I support meritocracy, because I want police officers who are actually capable of putting handcuffs on a suspect. In this video from Chicago, four police officers, working together, repeatedly try, and repeatedly fail, to put handcuffs on one suspect. Eventually the suspect runs away.
https://twitter.com/CPD1617Scanner/status/1727678611933515858
I solved the October 19, 2023 Wordle in just two guesses!
I solved the October 19, 2023 Wordle in just two guesses!
My guesses were STRAP and SPLAT.
Here’s a screenshot:
How exactly is this a “school,” and how exactly are the people who attend it “students”? It seems more like a day care center for juvenile delinquents.
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
November 28, 2023
This video from NBC News shows multiple “students” brutally beating a school employee at Hill Crest High “School” in Queens, New York.
I put the words “students” and “school” in quotation marks, because based on everything that the media has reported on this institution, it doesn’t seem to be a “school,” and the people who attend it don’t seem to be “students.”
The “students” skipped “class” for two hours so they could jump up and down in the hallways, and yell and scream about a teacher who had attended a pro-Israel rally on her own personal time during off school hours. I don’t think the “students” who are yelling and screaming actually have any idea what it is that they are yelling and screaming about. The “students” threatened the teacher, and she had to lock herself in a room for her own protection.
How exactly is this a “school,” and how exactly are the people who attend it “students”?
It seems more like a day care center for juvenile delinquents.
Accused of burglarizing West Loop store, 12-time convicted burglar is released to await trial
https://cwbchicago.com/2023/11/paroled-serial-burglar-caught-and-released-west-loop-chicago.html
Accused of burglarizing West Loop store, 12-time convicted burglar is released to await trial
November 27, 2023
CHICAGO — A man who has been sentenced to prison 14 times, including 12 times for burglary, is now charged with burglarizing a CVS in the West Loop. But, even though he is on parole for four burglaries, the state did not revoke his parole, and a judge set him free to await trial.
Back in March 2020, a minister detained Mack Triplett after catching the serial burglar red-handed as he broke into a church on the Near West Side, according to a CPD report. Police said he admitted to breaking into the church so he could steal from its vending machine.
Prosecutors charged Triplett with that break-in along with seven other burglaries, mostly at convenience stores in the West Loop, court records show. They also charged him with taking $7,310 worth of watches and clothing from Zumiez, 2 South State Street.
Triplett eventually struck a plea deal in which he received four concurrent six-year sentences while prosecutors dropped all the other burglary charges. A break-in at CVS, 400 West Madison, was among the cases that were dropped.
He was paroled in February after serving about three years.
On November 19, Chicago police responded to a burglary-in-progress call at the CVS at 400 West Madison, one of the locations Triplett was accused of burglarizing in 2020.
When officers arrived, they found the store’s revolving door broken and a front window busted out. They looked inside and saw Triplett holding a plastic bag and a blue backpack, according to the report they subsequently wrote.
Triplett dropped the bags and ran out the back door with the cops hot on his heels, police said. The officers caught him and allegedly found six bottles of booze worth $117 in the bags he had been holding.
Prosecutors charged him with burglary.
But CPD officers noted in their report that the Illinois Department of Corrections declined to file a parole hold on Triplett. In court the next afternoon, Judge David Kelly released Triplett from custody with instructions to stay away from the CVS.
In addition to the four burglaries that he is currently on parole for, Triplett was convicted of burglary in 2012, 2006, 1999, 1996, and twice in 1991, according to IDOC records. He was convicted of attempted burglary in 2015 and 1994, possessing a stolen motor vehicle in 2003, and escaping from electronic monitoring in 2015.
I support using modern technology to give every person on earth a first world standard of living. The Asian tiger countries went from third world to first world in a very short period of time. Now Haiti is starting to do the same thing.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/experiment-haiti-making-once-arid-103000097.html
An experiment in Haiti is making once-arid lands fertile, and poor farmers into money-makers
By Jacqueline Charles
November 24, 2023
At first sight, the nearly four acres of farmland in this rural hamlet in northeast Haiti resembles more of a desert than a thriving agricultural experiment. The soil is brown and barren, battered by a lack of water and neglect.
But walk further inland and the seemingly lifeless terrain soon turns green: Cabbages and pumpkins rise out of the ground, papayas hang from trees and workers plant rows of hot peppers in the freshly plowed dirt as a generator hisses in the background.
