Opinion

Home Opinion

Feds Admit Dozens of Undercover Agents Joined Protesters at Capitol on Jan 6

6
Elvert Barnes, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

ANALYSIS – Federal and local law enforcement reportedly had at least 40 confidential informants, or CIs, (also known by federal agencies as Confidential Human Source – CHS) embedded with protestors and rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

This, according to the attorney for one of the Jan 6 defendants, Dominic Pezzola.

A member of the nationalist Proud Boys group, Pezzola is facing charges in federal court for allegedly conspiring to oppose the Jan. 2021 transfer of presidential power and related charges by interfering with Congress’ certification of the Electoral College vote.

His attorney says federal prosecutors kept this critical evidence secret and belatedly admitted this bombshell just recently.

I wrote about this issue in March when a video was released that showed undercover DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officers inciting the rioters to storm the Capitol. Many more videos are still sealed by the courts and kept from the public.

As the attorney’s filing noted:

Some of these undercover Metro officers marched with the Proud Boy[s] march. And some appear to have played roles of instigators, in that they are seen on body-worn videos chanting “Go! Go!,” “Stop the Steal!,” and “Whose house? Our house!” on Jan. 6.  Others generally followed demonstrators toward the Capitol.

 
While that video, part of which was posted on Rumble, shows three members of the MPD’s Electronic Surveillance Unit (ESU) acting as protesters and inciting the crowd, new information reveals that MPD and the feds may have had dozens of undercover informants there that day.

The Daily Caller reports that Pezzola’s lawyer, Roger Roots, said that federal prosecutors admitted Tuesday that eight FBI confidential human sources were embedded among the Proud Boys on Jan. 6. In his Wednesday court filing, Root said that Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) , part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), appears to have had some 19 informants active at the time.

That means that the largest number of federal CHSs on Jan. 6 didn’t even belong to the FBI, but instead were from DHS.

Roots added that, in addition to all these federal CIs, at least 13 undercover plain-clothes DC Metro Police agents worked among Jan. 6 defendants that day (one more than originally revealed). 

That’s a lot of local police undercover officers and federal confidential informants for one protest. And who knows how many more there may have been in other capacities.

In his filing, Roots argues that:

Pezzola submits that the entire defense in this trial, including opening,cross, and defense cases, would have been different, and much more aggressive, if defense counsel had known of the scope and scale of undercover government operations on Jan. 6. Prosecutors made arguments contrary to information they possessed and withheld; and defense counsel could have lodged different cross-examination and direct examination questions if they had known of these materials.

Roots concludes by noting that the “United States is refusing to provide information which obviously has a high likelihood of being exculpatory.”

He adds that defendants are entitled to this information. “ACCORDINGLY, Pezzola asks for an order compelling the United States to provide the names, identities, and reports of all HSI confidential informants operating at or near the Capitol or around the Proud Boys on January 6, 2021.”

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

Amanda Head: Leftists Get Taste Of Own Medicine And They’re Going BERSERK!

2

Justice is sweet.

Radical leftists on Twitter have managed to turn the app into something akin to the wild West over the years but Elon Musk’s recent takeover has brought some major changes these liberals aren’t happy with. After managing to go relatively unchecked leftists have doxxed and harassed conservatives for years but now they’re getting a taste of their own medicine.

Watch Amanda break down the controversy below:

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

China’s Spy Balloon Was a Big Deal, Likely Gained Valuable SIGINT for Beijing

11
Joe Biden via Gage Skidmore Flickr

ANALYSIS – Joe Biden’s Chinese spy balloon fiasco keeps getting worse. As I noted earlier, almost all of the Biden spin about the Chinese balloon that spent eight long days surveilling military and strategic sites across the United States, was misleading or outright false. 

Contrary to the furious pro-Biden spin, the 200ft tall balloon with a jetliner-sized surveillance package strapped to it, did pose an intelligence and military threat.

