Bail fund promoted by Kamala Harris won't share records of alleged criminals it sprung from jail

A bail fund promoted by Vice President-elect Kamala Harris that reportedly helped bail out several accused and convicted criminals — at least one with a markedly violent history — is refusing to share the records of the individuals it helped spring from jail in the midst of last year's deadly Black Lives Matter-led riots in Minnesota. In June 2020, as violent unrest swept the country in the wake of Minneapolis resident George Floyd's death at the hands of city police, Harris — then two months away from being chosen as Joe Biden's running mate — tweeted out a link to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which claims to "pa[y] criminal bail and immigration bonds for those who cannot otherwise afford to." If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota. https://t.co/t8LXowKIbw— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 1, 2020 Harris's support for the organization amid the riots last year was one of the factors that helped the Minnesota Freedom Fund realize a reported windfall of tens of millions of dollars, a gargantuan increase over the group's 2018 returns of around $100,000. Yet the bail fund was mired in controversy over the summer due to reports that it had helped spring from jail multiple alleged violent criminals, including at least one individual with multiple rape convictions on his rap sheet. A review by the Washington Post found that MFF helped bail out of jail one individual who allegedly shot at police officers during riots in Minnesota. Local Fox affiliate KMSP, meanwhile, found that among those who received bail money from the MFF were also "a woman accused of killing a friend [and] a twice convicted sex offender."

Official bail records hard to locate Yet a full accounting of the individuals bailed out by the fund last year was not available as of press time. A representative of the Minnesota Freedom Fund told Just the News via email this week that the records of those it has helped bail out "are available via the Hennepin and Ramsey County jail rosters." The group did not respond to repeated inquiries asking if it kept those records in its own files. The records within the jail rosters, meanwhile, are not easily accessible. Tom Lyden, a reporter with KMSP who originally broke that station's coverage of the controversies surrounding the bail fund, said that the documentation "is difficult to find and it is not available online." "You must go through items in the file, which you can only do at a live terminal," he said.

"In the rundown of court filings, it is usually listed as an 'Other,' along with many other items, so you have to go into each file to find it," Lyden said. "If there is such a document," he added. "In some cases, the defendant may get to keep the money, and in other cases I've been told it wasn't necessary. So, the [request form] is one indicator, but not the only one." Lyden said that, in the course of the station's investigations, the fund "confirmed a couple of the cases we suspected they were involved with, but could not find the necessary documentation." The group's unwillingness to provide records of whom it helps bail out of prison, coupled with the remoteness and relative inaccessibility of those records within local jail files, has rendered opaque a critical accountability metric at a time when the U.S. is grappling with the effects of politically inspired violence. Apart from the accused criminals it has sprung from prison, the Minnesota Freedom Fund last year was embroiled in additional, albeit comparatively minor, scandal in which its executive director, Tonja Honsey, was accused of impersonating a Native American woman. The group was founded in 2016 by University of Minnesota student Simon Cecil. The group's tight resources originally limited it to cash bails below $1,000. Last year, in the case of the individual accused of shooting at the police, it was able to afford a $75,000 bail charge.

https://justthenews.com/nation/crime/bail-fund-promoted-kamala-harris-allegedly-sprung-violent-criminals-wont-share-records

https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1267555018128965643

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/kdh-social-minnesota-freedom-fund

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/821214607/201911359349204476/IRS990EZ

https://www.startribune.com/university-of-minnesota-student-takes-on-injustices-in-the-bail-system/418289153/

Trump declassifying trove of FBI memos exposing Steele's motivations, ties to impeachment witness

Delivering in his final days on one of his last unfulfilled promises, President Trump is declassifying a massive trove of FBI documents showing the Russia collusion story was leaked in the final weeks of the 2016 election in an effort to counteract Hillary Clinton's email scandal. The memos to be released as early as Friday include FBI interviews and human source evaluation reports for two of the main informants in the Russia case, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and academic Stefan Halper. The president authorized the release of a foot-high stack of internal FBI and DOJ documents that detail significant flaws in the investigation and provide a detailed timeline of when the FBI first realized the Steele dossier was problematic, multiple government officials told Just the News. Among the bombshell revelations is an admission by Steele that he violated his confidential human source agreement with the FBI and leaked information from his dossier to the news media in the final weeks of the election because he wanted to counteract new revelations in the Hillary Clinton email scandal that were hurting her election efforts. The former foreign intelligence officer made the confession in a fall 2017 interview with agents.

Steele, who was hired by Clinton's campaign law firm to compile anti-Trump dossiers attempting to link Trump to Russian influence, told agents he had two clients at the time — Clinton and the FBI — and chose the interests of the Democratic candidate over the bureau in leaking. Steele told the bureau that then-FBI Director James Comey's decision to reopen the Clinton email probe in fall 2016 triggered him to leak his dossier details in what he described as a taking-the-gloves-off moment. The FBI interview summary makes clear that Steele, a British citizen, was allegiant to Clinton, did not like Trump and believed a Trump presidency would be negative for his homeland and thus made a decision to meddle in the U.S. election by leaking information to the news media. The leaks, which led to Steele's termination as an FBI informant, have been known for more than a year, but his motivation for leaking was hidden in the classified documents. His admission that the Russia collusion narrative, later debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, was injected into the public as a means of counteracting Clinton's email scandal corroborates other information obtained by the CIA.

