Tariff Threat Working? Mexican Soldiers, Armed Police Blocking ‘Hundreds’ Of Migrants At Border
By Chris Menahan
President Donald Trump‘s threat to put tariffs on Mexico unless they stop aiding the illegal invasion of our southern border appears to already be producing fruit.
From Reuters:
Mexican soldiers, armed police and migration officials blocked hundreds of migrants after they crossed the border from Guatemala in a caravan into southern Mexico on Wednesday, and detained dozens of them, a witness from a migrant aid group and an official said.
The Mexican response in the border town of Metapa, which included dozens of soldiers, marked a toughening of the government’s efforts to curb the flow of mainly Central American migrants, said Salva Cruz, a coordinator with Fray Matias de Cordova.
“That many sailors and military police, yes, it’s new,” Cruz said, by WhatsApp, from Metapa, in the southern border state of Chiapas, where the vast majority of migrants from Central America cross into Mexico. […]
Migration officials detained 350 to 400 people, the official said, noting that federal police and agents from the National Guard were present. Mexico’s government recently created a militarized police force called the National Guard made up of soldiers and federal police.
As Tucker Carlson noted last night, Republicans are working feverishly to sabotage this effort.
Dems won’t let FOXNEWS host debate…
By Reid Wilson
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) said Wednesday it would not permit Fox News to host a presidential primary debate, citing an explosive story this week alleging deep ties between the conservative network and President Trump’s inner circle.
In a statement, DNC Chairman Tom Perez said he had held conversations with Fox News about potentially allowing the network to host a primary debate. But he said the story, published in The New Yorker, caused him to end conversations with the network.
“Recent reporting in The New Yorker on the inappropriate relationship between President Trump, his administration and FOX News has led me to conclude that the network is not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates. Therefore, FOX News will not serve as a media partner for the 2020 Democratic primary debates,” Perez said in the statement.
The Washington Post first reported the DNC’s decision to exclude Fox News.
The DNC has already announced they will hold as many as 12 debates during the primary contest, including six this year. The first debates are scheduled for June, on NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo, and July, hosted by CNN.
Fox News had been lobbying to get its own debate, and Perez had considered partnering with the conservative outlet.
In a statement, Fox News senior vice president and Managing Editor Bill Sammon said the network hoped the DNC would reconsider, citing the network’s journalists Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, “all of whom embody the ultimate journalistic integrity and professionalism.”
“They’re the best debate team in the business and they offer candidates an important opportunity to make their case to the largest TV news audience in America, which includes many persuadable voters,” Sammon said in an emailed statement.
“I believe that a key pathway to victory is to continue to expand our electorate and reach all voters. That is why I have made it a priority to talk to a broad array of potential media partners, including FOX News,” Perez said.
The New Yorker article, by correspondent Jane Mayer, detailed deep ties between Fox News and the Trump White House.
Former Fox executive Bill Shine is now the White House communications director, and Mayer reported on allegations that former Fox News chief Roger Ailes had given Trump a heads-up about potential questions he would face in a 2016 primary debate.
After leaving Fox News amidst a sexual harassment scandal, Ailes — who has since died — advised the Trump campaign.
Fox News has not hosted a Democratic presidential debate for several election cycles. In 2016, the DNC partnered with Fox News on a primary debate in San Francisco, though that event was later canceled.
— Updated at 1:44 p.m.
Illegal Alien Miguel Merecias-Lopez Charged with Making 10,000 Fake IDs in Oregon Lab – Sold Across the US
By Jim Hoft
Miguel Merecias-Lopez pleaded guilty of conspiracy to produce more than 10,000 fake IDs that were sold across America.
The fake document operation was operating in Woodburn, Oregon for ten years.
The Fraud Doc Ring communicated with customers using Facebook, email, Snapchat and in person, the plea deal states. The customers paid through PayPal.
Merecias-Lopez moved to Oregon in 2017. He will be deported after serving his time.
Oregon Live reported:
A Woodburn man pleaded guilty Tuesday to participating in a conspiracy that produced more than 10,000 fraudulent government identification cards, including driver’s licenses from Oregon and more than 25 other states, U.S. Social Security cards, false immigration records, birth certificates, marriage licenses and vehicle titles.
Miguel Merecias-Lopez, 24, and unidentified conspirators worked out of a secret photo lab in Woodburn, using digital cameras, computers, scanners, laminators and a high-resolution printer to produce bogus documents that they sold and distributed in Oregon and mailed across the United States, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Sax.
The investigation continues and other arrests are anticipated.
Merecias-Lopez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to produce fraudulent documents and possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine before U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon in Portland.
He joined the conspiracy in January 2017 after he arrived in the United States from Oaxaco, Mexico, Sax said. He’s responsible for creating at least 300 of the fraudulent documents, including permanent resident cards, Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, according to a plea agreement…
Merecias-Lopez, who is being held at the Columbia County Jail in St. Helens, will be sentenced on June 18. He isn’t a U.S. citizen and is expected to face deportation after serving his term, according to the plea agreement.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Chief of Staff Ran Slush Fund – Funneled Over $1 Million in Campaign Donations to His Own Companies
March 4, 2019
According to a complaint filed with the Federal Election Committee Monday (FEC), two PACs founded by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s top aide, Saikat Chakrabarti funneled over $ 1 million in political donations into two of his own private companies, reported the Washington Examiner.
