COMING TO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU (Why do we keep warning you?)

 

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Did we warn you about this on August 20, 2010 ?

Click here:  When you finish your homework get ready for battle.

OOF !!! Surprise, Surprise! Judge Cannon will not take these new revelations lightly.

Side note:  Well, there's so much stuff out there that I never know from one day to the next what I'm going to post here on this blog.  So today, after I'm finished my bike ride, I decide to review some of the not-so-mainstream media and thought to myself, this one looks good enough to post.  And I turn on the truck's radio and Andrew Wilkow is in the last 15 minutes of his 3-hour show when he squeezes the following story into his full schedule and gives a shout out to its author, Julie Kelly.  If it's good enough for Andrew, then it's good enough for me. I posted a link to his show at the bottom of this page.  Remember, his arguments cannot be broken. ~ Storm'n Norm'n



The DOJ's Doctored Crime Scene Photo of Mar-a-Lago Raid
New disclosures in Special Counsel Jack Smith's espionage case against Donald Trump reveal the FBI tampered with evidence to create the infamous photo--and DOJ has lied about it for nearly two years.

JULIE KELLY
MAY 06, 2024




It is the picture that launched a thousand pearl-clutching articles.

A few weeks after the armed FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, the Department of Justice released a stunning photograph depicting alleged contraband seized from Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate that day; the image showed colored sheets representing scary classification levels attached to files purportedly discovered in Trump’s private office.

Included as a government exhibit to oppose Trump’s lawsuit requesting a special master to vet the 13,000 items taken from his residence, the crime scene pic immediately went viral—just as Attorney General Merrick Garland, who authorized the unprecedented raid, intended.

At the time, even regime-friendly mouthpieces questioned the need and optics of the raid; the photo helped juice the DOJ’s justification for the storming of Trump’s castle.

“[The] question of whether Trump had classified material with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort has captured the public’s attention. The photo published by the government appears to answer that question quite affirmatively,” Washington Post resident fact checker Philip Bump wrote on August 31, 2022.

Some of Bump’s colleagues were more hyperbolic. An ex-CIA officer told ABC News the cover sheets indicated the highest level of secrecy, which in the wrong hands could have resulted in murder. “People's lives are truly at stake. Without being melodramatic, anything that helps an adversary identify a human source means life and death," intelligence expert Douglas London melodramatically warned in reaction to the photo.

The New York Times insisted the photo was consistent with how the FBI handles criminal investigations. “[It] is standard practice for the F.B.I. to take evidentiary pictures of materials recovered in a search to ensure that items are properly cataloged and accounted for. Files or documents are not tossed around randomly, even though they might appear that way; they are usually splayed out so they can be separately identified by their markings,” reporters Glenn Thrush and Adam Goldman wrote on August 31, 2022.

Except…that is not what happened.
A Stunt with Potentially Case-Killing Consequences for DOJ

New court filings in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s espionage and obstruction case against Trump and two co-defendants conclusively demonstrate that the government used the cover sheets to deceive the public as well as the court. The photo was a stunt, and one that adds more fuel to this dumpster-fire case.

Jay Bratt, who was the lead DOJ prosecutor on the investigation at the time and now is assigned to Smith’s team, described the photo this way in his August 30, 2022 response to Trump’s special master lawsuit:

“[Thirteen] boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings…were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status. (Emphasis added.) See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’).”

The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.

Classified cover sheets were not “recovered” in the container, contrary to Bratt’s declaration to the court. In fact, after being busted recently by defense attorneys for mishandling evidence in the case, Bratt had to fess up about how the cover sheets actually ended up on the documents.

Here is Bratt’s new version of the story, where he finally admits a critical detail that he failed to disclose in his August 2022 filing:

“[If] the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose.”

But before the official cover sheets were used as placeholder, agents apparently used them as props. FBI agents took it upon themselves to paperclip the sheets to documents—something evident given the uniform nature of how each cover sheet is clipped to each file in the photo—laid them on the floor and snapped a picture for political posterity. (Emphasis mine. N.E.H.)

