The Chumph’s Private Thugs

Organized Chumph Thugs

Racist, Violent, Unpunished: A White Hate Group’s Campaign of Menace

They train to fight. They post their beatings online. And so far, they have little reason to fear the authorities.

It was about 10 a.m. on Aug. 12 when the melee erupted just north of Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia.

About two dozen white supremacists—many equipped with helmets and wooden shields—were battling with a handful of counter-protesters, most of them African American. One white man dove into the violence with particular zeal. Using his fists and feet, the man attacked one person after another.

The street fighter was in Virginia on that August morning for the “Unite the Right” rally, the largest public gathering of white supremacists in a generation, a chaotic and bloody event that would culminate, a few hours later, in the killing of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was there to protest the racist rally.

The violence in Charlottesville became national news. President Donald Trump’s response to it—he asserted there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the events that day—set off a wave of condemnations, from his allies as well as his critics.

But for many Americans, conservatives as well as liberals, there was shock and confusion at the sight of bands of white men bearing torches, chanting racist slogans and embracing the heroes of the Confederacy: Who were they? What are their numbers and aims?

There is, of course, no single answer. Some who were there that weekend in Charlottesville are hardened racists involved with long-running organizations like the League of the South. Many are fresh converts to white supremacist organizing, young people attracted to nativist and anti-Muslim ideas circulated on social media by leaders of the so-called alt-right, the newest branch of the white power movement. Some are paranoid characters thrilled to traffic in the symbols and coded language of vast global conspiracy theories. Others are sophisticated provocateurs who see the current political moment as a chance to push a “white agenda,” with angry positions on immigration, diversity and economic isolationism.

ProPublica spent weeks examining one distinctive group at the center of the violence in Charlottesville: an organization called the Rise Above Movement, one of whose members was the white man dispensing beatings near Emancipation Park Aug. 12.

The group, based in Southern California, claims more than 50 members and a singular purpose: physically attacking its ideological foes. RAM’s members spend weekends training in boxing and other martial arts, and they have boasted publicly of their violence during protests in Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley. Many of the altercations have been captured on video, and its members are not hard to spot.

Indeed, ProPublica has identified the group’s core members and interviewed one of its leaders at length. The man in the Charlottesville attacks—filmed by a documentary crew working with ProPublica—is 24-year-old Ben Daley, who runs a Southern California tree-trimming business.

Many of the organization’s core members, including Daley, have serious criminal histories, according to interviews and a review of court records. Before joining RAM, several members spent time in jail or state prison on serious felony charges including assault, robbery, and gun and knife offenses. Daley did seven days in jail for carrying a concealed snub-nosed revolver. Another RAM member served a prison term for stabbing a Latino man five times in a 2009 gang assault.

“Fundamentally, RAM operates like an alt-right street-fighting club,” said Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

Despite their prior records, and open boasting of current violence, RAM has seemingly drawn little notice from law enforcement. Four episodes of violence documented by ProPublica resulted in only a single arrest—and in that case prosecutors declined to go forward. Law enforcement officials in the four cities—Charlottesville, Huntington Beach, San Bernardino and Berkeley—either would not comment about RAM or said they had too little evidence or too few resources to seriously investigate the group’s members.

In Virginia, two months after the deadly events in Charlottesville, Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the Virginia State Police, would not say if the police had identified RAM as a dangerous group.

“We’re not going to be releasing the names of the groups that we believe were present that day in Charlottesville,” she said. Investigators, she added, are still “reviewing footage” from the event.

Law enforcement has a mixed record when it comes to anticipating and confronting the challenge of white supremacist violence.

Often working undercover at great personal risk, federal investigators have successfully disrupted dozens of racist terror attacks. In the last year, agents have captured three Kansas men planning to bomb a mosque and an apartment complex inhabited largely by Somali immigrants, arrested a white supremacist in South Carolina as he plotted a “big scale” attack, and investigated a neo-Nazi cell that allegedly intended to blow up a nuclear power plant.

But there have also been failures. During the past five years, white supremacists, some of them members of gangs or organized political groups, have murdered at least 22 people, according to the Global Terrorism Database and news reports. And some government insiders say the intelligence services and federal law enforcement agencies have largely shifted their attention away from far-right threats in the years since 9/11, choosing instead to focus heavily on Islamic radicals, who are seen by some to pose a more immediate danger.

State and local police have struggled to respond effectively to the recent resurgence in racist political organizing. Police in Sacramento were caught unprepared in June 2016 when neo-Nazis and anti-fascist counter-protesters, or “antifa,” armed with knives and improvised weapons, clashed outside the California State Capitol during a rally. Ten people were sent to the hospital with stab wounds….more…

 

Domestic Terrorism – Minnesota Mosque Bombing

If a Muslim threw a rock at an evangelical church, do you actually believe the white-wing press, from Faux News on down would be screaming “hate crime”?

They would be screaming Islamic Terrorism at the top of their hyperventilated lungs.

Knowing it is Session’s DOJ investigation surely warms the perps hearts.

Remember the pictures back during Katrina where the MSM described black people taking food and water from stores as “looting”, and white people doing the same thing as “foraging”?

 

 

The White-Right’s College Problem

Back when California resegregated their schools with Prop 209, the college population in California was nearly 85% white. Blacks and Hispanics made up about 8% of the student body.