It could also have been shot down much earlier without undue risk to those on the ground – especially since it first cruised over the Aleutian Islands and parts of Alaska.

And no, President Trump did not know or ignore prior Chinese balloon incursions when he was in office. 

Reports of brief crossings of Chinese balloons over peripheral parts of the U.S., like Florida, or U.S. territories far from the continental U.S. like Guam, did not surface until well after Trump left office.

Apparently, the Pentagon didn’t detect those extremely brief forays at the time, displaying a major gap in our surveillance capabilities.

But this incursion was of a whole different scope and scale.

I earlier argued that the primary goal of this latest extended cross-country balloon incursion for China was political.

It was a clear test. What would Biden and the U.S. military do? And their answer was, basically nothing until after the airship completed its 8-day surveillance mission.

However, an added, and more dangerous goal was potentially to test how to use a stratospheric balloon to employ a small nuclear device at an extremely high altitude to produce a massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would fry communications, power networks and almost all electronics across much of the United States.   

For more on that see my previous piece.

But let’s return to the more mundane intelligence-gathering functions of this airship. 

While the Biden spinners rushed to say that the balloon could not gather intel not already gained by Chinese satellites in low earth orbit, this simply ignorant, and untrue.

One left-leaning intelligence news site, SpyTalk, edited by the elderly Jeff Stein, wrote in an almost knee-jerk fashion without waiting for more facts: “Pssst: Chinese Satellite Not a Threat. Experts say news media hysteria over the floating orb not at all warranted.”

Stein then brought in his usual suspects to buttress his pro-Biden spin.

The liberal Stein quoted one of his regular minions, Paul Cobaugh, a left-leaning retired Army information operations specialist with no intelligence or technology background, as saying we have a “variety of capabilities to render it unusable or mitigate the threat.” 

This is partly true. We do have means to mitigate the threat. 

A senior U.S. defense official said on Feb. 2 that when the Chinese balloon was detected near Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, home of the 341st strategic intercontinental ballistic missile wing, the Pentagon “acted immediately to protect against the collection of secretive information.” 

That likely meant shutting off signals-emitting systems and moving secretive aircraft and sensitive equipment under cover or into a hangar.

The Pentagon can take similar steps to stop satellites from gathering intelligence, but it is far more disruptive to have a giant airship looming overhead for long periods of time, as it was in this case.

But SpyTalk’s Cobaugh takes his uninformed argument about the balloon to an extreme, adding with no nuance or uncertainty:

“It’s not a threat.”

SpyTalk didn’t stop there though and added the always predictable, hyper-partisan, Trump-hating former Air Force general and CIA director Michael Hayden to the mix, who totally dismissed the Chinese balloon, and Biden’s inaction, by saying:

“Really, it’s not a big deal.” 

Well, this is all just nonsense. It was a very big deal.

Beyond the various risks noted above and in my earlier piece, the ability to vacuum up valuable Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) unavailable to satellites, makes the balloon threat unique. 

As Defense News reports:

Experts say balloons loitering at high altitudes can offer some advantages over satellites and drones — or could at least augment their intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.

Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said one benefit of these balloons is their ability to hover closer to the ground than satellites, and they may be able to intercept communication or electronic signals that orbiting systems can’t.

“It could be thermal infrared, it could be signals intelligence. One of the reasons there are advantages to the suborbital position is you might not be able to do all of that from space,” he told C4ISRNET in a Feb. 3 interview. “There’s a whole lot of value to something other than space.”

Bryan Clark, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, said balloons also offer more persistent, less predictable coverage over an area of interest. While satellites follow a known orbit, airships use wind currents and automated controls to maneuver in different directions. They can also hover in one place for a long period of time.

Clark told C4ISRNET: “With a satellite, you know when they’re going to go overhead, so you stop doing whatever you’re doing for the time it’s overhead. If you have a balloon, it could be out there for days or months, and you’re sort of left either having to stop whatever you’re doing that’s generating intel — or you live with it.”