A year ago, such a lush landscape was unimaginable for Fransik Monchèr, a farmer and father of seven who couldn’t even grow fiery habanero peppers because they quickly died.
All that changed the day a group of entrepreneurs decided to take a gamble to launch a socioeconomic experiment with the goal of answering a simple, but daunting question: What if a Haitian farmer, like Monchèr, had everything he needed to be a successful grower?
“That farmer who has the land, how do you get him to upgrade his way of production — and how do we recuperate that cost?” said Maxwell Marcelin, one of the entrepreneurs.
The quest for the answers has birthed an unusual partnership among four Port-au-Prince-based friends and entrepreneurs, and local farmers and agronomists in northern Haiti. Together, they are pushing locally grown peppers and sweet potatoes while also aiding farmers like Monchèr in transforming their sun-scorched land, restoring hope in the only livelihood they’ve known: agriculture.
Though 75% of Haiti’s population lives in rural areas, the country can’t feed itself. Nearly half of the population, 4.9 million people, are experiencing acute hunger, according to the United Nations. The blame, the U.N. says, can be placed on a number of factors, including poor irrigation systems, lack of capital, political instability and the intensifying gang violence that has spread beyond the capital of Port-au-Prince to rural areas.
In areas where gangs are not occupying farmland or distribution routes, small-scale farmers are fighting to grow crops with limited or no government support. Crops fail due to increasingly frequent and severe droughts and tropical storms, and higher-than-average temperatures.
None of it makes for a hopeful scenario where agriculture can once more become the driving economic force in the countryside.
“Everybody is locked into the idea that it can’t be done,” said Geoffrey Handal, the accounting and logistics expert in the friends’ group, who challenges such pessimism. “We have all of the qualified agronomists, we have all of the techniques needed, we have all of the land, we have all of the water, we have everything.”
While Haiti’s capital is overrun by gangs, in the north entrepreneurs and farmers are trying to focus on its economic potential. Peppers like these growing in a field in Paulette, Haiti are being grown for both the local and export markets.
‘Total despair’
When Marcelin first arrived at Monchèr’s farm in Limonade, the northeast city that is part of the Marihaboux Plain, he believed, like the farmer, that the land was unworkable.
“It was total despair,” Marcelin said, as a group of workers dig a hole on a dirt mound to plant habanero pepper trees. “He said every time he tried to plant, there was no rain and he would lose his harvest.”
Refusing to accept that the expansive plot was a wasteland, Marcelin and Handal began to think about how they could help. Monchèr not only needed seeds, but also financing. But most importantly, he needed a steady supply of water so he wouldn’t have to depend on rains.
“That’s the basis of agriculture. Otherwise it’s like you’re playing the lottery” waiting for rain, Marcelin said.
Farmers in Haiti have always struggled to make a living off their crops. But with help from a group of fellow Haitians, they are hoping to see their fortunes turn.
In Haiti, crops failed not just because of too little or too much rainfall, but also due to a lack of access to irrigation, even when water is available.
Just across the border 45 minutes away in the Dominican Republic farmers are successful, Marcelin said, so the issue is not the availability of water.
“The only thing is there is no investment on our side of the border to bring the water to the producers,” he said.
Armed with a study showing that there was indeed water under Monchèr’s arid land, the group sprang into action. Magalie Dresse, a well-known designer who works with women artisans, helped with financing. Handal, who is also experimenting with producing a bank of high-quality seedlings, provided the seeds. And Marcelin crunched the numbers. With a background in management economics, he wanted to show Monchèr that he could have a successful harvest and rely on it for income to feed his family.
“We provided him with a well, a submersible pump, a generator —a propane one because there is no gas,” Marcelin said. ”He has the support of one of our agronomists to help him on what to do and what not to do. We plowed his field.”
The contributions have not gone unnoticed. Since January, Monchèr has grown more than 2,000 pounds of habanero peppers in addition to other fruits and vegetables.
‘“They backed me up,” he said, flashing a smile and standing upright in his field. “I could not have accomplished this on my own. I could not have dug a well because I don’t have the means to do that.”
Whereas before he saw despair, he now sees hope.
“My children are starting to eat and I am beginning to make some money. If they tell me they are hungry, I can come here, grab two or three papayas and sell them to find money to buy food,” Monchèr said.