That was apparently too much for the white-right racists. With the passing of the anti-black/Hispanic student bill which supposedly “saved” college spots for “qualified” white kids…

The University System started “High Stakes” testing as a tool of selecting students for admission.  The white population enrollment dropped to about 30%. At elite institutions like Berkeley the white student level dropped to 24%, while the school is now majority Asian (East and South).

Wow…That sure was successful in promoting unqualified white privilege.

So now we have “confederate Jeb Sessions” again trying to prevent schools from enrolling black and Hispanic students.

 

 

 

Lighting a Short Fuse – the Chumph Goes After the LGBQT Community

In a tweet more likely aimed at diverting the public’s attention away from Chumph crimes and failure to pass legislation, the punk-in-charge decides to take on the most powerful minority in America – the LGBQT community.

Bad move.

Out trots whipping boy Sessions to defend the Chumph’s attack on Transgender Military personnel and to try and overturn Civil Rights Law banning discrimination against the LGBQT community.

Trump Administration Argues Federal Civil Rights Law Does Not Protect Gay Employees

 

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not prohibit discrimination against gay and bisexual employees. The DOJ’s brief was not solicited by the court or any party to the case. Rather, in an unusual move, the Trump administration elected to weigh in with an aggressively anti-gay stance, arguing that gay Americans have no protection against workplace discrimination under federal law. Its decision is unsurprising in light of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ vigorous opposition to LGBTQ rights.

Title VII does not explicitly outlaw sexual orientation discrimination in employment. However, it does forbid “discrimination … because of sex.” which the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission interprets to encompass anti-gay discrimination. For at least 15 years, many federal courts have agreed, and in April, the 7^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Title VII does, indeed, protect gay employees. Both the 7^thCircuit and the EEOC relied on three theories of sex discrimination:

1. “But-for” sex discrimination

This theory holds that anti-gay discrimination qualifies as sex discrimination because, but for the gay person’s sex, she would not be discriminated against. Imagine, for example, that a homophobic employer fires a female worker because she marries a woman. But for that worker’s sex, she wouldn’t have been fired: Her boss has no issue with men marrying women, only women marrying women. The employee’s sex was fundamental to the discrimination she suffered—so it can therefore aptly be described as sex discrimination.

2. Sex stereotyping

The Supreme Court held in 1989’s Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins that sex stereotyping is a form of sex discrimination. Thus, when an employer mistreats a worker because she fails to conform to certain gender norms, it has engaged in discrimination “because of sex.” Initially, sex stereotyping was applied to masculine women and feminine men. But as the 7^th Circuit pointed out, gay people are “the ultimate case of failure to conform” to sex stereotypes, which, in America, have historically held that men should date only women and women should date only men. By intimately associating with people of the same sex, gay individuals violate this stereotype. And so, when they are discriminated against because of their sexual orientation, they have suffered sex stereotyping.

3. Associational sex discrimination

Under this theory, anti-gay bias constitutes sex discrimination in much the same way that anti-miscegenation laws constitute racial discrimination. The Supreme Court has held that when a state prohibits a white person from marrying a black person, it has engaged in discrimination because of race. Similarly, the 7^th Circuit ruled that when an employer mistreats a gay person for associating with a partner of the same sex, it has engaged in discrimination “because of sex.” Consider, for instance, a gay man who places a photo of his husband on his desk at work, and is fired for it. In effect, his employer is punishing him for being a man and intimately associating with another man. Change the sex of one partner and the discrimination disappears. This reveals, as the 7^th Circuit wrote, that “the discrimination rests on distinctions drawn according to sex.”

This fall, the full 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will evaluate these theories after the circuit’s chief judge essentially urged the court to adopt them. It is this litigation that spurred the Justice Department to declare that Title VII does not, in fact, protect gay employees. (Under President Barack Obama, the agency took no position on the matter, although it did determine that Title VII protects transgender workers.) By filing this brief, the DOJ has created an odd situation in which one federal agency (the EEOC) disagrees with another (the Justice Department) in federal court.

The DOJ’s primary argument is that Congress’ failure to add “sexual orientation” to Title VII—either in 1964 or in the years since—proves that the law does not currently cover gay employees. This theory is rather strange because the absence of legislative action is not typically considered to be a useful tool of statutory interpretation. Congress’ failure to act could mean that it does not wish for Title VII to encompass sexual orientation. But it could also mean that Congress believes the law already protects gay employees. More than 125 members of Congress recently signed a brief asserting their belief that Title VII currently bars sexual orientation discrimination. At the very least, the absence of clear legislative guidance on the matter is obviously ambiguous.

 

To repudiate the three theories of sex discrimination listed above, the DOJ deploys some extremely questionable logic:

• In response to the “but-for” theory, it argues that homophobic employers discriminate against gay men and women equally, taking sex out of the equation. But sex cannot be removed from the equation. When an employer discriminates against a white woman for dating a black man or vice versa, it is still guilty of race discrimination: Race was obviously the key factor in its discrimination. Similarly, when an employer discriminates against a man for dating a man, it is guilty of sex discrimination, because sex was the foundational element of its bias.

