge who issued the warrant believes so, too.

Now for setting the record straight.

Donald J. Trump appointed Christopher Wray as FBI director in 2017 after he fired former FBI boss James Comey.

Thus, Wray is a “Trump guy” in the strictest sense of the word. However, Wray also is a law enforcement pro. He is a seasoned prosecutor with many years of experience looking for bad guys.

To suggest that Christophe Wray would turn the FBI into a political weapon would be to deny the man’s long and distinguished history as a career prosecutor. It also is to defame his reputation.

FBI Director Wray doesn’t need me to defend him. I just feel the need to remind those critics of the FBI search (I will not call it a “raid”) that the FBI boss is an official dedicated to finding the truth behind a potential criminal act.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com