So much for Ocasio-Cortez’s promise to reduce “dark money” in politics!
According to a complaint filed by government watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center, it appears Chakrabarti set up his two companies for the sole purpose of hiding how the donations were used.
The Washington Examiner reported:
The arrangement skirted reporting requirements and may have violated the $5,000 limit on contributions from federal PACs to candidates, according to the complaint filed by the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group.
Campaign finance attorneys described the arrangement as “really weird” and an indication “there’s something amiss.” They said there was no way of telling where the political donations went — meaning they could have been pocketed or used by the company to pay for off-the-books campaign operations.
PACs are required to disclose how and when funds are spent, including for expenditures like advertisements, fundraising emails, donations to candidates, and payments for events and to vendors.
The private companies to which Chakrabarti transferred the money from the PACs are not subject to these requirements.
The complaint names Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Saikat Chakrabarti and asks the FEC to investigate and audit the two PACs alleging they were engaged in “an elaborate scheme to avoid proper disclosure of campaign expenditures,” reported the Examiner.
“It appears Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her associates ran an off-the-books operation to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, thus violating the foundation of all campaign finance laws: transparency,” Director of National Legal Policy Center Tom Anderson said.
Chakrabarti founded the two PACs in question in 2016 and 2017.
Brand New Congress was founded in 2016 and Justice Democrats was founded in 2017 with the end goal of getting ultra progressive candidates elected to Congress — ultimately these two PACs helped radical Communist Ocasio-Cortez win a Congressional seat last November.
The Washington Examiner explains how Chakrabarti set up the PACs and his shell companies to move the money around in secret:
In 2016 and 2017, Chakrabarti’s PACs raised around $3.3 million for the project, primarily from small donors. During this time, the committees transferred over $1 million to two shell companies controlled by Chakrabarti with names similar to one of the PACs, Brand New Campaign LLC and Brand New Congress LLC, according to federal election filings.
A few weeks after starting the Brand New Congress PAC, Chakrabarti formed one of the companies, Brand New Campaign LLC, in Delaware, using a registered agent service and mailbox-only address.
Over the next seven months, as small-dollar political donations poured into the PAC from progressives across the country, the committee transferred over $200,000, 82 percent of the contributions, to the company Brand New Campaign LLC. The payments were for “strategic consulting,” according to federal election filings. They were sent to an apartment address listed for Chakrabarti in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan.
In 2017, Brand New Congress PAC transferred another $240,000 to Brand New Congress LLC, also for “strategic consulting.” Another PAC co-founded by Chakrabarti that year called “Justice Democrats” transferred an additional $605,000 to Brand New Congress LLC in 2017.
Bradley A. Smith, a former chairman of the FEC, said he has never seen such an arrangement. “It’s a really weird situation,” he said. “I see almost no way that you can do that without it being at least a reporting violation, quite likely a violation of the contribution limits. You might say from a campaign finance angle that the LLC was essentially operating as an unregistered committee.”
Recall, AOC’s Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti is a radical Communist and a huge fan of Indian political leader Subhas Chandra Bose who was an ally of Adolf Hitler and Imperial Japan.
Ocasio-Cortez was lambasted by conservative media after her boyfriend’s name appeared on the House directory list — many speculated she put her boyfriend on payroll like a good Socialist.
“Nice to see her adapting to the swamp so quickly,” writer Luke Thompson said after discovering AOC’s boyfriend was designated as House staff a few weeks ago.
CNN, Democratic Party accused of conspiring against Sanders with ‘stacked’ audience at Q&A event
CNN and the Democratic Party have been accused of trying to sabotage Bernie Sanders after the network masked the political affiliations of audience members who pelted the senator with questions during a town hall event.
The Vermont senator found himself bogged down in complicated policy issues – and apologies – after fielding questions from audience members whose political loyalties and possible ulterior motives were obscured by CNN. The eyebrow-raising oversight was first spotted by Paste Magazine, which accused CNN, in concert with the Democratic Party, of “stacking” the audience against Sanders by not being upfront about who was tasked with asking the senator questions.
For example, a young woman identified by CNN as a student at American University suggested that Sanders had turned a blind eye to his campaign’s alleged sexist behavior during the 2016 primaries, and asked what the democratic socialist would do to make women feel more included in his 2020 presidential bid. Curiously, the network failed to disclose that the student also happens to be an intern at a major DC lobbying firm – an odd coincidence considering her question was adapted from a Sanders-bashing talking point popular among corporate-friendly Democrats.
CNN was similarly tight-lipped about the backgrounds of other audience members selected to interrogate Sanders.
One audience member labeled as a “George Washington student” was later revealed to be an intern for a Democratic fundraising organization, the Katz Watson Group, and was previously a campaign fellow for ‘Hillary Clinton for America’.