• In response to the sex stereotyping theory, the DOJ argues that gay men and lesbians may only raise a claim of sex stereotyping if they face discrimination because of their mannerisms—not because of their sexual orientation. So, according to the DOJ, a lesbian who “has masculine manners or clothing” may raise a sex stereotyping claim, but a traditionally feminine lesbian may not. Likewise, an effeminate gay man may suffer sex stereotyping, but a traditionally masculine gay man does not. To reach this conclusion, the DOJ asserts that employers may hold “moral beliefs” about sexuality that “need not be based on views about gender at all.” This argument simply defies logic. Homophobic employers may well hold “moral beliefs” about gay men and women. But those beliefs are always rooted in a stereotype about how men and women should behave.

• In response to the associational discrimination theory, the DOJ argues that discrimination against gay people based on their intimate associations is unlike discrimination against interracial couples. The brief insists that discrimination against interracial couples is rooted in a belief that one race is superior to the other—and that true sex discrimination is similarly rooted in beliefs that one sex is “inferior.” But this presumption is utterly incoherent. Everyone knows that interracial marriage bans constitute race discrimination because they take the race of each partner into account. It’s no different with anti-gay discrimination: When an employer discriminates against a gay person, it is objecting to his intimate association with someone of the same sex. You simply cannot escape this fundamental sex-based consideration, which Title VII proscribes.

The left-leaning 2^nd Circuit is almost certain to side with the EEOC and against the DOJ. But this fight is ultimately heading to the Supreme Court—and the Trump administration has now signaled loudly that it will encourage the justices to rule against gay employees. That may be disappointing to civil rights advocates, but it is not devastating to the cause. With arguments this unintelligible, the Justice Department seems unlikely to change anybody’s mind.

 

Special Counsel Investigation of Chumph Brings Serious Legal Heat

Meuller isn’t playing around. The level of prosecutorial heat being brought to this investigation would melt most evil-doers on the spot.

As further evidence that there is some “there there” in the investigation of the Chumph’s treason, mob activities, and obstruction of justice – Mueller has recruited a murderer’s row of some of the top prosecutorial legal talent in America.Those guys quite simply – wouldn’t be there unless there was ample evidence of the “dirty”. Too bad Kamala Harris is a Senator I’d  love to see she and Preet” Bharara on the same team on this.

No wonder the Chumph can’t get a top law firm to sign on to defend him…Not only does he stiff lawyers (and everyone else) on paying them for their work…The opposition this time is real, and the Chumph can’t escape because he has more money than the poor guy.

The Man Investigating Donald Trump’s Russia Connections Is Assembling a Murderer’s Row of Prosecutors

They include men and women responsible for bringing down Nixon, Enron, and the mafia.

As Donald Trump and company continue their audacious plan to humiliate each and every American with their constant incompetence, one man is pushing to find the truth about the president and his cronies’ connections to Russia and their clumsy, foolish, shockingly transparent attempts to cover up any wrongdoing. That man is Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department to lead the investigation, and a new story from Politico paints an interesting portrait of the team Mueller is assembling. In fact, I’m pretty sure, if I were Donald Trump, that this news of this team would make me very, very nervous.

He already has picked three former colleagues from his last job as a partner at the Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr law firm: Aaron Zebley, who also was Mueller’s FBI chief of staff; Jeannie Rhee, a former DOJ attorney; and Quarles, who got his start in Washington some four decades ago as an assistant Watergate prosecutor.

But Mueller’s biggest hire to date was [Andrew] Weissmann, who is taking a leave from his current post leading the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section. The two men have a long history together at the FBI, where Weissmann served as both the bureau’s general counsel from 2011 to 2013 and as Mueller’s special counsel in 2005.

Weissmann’s prosecution record includes overseeing the investigations into more than 30 people while running the Enron Task Force, including CEOs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. And while working in the U.S. attorney’s office in the eastern district of New York, he tried more than 25 cases involving members of the Genovese, Colombo and Gambino crime families.

Imagine being a president and a corrupt businessman who potentially is at the head of an immense conspiracy. Your life is full of paranoia. You don’t know whom to trust. The people around you are constantly trying to manipulate you. You’re out of your depth in most meetings. The media won’t stop talking about the scandal you’re at the center of, but you hope against hope that you’ll wake up tomorrow and it’ll just go away.

And then you find out the guys who are investigating you are people who have literally brought down presidents and corrupt businessmen. That’s the situation our president finds himself in now. And if we’ve learned anything from the past two years of Donald Trump’s political career, it’s that there’s nothing this guy handles worse than pressure. I have no doubt that we’re only days away from a Twitter rant about how these guys are losers who should be deported for being FAKE NEWS or something equally stupid.

 

 

It is Time to Remove Sessions

It is time for Congress to take up the issue of the removal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The legal basis for doing so is comprehensive –

1. Jeff Sessions perjured himself in testimony about his Russian meetings before Congress
2. There is is direct evidence of multiple meetings between Sessions and Trump’s Russian ally on at least 2 occasions, and possibly 3-4. None of these meetings as Sessions has claimed (again – perjury) had anything to do with his role as Senator
3. Sessions stonewalled Congress using the legally non-existent justification of his non-existent Executive Privilege in testimony this week. For the Attorney General to use an unconstitutional and illegal tactic to cover up in testimony is another form of perjury
4. Sessions was part of the Chumph’s team decision to fire Comey, violating his statement of “recusal” from the Trump-Russia collusion investigation

Democrats should make Sessions removal an absolute priority, and should be using any method necessary to short circuit Sessions dismantling og Civil Rights and along with it Voting Rights.

