The Sam Brinton luggage saga seems to be never-ending…New details about the crime are coming to light and are sure to upset taxpayers…
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – One of the most common federal felony charges brought against January 6 Capitol ‘rioters’ is ‘obstruction of an official proceeding.’ I put ‘rioters’ in quotes, because many of those charged by the Biden Department of Justice (DoJ) never rioted.
While there were violent rioters who viciously attacked police, and I have repeatedly stated that they should absolutely go to jail (just like similar violent BLM rioters), some on Jan. 6 simply entered the Capitol, or otherwise just wandered the halls.
That’s where the ‘obstruction’ charge comes in. And it carries a maximum 20-year sentence.
And DoJ might yet even charge former president Donald Trump with obstruction for his purported role in allegedly inciting the riot. Trump has already been indicted on a different ‘obstruction of justice’ charge related to his classified documents case.
The Epoch Times (TET) reported:
…federal prosecutors have charged more than 300 Jan. 6 defendants with obstructing congressional proceedings. The obstruction charge has been frequently used by the Justice Department during plea negotiations and as a means to coerce some Jan. 6 protesters into providing information to incriminate fellow protesters.
Until recently, barring a general pardon by the next president of all non-violent Jan. 6 offenders – which I would strongly support – there was little hope for those hundreds of non-violent Americans caught up in the FBI’s draconian Jan. 6 dragnet.
But now, one Jan. 6 defendant, Edward Jacob Lang, is asking the Supreme Court to hear his challenge of the ‘obstruction of an official proceeding’ charge levelled against him. He still has 10 other charges pending, including assaulting a police officer, but that’s a separate issue.
Obstruction is one of the charges most abused by the DoJ.
As Just the News (JTN) reported on what was stated in Lang’s court filing:
The obstruction charge could be levied against “anyone who attends at a public demonstration gone awry,” attorneys for Lang wrote in an appeal to the Supreme Court last week. The proceeding for which the charge was brought refers to the event where Congress certifies the Electoral College votes to confirm the president.
The charge “is nothing less than the weaponization of the penal code to stifle dissent; it sets a terrifying precedent unworthy of this nation’s history,” Lang’s attorneys also wrote.
Meanwhile, Lang has been in jail for over two and a half years (900 days) without a trial. I doubt any violent BLM rioters who assaulted police have been locked up as long, if at all.
Where is the ACLU when real government abuse is taking place and violating Americans’ civil liberties?
Not here.
But who needs the ACLU when you have real legal warriors fighting for our civil rights. Lang’s attorney Norman Pattis told Newsweek that if they are successful in this case, the Supreme Court could overrule the cases of “hundreds of defendants.”
“The government misuse and abuse of the federal penal code in the [January 6] cases is shocking,” Pattis added.
As Newsweek reported:
The statute that Lang’s legal team is arguing has been too broadly applied in his case comes from a federal law that states an individual who “corruptly alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document” or “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so” can be imprisoned for up to 20 years.
Newsweek added:
In the petition to the Supreme Court, Lang’s team argues that the defendant did not satisfy the “corrupt” element and that various interpretations in lower courts have led to a “cacophonous result that leaves unsettled significant issues…”
It went on: “Our political life for centuries has been fractious, with violence all too frequent. Seeking to punish and silence dissent in the name of democracy is the twisted dream of a slumbering tyrant.”
The petition urged the justices to hear the case “as the nation’s attention turns to the 2024 election.” It argued that there is “good reason” to suspect the Justice Department’s use of the statute will “serve to chill political speech and expression on the eve of one of the most consequential events in American life – the election of the next President of the United States.”
Meanwhile, as ET reported, on June 7, 2022, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols granted Lang’s motion to dismiss (pdf) the obstruction charge.
The judge said that the statute “must be interpreted” in such a way that “requires that the defendant have taken some action with respect to a document, record, or other object in order to corruptly obstruct, impede or influence an official proceeding.”
In other words, if someone hasn’t been accused of taking such an action, they cannot be charged with this violation.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
On Monday, White House candidate Vivek Ramaswamy announced a list of candidates he would nominate to the Supreme Court if he were elected.
“President Biden’s focus on judicial appointments appeared to be on diversity of race & gender. While I drew from diverse experiences — current and former federal judges, a former Solicitor General, two U.S. Senators — my sole criterion was to select candidates with an unwavering commitment to an originalist understanding of the U.S. Constitution, who also understand the unique threats to liberty in the 21st century (including lurking state action),” Ramaswamy said in a statement.
