Clinton-Appointed Federal Judge Gives Democrats Go-Ahead to Probe Trump’s Finances in Lawsuit

President Trump suffered a set back on Tuesday when he lost a bid to halt a lawsuit brought by over 200 rabid Congressional Democrats who are seeking a DC federal court to require that Trump get approval from lawmakers before he accepts any financial benefits from foreign governments, reported Bloomberg.

In other words, loser Democrat lawmakers, who couldn’t even run a successful lemonade stand, are targeting president Trump and accusing him of violating the very rarely litigated emoluments clause of the US Constitution by claiming his luxury hotels which are blocks from the White House is evidence Trump is receiving benefits.

The emoluments clause is a provision that bars US presidents from accepting gifts from foreign governments without permission from Congress first.

US District Judge Emmett Sullivan (the same judge assigned to General Flynn’s case), a Clinton appointee on Tuesday denied Trump’s request to stop the lawsuit.

The 2017 lawsuit against Trump was led by Stolen Valor fraud Senator Richard “Da Nang Dick” Blumenthal (D-CT).

Bloomberg reported:

In a pair of orders issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan denied Trump’s request to halt the lawsuit so he could immediately appeal Sullivan’s earlier refusals to dismiss the case. The decision means the 2017 lawsuit led by U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut can proceed.

In a separate order, the judge said lawmakers can begin collecting evidence to support their claims on June 28, but must wrap up that process by Sept. 27.

The president’s lawyers say money flows into his businesses legally. The judge has not yet made a final determination on that issue.

Noting the lawmakers told him they can quickly gather evidence and that both sides say final briefs can be submitted within six months, Sullivan ruled that Trump’s lawyers hadn’t met their burden of showing a mid-case appeal would significantly speed up resolution of the case.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/06/clinton-appointed-federal-judge-gives-democrats-go-ahead-to-probe-trumps-finances-in-lawsuit/

US Denies Iran Access To The United Nations To Present Their Evidence - US Briefed UN Alone

ECB To Italian Government: Your Gold Is Ours

As the squabbling over Italy's populist government's plans to blow out its budget deficit to finance an agenda of tax cuts and social spending (including a 'citizen's income' that's essentially UBI-lite) crowded the headlines, the issue of who owns the 2,451 metric tons of gold reserves held by the Bank of Italy has been quietly ignored - at least, outside of Italy.

But that might be about to change.

On Tuesday, the ECB asked the League, the dominant party in Italy's ruling coalition, to remove a reference to the Bank of Italy holding gold as an "exclusive title of deposit" according to Bloomberg.

Translation? If Italy is not allowed to have title to Italian gold, then Italy's gold now belongs to the ECB.

Today's escalation over Italy's gold "title" comes two months after the WSJ reported that Italy’s ruling populists pushed ahead with efforts to seize control of the central bank and its gold reserves. Complaining that hundreds of thousands of small individual investors lost billions of dollars after several Italian banks failed in recent years, the current Italian government depicted the central bank as a symbol of a technocratic elite aloof from the needs of ordinary Italians.

“We need a change of course at the Bank of Italy if we think about what happened in the last years,” said Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, leader of the 5 Star Movement.

Shortly thereafter, 5 Star lawmakers asked parliament to pass two draft laws.

One law would instruct the central bank’s owners, most of them private banks , to sell their shares to the Italian Treasury at prices from the 1930s.The other law would declare the Italian people to be the owners of the Bank of Italy’s reserve of 2451.8 metric tons of gold, worth around $102 billion at current prices.

"The gold belongs to the Italians, not to the bankers,” said Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy, a far-right opposition party that supports both bills. “We are ready to battle everywhere in Italy and to bring Italians to the streets if necessary."

So far there has been no fighting but if indeed Draghi just told Italy that its gold now belongs to the Frankfurt-based central bank we expect that to change (We discussed the proposed laws in more detail here).