The Sessions is doing his best to protect his white supremacist and KKK favorites.

Trump administration quietly rolls back civil rights efforts across federal government

or decades, the Department of Justice has used court-enforced agreements to protect civil rights, successfully desegregating school systems, reforming police departments, ensuring access for the disabled and defending the religious.

Now, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the DOJ appears to be turning away from this storied tool, called consent decrees. Top officials in the DOJ civil rights division have issued verbal instructions through the ranks to seek settlements without consent decrees — which would result in no continuing court oversight.

The move is just one part of a move by the Trump administration to limit federal civil rights enforcement. Other departments have scaled back the power of their internal divisions that monitor such abuses. In a previously unreported development, the Education Department last week reversed an Obama-era reform that broadened the agency’s approach to protecting rights of students. The Labor Department and the Environmental Protection Agency have also announced sweeping cuts to their enforcement.

“At best, this administration believes that civil rights enforcement is superfluous and can be easily cut. At worst, it really is part of a systematic agenda to roll back civil rights,” said Vanita Gupta, the former acting head of the DOJ’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama.

Consent decrees have not been abandoned entirely by the DOJ, a person with knowledge of the instructions said. Instead, there is a presumption against their use — attorneys should default to using settlements without court oversight unless there is an unavoidable reason for a consent decree. The instructions came from the civil rights division’s office of acting Assistant Attorney General Tom Wheeler and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Gore. There is no written policy guidance.

Devin O’Malley, a spokesperson for the DOJ, declined to comment for this story.

Consent decrees can be a powerful tool, and spell out specific steps that must be taken to remedy the harm. These are agreed to by both parties and signed off on by a judge, whom the parties can appear before again if the terms are not being met. Though critics say the DOJ sometimes does not enforce consent decrees well enough, they are more powerful than settlements that aren’t overseen by a judge and have no built-in enforcement mechanism.

Such settlements have “far fewer teeth to ensure adequate enforcement,” Gupta said.

Consent decrees often require agencies or municipalities to take expensive steps toward reform. Local leaders and agency heads then can point to the binding court authority when requesting budget increases to ensure reforms. Without consent decrees, many localities or government departments would simply never make such comprehensive changes, said William Yeomans, who spent 26 years at the DOJ, mostly in the civil rights division.

“They are key to civil rights enforcement,” he said. “That’s why Sessions and his ilk don’t like them.”…

On March 31, Sessions ordered a sweeping review of all consent decrees with troubled police departments nationwide to ensure they were in line with the Trump administration’s law-and-order goals. Days before, the DOJ had asked a judge to postpone a hearing on a consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department that had been arranged during the last days of the Obama administration. The judge denied that request, and the consent decree has moved forward.

The DOJ has already come under fire from critics for altering its approach to voting rights cases. After nearly six years of litigation over Texas’ voter ID law — which Obama DOJ attorneys said was written to intentionally discriminate against minority voters and had such a discriminatory effect — the Trump DOJ abruptly withdrew its intent claims in late February….More…

 

 

 

Won’t Nobody Take the Chumph With the Skinny Legs? Lawyers Run From DOJ Jobs

Damn…Never thought I’d see the Legal profession push away from a full table.

Even the otherwise reliable Falwell, Liberty University scions of the racist Federalist Society who spent 8 years under Bush chasing the ever rare, elusive Unicorn of reverse racism against whites won’t touch the Chumph.

Then again, it could be they know he is guiltily of treason.

 

Trump administration unable to fill Justice Department jobs because lawyers are avoiding him ‘like the plague

The Trump Administration — already behind in making political appointments — now finds itself unable to fill important jobs connected to the Justice Department because attorneys, mindful of  their reputations, want nothing to do with the scandal-plagued White House.

According to Politico, the President’s staffers are are coming up empty when it comes to tracking down legal minds interested in working for the president.

“They were dealing with a pool that had already shrunk and, now, of course, some people will be avoiding it like the plague,” one GOP lawyer who worked in President George W. Bush’s administration told Politico. “The lesser-known folks are wondering if they’re going to take a huge reputational hit if the president of the United States starts tweeting about them. … There’s definitely some poisoning of the well going on in terms of who would take a job at this point.”

At issue: Trump’s abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey — who he also referred to as a “nut job” — and fear of being caught up in the looming Russian scandal that could bring the whole administration down and lead to Trump’s impeachment.

Politico notes that the pool of candidates the White House had to choose from was extraordinarily small to begin with, as many mainstream conservative attorneys signed “Never Trump” pledges prior to the 2016 elections — which could also prove a hindrance since the White House has pushed for appointees to make a “loyalty pledge” to the president.

As it stands now — as Trump enters the fifth month of his presidency — the administration has yet to fill scores of seats on the federal bench and 93 U.S. attorney posts around the country sit empty after the president demanded the immediate resignation of all attorneys appointed by his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

Additionally the Trump administration has also found it difficult to find a replacement for Comey with potential nominees wondering how they’ll last working for a volatile president currently under investigation by the same department.

