Author: hearseeno

The Trump Administration’s Census Cover Up

Last month, we challenged the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census — essentially a door-to-door federal inquiry of the citizenship status of every member of every household in the country.

…  The Official Story

Here’s the official story, according to the Trump administration, of how a citizenship question came to be added to the census, in three parts.

First, on December 12, 2017, Arthur Gary, a Trump appointee in the Department of Justice, wrote a letter to the acting head of the Census Bureau, Ron Jarmin, requesting that a question on citizenship be included in the 2020 Decennial Census. The ostensible reason was that such information “is critical to the Department’s enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and its important protections against racial discrimination in voting.”

The Census Bureau is part of the Department of Commerce, which leads to the second step in the story. On March 22, 2018, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross testified before Congress under oath that this December 2017 request was the beginning of the process for considering the inclusion of a question on citizenship in the Decennial Census, stating that “[t]he Department of Justice, as you know, initiated the request.”

…The Real Story

[after several emails back and forth with Wilbur Ross about follow through on placing a citizenship question on the 2020 Census form starting 9 months prior to the DOJ letter, in March 2017]  … On May 2, 2017, Secretary Ross wrote an email to an aide stating that he was “mystified why nothing have [sic] been done in response to my months old request that we include the citizenship question.”

The aide responded with an email that amounts to a smoking gun. He reassured Ross that they “will get that in place” and explained the plan: They would plant a request with the Justice Department: “We need to work with Justice to get them to request that citizenship be added…”

Two months later, Secretary Ross received an email, solving the mystery of whom Steve Bannon sent to talk to Ross about the census. It was none other than the Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has long pushed an anti-immigrant agenda.

On July 14, 2017, Kobach sent an email to Ross “following up on our telephone discussion from a few months ago… we talked about the fact the US census does not currently ask respondents about their citizenship.”

By August 8, Ross was growing impatient and indicated in an email to an aide that he was prepared to call Attorney General Jeff Sessions directly…

The following day, the aide assured Ross that a memo on the citizenship question was coming his way:

A month later, the pressure appeared to have paid off. On September 18, a Justice Department aide wrote to Commerce official Wendy Teramoto stating that “we can do whatever you all need us to do…. The AG is eager to assist.” Ross and Sessions then met.

… All of this took place months before the Justice Department requested that the Census Bureau add a question on citizenship to the 2020 Census — which appears to be nothing more than a cover-up for the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. And Secretary Ross appears to have personally participated in that cover-up when he misled Congress by testifying on March 22, 2018, that “[t]he Department of Justice, as you know, initiated the request.”

[click the link to see the redacted emails mentioned above]

The Trump Administration’s Census Cover Up

The Trump Administration Finds A New Way To Hand Banks Even More Money

The 2017 Republican tax legislation dramatically slashed tax rates on income from such entities, generating a firestorm of criticism that it was a giveaway to real estate moguls like Trump, U.S. Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) and other Republican backers of the legislation who have such entities in their personal portfolios. (The criticism became known as the “Corker Kickback” scandal.)

To reduce some of the cost of the overall tax cut bill — and to mute some of the specific criticism of the pass-through sections — GOP lawmakers included provisions prohibiting certain kinds of businesses from qualifying for the pass-through tax cut. One such business was “financial services,” and its removal countered assertions that the bill could enrich big banks.

However, less than a year after passage of the tax legislation, the Treasury Department, headed by former banker Steve Mnuchin, issued the proposed rule whose fine print asserts that “financial services” actually do not include banking. If that interpretation of the tax bill stands, hundreds of banks operating as S corporations — as well as their owners — could claim the tax cut.

The Trump Administration Finds A New Way To Hand Banks Even More Money

‘Turn the Plane Around’: Government Wrongfully Deports Asylum Seekers

The ACLU and the Trump administration squared off in court on Thursday over Jeff Sessions’ new policy that denies asylum protections to immigrants fleeing domestic violence and gang violence. The hearing focused on whether U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan would issue an emergency order to block the deportation of our plaintiffs, many of whom are women and children fleeing extreme sexual and gang violence, while the case proceeds.

