U.S. Repatriates over $311.7 Million in Assets to the Nigerian People that were Stolen by Former Nigerian Dictator and His Associates
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-repatriates-over-3117-million-assets-nigerian-people-were-stolen-former-nigerian-dictator
Rep. Jordan Calls On FBI Director To Explain Actions In Michael Flynn Counterintelligence Probe
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, wants FBI Director Christopher Wray to review the bureau’s investigation into whether former national security adviser Michael Flynn acted as a Russian agent.
Jordan and Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, another Republican on the Judiciary panel, asked Wray in a Monday letter to produce all FBI documents that refer to “Crossfire Razor,” the FBI’s code name for Flynn.
“We write to request that you immediately review the actions of the FBI in targeting LTG Flynn,” the Republicans wrote to Wray.
They sent out the letter after revelations last week that the FBI determined by early 2017 that there was no evidence Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, worked as a Russian agent during President Donald Trump’s campaign. The bureau kept the investigation open, however, at the request of Peter Strzok, the former deputy chief of FBI counterintelligence.
Other documents released last week show that top FBI officials strategized before a Jan. 24, 2017, interview with Flynn at the White House.
“What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” reads a handwritten memo from Bill Priestap, who served as the FBI’s chief of counterintelligence.
Strzok and Joseph Pienkta, an FBI agent, interviewed Flynn at the White House that same day regarding his phone calls in December 2016 with Sergey Kislyak, who was at that time the Russian ambassador to the U.S.
https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/04/christopher-wray-fbi-michael-flynn-jim-jordan/
Republicans demand interviews with FBI's Priestap, Pientka after bombshell Michael Flynn revelations
Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Mike Johnson, R-La., on Monday demanded that FBI Director Christopher Wray provide a slew of information after last week's bombshell revelations in the case of former national security adviser Michael Flynn – and the lawmakers are specifically seeking to question a mysterious FBI agent, Joe Pientka, who participated in the January 2017 White House interview that led to Flynn's prosecution.
Fox News has previously determined that Pientka was also intimately involved in the probe of former Trump aide Carter Page, which the DOJ has since acknowledged was riddled with fundamental errors and premised on a discredited dossier that the bureau was told could be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Pientka was conspicuously removed from the FBI's website after Fox News contacted the FBI about his extensive role in Crossfire Hurricane Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) matters a change first noticed by Twitter user Techno Fog but sources say Pientka remains in a senior role at the agency's San Francisco field office.
The FBI, speaking to Fox News last December, asserted that reporting on Pientka's identity would potentially endanger his life and would serve no legitimate journalistic purpose. Republicans have previously sought to question Pientka, however, beginning in 2018. On Monday, the FBI declined to provide any additional comment.
Wray, earlier this year, suggested in testimony that several agents could be under internal investigation by the FBI.
“As for current employees, there are what I would call more line-level employees who were involved in some of the events in the report, all of those employees … were referred to our Office of Professional Responsibility, which is our disciplinary arm," Wray wrote. He did not elaborate.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-fbi-bill-priestap-joe-pientka-michael-flynn-revelations
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The FBI’s investigation of Flynn also included reaching out to a confidential human source (CHS) and an analysis of Flynn’s travel. The CHS informed the FBI of Flynn speaking at an event, which remained redacted. The CHS further stated that Flynn had dinner and drinks with those in attendance and took a cab and a train with an unidentified individual whose “father may be a Russian Oligarch.”
That may be a reference to Svetlana Lokhova, a Russian academic and author who has disputed any ties to Russian intelligence and has defended her brief interactions with Flynn, including in interviews with Fox News. It appears the FBI found no concern for any of Flynn’s ties to Lokhova.
Based on the lack of derogatory information, the Washington Field Office concluded that Flynn “was no longer a viable candidate as part of the larger CROSSFIRE HURRICANE umbrella case.”
Furthermore, the author of the memo noted that Flynn was not specifically “named as an agent of a foreign power by the original CROSSFIRE HURRICANE predicated reporting” and discussed the absence of derogatory information or leads. He also wrote that at the “direction of FBI management, [Flynn] was not interviewed as part of the case closing procedure.”
Cont. from images:
Other questions remained as to why the documents were only surfacing this week. The Justice Department turned over the new exculpatory documents on Wednesday and Thursday, even though a February 2018 standing order in the case from United States District Court for the District of Columbia Emmet Sullivan required the government to turn over any exculpatory materials in its possession that pertained to Flynn.
LISA PAGE SUES GOVERNMENT FOR THERAPY BILLS AFTER TRUMP MOCKS HER
Flynn has sought to withdraw his guilty plea and has been seeking exoneration, saying the FBI engaged in "egregious misconduct." Flynn, who has said more recently that he did not lie to the FBI, pleaded guilty in late 2017 as mounting legal fees pushed him to sell his home.
Prosecutors have suggested Flynn's guilty plea allowed him to escape liability for a possible charge under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), another little-known and once-rarely used law, for his alleged work in Turkey.