The list, first reported by Axios, includes multiple federal appeals court judges, like Judge James Ho, a member of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who Trump suggested as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court prior to the 2020 presidential election.
Ramaswamy’s list also includes three other federal appeals court judges: Judge Lawrence VanDyke, Judge Lisa Branch, and Judge Thomas Hardiman.
The list is rounded out with three non-judges, including Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), both of whom also appeared at times on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlists.
Ramaswamy also included Paul Clement, a veteran Supreme Court advocate who served as U.S. solicitor general under the second Bush administration.
Republican White House contender Ron DeSantis says he is eyeing Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds as his potential pick for vice president.
DeSantis made the remarks after he touted the popular Iowa governor on Friday at a forum with Tucker Carlson. (RELATED: Tucker Carlson to Host GOP Presidential Forum – Without Trump)
“Governor, you have spent a lot of time with Governor Reynolds, you defended her after President Trump’s recent statements,” a reporter said to DeSantis at an event on Saturday. “Would you consider her as a potential vice presidential pick in this campaign?”
“Of course,” DeSantis responded. “I mean, she’s one of the top public servants in America, I thought the attacks on her were totally, totally out of hand, and totally unnecessary.”
“We should be thanking good Republican office holders,” he continued. “You know, we kind of joke about the Iowa-Florida [competition], sometimes they do things before us, sometimes we do. But honestly, I want them to do better than us because it’s healthy. When Republicans are doing well, I like that, I don’t get jealous of that, I want to see them do well.”
“And so they’ve done a great job and I think she’s been a model public servant and anybody who’s a Republican that’s trying to denigrate her I think is way off base on that,” he concluded.
ANALYSIS – In one of my earlier PDBs I asked if the Pentagon’s ‘Wokeness’ was a deliberate effort to keep straight, white Christian males from joining the military. Of course, I knew the answer was ‘yes.’
I even said, “this may be the left’s goal – to deliberately alienate [straight] white Christian men from joining, so they can expand efforts to recruit non-religious, non-white, woke LGBT lefties instead.”
But now Joe Biden’s Army Secretary, Christine Wormuth, a lefty civilian bureaucrat who never served a day in uniform, is saying the quiet part out loud. And she is going even farther. Much farther.
Wormuth doesn’t just want to alienate white Christian men, so they won’t join, she specifically wants to keep out recruits from what I call ‘patriot families’ – those who have a history of serving our country going back up to seven generations.
Most of these patriot family recruits would be white Christian men. Many of them are from the South.
Since the end of the draft in 1973 at the close of the Vietnam War, notes the Wall Street Journal, the Army has relied “heavily on veterans and military families to develop the next generation of recruits, especially in the region known in the military as the ‘Southern Smile,’ a curving region from the mid-Atlantic and down across the southern U.S.”
But we now also have multi-generational Hispanic service members and a few others. The children of all these military families make up most new recruits in the U.S. military.
The Journal added:
Today, nearly 80% of all new Army recruits have a family member who has served in uniform, according to the service. That can be a good thing, said Col. Mark Crow, director of the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis at West Point, because “people who know the most about it stick around.”
But to the far-left Democrats, including Wormuth, all these patriots are dangerous and must be purged from our fighting forces. That’s what the Pentagon’s wokeness is really about.
As the Wall Street Journal reported:
Depending too much on military families could create a “warrior caste,” Wormuth said. Her plans seek to draw in people who have no real connection to the military and to broaden the appeal of service.
What does that nonsense mean in real terms?
Well, Daniel Greenfield says it very well in Frontpage Magazine:
There is a ‘warrior caste’ insofar as you have families who have fought for this country since the War of Independence. They showed up, they bled, and now they’re to be replaced by drag queens and identity politics quotas.
And Wormuth’s radical plan to replace our ‘warrior caste’ is being finalized.
According to the WSJ, “Wormuth said she expects within weeks to begin drafting a proposal for a recruiting overhaul so sweeping that Congress might need to pass legislation to enact all of it.”
While not going into details, Wormuth has stated that: “The Army is strategically deploying recruiters to communities across the country based on demographics, ethnicity, race, and gender.”
How does this translate into policy?
Greenfield writes in another Frontpage piece that: “Rather than getting the best people or even adequately qualified people, the goal is to match the force to the census data in a completely senseless exercise so that the people they do get are 20% black, 7.2% Asian, and 0.6% American Indian, or develop a plan to get those Asians.”