The group’s initial investment of about 480,000 gourdes — about $3,600 — is expected to bring Monchèr about $7,000 in sales, which he will make from selling his habanero peppers to AGRILOG/Ets JB Vital, S.A., the company that Marcelin and Handal use to export peppers to Miami.
A group of young entrepreneurs from Port-au-Prince is helping farmers in northern Haiti grow peppers. This variety, known as “Piman Bouk,” is among the peppers being developed in Paulette, Haiti.
“This is someone we’ve taken out of poverty when we gave him this opportunity,” Marcelin said.
“Because we invested in Fransik,” he adds, walking through the papaya trees, “we’ve created an oasis.”
From coffee to sweet potatoes
Growing up in a poverty-stricken Haiti as a member of a well-off family, Handal knew he was blessed, a feeling he’s wanted to share with others.
“I’ve always felt like every Haitian should have it and we should show the world this is how we live,” he said.
For 200 years, the Handal family exported coffee, once among the island’s most lucrative cash crops. But deforestation, natural disasters and the increasing need for coffee to be grown at higher elevations due to warming temperatures led to a rapid decline in coffee production. In 2008, Handal said the family was shipping 33 cargo containers of coffee beans each season.
A year later, before the devastating 2010 earthquake further decimated production, the family shipped only two containers “because we couldn’t find any coffee.”
Handel said that an investigation into the demise of Haiti’s coffee market led him to conclude that the family needed to invest in agricultural production. But more than a decade went by before he revisited the idea of exports, spending most of the time working in the family’s shipping business in Port-au-Prince.
“I realized the only two things we could export here would be, first of all, textiles and second, agriculture,” he said. He decided on the agriculture route as a way to boost his export volume. “It was purely a logistic play to see what could I do to get containers full of agriculture products out of Haiti.”
Then he met Marcelin, who pitched him on growing peppers and sweet potatoes, and helping farmers boost their harvest.
“The Dominican Republic is the same size, same economy as Haiti and there is no reason why we can’t reach that level of GDP,” Handal said. “If we do this right, if we invest properly in Haiti in 20 years, we can have 10% GDP growth every year. With that measure, this is how billionaires get made. This is how you create a real economy.”
Marcelin said he became interested in agriculture through the work of his wife, Kalinda Magloire. She is the founder of a clean cooking social enterprise known as SWITCH, which encourages Haitians to move away from charcoal in favor of propane.
One of the effects of Haiti’s declining agricultural sector is that when farmers can’t cultivate their land, they turn to cutting their trees down for charcoal production, which gives them about $400 every two years. For farmers to stop cutting trees to survive, said Marcelin, they need a path to production to get replace that revenue.
Cutting down the trees is “the easiest choice today because he doesn’t have money to invest, so he just lets the trees grow and then every two years, he sells them,” he said. “But if he had the financing, the know-how and access to market, he would have an alternative.
“When we were presenting clean cooking as an alternative, the question we were always presented with was, ‘What about the farmer who lives off charcoal?’ ” Marcelin adds. “This is why we started thinking about agriculture.”
Bringing back the Scotch bonnet, saving the Bouk
About 17 miles to the east of Limonade along National Highway 6 in the rural community of Paulette is the for-profit side of Marcelin and Handal’s vision. Together with the Peasant Movement for the Development of Paulette they are growing sweet potato and several varieties of pepper, including the high-in-demand “Piman Bouk,” whose first shipment arrived in Miami in April.
Despite the demand for Bouk, it is hard to find, said Handal, who has built a nursery to provide high quality pepper seeds.
“Today, even if a farmer wants to go plant Bouk, he won’t find quality seeds to do it,” Handal said.
The entrepreneurs also want to bring back production of the Caribbean Scotch bonnet, a variety of chili pepper. According to local lore, the Scotch bonnet, popular in Jamaica, was bountiful around Cap-Haïtien before the Haitian revolution but soon disappeared after Haiti won its independence from France in 1804.
The two are also working on exporting sweet potato, which for now is being sold on the local market as they continue to improve the yield for export to Europe with the help of agronomists from Honduras, who have expertise in growing the vegetable.
Geoffrey Handal is among four friends from Port-au-Prince, Haiti who have come together to launch a socioeconomic lab focused on helping farmers in northern Haiti access expertise and new techniques to grow crops.
To make the agricultural project work, the duo invested in a drip irrigation system, similar to what’s used in the Dominican Republic, and fertilizer. They also brought onboard interns from the nearby University of Limonade to assist and to learn.