“It certainly doesn’t help when the stated basis for firing your predecessor is that he was a ‘nut job,’” suggested Paul Rosenzweig, a lawyer who served under President George W. Bush. “I look around at people considering going into the Trump administration and the same names come up for every open job…It’s the same six names for every open job—the people who are both qualified and willing to serve.”

One anonymous Trump adviser said that the hiring problems at the Department of Justice aren’t as bad as they seem and that things are actually worse at the State Department.

“That’s been a bit of a problem for the administration, but not as much at DOJ,” the adviser said. “That’s been a very serious problem over at the State Department. A lot of the conservative foreign policy establishment were ‘Never Trumpers…’ The proportion is much higher at the State Department and the White House.”

 

Stopping Jeff Sessions Racist Drug War

A background on what Jeff Sessions KKK War is all about

 

Kamala Harris Calls for Grand Dragon Sessions Resignation

Former California Attorney General, now Senator Kamala Harris want Sessions’ head on a pike…Sessions is a criminal, having committed perjury at his Senate confirmation hearings.

Having Sessions as the head of the DOJ, is no different than appointing Al Capone as Sheriff. Second, Sessions is actively involved in covering up the Chumph’s criminal activity. And as such is a criminal co-conspirator.

Charge him, arrest him, try him, convict him…And hang him for treason with Putin’s Bitch and the rest of the Chumph scum/

Kamala Harris: Jeff Sessions must resign

Speaking to CNN”s Jake Tapper on Thursday afternoon, Senator Kamala Harris of California renewed Democratic calls for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to resign over the firing of FBI director James Comey.

“There is good reason to believe that he was not truthful when he testified before Congress,” Harris said, in reference to Sessions’s confirmation hearing, during which he said under oath that he had no communications with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential campaign.

It was subsequently reported that Sessions met on two occasions with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. Sessions had recused himself in March from the inquiry into improper contacts between Donald Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin. Yet it was Sessions, along with deputy Rod Rosenstein, who recommended that Trump fire Comey—who was investigating the Trump-Russia ties. (Kislyak met with Trump on Wednesday, just hours after Comey was fired.)

The public nature of the Russia investigation infuriated Trump, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal:

The more James Comey showed up on television discussing the FBI’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, the more the White House bristled, according to aides to President Donald Trump.

Harris, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump and is rumored to have presidential ambitions, told Tapper that Sessions’s complicity in the Comey firing “calls into question his objectivity, and his ability to keep his word.”

Her calls for Sessions to resign were seconded by her Democratic colleague Ron Wyden of Oregon.

 

 

Sally Yates Smackdown of Smarmy Ted Cruz

Bad news Ted Sleazy – the kind of folks who rise to high positions in the DOJ without political appointments during, at least, Democrat Presidencies tend to be both smart and qualified, and real lawyers. Which is why Sally Yates just had your ass for lunch.

 

The Facade Crumbles to Reveal the Chumph Fascists

Laughing at Hitler…

The US Department of Justice is literally prosecuting a woman for laughing at Jeff Sessions

As attorney general, Jeff Sessions now heads the Justice Department.

It is hard to believe this is happening, but it’s real: The US Department of Justice is literally prosecuting a woman for laughing at now–Attorney General Jeff Sessions during his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this year.

According to Ryan Reilly at HuffPost, Code Pink activist Desiree Fairooz was arrested in January after she laughed at a claim from Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) that Sessions’s history of “treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well-documented.”

Sessions, in fact, has a long history of opposing the equal treatment of all Americans under the law. He has repeatedly criticized the historic Voting Rights Act. He voted against hate crime legislation that protected LGBTQ people, arguing, “Today, I’m not sure women or people with different sexual orientations face that kind of discrimination. I just don’t see it.” And his nomination for a position as a federal judge was rejected in the 1980s after he was accused of making racist remarks, including a supposed joke that he thought the Ku Klux Klan “was okay until I found out they smoked pot.”

Given this history, Fairooz laughed at Shelby’s claim.

But federal prosecutors have pushed forward with the case against Fairooz. As Reilly reported, prosecutors argue that “the laugh amounted to willful ‘disorderly and disruptive conduct’ intended to ‘impede, disrupt, and disturb the orderly conduct’ of congressional proceedings.” In court, they have tried to emphasize that the laugh was extraordinarily disruptive, with a US Capitol Police officer claiming that Fairooz laughed “very loudly” and people in the hearings turned around when they heard it.

Fairooz’s defense, meanwhile, has argued that her laughter was a reflex and not meant to disrupt the hearings. Fairooz was also in the back of the room, and her laughter had no noticeable impact, based on video of the hearings, on Shelby’s introductory speech for Sessions.

The trial will continue at the Superior Court in DC this week. If convicted, Fairooz faces a fine up to $500 and up to six months’ imprisonment for the laugh-related charge. She is also charged with another misdemeanor for “allegedly parading, demonstrating or picketing within a Capitol, evidently for her actions after she was being escorted from the room,” Reilly reported.

 

Sessions Brings Back KKK “Justice” in Alton Sterling Case – Refusing to Prosecute

Shooting black folks in the back is just fine with the Chump’s Grand Dragon Attorney General.

The Justice Department is officially dead, and can no longer be respected or trusted as any sort of legitimate arbiter of either the Law or Justice.