As the judge deliberated the stay, disturbing news came to light: Early Thursday morning the government had pulled two of our clients—a mother and her young daughter—out of their detention rooms and put them on a deportation flight back to El Salvador. This directly violated government promises in open court the previous day that no one in the case would be removed before 11:59 p.m. Thursday night.  

Judge Sullivan was outraged, saying “it was unacceptable” that someone who had alleged a credible fear and was “seeking justice in a U.S. court” would be “spirited away” while her attorneys were literally arguing on her behalf.

He ordered the government to “turn the plane around.” Further, the judge suggested that if the situation was not fixed, he would hold contempt proceedings for those responsible—starting with Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Our clients on that deportation flight, Carmen* and her daughter, fled El Salvador to escape two decades of horrific sexual abuse by her husband and death threats from a violent gang. Carmen was repeatedly raped, stalked, and threatened with death by her abusive husband, even when they were living apart. In June 2018, she and her daughter escaped, seeking asylum in the United States. Despite asylum officers finding that their accounts were truthful, they were ultimately denied them asylum protection because they did not have a “credible fear of persecution.”

This disconnect is the direct result of new policies issued by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that wrongly instruct asylum officers to deny whole categories of asylum claims, specifically gutting protections for immigrants fleeing domestic violence and gang brutality.

Sessions has now characterized these types of persecution as insufficient to invoke asylum protections, despite decades of settled domestic and international law which recognize gender-based persecution as a basis for asylum. Federal courts have also recognized asylum claims in a variety of circumstances involving gang brutality.

The ACLU and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies filed a lawsuit on Tuesday challenging the new policies. At the conclusion of Thursday’s hearing, Judge Sullivan issued the stay, temporarily blocking the deportation of any of the plaintiffs while the case proceeds.

What happened to Carmen embodies exactly why the stay is necessary: This administration has shown time and time again that in its rush to deport as many immigrants as possible, they will flout the law and callously put the most vulnerable people’s lives in danger.

‘Turn the Plane Around’: Government Wrongfully Deports Asylum Seekers

odinsblog:

In America, poverty is a death sentence and Donald Trump and the Republican Party are slowly repealing The Affordable Care Act, making healthcare unaffordable once again. We need Medicare For All, and we need it now. No one should die because they can’t afford overpriced, profitized healthcare.

These are some of the people who needlessly died, just because they couldn’t afford healthcare. Unfortunately, as long as conservative politicians control congress, they won’t be the last.

This thread goes hard: https://twitter.com/eshalegal/status/962051340485537792?s=21

Source: odinsblog

Robert Mueller Saw Trump Coming in 2011 | Dame Magazine

“Some believe that organized crime is a thing of the past. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Traditional criminal syndicates still con, extort, and intimidate American citizens.

As you know, just last week we arrested nearly 130 members of La Cosa Nostra in New York, New Jersey, and New England. We will continue to work with our state and local partners to end La Cosa Nostra’s lifelong practice of crime and undue influence.

But the playing field has changed. We have seen a shift from regional families with a clear structure, to flat, fluid networks with global reach. These international enterprises are more anonymous and more sophisticated. Rather than running discrete operations, on their own turf, they are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish.

We are investigating groups in Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East. And we are seeing cross-pollination between groups that historically have not worked together. Criminals who may never meet, but who share one thing in common: greed.  

They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military. These individuals know who and what to target, and how best to do it. They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.

This is not “The Sopranos,” with six guys sitting in a diner, shaking down a local business owner for $50 dollars a week. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder.

These crimes are not easily categorized. Nor can the damage, the dollar loss, or the ripple effects be easily calculated. It is much like a Venn diagram, where one crime intersects with another, in different jurisdictions, and with different groups.

How does this impact you? You may not recognize the source, but you will feel the effects. You might pay more for a gallon of gas. You might pay more for a luxury car from overseas. You will pay more for health care, mortgages, clothes, and food.  

Yet we are concerned with more than just the financial impact. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called “iron triangles” of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.

Let us turn for a moment to the link between transnational organized crime and terrorism. If a terrorist cannot obtain a passport, for example, he will find someone who can. Terrorists may turn to street crime—and, by extension, organized crime—to raise money, as did the 2004 Madrid bombers.