The financial model, which Handal came up with, calls for the Paulette farmers to get 30% of sales.
“At the end of the day, when you look at the investment, it comes up to 50-50 in terms of profits,” Marcelin said. “In Paulette, it’s a Fransik Monchèr magnified. We created jobs but the profit sharing is for the whole organization…. Everyone who is in the ecosystem is making money.”
Handal also sees another important result.
“For me as long as the community is involved, that’s all you need,” he said.
The two also focus on finding creative ways to get around problems. After some of the habaneros and Piman Bouk ripened before they could be shipped out, Marcelin and Handal decided to go into the pepper sauce business.
With their next harvest less than 30 days away, they are hoping the sweet potatoes will be ready so they can be shipped out. If not, they will just continue to sell it locally.
The effort is “a bet that this country will not die, which is a bit of a leap of faith these days. But if it’s not going to die, it’s going to grow at some point,” Handal said. “And that’s why we invest.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom gave early release to a convicted mass shooter, became friends with him, was photographed in public with him, and got him a cushy government funded job. Meanwhile, Newsom has shown zero concern for the innocent victim who was paralyzed by this convicted mass shooter.
LA gangster who shot and paralyzed a 16-year-old girl now works for California’s Department of Public Safety after Gavin Newsom slashed his 162 year sentence to just eight years
Jarad Nava shot into a car carrying four young women in September 2012
They were relatives of a rival gang member and one was a pregnant teenager
Another, Yesenia Castro, had her spinal chord severed by a bullet
After serving 8 years in prison, he was released in December 2020
By Jen Smith
November 23, 2023
Above: Jarad Nava, now 28, works as an assistant in the Department of Public Safety and is an advocate of prison reform and was featured in a Los Angeles Times profile today. He is shown with California Governor Gavin Newsom
Above: Victim, Yesenia Castro, was 16 when she was shot in the back and lost use of her legs. She wanted Nava to spend at least 50 years in prison
A former gangster who was sentenced to 162 years in prison for shooting and paralyzing a 16-year-old girl in 2012 is now working in the California capitol.
Jarad Nava, now 28, works as an assistant in the Department of Public Safety and is an advocate of prison reform. He was featured in a Los Angeles Times profile Thursday and credits California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom for his early release.
In 2012, while drunk and high, he shot into a car carrying the relatives of a rival gang member. One of the victims was 16-year-old Yesenia Castro, who was shot in the back.
The bullet severed her spinal chord and she was paralyzed from the waist down.
Nava, who was 17 at the time, rejected a plea deal that would have sentenced him to 30 years in prison.
After trial, he was sentenced to 162 years in prison on four counts of attempted murder.
In the years that followed, he was featured in a prison reform documentary that highlighted his case and the plight of young offenders who the filmmakers felt had been unfairly represented.
Yesenia, his victim, was interviewed for the film and said she wanted him to spend 50 years in prison.
‘When they arrested him, I felt relieved. I don’t want him to be dead or anything, I just want him to pay a price,’ she said.
Despite that, his sentence was commuted to 10 years by Gavin Newsom. He eventually walked free in 2020, eight years after the shooting.
The U.S. just instantly shut down multiple entries from the Canadian border. Very easy to do. No great effort was required. I wonder why they never do that with the Mexican border.
The U.S. just instantly shut down multiple entries from the Canadian border.
Very easy to do.
No great effort was required.
I wonder why they never do that with the Mexican border.
In 1989, Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s wide-eyed trip to a Texas grocery store led to the downfall of communism
When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake
By Craig Hlavaty, Houston Chronicle
September 13, 2017 – Updated January 31, 2018
In September 1989, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall’s Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center.
09/16/1989 – Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall’s Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center. Between trying free samples of cheese and produce and staring at the frozen food selections, Yeltsin roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement.
09/16/1989 – Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall’s Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center. Between trying free samples of cheese and produce and staring at the frozen food selections, Yeltsin roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement.
09/16/1989 – Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall’s Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center. Between trying free samples of cheese and produce and staring at the frozen food selections, Yeltsin roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement.
09/16/1989 – Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall’s Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center. Between trying free samples of cheese and produce and staring at the frozen food selections, Yeltsin roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement.
09/16/1989 – Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall’s Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center. At the check-out counter, an employee showed the Soviet politician how a computer scans each item and totals the bill automatically.
In 1989 Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s wide-eyed trip to a Clear Lake grocery store led to the downfall of communism.