Justice Department will not charge Baton Rouge officers in fatal shooting of Alton Sterling

The Justice Department has decided not to bring charges against the officers involved in the death of Alton Sterling, whose videotaped shooting by police in Baton Rouge last summer prompted unrest across the city, and is planning to reveal in the next 24 hours that it has closed the probe, according to four people familiar with the matter.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the Sterling family had yet to be informed by the Justice Department of the decision, and it is unclear how and when the department will announce its findings.

“We have not heard nor received an update and are unaware of any charges that may or may not be filed,” said Ryan Julison, a spokesman for the Sterling family’s attorneys. “We have not received word, nor has the family been given any notice of upcoming updates regarding this case.”

The case will be the first time under Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the department has publicly declined to prosecute officers investigated for possible wrongdoing in a high-profile case, and officials in Baton Rouge have been girding for a possible reaction there.

Sterling’s death last summer sparked tense protests across the city. President Barack Obama weighed in on the matter then, declaring his confidence in the Justice Department probe and remarking, “We have seen tragedies like this too many times.”

The shooting came the day before a police officer in Minnesota gunned down school cafeteria manager Philando Castile during a traffic stop that was broadcast on Facebook, and in the same week that a black man upset by police and out to kill white people gunned down five officers in Dallas. A little more than a week later, another gunman targeting police shot and killed three officers in Baton Rouge.

By the police account, officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake saw Sterling, 37, outside a convenience store in July after it was reported that a man had threatened someone there with a gun. Sterling, who was selling CDs outside the store, fit the description of that man, according to a search warrant affidavit in the case.

A video of the shooting shows Sterling lying on his back with two officers on top of him. One of the officers appears to yell, “He’s got a gun!” and then shots ring out. A detective wrote in the search warrant affidavit that officers had observed the butt of a gun in Sterling’s front pants pocket. At issue in the investigation was whether Sterling was reaching for the weapon, as officers claimed, when he was shot and killed.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Local police and city officials have said this week that they believed a decision was imminent, but they and representatives for Sterling’s family said they had not been told when an announcement from the Justice Department was coming. Some local schools have sent notes to parents informing them of action plans in case of major protests, and several local lawmakers have publicly called on the Justice Department to end the suspense.

“The Department of Justice’s failure to communicate with the community has created angst and nervousness, and I fear carries the potential for increased tension between the community and law enforcement,” Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D), whose congressional district includes part of Baton Rouge, wrote in a letter to Sessions on Friday. “It is inappropriate and against the interests of public safety . . . to allow this level of uncertainty to continue.”…

 

The New Jim Crow at the DOJ

There is a particularly virulent and dangerous type of white-right racist out there, who plays the white-victim game.

This type of racist is set to destroy much of Civil Rights in the country and further establish the New Jim Crow under chief racist Jeff Sessions.

The white-victim game works like this. The biggest kid in elementary school is the schoolyard bully. A Martial Arts studio opens up in the town, and some of the other kids, tired of being beat up, begin to take classes. Afraid some of his victims might be able to defend themselves, he goes to his Dad, who sits on the City Council, and convinces him to pass a law making Martial Arts studios illegal in the town because “they encourage violence”.

The white-right racist victimrat plays this game. During the Bush administration these people were put in charge of destroying the DOJ’s Civil Rights division. They spent 8 years searching for that elusive instance where a white person had been discriminated against by a minority, nearly ignoring the more than 20,000 cases a year referred to them. In years, they found exactly 1 case. During this entire time denying the existence of racism against blacks and minorities.

The DOJ under Sessions may as well be the KKK. They are becoming the enemy of the entire country.

The new DOJ “Civil Rights” Division under Putin’s Bitch and Sessions

How Trump Will Dismantle Civil Rights Protections in America

The same way Bush did: by politicizing the DOJ.

If you talk to people who worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the George W. Bush administration about their old jobs, you might hear one of two stories. Each can be viewed as a possible prelude to what the DOJ’s “crown jewel” division is poised to go through now that Donald Trump is president and Jeff Sessions is attorney general.

The first story takes place in Ohio during the lead-up to the 2004 election, when local officials were sued over a Republican plan to send thousands of “voter challengers” to polling places in predominantly black districts. The practice, putatively aimed at identifying ineligible voters, stemmed from a controversial Ohio law that civil rights advocates considered a vestige of Jim Crow.

One person who didn’t see it that way was Alex Acosta, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the time and now Trump’s nominee for secretary of labor. Less than a week before Election Day, Acosta wrote a letter to the judge overseeing the Ohio case to express his support for the “challenger” law and to argue that its purpose was to create a “balance between ballot access and ballot integrity”—not to intimidate voters.

The surprising thing about Acosta’s letter was that no one had asked for the DOJ’s opinion. The federal government was not party to the Ohio case, and Acosta was under no obligation to comment on it; in fact, he was defying a long-standing Civil Rights Division norm by taking action on a voting issue so close to an upcoming election. The “challengers” were ultimately allowed to go to the polls. Among liberals, the episode went down as a defining example of how zealous and brazen Bush-era political appointees could be in pursuing a partisan agenda.

The second story you might hear from alumni of Bush’s Civil Rights Division concerns a litigator named David Becker, who had been working in the voting section since the tail end of the Clinton administration. In 2005, Becker decided to quit—but not before getting involved in a DOJ lawsuit that accused the city of Boston of “improperly influencing, coercing, or ignoring the ballot choices of limited-English-proficient Hispanic or Asian-American voters.”