Meanwhile, yesterday Italian BTP yields tumbled to their lowest level in a year as investors breathed a sigh of relief following reports that the European Commission would hold off on kick-starting an "excessive debt proceeding" - a process that would likely result in Italy becoming the first eurozone constituent to face a fine (potentially extending into the billions of euros) for violating the bloc's stringent fiscal rules.

According to reports, the EU was holding off to give the Italian government more time to try and come up with a compromise. Meanwhile, both the League and the Five Star Movement have trudged ahead with a plan to have the Italian Treasury and Bank of Italy issue mini-BOTs - bonds that ostensibly would help the Italian government settle overdue payments, but which critics have denounced as a parallel currency. ECB President Mario Draghi denounced the plan as a step toward launching a parallel currency.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-25/ecb-italian-government-your-gold-ours-now

Financial Blacklisting: Sleeping Giants and Soros-Backed Group Pressure Mastercard to Censor the Right

A coalition of far-left political activist organizations known for peddling smears about conservatives held a protest at Mastercard’s annual general meeting (AGM) today, aiming to pressure the international credit card giant to financially blacklist wider sections of the political right. The groups’ proposal to form a “human rights committee” did not sway shareholders, who voted the measure down.

At Mastercard’s AGM this morning, the far-left groups SumOfUs and Sleeping Giants circled the venue with a mobile billboard stating: “Putting hate groups out of business? #Priceless.”

According to a press release published by the two organizations, this was coupled with a speech from Sleeping Giants co-founder Nandini Jammi, “addressing the need for Mastercard to take swift action by cutting off its services to these hate groups.”

Sleeping Giants, whose founders initially refused to take accountability for the organization’s words and actions by remaining anonymous, was set up in 2016 by far-left political activists with the sole stated purpose of defunding Breitbart by spreading lies about it. The identity of its other founder, former advertising professional Matt Rivitz, was revealed last year.

Sleeping Giants coupled these smears with targeted social media harassment campaigns against corporations whose ads appeared on Breitbart News.

Over time, Sleeping Giants expanded its targets to encompass any conservative media with which its organizers politically disagree, including Fox News shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Daily Caller, Dennis Prager, and the Daily Wire.

SumOfUs is purportedly a “human rights” activist group that now campaigns to make speech with which it politically disagrees unprofitable. Its website lists a number of powerful left-wing foundations among its partners, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Tides Foundation, the Media Democracy Fund, and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation.

Earlier this year, SumOfUs presented a proposal to Mastercard’s shareholders, calling on the company to establish a “human rights committee” that would monitor payments to the “far right.” The protest aimed to pressure Mastercard to accept the proposal. Shareholders voted down the proposal this morning, despite the protest.

“Over the past few years, the rise of the far-right has wreaked havoc around the world, terrorizing and harming marginalized groups,” wrote SumOfUs in its press release.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/06/25/financial-blacklisting-sleeping-giants-and-soros-backed-group-pressure-mastercard-to-censor-the-right/

Senate Bill Aims at Tech Giant Accountability

WASHINGTON—Facebook, Google, and other big Silicon Valley digital firms would have to disclose the value of their customers’ personal data if a proposal introduced by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) becomes law.

The Warner/Hawley proposal—the Designing Accounting Safeguards to Help Broaden Oversight and Regulations on Data (DASHBOARD) Act—is the latest development in a growing movement in Congress to require more transparency and accountability of the most powerful internet and social media players.

The DASHBOARD proposal “will require data harvesting companies such as social media platforms to tell consumers and financial regulators exactly what data they are collecting from consumers, and how it is being leveraged by the platform for profit,” the senators said in a statement on June 24.

The proposal includes provisions that:

Require commercial data operators (defined as services with over 100 million monthly active users) to disclose types of data collected, as well as regularly provide users with an assessment of the value of that data.

Require commercial data operators to file an annual report on the aggregate value of user data they’ve collected, as well as contracts with third parties involving data collection.

Require commercial data operators to allow users to delete all, or individual fields, of data collected—and disclose to users all the ways in which their data is being used. This includes uses not directly related to the online service for which the data was originally collected.

