Tom Fitton: ‘Air Pelosi’ – What you don’t know about the lucrative travel our leaders enjoy on your dime

When President Trump denied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi use of a military aircraft for a CODEL (congressional delegation trip) to Afghanistan recently, he called the public’s attention to wasteful taxpayer-funded congressional travel.

In his letter to Pelosi blocking the trip, President Trump mentioned the 800,000 federal workers going without pay. The real irony is that U.S. government workers in Afghanistan, who were among those not being paid, worked for two weeks to plan the trip – and on a holiday weekend.

We at Judicial Watch were not at all surprised by this foolishness. For years we have been exposing the lucrative travel our leaders enjoy at taxpayer expense.

We have long noted Pelosi’s abuse of the perks of public office that granted her access to luxury military travel. This current expedition is hardly new for her.

In 2009, during Pelosi’s first speakership, we uncovered documents from the Department of Defense detailing her multiple requests for military air travel. The documents included internal DOD email correspondence detailing attempts by DOD staff to accommodate Pelosi’s numerous requests for military escorts and military aircraft as well as the speaker’s last-minute cancellations and changes. https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-uncovers-documents-detailing-pelosis-repeated-requests-military-travel/

In response to a series of requests for military aircraft, one Defense Department official wrote, “Any chance of politely querying [Pelosi’s team] if they really intend to do all of these or are they just picking every weekend?… [T]here’s no need to block every weekend ‘just in case’…” The email also notes that Pelosi’s office had, “a history of canceling many of their past requests.”

One DOD official complained about the “hidden costs” associated with the speaker’s last-minute changes and cancellations. “We have … folks prepping the jets and crews driving in (not a short drive for some), cooking meals and preflighting the jets etc.”

https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/in-the-news/tom-fitton-air-pelosi-what-you-dont-know-about-the-lucrative-travel-our-leaders-enjoy-on-your-dime/

Judge orders NXIVM defendants – except Bronfman – to appear Monday to discuss Bronfman trust that pays their attorneys

oday, an order by Judge Nicholas Garaufis was entered into the docket in the case of the US v. Keith Raniere, Allison Mack, Nancy Salzman, Lauren Salzman, Kathy Russell and Clare Bronfman.

The judge’s order reads:

“The parties are DIRECTED to appear for a status conference before the undersigned on January 28, 2019, at 11:00 A.M. in Courtroom 4D South to discuss issues concerning the irrevocable trust (the “Trust”) that is paying the legal fees of all Defendants (except Clare Bronfman) and certain witnesses.

“All Defendants are required to attend. In particular, the court plans to address issues it has identified in its review of the Trust’s indenture and the declaration that Defendants submitted in response to the court’s 266 January 9, 2019 order. The court will schedule the anticipated Curcio hearings at a later date. Ordered by Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis on 1/23/2019. (Haddad, Andrew) (Entered: 01/23/2019)”.

So it begins.

Judge Garaufis has reviewed the trust, and is pulling back the covers on who is putting money into the trust; how much money is left in the trust – and whether that is sufficient to pay for the attorneys for Raniere, the Salzmans, Mack and Russell through the trial; who is benefited by the trust; and, most importantly, what conflicts arise or might arise out of a trust where one of six defendants – Clare Bronfman – is funding [partially or fully] through a trust – the defense of her five co-defendants.

The status conference will likely set the schedule for how to go forward, define the issues, and devise a road map of how get to the bottom of all these thorny issues.

Other than Bronfman, it is unlikely that any of the other defendants in the case have enough money to pay for their own attorneys. Thus, they are totally dependent on Clare and whoever else is funding the trust.

And trusts, like almost everything else, abide by the golden rule: She who has the gold, rules.

Is the trust serving to fund attorneys who have each client’s best interest at heart? Or is there a subtle, implied and unspoken “master plan” to save Bronfman and Raniere first and foremost? And let the others take the fall.

Or if not take the fall, to fight to the end in unison when the best interest of some is not to be in unison with Raniere and Bronfman.

Kathy Russell’s attorneys are now claiming she was set up by the prosecution, falsely induced to go before the grand jury as a witness, and then subsequently indicted.

https://frankreport.com/2019/01/23/judge-orders-nxivm-defendants-except-bronfman-to-appear-tuesday-to-discuss-bronfman-trust-that-pays-their-attorneys/

Pelosi: No Dem counteroffer on border security

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that House Democrats are not working behind the scenes to craft a counteroffer to President Trump’s border wall demands as a strategy for ending the history-making partial shutdown.