It was Sept. 16, 1989, and Yeltsin, then newly-elected to the new Soviet parliament and the Supreme Soviet, had just visited Johnson Space Center.
At JSC, Yeltsin visited mission control and a mock-up of a space station. According to Houston Chronicle reporter Stefanie Asin, it wasn’t all the screens, dials, and wonder at NASA that blew up his skirt, it was the unscheduled trip inside a nearby Randall’s location.
Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,” wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”
Shoppers and employees stopped him to shake his hand and say hello. In 1989, not everyone was carrying a smart phone in their pocket so Yeltsin “selfies” weren’t a thing yet.
Yeltsin asked customers about what they were buying and how much it cost, later asking the store manager if one needed a special education to manage a store. In the Chronicle photos, you can see him marveling at the produce section, the fresh fish market, and the checkout counter. He looked especially excited about frozen pudding pops.
“Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said. When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn’t believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him. Little did he know there countless stores just like it all over the country, some with even more things than the Randall’s he visited.
The fact that stores like these were on nearly every street corner in America amazed him. They even offered him free cheese samples.
By contrast, this is what a Russian grocery store looked like at the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE
According to Asin, Yeltsin didn’t leave empty-handed, as he was given a small bag of goodies to enjoy on the rest of his trip.
About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.
In Yeltsin’s own autobiography, he wrote about the experience at Randall’s, which shattered his view of communism, according to pundits. Two years later, he left the Communist Party and began making reforms to turn the economic tide in Russia.
Maybe you can blame those frozen Jell-O Pudding pops he’s seen marveling in those Chronicle photos.
“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote.
“That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”
The leader himself stepped down on the last day of 1999 after years of trying to bring a new system to Russia. The cronyism in place only managed to stifle Yeltsin’s dream for his country. Corruption and perceived incompetence plague his final years in office. Leaving the Kremlin voluntarily is said to have kept him from criminal prosecution.
His successor was Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took over as acting president. Putin had been an aide to Yeltsin in the years previous.
Yeltsin died in 2007 at the age of 76.
The Randall’s he visited, just off El Dorado Boulevard and Highway 3, is now a Food Town location.
Video from a person’s doorbell camera shows someone stealing voting ballots from their mailbox. When the homeowner went to vote in person on election day, they were told that they had already voted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trvX07puB0E
Video allegedly shows woman stealing ballots from Lawrence mailbox
By Darren Botelho
November 14, 2023
As of Tuesday afternoon, there were two reports of potential voter fraud—or stolen ballots— in Lawrence
Officials are looking into allegations of possible voter fraud in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and NBC10 Boston has obtained video footage from a man’s home that appears to show a woman removing ballots from his mailbox.
The man, who did not want to be identified, said he went to vote in person on Election Day last week and was told, according to the list, he already voted.
So, he checked his camera footage and then contacted the police.
The Essex County District Attorney’s Office and Secretary of State William Galvin are now looking into any allegations of potential voter fraud.
“We’re going to get all the ballots out of Lawrence, we’re going to get all the mail-in ballots and we’re going to review everything and all the provisionals and reconcile the list, and if further investigation contacting some of the people who allegedly voted by mail needs to be done, we will do it,” Galvin said.
As of Tuesday afternoon, there were two reports of potential voter fraud—or stolen ballots— in Lawrence.
“There may be more. It’s premature to say how many,” Galvin said.
The second police report filed was from a Lawrence woman who was still waiting for elections officials to decide whether her in-person vote will count or the mail-in vote, which she said had her signature forged.
“How come it’s not going to be counted, if I’m voting right in front of you, and I’m telling you that vote you have there is not mine,” Rosalis González said.
State elections officials are now sorting through these allegations and told NBC10 Boston the results would be delivered before the candidates begin their new terms in January.
“We’re on it. The minute we heard about it we took action,” Galvin said. “We’ve had a history of sending people to jail when they’ve committed crimes. That’s what we’ll do here.”
There may also be a federal investigation if there was mail stolen from mailboxes, as mail theft is a federal offense.
Victim, raped repeatedly by her uncle at 14 years old, terrified by his impending parole 29 years later
https://www.yahoo.com/news/victim-raped-repeatedly-her-uncle-030443925.html
Victim, raped repeatedly by her uncle at 14 years old, terrified by his impending parole 29 years later
November 17, 2023
The California state Board of Parole will release a serial child rapist with 140 years left on his sentence using a program allowing the early release of older inmates, despite objections from his victim and those who prosecuted him.