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“For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.”
—2 Timothy 1:7
“Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.”
—Deuteronomy 31:6
“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
—Psalm 23:4
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To him belongs eternal praise.”
—Psalm 111:10
House Republicans Send Letter to Wray Demanding All Documents on Operation Against Flynn, Provide FBI’s Bill Priestap and Joe Pientka For Interviews
https://republicans-judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2020-05-04-JDJ-Johnson-to-Wray-re-Flynn.pdf
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Pulitzer Prize to New York Times Essay Falsely Claiming American Revolution Was Fought to Preserve Slavery
The 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary was awarded Monday to Nikole Hannah-Jones for an essay in the New York Times that falsely claimed the American Revolution was fought primarily to protect slavery.
The essay, titled “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true,” launched the Times‘ controversial 1619 project.
The essay incorrectly claimed that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776 (signing began weeks later, on August 2).
However, the far more egregious error was Hannah-Jones’s claim about the cause for which the Revolution was fought. She wrote: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
That passage, which appeared in the original text, has since been updated to include the word “some” (emphasis added): “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.”
Historians were outraged by Hannah-Jones’s false claim. One of them, Northwestern University Professor Leslie Harris, was enthusiastic about the 1619 Project, but furious about the inaccurate claim. Harris recalled in Politico:
On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.
…
I vigorously disputed the claim. Although slavery was certainly an issue in the American Revolution, the protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.
…
Overall, the 1619 Project is a much-needed corrective to the blindly celebratory histories that once dominated our understanding of the past—histories that wrongly suggested racism and slavery were not a central part of U.S. history. I was concerned that critics would use the overstated claim to discredit the entire undertaking. So far, that’s exactly what has happened.
The current version of Hannah-Jones’s essay preserves other controversial statements, such as the claim that “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” which repeats (almost verbatim) a claim then-President Barack Obama made in 2015 to National Public Radio that racism is “still part of our DNA.”
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2020/05/04/pulitzer-prize-to-new-york-times-essay-falsely-claiming-american-revolution-was-fought-to-preserve-slavery/
Netanyahu lashes out at top court, threatens new elections
The court is looking into whether a politician facing criminal corruption charges, such as Netanyahu, can form a new government; and whether his coalition deal with Gantz violated the law
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged the country’s Supreme Court on Monday not to interfere in his efforts to build a coalition government, threatening that a decision against him could drag the country toward an unprecedented fourth straight election in just over a year.
Netanyahu made his comments shortly after the court heard a second day of arguments in a series of legal challenges to the coalition deal.
The court’s rulings, expected by the end of the week, will dictate whether Israel breaks out of its prolonged political paralysis with Netanyahu and his former political rival Benny Gantz joining forces in government, or whether the country is plunged into another election.
The court is looking into two key questions: whether a politician facing criminal corruption charges, such as Netanyahu, can form a new government; and whether his coalition deal with Gantz violated the law.
Speaking to reporters following a briefing on coronavirus developments, Netanyahu pressed the court not to get involved in the country’s political affairs lest it risks forcing new elections.
“We hope the court doesn’t interfere. It doesn’t need to interfere. There is the will of the people, the clear expression of the will of the people,” Netanyahu said.
If a court ruling picks apart the coalition deal, it “increases the chances that we will be dragged to fourth elections, something that will be a catastrophe,” he said.
An unusually large panel of 11 justices, all wearing face masks and separated by plastic barriers, heard the case against the emerging coalition. Reflecting on the case’s importance, the court took the rare step of streaming the proceedings on its website and on national TV.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/rkXm3gCFI
Water-Splitting Module a Source of Perpetual Energy
Rice University researchers have created an efficient, low-cost device that splits water to produce hydrogen fuel.
The platform developed by the Brown School of Engineering lab of Rice materials scientist Jun Lou integrates catalytic electrodes and perovskite solar cells that, when triggered by sunlight, produce electricity. The current flows to the catalysts that turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a sunlight-to-hydrogen efficiency as high as 6.7%.
This sort of catalysis isn’t new, but the lab packaged a perovskite layer and the electrodes into a single module that, when dropped into water and placed in sunlight, produces hydrogen with no further input.
The platform introduced by Lou, lead author and Rice postdoctoral fellow Jia Liang and their colleagues in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano is a self-sustaining producer of fuel that, they say, should be simple to produce in bulk.
“The concept is broadly similar to an artificial leaf,” Lou said. “What we have is an integrated module that turns sunlight into electricity that drives an electrochemical reaction. It utilizes water and sunlight to get chemical fuels.”
Perovskites are crystals with cubelike lattices that are known to harvest light. The most efficient perovskite solar cells produced so far achieve an efficiency above 25%, but the materials are expensive and tend to be stressed by light, humidity and heat.
https://www.naturalblaze.com/2020/05/water-splitting-module-a-source-of-perpetual-energy.html