“That’s not true. That’s not true. That’s not true,” Pelosi said during a press briefing in the Capitol.

Instead, the Speaker asserted that Democrats’ strategic blueprint remains unchanged: The House will continue to pass spending bills already authored and endorsed by Republicans, while insisting that Trump reopen the government as the prerequisite for bringing Democrats to the negotiating table on his border wall.

“We are doing what we have been doing all along: working on our congressional responsibility to write bills, appropriations bills, to keep government open,” she said.

The remarks arrive as Democratic leaders are expected to release their own plan to bolster border security, to include enhanced surveillance technologies and reinforcement of existing physical barriers — but no new wall construction.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Wednesday that the Democrats are prepared to match Trump’s figure of $5.7 billion for border security — with two stipulations: it can’t be used for new wall construction, and the negotiations must happen after the shutdown has ended.

"Using the figure that the president has put on the table, if his $5.7 billion is about border security then we see ourselves fulfilling that request, only doing what I like to call using a smart wall," Clyburn told reporters after a Democratic caucus meeting. "These are the types of things that we are going to be putting forward."

Pelosi on Thursday framed the Democrats’ emerging border security proposal — expected to be released as early as Thursday afternoon — as a standard part of the appropriations process.

“Many of those bills have come to the floor again and again, just this week. The Homeland Security Bill was not finished. Hopefully it will be finished soon, and out of that you will see our commitment to border security,” she said. “That’s not any negotiation behind the scenes, or anything like that.”

Pelosi declined to put a figure on the border security provisions to be included in the Department of Homeland Security bill, being spearheaded by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who heads the Homeland Security Committee. But she emphasized that it will come in addition to other border-related funding already included in House-passed bills to to fund other agencies with a hand in security, including the Treasury, Justice and State departments.

“Within our $49 billion Homeland Security bill there will be some provisions,” she said.

Pelosi’s remarks highlight the disagreement at the crux of the shutdown standoff: Democrats are insisting the government be reopened as a condition of negotiating on the border wall; Republicans are demanding negotiations on the border wall as a condition of reopening the government.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Wednesday that the Democrats “are prepared to spend a very substantial sum of money because we share the view that the borders need to be secure.”

But Hoyer, speaking for most Democrats, said there’s no “crisis” at the southern border, as Trump has insisted, and he amplified the party’s position that the Democrats will start negotiating new border security spending only after the government has been reopened, even if only temporarily.

“The letter is not a negotiation,” Hoyer said. “The letter is going to articulate what we believe is an effective investment to accomplish border security.”

Amid the standoff, Pelosi on Wednesday postponed Trump’s State of the Union address, initially scheduled for Jan. 29, citing the injustice of requiring federal law enforcement officials to secure the Capitol while they aren’t getting paid.

Trump late Wednesday acquiesced to the postponement.

“This is her prerogative,” he tweeted. “I will do the Address when the Shutdown is over.”

Pelosi on Thursday thanked Trump for assent, saying the fight over the speech was an unneeded distraction that’s “so unimportant in the lives of the American people.”

“Thank goodness we’ve put that matter to rest and that we can get on to the subject at hand: open up government, so we can negotiate how best to protect our borders,” she said.

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/426810-pelosi-no-dem-counter-offer-on-border-security

The Ruling Elites Love How Easily We’re Distracted and Turned Against Each Other

No wonder the ruling elites love how easily we’re distracted and divided against ourselves: it’s so easy to dominate a distracted, divided, blinded-by-propaganda and negative emotions populace.

Let’s say you’re one of the ruling elites operating the nation for the benefit of the oligarchy. What’s the best way to distract the populace from your self-serving dominance in a blatantly neofeudal system?

1. Provide modern-day versions of Bread and Circuses to distract the commoners from what actually matters: “the golden age of TV” and binge-watching; a cultural obsession with glorifying oneself via selfies posted on Facebook and Instagram; tweeting outrage and indignation on Twitter; a corporate-state media which magnifies insignificant events into social crises, political “leaders” who intentionally inflame polarization and conflict and so on.

Combine all these distracting circuses into one 24/7 system-overload, and what do you get? A populace so distracted, so stressed, so emotionally dazed that they are unable to focus on the predatory exploitation of the ruling elites, much less figure out how to change the neofeudal status quo.

1. Divide the populace with calculatedly divisive cultural issues and turn the commoner class against itself: with no middle ground and no shared class identity allowed, the populace is easily sliced and diced into angry, disaffected tribes who blame whomever media propaganda has targeted as “the other” for the nation’s woes.