Late last year, the Trump administration declassified evidence showing the CIA warned President Obama and the FBI that it had intercepted intelligence indicating Hillary Clinton had personally ordered up an operation to "vilify" Trump with a false story of collusion as a means of distracting from the negative publicity of her email scandal. Multiple investigations have concluded that much of Steele's dossier was debunked or never corroborated by the FBI and likely contained Russian disinformation planted with his sources. The probes found the FBI wrongly continued to rely on the allegations of Russia collusion to target Trump campaign figures for investigation and failed to disclose major flaws in their investigations to the courts that had authorized surveillance warrants. The investigation also found that Steele's primary source of Russian intel later disowned or distanced himself from the claims attributed to him in the Steele dossier and that U.S. intelligence had concerns the source was tied to Russian intelligence. The soon-to-be-released records also expose a tantalizing connection between Steele, his primary source and one of the Democrats' key impeachment witnesses in the Ukraine scandal, former Trump National Security Council Russia expert Fiona Hill. Steele divulged to the FBI that he was introduced by Hill to his primary sub-source of information for his anti-Trump dossier and that he later told Hill that the source had provided information for his now infamous memos. The documents also will settle a long-debated question in Washington about whether the FBI's tactics amounted to spying on the Trump campaign.

Tasking instructions the FBI gave to Halper, an academic who long worked as an FBI informant, make clear he was instructed to infiltrate the Trump campaign by posing as someone who wanted to work for the GOP nominee and then targeting campaign advisers to find out what they knew about Trump or his campaign's ties to Russia. Halper was specifically instructed by the FBI to focus on campaign advisers Sam Clovis, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, in some cases recording some of their conversations, the records are expected to show.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/trump-declassifying-tranche-fbi-memos-exposing-steeles#article

Debunked: There's no evidence of a planned 'huge uprising' of pro-Trump ‘armed protests’ in all 50 states

The FBI and news media is exaggerating and playing politics.

In the wake of the Capitol Hill melee last week, the news media has been breathlessly reporting on the possibility — citing an intelligence bulletin from the FBI — that there will be widespread armed protests in all 50 states on and leading up to Inauguration Day. If the FBI is to be believed, there is a serious, deliverable plot in motion that involves armed insurrectionists simultaneously storming each and every state capitol. The hysteria has reached new heights this week, with prominent pundits, politicians, reporters, and other personalities claiming that a wave of pro-Trump right wing violence is right around the corner. Security is being ramped up in capital cities across America, with many states announcing that they are bringing in National Guard units to prepare for the chaos that they’ve been told will meet them on or before the 20th.

The FBI, which has not gone on the record publicly to speak about this potential massive national security issue, has decided to communicate it to the public by leaking this bulletin to select individuals in the news media. As shown above, it has been the source for blaring, intense headlines across the legacy media landscape. The details within this “internal FBI bulletin” have now been shared by a variety of news sites such as CNN, Yahoo News, ABC News and other establishment outlets.

CNN reports on the FBI intel report: The FBI has received information indicating "armed protests" are being planned at all 50 state capitols and the US Capitol in Washington, DC in the days leading up to President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20.

ABC reported on the memo: Starting this week and running through at least Inauguration Day, armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols and at the U.S. Capitol.

Yahoo News reported: The [FBI] had been made aware of armed groups “storming” local, state, and federal courthouses and buildings if President Donald Trump is removed from office before Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20.

After digging deeper into these claims, I found that they are not only incredibly exaggerated and don’t hold up to much scrutiny, but even more disturbingly, seem to be part of an information operation similar to what has embroiled the FBI in many controversies over the past several years. The reported group behind these planned protests is the Boogaloo movement, which can be understood as a loosely connected contingent of activists, some of which have extremist viewpoints across the political spectrum. Unlike, say, the far-left Antifa organization, the Boogaloo movement has never shown the capacity to organize in every state. There is hardly anything “pro-Trump” about the organization, whose supporters routinely mock the president and his supporters. In fact, the group’s website (which I will not link to in order to protect this platform) claims that its supporters will display “much more restraint and professionalism than the Trumpers in DC.” The FBI bulletin’s evidence for the mass mobilization campaign is unknown, but it appears to be sourced to this flyer, which is on the Boogaloo aggregator website. There hasn’t been a single additional right-of-center group that I am aware of that has announced that they will participate in these “armed marches.” It seems that this claimed “threat” is exclusive to the Boogaloo movement. What also remains completely unreported is that the group itself appears to have canceled the D.C. rally. “Plans to have a demonstration in Washington DC are cancelled and will not move forward,” a memo posted Sunday on the website reads. It’s difficult to estimate the exact number of supporters for the Boogaloo movement. Its main Facebook page, which has since been shut down, had accumulated around 30,000 followers. Additionally, Facebook has removed hundreds, not thousands, of accounts associated with the group on their platform.

https://jordanschachtel.substack.com/p/debunked-theres-no-evidence-of-a