And there is much more our intelligence experts and agencies can’t yet divulge about this balloon.

Hopefully, once it is fully recovered we can expect a full damage assessment.

So, yes, the high-tech, high-altitude, Chinese surveillance airship that spent 8 days traversing the U.S. was a threat, and the leftist partisan spin machine continues to churn out uninformed nonsense.

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

AP ‘Stylebook’ – How the Left Manipulates Abortion Language to Manipulate News

0
Washington D.C., USA - January 22, 2015; A Pro-Life woman clashes with a group of Pro-Choice demonstrators at the U.S. Supreme Court.

ANALYSIS – Most conservatives understand that one of the left’s major weapons in the war of ideas is manipulating language and using well-researched buzzwords and phrases to change reality and mask their more extreme ideas.

We see it every day with the constant use of ‘gun violence’ rather than shooting or murder committed by a criminal. We see it with ‘global warming’ becoming ‘climate change’ when the facts don’t support the narrative.

We also see it with the insanely deceptive and grotesque ‘gender-affirming care’ rather for genital-mutilating sex-change surgery.

And of course, we see it in spades with abortion, where supporting the unrestricted killing of unborn babies in the womb becomes ‘reproductive health care rights,’ previously known as being ‘pro-choice.’

The new term is far better politically since it appears to somehow be about rights and health, not deception and killing. Plus, ‘pro-choice’ has been thoroughly sullied by its accurate association with being ‘pro-abortion.’

And we can’t have that.

And now, since the Dobbs decision correctly returned the abortion issue to the states where it always belonged, the battle to control the language, and hence the narrative on abortion, is intensifying.

And it just got a lot worse.

The latest words and phrases chosen by the left to describe or refer to abortion fly in the face of fact and science.

But the leftist language warriors are now being reinforced by the power behind the news media – the Associated Press—and its widely used ‘Stylebook.’

The Daily Signal reports:

The Associated Press recently released a guide for news outlets for reporting on abortion that’s so biased in favor of the procedure, its guidance often runs contrary to medical science. The new guide has the ability to significantly distort how Americans perceive the abortion issue.

The AP’s “Abortion Topical Guide” is part of the widely used “AP Stylebook” that many outlets across the country, including The Daily Signal, use as a guide for everything from grammar to punctuation to best practices for terms and phrasing.

One glaring problem among many? The guide frequently cites the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to back up its guidance. ACOG claims to be the premier professional membership organization of OB-GYNs. But on the issue of abortion—a procedure that most OB-GYNs don’t perform—ACOG is wholly committed to lobbying for extreme abortion policies that don’t reflect its membership’s views.

In typical Orwellian fashion, the leftists at AP cudgel writers into referring to an unborn child’s “heartbeat,” which is detectable via ultrasound from the very early stages of life to the deliberately bland and mostly meaningless term “cardiac activity.”

The Stylebook also inappropriately enters the scientific realm as self-made medical experts when it advises writers not to refer to unborn children as “pain-capable” until after at least 24 weeks.

This, even though the beloved doctors who actually perform surgeries on ‘preemies,’ or premature babies in utero, regularly use anesthesia for those babies under 24 weeks because they feel pain.

The AP’s demonic advice also contradicts the massive, and growing, body of research showing unborn babies can feel pain at just 15 weeks or even earlier.

And most importantly, the Stylebook admonishes writers to never, ever use the accurate but uncomfortable phrase – ‘late-term abortion.’

Polls show a solid majority of Americans are opposed to late-term abortions, so best to religiously (pun intended) avoid the term.

The Daily Signal concludes:

The AP guide misses the mark throughout. Of course, that’s inevitable when the goal is not objective reporting of fact but rather promoting pro-abortion propaganda. Try as the AP might, it’s a fool’s errand to put lipstick on a pig.

I go further by saying AP is part of the left’s far-flung language-distorting media empire intended to manipulate words, in order to manipulate news, in order to manipulate you.