Empower the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) to develop methodologies for calculating data value, while encouraging the agency to facilitate flexibility to enable businesses to adopt methodologies that reflect the different uses, sectors, and business models.

The proposal is especially significant coming from Warner, who made a fortune in the cellular telephone and technology industry before being elected to the Senate in 2008 after serving a term as Virginia’s governor.

The DASHBOARD initiative is also significant as the second such team effort by Warner and Hawley, who make an unlikely pair in some respects. Warner, 65, is a moderate liberal Democrat who is nearing the end of his second term in the Senate and is favored to win a third one in 2020.

The 39-year-old Hawley is a populist conservative Republican elected in 2018 to his first Senate term. He was Missouri’s attorney general before entering the Senate.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/senate-bill-aims-at-tech-giant-accountability_2978268.html

‘Google Is a Totalitarian Entity,’ ‘Way Beyond’ Monopoly

Google’s shaping of people’s attitudes and behaviors through its control of internet searches amounts to something “way beyond” a monopoly, determined Dr. Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. He joined Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak to discuss Project Veritas’ undercover investigation documenting Google executives’ stated commitment to avoid another “Trump situation.”

“What we have here is yet another confirmation of what I and some other people have been trying to warn the world about for years. Google has been amazing in just keeping to itself and never allowing anything to leak, but this is probably the fourth or fifth major leak [within the past year] of materials again confirming what we could call my worst fears about the company.”

“This has been happening for years,” said Esptein of Google’s manipulation of its services to advance left-wing and partisan Democrat politics. “This is happening now. This is happening every single day, and it’s not just happening in the U.S, which is why I’m speaking up, because politically, I’m closer to Google than I am to Breitbart. “

Epsitein continued, “I’m speaking up because this is happening now. This is not something they’re planning to do next year. This is something they’re doing right now. They’re training the algorithms to do this better and more effectively, more comprehensively. This is happening right this minute. This is happening today.”

“Google algorithms are having a dramatic impact on the thinking, behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, purchases, and voting preferences of two-and-a-half billion people, right now,” stated Epstein. “That’s the power they have. That’s the power they’re exercising.”

Google’s status is beyond that of a monopoly, explained Epstein.

“This is what a totalitarian regime does,” said Epstein of Google’s leveraging of its power in pursuit of political ends. “This is not a monopoly. A monopoly fixes prices. That’s not what this is. This is way beyond that. This is a repressive government. This is a totalitarian, authoritarian government that at this point rules much of the world.”

Epstein recalled, “I had calculated back in 2015 that Google’s search algorithm — even by that time — was determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world. This is because a lot of elections are very close, so it’s very easy to flip them.

Epstein went on, “Ninety-two percent of the searches in the world are conducted on Google’s search engine, and people trust the results they’re getting because [they believe] they’re getting them from an algorithm, and algorithms are objective and impartial. That shifts the opinion very rapidly and dramatically of people who are undecided.”

“Google is not a monopoly,” repeated Epstein. “Google is a totalitarian entity — a government-like entity — the likes of which the world has never seen, and no, I am not exaggerating. If anything, I am underplaying just how creepy this situation is.”

Epstein assessed the worldview of Google’s executives as politically messianic in its paving of the metaphorical road to hell with good intentions.

“The logic behind these creepy terms [such as “algorithmic unfairness”] is utopian,” stated Epstein. “In other words, these are people who see themselves as do-gooders. For the most part, I see them as do-gooders, also, because politically, I’m not a conservative. But the point is they see themselves as do-gooders. They see themselves as utopian, as people with a mission to create a better world.”

Epstein continued, “So they use language — the way they use the terms ‘fairness’ and ‘unfairness’ is so creepy — which on its surface looks really good, right? ‘Let’s have fairness in what we show people. Let’s have fairness in our algorithms.’ Except when you look more carefully, what they’re really saying is ‘Let’s promote one particular set of values. Let’s promote one particular political party. Let’s suppress material that contradicts the values that we hold and the politics we believe in.'”