That raises many troubling questions, to say the least, about the FBI’s handling of the alleged incriminating documents.

For example, who made the on-site determination as to the classification level appropriate for each document? Did agents have security clearance and expertise related to classification? Did the agents know whether the document had been declassified by Trump while still in office?

The hasty assessment also appears to contradict Bratt’s statements in court about the classification status of the seized documents. Bratt told Judge Aileen Cannon during a hearing last year that the records were undergoing a classification review, presumably conducted by the intelligence community, to determine the correct level of secrecy.

Did the final analysis confirm or dispute the assessments by the field FBI agents who conducted the raid?
Missing Paper Trial and Messy Boxes

But Jack Smith might have bigger problems. During the raid, agents took a box in its entirety if it contained papers with classified markings; the box usually contained other items, which is how the FBI ended up with so many of Trump’s personal belongings.

So, in order to flag the location of the alleged classified record in the box, agents, as Bratt noted, used the cover sheets as placeholders. (The classified records were then placed in a separate secure file.)

But now defense attorneys claim, and the special counsel concedes, that some placeholders do not match the relevant document. “Following defense counsel’s review of the physical boxes…and the documents produced in classified discovery, defense counsel has learned that the cross-reference provided by the Special Counsel’s Office does not contain accurate information,” attorneys representing Trump’s co-defendant Waltine Nauta wrote in a May 1 motion.

The motion forced the special counsel to admit the error. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet,” Bratt wrote.

In other words, in their zeal to stage a phony photo using official classified cover sheets, FBI agents might have failed to accurately match the placeholder sheet with the appropriate document. This is a potentially case-blowing mistake, particularly if the document in question is one of the 34 records that represents the basis of espionage charges against Trump.

And there is another issue in connection with the cover sheets. Defense attorneys also noted that in at least one instance, the location of the cover sheet in the physical box didn’t match the FBI’s accounting. “[The] sheet…does not appear for several hundreds of pages later than the FBI Index indicated it would. Defense counsel’s review of these materials calls into question the likelihood that the contents of the physical boxes remains (sic) the same as when they were seized by the FBI on August 8, 2022.”

Which Bratt also admitted is an issue. After the boxes were transported from Florida to the hopelessly corrupt Washington FBI field office (another scandalous aspect of the case since the investigation should have been conducted in southern Florida not in another jurisdiction), a private company took scans of the inside of the boxes. But according to the defense team, the current condition of the boxes does not match the scans taken in August 2022.

Bratt explained that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” He then offered a list of excuses including how some “boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full.”

It is safe to assume Judge Cannon will not take these new revelations lightly--particularly since Bratt also had to admit in the same filing that he did not tell her the truth when she asked about the condition of the boxes during a hearing last month. On April 12, Cannon directly asked Bratt, “are the boxes in their original, intact form as seized?” Bratt replied yes, but “with one exception, and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents [place.]”

Oof.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, Jack Smith’s team might need several thousand words to weasel their way out of this mess.

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Click here: Andrew Wilkow     The Wilkow Majority on Sirius XMRadio

The lie that led you astray.

 Note: Before you read the following editorial understand that the lie began here:

"In August 2011, President Obama signed an Executive Order announcing a government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce. He directed executive departments and agencies to focus on diversity and inclusion as a key component of their human resources strategies, and instructed that the agencies both promote diversity and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity.  To implement the President’s diversity initiative, The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a government-wide diversity and inclusion strategic plan, and related guidance.  OPM has conducted more than 40 trainings on the development of agency-specific strategic plans and on the government-wide diversity and inclusion initiative" - N.E.H.