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

Former Trump Adviser, Kash Patel Joins Matt Whitaker’s Podcast

0
Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Ramón Colón-López and the chief of staff to Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, Kash Patel, arrive at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Jan. 14, 2021. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando)

Matt Whitaker hosts prominent Trump adviser Kash Patel on Liberty & Justice.

Per Matt Whitaker:

Kash Patel is an American attorney, children’s book author and former government official. He served as chief of staff to the Acting United States Secretary of Defense under President Donald Trump.

Matthew G. Whitaker was acting Attorney General of the United States (2018-2019). Prior to becoming acting Attorney General, Mr. Whitaker served as Chief of Staff to the Attorney General. He was appointed as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa by President George W. Bush, serving from 2004-2009. Whitaker was the managing partner of Des Moines-based law firm, Whitaker Hagenow & Gustoff LLP from 2009 until rejoining DOJ in 2017. He was also the Executive Director for FACT, The Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust, an ethics and accountability watchdog, between 2014 and 2017. Mr. Whitaker is the Author of the book–Above the Law, The Inside Story of How the Justice Department Tried to Subvert President Trump.

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

GOP Governors Migrant ‘Stunt’ Working as Dem Mayors Plead for Help

5
via Wikimedia Commons

ANALYSIS – When Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas began busing illegal migrants from their states to deep blue ‘sanctuary’ cities like New York City, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., Democrats, and the establishment media called it a political ‘stunt.’

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, leading another state suffering from the same migrant crisis, has also sent migrants from his state to sanctuary cities in recent months.

Abbott has been the most prolific bussing migrants north. 

DeSantis sent a couple of busloads to the uber liberal and wealthy enclave of Martha’s Vineyard, the exclusive Massachusetts island that is a regular playground for liberal Hollywood and DC elites.

The governors want to put the pressure of Joe Biden’s horrendous border and immigration policies on the front stoops of big city Democrat mayors, instead of the backyards of mostly red Republican border states.  

They also wanted to highlight the issue nationally and emphasize the sheer insanity of the entire sanctuary city concept where illegal aliens are virtually invited to come and stay, safe from federal law enforcement.

And the governors’ ‘stunt’ appears to be working.

Both the outgoing mayor of Chicago and the new mayor of NYC are begging for help with the crush of these migrants.

NYC Mayor Eric Adams, a national surrogate for Biden, has been the most outspoken, recently saying Biden has “failed” his city which is being “destroyed by the migrant crisis.”

Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago sent a letter to Abbott on Sunday requesting that he stop sending busloads of migrants to the Windy City over what she called political motivations.

She said the city has been caring for more than 8,000 penniless migrants since the first buses arrived from Texas in August. And the number is growing.

But Abbott began sending migrant buses to these blue cities in the fall as a response to the surge of migrant crossings at the southern border caused by Bien’s obscene and likely illegal immigration policies. 

Abbott has said the migrant ‘relocations will continue until the federal government secures the border.

In her letter, Lightfoot said she is sympathetic to the challenges of border towns in Texas but wrote:

Chicago is a Welcoming City and we collaborate with County, State, and community partners to rise to this challenge, but your lack of consideration or coordination in an attempt to cause chaos and score political points has resulted in a critical tipping point in our ability to receive individuals and families in a safe, orderly, and dignified way.

Well, good. Now she can truly be ‘sympathetic’ to the border towns suffering under the stampede of illegal migrants Biden is allowing into the country.

She added a bunch of other claptrap in her letter blaming Abbott for being heartless and creating a humanitarian crisis, etc.

Unfortunately, what she totally ignores is that her ‘welcoming’ policies, and those of her party and the president, are the direct cause of the migrant crisis.

Meanwhile, Politico reports that “Republicans just gained an unlikely ally in their attacks on the president’s immigration policies: the Democratic mayor of New York.”

Unlike Lightfoot, Adams seems to get it.