Cody Woodsen Klemp, now 67, had previous convictions for rape and attempted rape before his niece was placed in his care in 1990, per reporting by FOX 11.
Four years later, he was convicted on 40 felonies stemming from his repeated rape of the then-14-year-old, including 20 counts of committing a lewd and lascivious act on a child, 10 counts of rape and 10 counts of forced oral copulation on a child.
Jurors heard evidence that Klemp made numerous threats to kill his victims for reporting the abuse, per The Press Enterprise – but the child managed to escape and disclose the abuse to her therapist.
On November 8, just 29 years into Klemp’s 170-year prison sentence, the state parole board announced his impending release some time before or on March 15, 2024.
The body, made up of 21 commissioners appointed by the Governor and approved by the state senate, justified their decision with his “low risk for violence,” his advanced age and his “marketable skills.”
When it was enacted in 2018, the Elderly Parole Program allowed for a parole review for inmates over 60 who have already served 25 years of their sentence. Revisions in 2021 changed the program, making inmates over 50 eligible for parole hearings if they served 20 or more continuous years of their sentences, per reporting by The Press Enterprise.
Riverside District Attorney Mike Hestrin, whose office prosecuted Klemp, expressed shock at the board’s decision:
“This is a devastating blow to victims, and our office will continue to fight on their behalf,” Hestrin wrote in a statement Friday. “Although this practice of early release is far from unusual these days, considering the inmate’s particularly violent criminal history, and admissions to the parole board itself, it is shocking that such a release would be considered.”
Before his release was announced at the November 8 parole hearing, his victim testified to the lasting psychological effects of her uncle’s abuse.
“It was because of him that I learned to cut. It was because of him that I hate me,” Klemp’s victim, now 48, told the board. “It was because of him that the only prayer I had was a prayer not to wake up. I always believed that somehow I did something to deserve it.”
“Unlike Cody, for me, for his victims, there is no parole board,” she continued. “We don’t get to ask or request release from our mental prisons.”
Klemp’s victim was born to a developmentally disabled mother who bore at least a dozen children, all of whom were adopted to foster homes or families, per reporting by The Orange County Register.
The abuse started with a tickling game, she told the outlet. That game escalated to repeated rape and psychological abuse. When she threatened to kill herself, the victim said, Klemp gave her a gun and dared her to follow through.
“The only reason the abuse stopped was because I had the guts to run away,” she told the outlet. “I had no money, I had nowhere to go, and yet anything that I faced in the streets would have been better than what I was facing at home.”
Following Klemp’s conviction, his niece sued child welfare agencies in Riverside and Los Angeles on the grounds that they did not perform sufficient background checks before placing her with her uncle. Klemp’s victim told The Press Enterprise she lost on a technicality.
A year after her placement, a Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services administrator told The Press Enterprise, mandatory background checks and home visits were mandated for child placements through the agency.
In an interview with South California News Group, the victim said she was “terrified [Klemp is] going to kill [her].”
“He’s a lifetime criminal,” she told the agency. “He’ll do it. He’s dangerous. I have been a mess. I’ve had nightmares all night long. It’s just this impending doom. It’s like being raped over and over again.”
More so than her own safety, his victim said, she feared for other potential victims:
“I am very scared – but I can only die once,” she said. “The victims that he goes on to perpetrate against will die many, many more times.”
She decided to go public with her story hoping that the board would reconsider its decision, saying that she “want[s] this in every newspaper.”
The Riverside District Attorney’s Office wrote in their news release Friday that anyone opposed to Klemp’s release or the Elderly Parole Program’s minimum eligibility requirements may contact Gov. Gavin Newsom at 1021 O Street, Suite 9000, Sacramento, CA 95814 or by calling (916) 445-2841.
For all practical purposes, carjacking in Washington D.C. has been decriminalized.
I don’t believe for one second that leaders in Washington D.C. are “trying to find a solution” to carjacking.
Instead, I believe that the city’s leaders want there to be as much carjacking as possible.
Because why else would the city keep releasing the same carjackers again and again and again?
For all practical purposes, carjacking in Washington D.C. has been decriminalized.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/rise-dc-carjackings-linked-repeat-214249755.html
Rise in DC carjackings linked to repeat juvenile offenders, police data shows
November 16, 2023
Carjackings are on the rise in our nation’s capital.