“They’re hiding all that, which is a very simple straightforward political agenda,” added Espitein. They’re hiding that behind this very highfalutin utopian language. We’re here to make the world better.”

Epstein teased a forthcoming proposal of his which he said will “solve the Google problem.”

https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2019/06/25/robert-epstein-google-is-a-totalitarian-entity-way-beyond-monopoly/

Britain Signs £1 Trillion ‘Net Zero’ Carbon Suicide Note

As predicted, Theresa May’s lame-duck government has gone ahead and signed the £1 trillion suicide note committing the UK to ‘Net Zero’ decarbonisation by 2050.

Do any of the incompetent, virtue-signalling pillocks — both on the Government and Opposition benches — who signed this piece of magical unicorn fairytale tosh have any idea what £1 trillion looks like?

Here’s one helpful offering from the Global Warming Policy Foundation:

With that sum of money, it points out, you could pay the salaries of 314,000 NHS nurses for a century.

Another way of looking at it is this: if one second is one pound, then £1 trillion is the equivalent of a pound spent every second for 32,000 years.

Whichever way you look at it, £1 trillion is the kind of public expenditure you’d need to be out of your mind not sign off without very serious scrutiny.

After all, if you’re going to make a huge fuss about the bagatelle of £350 million on the side of a bus, then clearly you’re going to pay much, much more attention to a figure several orders of magnitude even than the £750 billion or so the government spends on health, education, defence, welfare, housing, foreign aid, and so on.

But yesterday our elected representatives in parliament — the people we rely on to ensure that the money taken from us in the form of taxation or borrowing or inflationary money printing is spent responsibly and wisely — gave it all of 90 minutes sketchy thought before deciding that £1 trillion was so trivial as not even to be deserving of any kind of cost-benefit analysis.

Let’s be clear on the facts, here.

Climate change — aka Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming — is #fakenews.

Even if it were not an imaginary problem cooked up for ideological reasons by activist scientists, shyster politicians, green campaigners and crony capitalists — there is no evidence whatsoever that it is within mankind’s ability to control the climate by reducing industrial CO2 output.

Furthermore, even if we were to believe the green loons, braindead politicians, and rent-seeking scum suckers from the renewables industry who claim that it is possible, such gestures are only going to make sense if all the world’s major economies follow suit. Countries that choose to ‘decarbonise’ their economies unilaterally will simply be committing suicide by burdening their own producers with unnecessary extra costs. And since China — by far the world’s biggest producer of CO2 – isn’t playing ball, nor is the U.S., nor is India, nor, we learn this week, is Japan –there is no chance on earth that this is going to happen.

Net Zero by 2050 is a hopeless aspiration.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/06/25/britain-signs-1-trillion-net-zero-carbon-suicide-note/

Media companies scramble after judge rules they are liable for Facebook comments

Major media companies and Facebook are scrambling to come to grips with a landmark ruling by an Australian judge that found publishers are legally responsible for pre-moderating comments on the social media site.

On Monday in the New South Wales supreme court judge Stephen Rothman found that commercial entities, including media companies, could be regarded as the publishers of comments made on Facebook, and as such had a responsibility to ensure defamatory remarks were not posted in the first place.

The judgment has potentially profound impacts on the way news organisations in Australia interact with the social media giant, and prompted immediate backlash from the country’s largest media companies.

“This ruling shows how far out of step Australia’s defamation laws are with other English-speaking democracies and highlights the urgent need for change,” News Corp Australia said in a statement following the ruling.

“It defies belief that media organisations are held responsible for comments made by other people on social media pages.

“It is ridiculous that the media company is held responsible while Facebook, which gives us no ability to turn off comments on its platform, bears no responsibility at all.”

https://governmentslaves.news/2019/06/25/media-companies-scramble-after-judge-rules-they-are-liable-for-facebook-comments/

This will only extend censorship WW

BEST team in Baltimore seizes 333 pounds of cocaine in container of beach chairs from China

BALTIMORE – A Border Enforcement Task Force (BEST) team in Baltimore comprised of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers seized 332 pounds of cocaine in the port of Baltimore June 18.