GOP leaders high-fived this month after hearing Mayor Adams say Biden had “failed” the city on immigration and that NYC “is being destroyed by the migrant crisis.”

In this past year, more than 57,000 migrants have arrived in New York after crossing the southern border. Some were sent from states like Texas, but others arrived on their own.

City services used to house, feed, educate, and provide health care to newcomers are estimated to cost taxpayers $2.9 billion next year alone.

This is more than the entire NYC Fire Department operating budget. 

Adams’ new rhetoric has drawn praise from some Republicans and the conservative editorial page of the New York Post.

His words have also echoed remarks by Fox News contributor Sean Duffy.

But not all Republicans are cheering for Adams. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas wasn’t quite ready to applaud the New York mayor.

Politico continued:

“Eric Adams is right to blame the Biden Administration for the border crisis, but this is the same guy who campaigned on his city’s sanctuary status and extended childcare, colleague classes and other taxpayer-funded programs to illegal migrants,” Roy said in a statement.

“Texas has been bearing the brunt of this crisis for over two years — now New York is getting a taste of their own medicine.”

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

Amanda Head: The Hollywood Conservative’s PSA

1

You need to hear this.

Watch Amanda explain the situation below:

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

Amanda Head: Bar Association Goes Idiodically Woke

3

Law schools across the country are abandoning their decades-long principles going woke and the move could prove disastrous for attorneys, current law students, and prospective law students across the nation.

Let Amanda break down the situation in the video below.

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

Democrat House Intel Committee Chief Pressured Twitter to Ban Journalists and Critics

0

ANALYSIS – In the ‘yes, we were right all’ along category, it is crystal clear that leading Democrats politicos held enormous sway over the woke peons at Twitter, and still do at other Big Tech social media companies. 

And, in clear violation of the First Amendment, and press freedom, these top Democrats use that power to pressure these companies to suspend and ban journalists and critics alike.

In the latest bombshell drop from Musk’s Twitter Files we learn that by 2020, Twitter was inundated with requests and demands from elements of the government to censor various personalities and narratives.

The most egregious example is that of Adam Schiff, his position as Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee gave him credibility to push false narratives, and then push Big Tech to censor any contrary views.

Significantly, Schiff’s office wanted Twitter to shut down one of the most effective journalists pushing back on his phony Russia collusion narrative.

Fox News reports:

Published Tuesday, the latest round of the Twitter Files – internal documents revealing how Twitter engaged in censorship and promoted disinformation in tandem with government agencies for the past few years – revealed that Schiff’s office asked Twitter to remove journalist Paul Sperry and others from the site. 

Taibbi, who published the Twitter Files post-by-post to Twitter at the behest of Musk, provided documentation showing that “the office for Democrat and House Intel Committee chief Adam Schiff” asked “Twitter to ban journalist Paul Sperry.”

The document Taibbi shared featured correspondence between the “House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee” – Schiff’s office – and Twitter, which included a request to “Suspend the many accounts, including @GregRubini and @paulsperry, which repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies and harassed [REDACTED].”

In the article [Schiff wanted banned], Sperry said then-CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella was overheard talking in the White House with Sean Misko, a holdover staffer from former President Barack Obama’s administration.

A former official who reportedly heard the conversation told Sperry, “Just days after [Trump] was sworn in they were already trying to get rid of him.”

Paul Sperry is a senior staff writer for RealClearInvestigations and has also penned pieces for the New York Post, the Federalist, and other publications.

RealClearInvestigations senior writer Mark Hemingway tweeted, “Of course, Sperry’s real crime was doing vital reporting exposing the mistruths about Russia collusion, a subject Schiff lied about for years.”

The New York Post explained:

Sperry’s reporting clearly showed the partisan motives behind the leaks, and how they were partly manufactured partisan CIA hacks to bring down the former president.

Schiff’s outrageous demands and pressures were solely intended to crush that news from ever being seen.