Town hall moderator Wolf Blitzer introduced another audience member as a mother of two who is “active in the Maryland Democrat Party.” It turns out the innocuous mom was actually the chair of her county’s Democratic Central Committee.
CNN conceded that it should have been more transparent about its question-askers.
“Though we said at the beginning of the Town Hall that the audience was made up of Democrats and Independents, we should have more fully identified any political affiliations,” the network said in a statement.
Edward Hall, an economist and co-founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement, told RT that CNN’s deceptive identification practices were “par for the course” and part of a “long-running disease” in US politics, which uses in-fighting to protect corporate interests.
This isn’t the first time that CNN has given Sanders a raw deal. In one notable example, the network was taken to task for declaring Clinton the Democratic candidate even though, at the time, she lacked the required number of pledged delegates to clinch the nomination. Emails published by WikiLeaks famously revealed that CNN contributor Donna Brazile passed town hall debate questions to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 primary against the Vermont lawmaker.
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MCCABE: DOJ DISCUSSED REMOVING TRUMP…
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe says that after President Trump fired his boss, FBI Director James Comey, there were discussions within the Department of Justice about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
Last year, the New York Times reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein discussed recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment.
McCabe confirmed the report in a new interview with “60 Minutes” host Scott Pelley, who relayed what McCabe told him on “CBS This Morning” Thursday.
“There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment,” Pelley said.
In a statement released by the Justice Department, Rosenstein said McCabe’s account of a discussion of invoking the 25th amendment was “inaccurate and factually incorrect.”
Trump responded in a pair of tweets later Thursday morning.
The discussions occurred between the time of Comey’s firing in May of 2017 and the appointment eight days later of special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
According to the Times, Rosenstein also suggested that he secretly record Trump in the White House. Rosenstein disputed the account, and a Justice Department official said he made the remark sarcastically. But McCabe told Pelley that Rosenstein’s offer to wear a wire was made more than once and that he ultimately took it to the lawyers at the FBI to discuss.
McCabe, who was named acting director of the bureau after Comey’s firing, launched obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigations into whether Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey.
He told Pelley he did so in order to preserve the FBI’s Russian probe in case there was an effort by Trump to terminate it.
“I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion,” McCabe said. “That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”
McCabe’s comments come ahead of the release of his new book, “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump,” due out next week.
In an excerpt of the book published Thursday in the Atlantic, McCabe describes a phone call he received from Trump on his first full day on the job as acting director of the FBI. According to McCabe, Trump told him that he had “hundreds of messages from FBI people [saying] how happy they are that I fired [Comey].”
“You know — boy, it’s incredible, it’s such a great thing, people are really happy about the fact that the director’s gone, and it’s just remarkable what people are saying,” Trump said, according to McCabe. “Have you seen that? Are you seeing that, too?”
McCabe was eventually fired in March 2018, less than two days before he would have collected a full early pension for his FBI career.
“Andrew McCabe FIRED,” Trump tweeted on the day of McCabe’s dismissal. “A great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI – A great day for Democracy.”
Trump has since railed against McCabe dozens of times on Twitter. “He LIED! LIED! LIED! McCabe was totally controlled by Comey – McCabe is Comey!” he exclaimed last April. “No collusion, all made up by this den of thieves and lowlifes!”
DICTATOR! LEFTISTS FREAK OUT OVER PLAN TO DECLARE NATIONAL EMERGENCY TO BUILD WALL
Meltdown goes into overdrive
FEBRUARY 14, 2019
Anti-Trump leftists reacted with horror to the news that the president is about to declare a national emergency to build the wall, labeling Trump a “dictator”.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that Trump would be signing a spending bill to keep the government open but will also be “issuing a national emergency declaration at the same time,” which McConnell would support.
Within minutes, liberals adopted alarmist rhetoric, claiming that the decision proves their already held belief that Trump is a dictator.
Judd Legum tweeted that Trump had been forced to act like a “dictator” because he couldn’t get Mexico or Congress to pay for the wall.
Max Temkin, founder of Cards Against Humanity and former consultant for Barack Obama, compared the declaration to Hitler seizing power after the Reichstag fire.
“An executive declaring a national emergency to circumvent a legislative body is straight out of the dictator textbook. Don’t let anyone try to claim otherwise, because historically, this is how it’s worked,” commented journalist Kris M. Wernowsky.
Former Democratic Congressional candidate Dr. Dena Grayson followed suit.
Leftist heads on Twitter exploded.
“Trump’s ‘national emergency’ action is the stuff of a fascist dictator and should be opposed in every possible way. It is profoundly racist and un-American,” claimed one user.
“Egypt was under national emergency for 30 years. 8 years ago this week, the people rose up and removed their dictator. We don’t have to wait 30 years,” screeched another user.
“Welcome to the kingdom of Trump first dictator of America. We have got to get this clown out of office,” asserted another.
Trump’s emergency declaration is inevitably going to be tied up in court, meaning it will receive due process and thereby prove that Trump is not in fact a dictator.
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