While conducting import trade enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers detected an anomaly during an x-ray scan of a container of beach chairs from China. Officers also observed that the original security seal lock was replaced with another lock. Officers discovered four large black duffel bags inside the container. The bags contained a combined 125 bricks of a white powdery substance that field-tested positive for cocaine.

The cocaine weighed about 151 kilograms, or about 333 pounds, and has a street value of about $10 million.

The container transited through Panama before arriving in Baltimore. It was destined to an address in Maryland.

No arrests have been made. HSI Baltimore has initiated an investigation.

“Because of the unique authorities and interagency expertise unified through BEST, HSI agents and CBP officers were able to quickly identify and interdict this significant amount of illicit narcotics,” said Cardell T. Morant, HSI Baltimore acting special agent in charge. “We will continue to disrupt any attempt to traffic illicit narcotics that pose a threat to our communities’ physical and economic health.”

“This seizure illustrates the complexities of Customs and Border Protection’s multi-faceted missions, from ensuring that imported goods comply with U.S. trade regulations to interdicting dangerous drugs that harm our communities,” said Casey Durst, CBP’s Director of Field Operations in Baltimore. “CBP officers remain vigilant at our nation’s ports of entry to significantly impact transnational criminal organizations that push dangerously unsafe consumer goods or dangerous drugs.”

CBP officers screen international travelers and cargoes and search for illicit narcotics, unreported currency, weapons, counterfeit consumer goods, prohibited agriculture, and other illicit products that could potentially harm the American public, U.S. businesses, and our nation’s safety and economic vitality.

The primary mission of BEST is to combat emerging and existing Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCO) by employing the full range of federal, state, local, tribal and international law enforcement authorities and resources in the fight to identify, investigate, disrupt and dismantle these organizations at every level of operation.

BEST special agents and task force officers investigate a wide range of criminal activity with a nexus to our land and sea borders, to include drug trafficking, arms trafficking, human trafficking and smuggling, gangs, money laundering and bulk cash smuggling, child exploitation, maritime smuggling, illicit tunnels and commercial fraud.

https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/best-team-baltimore-seizes-333-pounds-cocaine-container-beach-chairs-china#wcm-survey-target-id

Chinese coke????

ICE releases list of accused murderers, rapists protected under state's sanctuary law

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in the Pacific Northwest are taking the unusual step of criticizing Washington state’s new sanctuary state law and giving detailed examples of the danger they believe it presents to the public.

The office recently issued a press release which lists seven cases in which ICE requested detainers on criminal illegal aliens being held in local jails and those requests were ignored, many with tragic consequences.

According to ICE, Rosalio Ramos-Ramos was arrested last January for murder and dismembering his victim. It happened just months after Ramos was released from a Washington jail despite ICE’s request for an immigration detainer and notification of his pending release, neither of which were honored.

ICE also cites the case of Mexican national Martin Gallo-Gallardo, who was in a Clackamas County Oregon jail. The statement said jail officials ignored ICE’s request for an immigration detainer and notification of release. Gallardo was released and within months was re-arrested, this time for allegedly murdering his wife.

The most recent case involves Francisco Carranza-Ramirez, who was also in the U.S. illegally. He was convicted of raping a wheelchair-bound Seattle woman twice. He was sentenced to time served and released, under the judge’s order that he self-deport back to Mexico. King County Sheriff’s officials say he eventually did return to Mexico, but not before assaulting his victim a third time.

Meantime, Washington state just passed what some immigration advocates are calling the strongest sanctuary state law in the country. It forbids local jails and state prisons from honoring ICE immigration detainers and even prevents corrections officials from even letting ICE know about the pending release of a criminal illegal immigrant. The law also instructs the attorney general to draft new rules restricting ICE agents from making immigration arrests at courthouses and hospitals.

In signing the law, Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee reportedly said, “We will not be complicit in the Trump administration’s depraved efforts to break up hard-working immigrant and refugee families.”