This Regime Is Built on a Lie

• By Scott Yenor
• May 1, 2024

Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

In the following essay, Scott Yenor examines the “mandatory ideology” of the emerging regime: “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the all-consuming paradigm by which our schools and (in due course) our nation are being reoriented toward the principle of group outcome equality. This is the first in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

“Under Siege,” reads one headline in the industry-standard Chronicle of Higher Education, “DEI Officers Strategize to Fight Back.” “Leaders Create Informal Support Network Amid DEI Opposition,” reads a headline in Insight into Diversity. Conferences are held to organize resistance. Even “College Presidents Are Quietly Organizing to Support DEI,” reads another Chronicle headline.  

An alleged moral necessity underlies this open political defiance. The current environment, it is assumed, is saturated with racism. It must be re-engineered with DEI policies: racial preferences in admissions and hiring, mandatory diversity training, a race-centered curriculum. Peace, harmony, achievement, and opportunity will then reign in workplaces and on campuses—after a generation or so of such policies. 

It starts in the ivory tower, but it can hardly be expected to end there. These assumptions—that the present social order is “systemically racist;” that said racism can only be eliminated by the imposition of group outcome equality, supplanting the American idea of equal opportunity—require a whole-of-society approach, a top-to-bottom reorganization. This is the animating ideology of what Tom Klingenstein has called the “group quota regime.”

This ideology—what many Americans now recognize as “wokeism”—has effectively taken over all of the major power centers across our society: not just the universities but the media, the government, the Big Tech giants, the mass media, and more. It is the animating creed of what Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards recently identified as an “emerging totalitarianism.” Adherence is compulsory: consider the professions of faith now required of professors, or the constantly rising phenomenon of “cancellation.” Those who object to its ascendancy, however, should focus more attention on its foundations in academia. Those foundations, even on their own terms, are surprisingly shaky, and may present opportunities for critics of the regime. 

The case against DEI, as Prof. Shaun Harper of USC’s Race and Equity Center argues, is based on “misinformation, misunderstanding, and reckless mischaracterizations.” Harper and nearly a dozen well-credentialed colleagues propound these supposed facts in a recent 62-page report, Truths About DEI on College Campuses: Evidence-Based Expert Responses to Politicized Misinformation. 

DEI not only reduces dignitary harms to underrepresented minorities, they say, it points to a reconstruction of the environment that will foster more student success for all. “By employing a more comprehensive and coordinated approach” to DEI, writes Mitchell Chang of UCLA in the Truths report, “campuses increase their overall organizational cohesiveness and capacity to improve the quality of the educational context.” 

Campus Report never acknowledges them. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev’s 2018 article “Why Doesn’t Diversity Training Work?” from Anthropology Today—an article since expanded into a book from Harvard University Press—is never cited in Truths. Elizabeth Paluck and Donald Green, who wrote or co-authored skeptical meta-analyses on the diversity training literature in both 2009 and 2021, are not cited. Even Katerina Bezrukova et. al., whose 2016 “A Meta-analytical Integration of Over 40 years of Research on Diversity Training Evaluation” is ambiguously supportive of diversity training, is not cited in Truths. Only certain truths are fit to print. 

“Hundreds of studies,” write Harvard’s Dobbin and the University of Tel Aviv’s Kalev, “dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior, or change the workplace.” Though “diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program,” it remains popular among institutions who feel they just check the boxes out of concern for legal issues and out of fear that those in the diversity industry will wage public relations campaigns against dissenting institutions.

One problem is that advocate-scholars seek to demonstrate the effectiveness of DEI trainings through surveys. Subjects are surveyed about their attitudes about diversity before trainings and then again after trainings. After the trainings, studies show that subjects are more likely to embrace pro-DEI and anti-stereotype sentiments. Credit for the changes in attitude is consistently attributed to the intervention or the trainings. 