Organized criminals have become “service providers.” Could a Mexican group move a terrorist across the border? Could an Eastern European enterprise sell a Weapon of Mass Destruction to a terrorist cell? Likely, yes. Criminal enterprises are motivated by money, not ideology. But they have no scruples about helping those who are, for the right price.

Intelligence and partnerships are key to our success in countering these threats.  

In the past nine years, we in the FBI have shifted from a law enforcement agency to a national security service that is threat-driven and intelligence-led.

With organized crime, we are using intelligence to expand upon what we already know, from phone, travel, and financial records to extensive biographies of key players. And we are sharing this information with our partners around the world.

But we are also building a long-term strategy for dismantling these enterprises. Last year, we set up two units, called Threat Focus Cells, to target Eurasian organized crime. The first focuses on the Semion Mogilevich Organization; the second on the Brother’s Circle enterprise.

For those of you not familiar with either group, their memberships are large, their reach is global, and their scope of operations is broad, from weapons and drug trafficking to high-stakes fraud and global prostitution. If left unchecked, the resulting impact to our economy and our security will be significant. Indeed, Semion Mogilevich is on the FBI Top Ten Most Wanted List, and he will remain so until he is captured.”

Robert Mueller Saw Trump Coming in 2011 | Dame Magazine

drst:

darthmelyanna:

thatravenclawbitch:

freifraufischer:

dianabiprince:

liberalsarecool:

“The National Rifle Association (NRA) has said it’s suffering from substantial financial issues that could cause the organisation to “be unable to exist”.

In a recent court filing, the powerful organisation that lobbies on behalf of gun makers, owners and campaigns against almost all gun regulations, said it had lost its media insurance coverage due to an aggressive campaign brought on by New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo. The campaign encouraged companies to cut ties with the gun lobbying group. A lack of liability insurance threatens to shut down the group’s multi-million dollar media entities, including NRATV, its own streaming channel.“

#HappyFriday

Here’s a link if you want to read more. 8/3/2018.

But let’s see this for what it probably is: an attempt to distract from recent disclosures that the Russians were somehow trying to infiltrate or otherwise get in bed with the NRA. Link.

Also didn’t the Parkland kids start the actual campaign to kill the NRA? WTF with blaming the milquetoast centrist Cuomo?

Yeah, I have to wonder if they’re setting themselves up for dissolution so that when it is revealed just how compromised they were and just how much Russian money they laundered and funneled into GOP campaigns, they can reassemble in another form and use it as a fig leaf of disavowal.

Source: liberalsarecool

Judge slams Trump admin for suggesting ACLU, others should find deported parents

[T]he administration argued that immigrant advocacy groups – not the government – should be responsible for tracking down the more than 500 parents it had separated from their children at the border and deported without them…

“The reality is there are still close to 500 parents that have not been located, many of these parents were removed from the country without their child, all of this is the result of the government’s separation and then inability and failure to track and reunite,” Sabraw said.

“And the reality is that for every parent who is not located, there will be a permanent orphaned child, and that is 100% the responsibility of the administration,” he added….

In a court document Thursday, the Justice Department had suggested the American Civil Liberties Union should use its “network of law firms, NGOs, volunteers and others” to find the parents, using information the administration will provide.

“Plaintiffs’ counsel [ACLU] should ascertain whether each possible class member wishes to be reunified with his or her child, or whether he or she wishes to waive reunification,” the filing continued, adding that the ACLU would be “responsible for ensuring” the parents have the opportunity to get legal advice and consult with their children, with the government helping to “facilitate” those family communications. The ACLU “would then be responsible for providing Defendants with a final, unequivocal, written confirmation of whether each possible class member wants to be reunified with his or her child,” the filing said….

The ACLU argued that shifting the responsibility from the government is unacceptable….

The administration has maintained that any parents deported without their children willingly left without them. Attorneys and immigrant advocates, however, have questioned whether the parents fully understood what they were agreeing to. The ACLU filed a lengthy collection of sworn statements from attorneys who say some parents were asked to sign documents they didn’t understand, felt coerced to sign or believed they were agreeing to something to get their children back.

Judge slams Trump admin for suggesting ACLU, others should find deported parents