Now, ICE’s Deputy Director of the Seattle Field Office, Bryan Wilcox, says the law is putting lives in jeopardy.

“I think we’ve sort of hit a critical mass and this statute that the state passed is one step too far,” said Wilcox in an interview with Fox News.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/ice-takes-on-washington-states-sanctuary-law-by-showing-dangers-of-ignoring-immigration-detainers

Justice News

https://www.justice.gov/news

>>6841738

More bait

Trying to set us up. We are a fighting unit but our weapons are words and facts not arms and violence.

Take your bitch ass out of here.

Merrill Lynch Caught Criminally Manipulating Precious Metals Market "Thousands Of Times" Over 6 Years

Remember when it was pure tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory to accuse one or more banks of aggressively, compulsively and systematically manipulating the precious metals - i.e., gold and silver - market? We do, after all we made the claim over and over, while demonstrating clearly just how said manipulation was taking place, often in real time.

Well, it's always good to be proven correct, even if it is years after the fact.

On Tuesday after the close, the CFTC announced that Merrill Lynch Commodities (MLCI), a global commodities trading business, agreed to pay $25 million to resolve the government’s investigation into a multi-year scheme by MLCI precious metals traders to mislead the market for precious metals futures contracts traded on the COMEX (Commodity Exchange Inc.). The announcement was made by Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and Assistant Director in Charge William F. Sweeney Jr. of the FBI’s New York Field Office. In other words, if the Merrill Lynch Commodities group was an individual, he would have gotten ye olde perp walk.

As MLCI itself admitted, beginning in 2008 and continuing through 2014, precious metals traders employed by MLCI schemed to deceive other market participants by injecting materially false and misleading information into the precious metals futures market.

They did so in the now traditional market manipulation way - by placing fraudulent orders for precious metals futures contracts that, at the time the traders placed the orders, they intended to cancel before execution. In doing so, the traders intended to “spoof” or manipulate the market by creating the false impression of increased supply or demand and, in turn, to fraudulently induce other market participants to buy and to sell futures contracts at quantities, prices and times that they otherwise likely would not have done so. Over the relevant period, the traders placed thousands of fraudulent orders.

Of course, since we are talking about a bank, and since banks are in charge of not only the DOJ, and virtually every other branch of government, not to mention the Fed, nobody will go to jail and MLCI entered into a non-prosecution agreement and agreed to pay a combined - and measly - $25 million in criminal fines, restitution and forfeiture of trading profits.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-25/merrill-lynch-caught-criminally-manipulating-precious-metals-market-thousands-times

The full non-prosecution agreement and attachments is below (pdf link)

https://www.scribd.com/document/414521078/Mlci-Npa-and-Attachments-Final-Mlci-Bac-Doj-Executed-0#from_embed

Corrupt gov gives corrupt corp a pass

Once again, the US justice department treats pedophile Jeffrey Epstein like a saint

You would almost think that billionaire serial sex-abuser of children and former pal of Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, has some kind of secret leverage that keeps him from being brought to justice for his sickening crimes. From the Miami Herald:

Suspected sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was handed another break by the Department of Justice on Monday when federal prosecutors rejected his victims’ efforts to throw out his plea deal and prosecute him for abusing dozens of underage girls.

In the 35-page motion, filed in federal court in the Northern District of Georgia, federal prosecutors said that there is no legal basis to invalidate Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement — and they warned the federal judge in the case against doing the same.

U.S. Attorney Byung “B.J.” Pak said that because Congress did not outline specific penalties in the Crime Victims’ Rights Act when it was created by Congress, Epstein’s victims have no right to demand anything from the government — not even an apology. A federal judge ruled earlier this year that the plea deal violated that legislation.

In the video below, you can see a rogue’s galleries of awful people who helped Epstein in his quest to sexually abuse girls and to protect him from paying for his crimes:

https://governmentslaves.news/2019/06/25/once-again-the-us-justice-department-treats-pedophile-jeffrey-epstein-like-a-saint/