The success of diversity programs is too often demonstrated, Devine and Ash conclude, by the simple “completion of the program or its favorable evaluation by the trainees” and data is often “immediate, self-reported, and individual-level” or experimental with very small samples rather than from control groups or long-term testing. So fraught with such scientific limitations is the existing literature about the efficacy of diversity training (DT), that Devine and Ash conclude: “the evidence regarding the efficacy of DT is for the most part wanting. The lack of systemic and rigorous research investigating company-wide DT, combined with the mixed nature of evidence regarding the efficacy of the programs, prevents us from drawing clear conclusions regarding best practices for organizational DT.”

Advocate-scholars promoting diversity training extrapolate broadly from paltry evidence. Scholars like Paluck, Green, et. al. notice “a pattern of smaller studies reporting significantly stronger effects” from diversity training that are blown out of all proportion to the strength of their findings. Studies with large standard errors are treated as dispositive. This, they conclude, is a “symptom of publication bias” when results of a study reveal “optimistic conclusions,” especially to powerful, monied interests.

Studies do not support the idea that diversity training changes much in workplaces or on campuses. The 2009 study of Paluck and Green, of Harvard and Yale respectively, surveyed nearly 1,000 studies and found that few catalogued lasting, positive effects from diversity trainings. There is also a 2008 article from the management literature, where Carol T. Kulick and Loriann Robertson show that 27 out of 31 studies could establish only small, fleeting improvements on one or two of the many items measured. (Kulick and Robertson are also not cited in the Truths.) A 2016 review of 39 studies by business management researchers found only five tried to measure long-term effects; two studies found positive effects, two found negative effects, and one found no effects. 

Paluck and Green et.al. conducted a 2021 meta-analysis of over 400 studies evaluating diversity training that were published between 2007 and 2019. Recent trends, the authors conclude, involve taking methods that work in experimental, small-group settings and trying to apply them to broader settings. Such studies show “limited effects on prejudice” and even smaller effects on behavior, suggesting to the authors “the need for further theoretical innovation or synergies” with other kinds of interventions. Over three-quarters of the studies concerned “light-touch” trainings, which encourage, for instance, persons of different races to talk with one another. Only 8% of light-touch studies found a measurable decrease in prejudice one day after the treatment and only 1% had measurable changes a month later. The evidence in support of such trainings “remains thin regarding the broader theoretical claim that light touch interventions set in motion changes in perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors.” 

A 2022 literature review from Devine and Ash suggests that “the enthusiasm for, and monetary investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goals.” Devine and Ash adopt a more nuanced approach, measuring trainings aimed at increasing minority representation in the workplace by that standard, while trainings aimed at creating equitable health outcomes are measured against those outcomes. So paltry were the results that Devine and Ash recommend “targeting socially connected individuals within an organization” as a means of accomplishing changes in culture rather than continuing with ineffective, expensive diversity training.  

than double-down on their analysis and advocacy.

Yet the DEI industry is rallying its “science” and burrowing into renamed offices on campuses and within corporations. Critics of DEI, and of the group quota regime more broadly, must oppose such measures not only with a good conscience, but with the knowledge that they cannot even justify themselves. These policies are based on the idea of a silent race war being waged within our institutions; they threaten internal peace, the ethic of achievement, the cohesion of a community, and the competitive standing of our institutions.

This is precisely the point. The DEI paradigm is no mere academic framework; in fact, it fails as such. It can be understood, and engaged, only as ideology—as the theoretical framework of the emerging totalitarianism. Proof of effectiveness does not matter to its partisans, so much as the enforcement of uniformity and the acquisition of power it entails. It is a monumental experiment in social engineering, aimed not just at the foundations of the university but at the foundations of our republic.

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Scott Yenor is Senior Director of State Coalitions at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life and a professor of political science at Boise State University.

Jennifer Granholm caught lying about her stocks.

 

 

U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) said...

The following from: 

https://www.blackandblondemedia.com/2008/04/26/democrat-race-lie/

October 13, 1858

During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas (D-IL) said, “If you desire negro citizenship, if

you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in favor of the citizenship of the negro. For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. I believe this Government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races.”. Douglas became the Democrat Party’s 1860 presidential nominee.