Becker, who had years of experience helping jurisdictions make their elections accessible to minority language–speakers, believed that Republicans in the Justice Department were pursuing the lawsuit for political reasons. In a series of letters to Boston officials, Becker asserted that the case was “largely without legal merit” and was being brought, in part, because Boston had voted Democratic in the 2004 election. Though he was still working for DOJ when he first reached out to city officials, Becker offered to help them fight against the government when he left.

The Becker story is not particularly well-known. But for some conservatives, it remains a galling example of the kind of treachery that Bush’s team encountered from career civil rights staff when Republicans took over the division in 2001. Bradley Schlozman, who worked in the “front office” of Civil Rights from 2003 until 2006 and was despised by many of the former career lawyers I spoke with, recently brought it up to illustrate what he called the “extraordinary unprofessionalism” he encountered in the division as a Bush appointee.“In my opinion, these were extremely partisan attorneys who had difficulty separating their political views from their obligations to their client: the United States,” Schlozman told me.

These two stories—both of them, as it happens, about letters that probably shouldn’t have been sent—serve as a reminder of the destructive, politically polarized rancor that plagued the Bush-era Civil Rights Division. Remembered by many DOJ alums as a traumatic and humiliating low point in the division’s history, the period was marked by an unprecedented level of hostility and mutual distrust between career attorneys and the “politicals” who supervised them.

“As time went on, it became more and more abrasive and overbearing,” said Albert Moskowitz, who oversaw the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division between 1999 and 2005. Particularly during Bush’s second term, he said, “People were abused and treated terribly, and there was just no one to tell and no place to go.”

At the heart of the rift was a fundamental misalignment of goals. As one lawyer hired into the Civil Rights Division under Bush, J. Christian Adams,described it in his 2011 polemic on the Obama-era DOJ, the conflict was part of “a larger war between two camps”: “militant leftists” who believed “civil rights laws do not protect everyone equally, but only certain ‘oppressed’ minorities,” and conservatives “who support a race-blind future.”

To frame it in a slightly less bellicose way, most attorneys who joined the Civil Rights Division before the Bush administration did so because they wanted to help the federal government challenge policies that discriminated against historically marginalized groups. The conservatives in charge under Bush, by contrast, were generally skeptical of federal intervention and believed in devoting more of the division’s resources to investigating things like voter fraud and human trafficking. In applying what they called a “race-neutral” approach to enforcement, they also made a point of bringing civil rights cases on behalf of white victims.

“Even attorneys who had served the division through the Reagan years and the [George H.W.] Bush years found it unbearable,” said Kristen Clarke, who started in the division a few months before Bush took office and now leads the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Nearly a decade since Bush left office, Trump and Sessions have started making their own moves to transform the DOJ and reorient the Civil Rights Division in particular to fit with their agenda. As we look for clues about how far they’ll go, the turbulent 2000s are a reminder of just how bad it can get, and how a new political team might go about pushing the division’s long-serving career attorneys out of the way.

So far, those attorneys haven’t even been told who their new boss will be, as Trump has not yet nominated anyone to the post. In the meantime, looking back on the Bush years is a way of putting down markers—an exercise in bracing oneself and establishing a worst-case precedent against which to measure the next four years.

If they deny you your legal right to vote…Its time to “Stand Your Ground”. The Ballot…Or the bullet.

 

 

The Empty Suit at Justice Has No Lawyers!

I guess the graduating class at KKK University Law School isn’t quite ready yet. After firing his entire staff of Prosecutors…Sessions hasn’t found anyone so far who will stoop to work with him. Geez…There have to be a few white-wing lowlifes from Jerry Fallwell U!

Seems in his haste to eliminate anyone who would move forward the investigation into Putin’s Bitch’s treason…Sessions wound up with and empty house.

An empty house for an empty suit…How apropos.

A month after dismissing federal prosecutors, Justice Department does not have any U.S. attorneys in place

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is making aggressive law enforcement a top priority, directing his federal prosecutors across the country to crack down on illegal immigrants and “use every tool” they have to go after violent criminals and drug traffickers.

But the attorney general does not have a single U.S. attorney in place to lead his tough-on-crime efforts across the country. Last month, Sessions abruptly told the dozens of remaining Obama administration U.S. attorneys to submit their resignations immediately — and none of them, or the 47 who had already left, have been replaced.

“We really need to work hard at that,” Sessions said when asked Tuesday about the vacancies as he opened a meeting with federal law enforcement officials. The 93 unfilled U.S. attorney positions are among the hundreds of critical Trump administration jobs that remain open.

Sessions is also without the heads of his top units, including the civil rights, criminal and national security divisions, as he tries to reshape the Justice Department.

U.S. attorneys, who prosecute federal crimes from state offices around the nation, are critical to implementing an attorney general’s law enforcement agenda. Both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations gradually eased out the previous administration’s U.S. attorneys while officials sought new ones.

Sessions said that until he has his replacements, career acting U.S. attorneys “respond pretty well to presidential leadership.”

But former Justice Department officials say that acting U.S. attorneys do not operate with the same authority when interacting with police chiefs and other law enforcement executives.