He adds:
That’s what deciding that the military should “look like America” really means in the ranks. You can’t have too many white men, but too many black men could also become a problem. If the goal is to match the census, then you can’t have too few minorities or too many. Come on in Jiang, we haven’t met our Chinese quota yet, sorry Jose, we have too many Hispanics already.
But as the Pentagon’s annual June ‘Pride’ festivities highlight, it’s not just about racial quotas, it’s also about sexual identity politics. Greenfield concludes:
Who needs a few good men when you can have a few good trans-men of color? And who cares if they speak English? No Habla Ingles? No problemo! Having HIV is not a problem. Being from an enemy nation is not a problem. Being a man who believes he’s a woman is not a problem.
Being white, especially a heterosexual male, is a very big problem. We need a military that looks like America and white heterosexual men look nothing like America.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
A fight for the ages…
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said he would fight former President Trump and said if the two former allies were facing off in a match, “I’d kick his ass.”
“Come on. The guy’s 78 years old. I’d kick his ass,” Christie told Piers Morgan in an interview that aired Thursday, when asked who would win in a head-to-head fight.
“Look, I’ll fight Donald Trump anywhere he wants, in any arena he wants – whether it’s on the debate stage or in the Octagon,” Christie later added.
The fighting match rhetoric comes as some high-profile figures have claimed on social media and elsewhere that they were prepared to fight their chief rivals.
Twitter owner Elon Musk claimed he would be “up for a cage fight” against Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who, in turn, tweeted “send me the location.”
Christie has been a vocal opponent of Trump for years but has recently become especially outspoken against his latest campaign for the White House.
ANALYSIS – First, let’s be clear. I was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as a security contractor for a foreign TV news crew. I witnessed the chaos firsthand and was not happy about it.
I strongly condemned those who violently rioted there in an article the very next day.
In my piece, I even said they should go to jail, just like any other violent rioters.
And they should. But Joe Biden’s DoJ isn’t content with ‘hard time’ for some of these rioters. They want a much longer time.
To also be clear, at the Capitol that day I saw tens of thousands of peaceful protesters before the riot. And saw many ‘rioters’ who weren’t violent.
Meanwhile, I have written about how many peaceful Jan. 6 protesters have been persecuted unfairly, and how harshly many violent rioters have been treated compared to equally violent Black Lives Matter (BLM) rioters.
Some of it is due to the Biden Department of Justice (DoJ) being hyper-political and overzealous, and part of it is the fact that these folks are getting tried and sentenced in the ‘People’s Republic of DC.’
When I first read of the case of Stewart Rhodes, head of the Oath Keepers, I thought he was one of the few who should get serious jail time. He and his gang were part of an organized, violent cadre that went to the Capitol to create violent chaos.
This is why they were charged and convicted of ‘seditious conspiracy’ – the only ones to be found guilty of that serious charge.
But when I heard he had gotten 18 years, I was floored. Child molesters get less time. Repeat violent offenders get less time. Even convicted spies sometimes get less time.
Eighteen years is a lot of time.
Even so, federal prosecutors are not satisfied with the severity of the jail terms delivered by the federal judge overseeing the case.
In the case of Rhodes, they wanted 25 years.
U.S. District Court Judge, and Barack Obama appointee, Amit Mehta sentenced Rhodes, and his colleagues, harshly due what he characterized as a dangerous criminal conspiracy aimed at violently derailing the transfer of presidential power.
But even if you believe these knuckleheads were intent on blocking the certification of the Electoral College vote, their chances of ‘derailing the transfer of presidential power’ two weeks later, on Jan 20, were little to none.
This is why Mehta’s sentences, while harsh, were still less than the prison terms prosecutors recommended and years below an agreed-upon “guidelines range” based upon their charges.
Of the others convicted of seditious conspiracy, Florida Oath Keeper leader Kelly Meggs received a 12-year term instead of the 21 DOJ wanted. Roberto Minuta of New York was sentenced to 4.5 years instead of 17. Joseph Hackett of Florida got a 3.5-year sentence; DOJ sought 12 years.
Ed Vallejo of Arizona was sentenced to 3-years, while DOJ wanted 17. And David Moerschel of Florida was sentenced to three years instead of the 10 DoJ wanted.
All of these are significant sentences in federal prison. A few might be deserved, but Biden’s DoJ isn’t happy with that. They want these folks to suffer even more.
If only DoJ was that zealous with other political crimes, and criminals, Hunter Biden might actually be in jail.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – Gal Luft, the ‘missing’ whistleblower responsible for exposing Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s China-related corruption, has been charged by the Biden Department of Justice (DoJ) for acting as an “unregistered agent of China.”