Leaders in the District have their hands tied trying to find a solution.
Right now, the issue is glaring. Carjackings are up 104% in D.C., and police say that volume is overwhelming.
Alarming statistics show more than 800 have occurred so far in 2023, compared to a little over 400 at the same time in 2022.
Dowling told FOX 5 that there are often a lot of repeat offenders.
D.C. police data reveals that 66% of arrests involve juveniles.
The current D.C. law makes it difficult to hold young people accountable for their actions.
Los Angeles keeps setting this serial armed robber free again and again and again, so he can commit as many armed robberies as he wants. This is proof that the city of Los Angeles is pro-crime.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/suspect-wanted-violent-home-robberies-203817031.html
Suspect wanted in violent follow-home robberies was arrested 5 times for robbery in 18 months
November 15, 2023
LOS ANGELES – Police in Los Angeles are asking for the public’s help in finding Dashawn Dow, a 20-year-old resident of Los Angeles, suspected in a series of violent follow-home robberies.
According to the LAPD, on October 2, 2023, around 1:30 p.m., surveillance footage captured a grey Maserati tailing a male and female victim into the parking structure of their North Hollywood apartment complex. Confronted by two armed suspects upon exiting their vehicle, the victims, fearing for their lives, complied with the demands, resulting in the loss of money and jewelry.
Another incident occurred on October 10, 2023, around 12:10 a.m., in the parking structure of a North Hollywood apartment complex. A male and female victim were accosted by two male suspects. One suspect forcibly tried to take the victim’s watch, and when resisted, the other suspect brandished a gun against the victim’s chest. Fearing for his life, the victim surrendered his belongings, and the suspects fled to a waiting getaway vehicle. Detectives believe Dow was involved in both incidents and used a firearm.
Dow, arrested five times for robbery in the past 18 months, managed to post bond after each arrest. He is identified in two other follow-home style robberies in downtown Los Angeles and is a person of interest in additional criminal investigations. Dow is currently at large and should be considered armed and dangerous.
Another act of vandalism leaves Squirrel Hill residents on edge
Another act of vandalism leaves Squirrel Hill residents on edge
By Laura Esposito
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Nov 12, 2023
Michael “Shlomo” Jacobs, 53, hung a small sign outside the front window of his business in Squirrel Hill, Marvista Design + Build, a week ago that said, “We Stand With Israel.”
He said he never expected it to make his business “a target of antisemitism.”
About 3:50 a.m. Friday, a woman was captured by surveillance cameras outside the business at 2435 Beechwood Blvd. using a hammer to repeatedly strike the window where the sign hung. Unsuccessful in breaking the glass, she left. A few minutes later, however, she was back.
She struck the window a few more times and took the sign. Before leaving, she smashed the windows of the company truck, which was parked nearby.
Pittsburgh police were investigating.
“There was a lot of hate in those swings,” said Mr. Jacobs, who found out about the incident the following day after noticing a literature rack outside the building was missing and saw the cracks in the window.
After reviewing the camera footage, Mr. Jacobs called it “a miracle” that the glass didn’t break.
“I can’t figure out why,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”
He later learned that neighbors woke to the sounds of the hammer smashing against the window and called police, thinking they were hearing gunshots. Footage shows two police cars arriving at 4:01 a.m., but the woman was long gone. Mr. Jacobs said that when he filed a police report later Friday, the responding officer said he had not heard about the incident from the overnight shift.
As a resident of the neighborhood that contains the largest Jewish population in Pittsburgh, Mr. Jacobs said the community already felt unsafe as “a wave of antisemitism” had arisen since the start of the Israel-Hamas war Oct. 7. Now, he said, that feeling has only worsened.
Hateful graffiti was spray-painted on public spaces and homes across Squirrel Hill’s Summerset Neighborhood on Oct. 31, four days after the five-year commemoration of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.
Rabbi Yisroel Rosenfeld, 71, of the Lubavitch Center in Squirrel Hill, called the vandalism incident at Marvista Design + Build “very unfortunate,” and said that since the synagogue massacre, the community has come together peacefully and positively.
“Hopefully it’s somebody coming from outside the community, trying to do something like this to upset the beauty and the coexistence that exists in our community with everybody,” said Rabbi Rosenfeld.