Thankfully, not all the Twits at Twitter were as easy to manipulate as others. 

In response to the last Schiff request, another unidentified Twitter employee wrote, “no, this isn’t feasible/we don’t do that.”

But the fact that Schiff and other partisan Democrats succeeded many other times is the real issue. 

It’s also a good reason to have Schiff not only removed from the intelligence committee as the new GOP leadership intends, but to also remove him from Congress entirely for gross abuse of power and other ethical breaches.

FBI Has Been Weaponized Against Americans by Politicized DOJ: Former Asst. Director

2
FBI Headquarters Washington DC [Photo Credit: I, Aude, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons]

ANALYSIS – As I have repeatedly written about, here, here, and here, the politicization at the higher levels of the FBI, and to degree at DHS (Department of Homeland Security), and other federal law enforcement agencies, is one of the gravest threats facing our Republic and our Constitutional liberties today.

The danger is widespread and involves the Bureau straying well into illegal domestic spying and censorship.

The possible crimes go from FBI collusion with Big Tech (Twitter, Facebook, et al,) to censor Americans who may criticize certain government-approved narratives, to creating an entire army of analysts, and agents exclusively devoted to pursuing a vaguely defined, virtually nonexistent, ‘domestic terror’ threat.

The latter being an aggressive pursuit many see as a thinly veiled attempt to target, coerce and silence conservatives simply.

It also extends to ignoring widespread violence against pro-life churches and nonprofits to using heavy-handed storm trooper tactics against unarmed peaceful pro-life protesters.

Much has been recently uncovered about the FBI collusion with Twitter, thanks to Elon Musk and his Twitter files. 

And the Bureau’s heavy-handed and tone-deaf response blaming any criticism of the FBI as coming from ‘conspiracy theorists’ spreading ‘misinformation,’ made them appear even more obtuse, and dangerous.

Some, including me, have called for thorough house cleaning at the Bureau, especially at the top where much of the rot appears to be concentrated.

As I have always said, the vast majority of the employees, analysts and field agents at the FBI are honorable, decent, American patriots.

But the same can no longer be said for much of the current leadership.

At the root of the problem is the FBI steadily giving up its traditional independence within the Department of Justice (DOJ), which has basically taken over the Bureau.

One way to start cleaning house is to create an independent commission modeled after the, yes – sometimes overzealous, 1970s Senate ‘Church Committee’ that uncovered abuses at the CIA, NSA, and FBI, to investigate the FBI again, and impose significant reforms.

And now we have another senior FBI official, ex-FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker, publicly saying the same thing.

The well-regarded Swecker retired as the assistant director for criminal investigations after 24 years at the FBI. 

Just the News reports that Swecker argues that the bureau’s problems start with the politicization of its ranks by the DOJ.

The news outlet adds:

“What I see is that it’s basically a wholesale takeover by the Department of Justice, which is filled with political appointees in every top position, and then by extension, right into the administration,” Swecker said in a wide-ranging interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

“You see DOJ people  and many of the top executive positions inside the FBI now — you see people that have made a career out of bouncing in and out of silk-stocking law firms between the Department of Justice and then these law firms. And I have to say they are incredibly liberal in their politics. And that has now sort of taken over the FBI, and they are inserting that ideology into their high-profile investigations.”

Just the News continues:

Swecker said the FBI’s involvement in labeling school parents “domestic terrorists,” and its “bare-knuckles” pursuit of Donald Trump contrasted with its “kid gloves cases” against Hillary Clinton, Andrew McCabe and Hunter Biden have not only shaken public trust but also the internal confidence of the FBI.

As the outlet noted, the FBI “has yielded the independence Congress gave it under the law and is now subservient to a group of liberal ideologues inside the Justice Department who have pressured agents to stray into unwarranted domestic spying and censorship.”

This is dangerously un-American and is one of the biggest threats to our Republic and our liberties. It’s time to really investigate and shake things up at the FBI.

Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.