“It’s like trying to win a baseball game without your first-string players on the field,” said former assistant attorney general Ronald Weich, who ran the Justice Department’s legislative affairs division during Obama’s first term.

“There are human beings occupying each of those seats,” Weich, now dean of the University of Baltimore School of Law, said of the interim officials. “But that’s not the same as having appointed and confirmed officials who represent the priorities of the administration. And the administration is clearly way behind in achieving that goal.”

Filling the vacancies has also been complicated by Sessions not having his second-highest-ranking official in place. Rod J. Rosenstein, nominated for deputy attorney general — the person who runs the Justice Department day-to-day — is still not on board, although he is expected to be confirmed by the Senate this month. Traditionally, the deputy attorney general helps to select the U.S. attorneys.

Rosenstein, who served as U.S. attorney for Maryland, has also been designated, upon his confirmation, to take on the responsibility of overseeing the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and any links between Russian officials and Trump associates after Sessions was forced to recuse himself.

 

As Expected – Sessions Sides With Murderers and Racists in Police Murders of Citizens

AG Jeff Sessions just ordered the DOJ to “play nice” in investigating evidence of Police criminality. Setting up a system of holding Police Departments to a lower level of accountability than your average criminal. Just another racist POS in the Trump debacle.

What Sessions is protecting is the use of the Police as a method to oppress and to deny Civil Rights to minorities, turning the law enforcement and criminal justice system back into just another tool of the New Jim Crow to prevent minority voting, to assure the school to jail pipeline runs smoothly, and to deny equal rights to minorities sunder the law.

Sessions seeks to protect the murderers of the unarmed, police abuses of power, and the overboard, and to establish the Chumph’s Police State.

Sessions Signals A Rollback On Justice Department’s Police Reform Efforts

“Since when did protecting civil rights take the back seat to making sure police officers don’t get their feelings hurt?” a former DOJ official says.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered a wide-ranging review of the Justice Department’s efforts to rein in rogue law enforcement agencies, putting the future of police reform in doubt.

In a March 31 “Memorandum Supporting Federal, State, Local and Tribal Law Enforcement” that was released Monday, Sessions set out several principles for the Justice Department’s posture toward local law enforcement. While local agencies should “protect and respect the civil rights of all members of the public,” the memo states, “local control and local accountability are necessary for effective local policing,” and managing non-federal law enforcement agencies “is not the responsibility of the federal government.”

The memo also stresses that the “misdeeds of individual bad actors should not impugn or undermine the legitimate and honorable work that law enforcement officers and agencies perform in keeping American communities safe.” (Sessions indicated in February that he had not read the Justice Department’s reports on Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore but that he believed they were based on anecdotes and not well supported.)

The Sessions memo orders a review of “existing or contemplated consent decrees” to make sure they comply with the goals laid out in the memo.

Even before his confirmation, Sessions had indicated he was skeptical of the Civil Rights Division’s pattern-and-practice investigations, which focus on widespread constitutional abuses rather than individual incidents. The Trump administration more broadly has sought to portray itself as friendly to law enforcement.

In seeking to comply with Session’s memo, Justice Department lawyers sought Monday to delay a hearing on the ongoing case in Baltimore. They requested time as they evaluate whether the consent decree under consideration in Baltimore would “advance the safety and protection of the public, promote officer safety and morale, protect and respect the civil rights of all members of the public, respect local control of law enforcement, are rooted in timely and reliable statistics on crime and criminals, and do not impede recruitment and training of officers,” as laid out in Sessions’ memo.

Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, called the Justice Department’s request to delay the consent decree progress in Baltimore “truly shocking.”

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions is undermining and obstructing extensive efforts that have been made to promote policing reform in a small set of the most broken police departments in our country,” Clarke said in a statement. “In a 163-page report, the Justice Department laid out extensive evidence of unconstitutional policing practices including unlawful stops, searches, and arrests; racial disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests; and use of excessive force. The mayor, the community and the police department all support reform, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions is the obstacle standing in the way. This administration is making clear its intent to delay and obstruct federal civil rights enforcement across our country.”

Sessions’ memo also places a potential consent decree in the city of Chicago in jeopardy. A report on the Chicago Police Department released just before the end of the Obama administration found widespread constitutional abuses that had damaged the relationship between law enforcement and the community in the city, deepening the city’s public safety issues. President Donald Trump frequently brought up Chicago’s violent crime problem on the campaign trail, laying the blame for the city’s issues on former President Barack Obama.

Christy Lopez, who served as deputy chief of the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division and oversaw DOJ’s Ferguson report, told The Huffington Post that sometimes reform isn’t possible without the Justice Department’s involvement.

“These decrees create the space for innovation and reform that just doesn’t happen otherwise. So much good work has been done, and is being done, because of these decrees. It is terrible to think of all the amazing things that won’t happen in policing if the AG gets his way,” Lopez said.

Lopez, the daughter of a police officer, worked on DOJ police investigations in several cities, including Ferguson. She said she’s concerned that Sessions is “second-guessing and undoing the enforcement decisions of career staff” for “explicitly” political reasons.

“Since when did protecting civil rights take the back seat to making sure police officers don’t get their feelings hurt?” she said. “Good police officers everywhere support the work of the Civil Rights Division. They know this is a giant step backwards for our country.”