Correspondent Jonathan Twombly recently posted a description of this divide-and-conquer strategy of the ruling elites:

I eschew conspiracy theories because I don’t feel humans are smart enough or cohesive enough to pull them off. Usually self-interested people pulling in the same direction create the conditions that some people view as conspiracies.

With that preface stated, it seems to me that Right and Left elites, who share the common goal of making the world work for themselves, and who do not have to live with the consequences of their policies, have co-opted non-elite people with cultural and social issues meant to distract them from what’s going on economically.

Right elites take the bread out of the non-elites mouths by coopting non-elites on the right with the circuses of religion and nationalism. At the same time, the left elites have done the same by coopting left non-elites with the circuses of political correctness, multiculturalism, etc.

None of these things – religion, nationalism, political correctness, multiculturalism, feminism, anti-racism, etc. – are necessarily bad in themselves, particularly in moderation. However, to distract people from having the economic wool pulled over their eyes, they need to be amped up into a public shouting match, which is what we see happening in media outlets controlled by, you guessed it, the elites.

https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/the-ruling-elites-love-how-easily-were-distracted-and-turned-against-each-other/

>>4889305

The judge knows the criminal corps and cartels are funding them, it wouldn't surprise me if the DS have worked a way to chip in via a few shell companies. Very interesting to say the least!

NewsGuard Rates Sites that Falsely Attacked Covington Kids as ‘Trustworthy’

NewsGuard, the news publication ranking extension run by establishment media figures along with former Clinton, Obama and Bush administration members, has rated a number of websites which wrongly attacked the students of Covington Catholic High School as “trustworthy.”

NewsGuard is a web browser extension app which has recently become a default extension in Microsoft’s mobile edge browser. Advised by individuals such as Tom Ridge, the first Secretary of Homeland Security for the George W. Bush administration; Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time magazine and Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy for the Obama administration; and Don Baer, the chairman of Burson, Cohn & Wolfe and former White House Communications Director for the Clinton administration; Newsguard aims to apply rankings of “trustworthiness” to individual news websites in an attempt to fight “fake news.”

In practice, NewsGuard creates a news blacklist primarily aimed at sites not favored by the establishment, including Breitbart News, the Daily Mail, and the Drudge Report.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/01/24/newsguard-rates-sites-that-falsely-attacked-covington-kids-as-trustworthy/

>>4889557

External abortion at 3000 weeks

Ilhan Omar Endorsed Somalia’s New President. Four Days Later, Omar’s Brother-in-Law Had a Powerful Job in His Administration

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) became the first Somali-American legislator in United States’ history when Minnesota’s House District 60B elected her on November 8, 2016. The distinction won Omar immediate fame and influence in Somalia, which was entering the final stretch of a critical presidential election of its own.

According to prominent federal security clearance defense attorney Sean Bigley (read below), Omar's documented actions in the weeks that followed would almost certainly prevent any applicant with such a background from obtaining or keeping a U.S. security clearance.

Ilhan Omar is now a U.S. congresswoman, however. Elected federal officials are exempted from the arduous security clearance process; they hold de facto clearances once sworn in to office. Further, Omar will likely be privy to a significant amount of classified national security information this term. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has granted Omar's request for a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

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“Corruption … affects virtually every aspect of the Somali society: from public officials’ misuse of public goods for private gain and the solicitation of bribes in exchange for basic services to the clan-based patronage networks used to obtain employment and political appointments.” – Transparency International, 2018

The common hyperbole for describing government corruption – “rampant,” or “endemic” – does not help adequately illustrate Somalia’s recent administrations. “As bad as it gets” does the job, literally: Transparency International, the massive NGO dedicated to exposing public-sector corruption, has placed Somalia dead-last among all nations on Earth in its annual “Corruption Perceptions Index” – for 11 consecutive years. Somalia has occasionally managed to tie, though never outrank, North Korea.

Any significant involvement by a U.S. citizen in Somalia's election process would likely raise eyebrows at America's intelligence agencies.

On December 20, 2016, just a few weeks after her election to Minnesota's state legislature, Ilhan Omar was in Mogadishu with then-President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, a favorite for re-election. He reportedly invited her to appear with him prior to the election taking place.

https://pjmedia.com/davidsteinberg/ilhan-omar-endorsed-somalias-new-president-four-days-later-omars-brother-in-law-had-a-powerful-job-in-his-administration/