Luft is now hiding overseas. You really can’t make this stuff up.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer called Luft “very credible” as a whistleblower against the Bidens, but earlier alluded to him being ‘missing’ and not able to testify before his committee.
Federal prosecutors in New York also claimed Luft, a US-Israeli citizen who headed the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a U.S. think tank, was involved in arms trafficking and violated sanctions by brokering sales of Chinese-made weapons and Iranian oil to China.
The very same background that makes Luft credible is what Biden’s DoJ is using to prosecute him.
According to a DOJ press release:
[Gal Luft] engaged in multiple, serious criminal schemes. He subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. government official; he acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement.
Perhaps this is all true. Perhaps it’s not. But it sounds exactly like the kind of guy who would have real evidence of bribery and foreign influence peddling against the Bidens.
The bigger question is why indict him now?
The indictment was handed down by a grand jury in 2022 and yet only unsealed on Monday.
Well, last week, the New York Post published a 14 minute video of Luft stating that in 2019 he provided evidence to the DoJ and FBI on Hunter Biden’s shady international deals which made him a target of the Bidens. In the video, made in an undisclosed location, Luft said:
I, who volunteered to inform the US government about a potential security breach and about compromising information about a man vying to be the next president [Joe Biden], am now being hunted by the very same people who I informed [on] — and may have to live on the run for the rest of my life.
Luft claimed that both Hunter and Jim Biden, the president’s brother, received tens of thousands of dollars a month each from the state-controlled energy company China Energy Fund Committee (CEFC) to access the Biden’s FBI connections and use the family name to promote China’s global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
And now just days later, he is being prosecuted by the Biden’s for allegedly being in bed with China.
In last week’s video, Luft claimed to have provided this information to the FBI and DoJ during a March 2019 meeting in Brussels, but rather than pursue his claims, DoJ covered it up.
Then, he says, they went after him.
Luft was arrested in Cyprus in February this year but managed to flee after being released on bail. His arrest came after Interpol issued a warrant against him on suspicion of arms trafficking to Libya and China. In a tweet shortly afterwards, Luft claimed his arrest by Cypriot police was part of a ‘politically motivated extradition request’ by the United States.
He added that: “DOJ is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim & Hunter Biden.”
In his video Luft also claimed he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying before the House Oversight Committee that close Biden family members had been bribed by a source with ties to the Chinese military.
“He’s got a wealth of information. But they never followed up on that meeting. Instead, they arrested him in Cyprus to silence him,” Republican Senator Ron Johnson told Fox News, accusing the government of cover-up.
As Douglas Andrews writes in the Patriot Post:
[when] a low-level CIA analyst and holdover from the Obama administration begins plotting to have Donald Trump removed from office just two weeks into his term, Democrats are quick to protect his identity, laud him for his “patriotism” and his status as an “apolitical civil servant,” and promote his hearsay claims as the substance for impeaching a sitting president.
But if, on the other hand, as the New York Post reports, a credible firsthand witness to corruption is poised to testify to the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee that the Biden Crime Family “received payments from individuals with ties to Chinese military intelligence and that the Bidens had an FBI mole who shared classified information with their [Chinese] benefactors,” well, then the deep-state Democrats move to indict him.
If Donald Trump’s DoJ had criminally prosecuted whistleblowers against him, there would be outrage in every media outlet. But it is Biden, so they take his DoJ’s indictment at face value and allow Team Biden to discredit and silence the whistleblower.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
An Iowa state senator is turning his back on former President Donald Trump.
On Thursday, Jeff Reichman flipped his endorsement for president from Trump to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis after the former President lashed out at Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.
“Iowa Republicans must be united if we are going to take our country back and reverse Joe Biden’s failures,” Jeff Reichman, a first-term state senator, said in a statement. “Governor DeSantis has achieved the same type of commonsense policy victories in Florida as we have in Iowa under Governor Kim Reynolds, and he will deliver historic success for the conservative movement as president as well.”
In March, the first term Iowa state senator was listed among roughly a dozen Iowa officials who the Trump campaign rolled out as early endorsers of the former president.
Gov. Reynolds has said she would remain neutral in the 2024 process so all candidates feel welcome to campaign in the state.
Reynolds appeared last week alongside DeSantis’s wife, Casey DeSantis at the launch of her “Mamas for DeSantis” initiative for the Florida governor’s presidential campaign.
The Secret Service provided a shocking update about the mystery drugs found in the White House…
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