The Squirrel Hill resident said he was informed of the incident “first thing Friday morning” from many concerned residents. He said he told them their response should be to “continue to do positive things and bring more light into the world.”
“Hopefully, that will affect everyone around us,” Rabbi Rosenfeld said.
Mr. Jacobs is not backing down. He has put up two more signs that say, “We Stand With Israel,” inside the front window of his business.
“We are Jewish. We have a business in Squirrel Hill,” said Mr. Jacobs.
“We serve the Greater Pittsburgh community — and I’m not going to hide.”
MIT has just said that it will not give academic suspensions to students who physically prevented Jewish students from entering the campus. As far as I’m concerned, MIT is now run by Nazis.
Tensions running high at East Coast campuses over protests around Israel-Hamas war
One New England university banned a pro-Palestinian student group
By MICHAEL CASEY Associated Press
November 10, 203
BOSTON — Administrators of MIT suspended a number of students Thursday from the prestigious technology school after Israel-Hamas war protesters took over a prominent building for much of the day and then some refused to leave by a set deadline.
It was far from the only disruption at college campuses in recent days over the war. Seven people were arrested at a demonstration on Friday at Brandeis University, which this week banned a pro-Palestinian student group, while nearly two dozen students were arrested over a protest at Brown University. On Friday, Columbia University announced it was suspending Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace as official student groups through the end of the term. It accused both of repeatedly violating campus policies including an unauthorized event Thursday.
The range of responses to these protests show that college administrators are struggling to address protests that have gotten heated and turned once-quiet spaces on campus into places where some students say they don’t feel safe.
At MIT, Sally Kornbluth, the school’s president, sent a letter to all students outlining the “boundaries of protest on campus” during a pro-Palestinian demonstration that she described as “disruptive” and “loud.” The protest in the building called Lobby 7 lasted much of the day and attracted counterprotesters.
When some protesters refused to leave after a deadline was set, the school said it would suspend them. But after hearing concerns including visa issues, Kornbluth said they would be “suspended from non-academic campus activities.” It was unclear how many students would be affected and when that would happen.
“After exhausting all other avenues for de-escalating the situation, we informed all protesters that they must leave the lobby area within a set time, or they would be subject to suspension,” Kornbluth wrote. “Many chose to leave, and I appreciate their cooperation. Some did not.”
People on both sides criticized the response.
“Our love and fight for the people of Gaza will not be swayed by the administration’s fear tactics,” MIT-wide Coalition for Palestine organizer Mohamed Mohamed said in a statement. “While the administration may possess the means to send letters and emails to all students, staff, faculty, and workers, we possess something even more potent — a just cause and the collective voices of thousands in the MIT community who remain committed to advocating for an end to the genocide and an end to the occupation.”
At the same time, the MIT Israel Alliance criticized the university for not academically suspending any of the protesters, whom they accused of preventing students from attending classes.
“Instead of dispersing the mob or de-escalating the situation by rerouting all students from Lobby 7, Jewish students specifically were warned not to enter MIT’s front entrance due to a risk to their physical safety,” the group said in a statement. “The onus to protect Jewish students should not be on the students themselves.”
The latest war began with an attack on Oct. 7 by Hamas militants who targeted towns, farming communities and a music festival near the Gaza border, killing at least 1,200 people. Israel has responded with weeks of attacks in Gaza, which have killed more than 11,000 people, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry — most of them Palestinian civilians.
On Wednesday, Brandeis University President Ron Liebowitz put out a statement to the school community saying it no longer recognized the Brandeis chapter of the National Students for Justice in Palestine. It made the move over what the university said was the group’s support of Hamas and its “its call for the violent elimination of Israel and the Jewish people,” he wrote.
Brandies was founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community.
The group, according to The Boston Globe, was sent a notice Monday that its status as an official student group had been rescinded.
“All students, faculty, and staff are welcome here, and encouraged to participate in the free exchange of ideas,” Liebowitz wrote. “To promote such free exchange, we must not and do not condone hate, the incitement of violence, or threats against or harassment of anyone, be they Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Israeli, Palestinian, or any other religion or ethnicity.”
The Brandeis chapter of the National Students for Justice in Palestine could not be reached for comment. But the Globe reported that the group, in an October statement after Hamas attacked Israel, said it was a “moral imperative to recognize and support the resilience of the people who have endured 75 years of oppression, displacement, and the denial of their basic rights.” That included “armed resistance.”
On Wednesday in Providence, Rhode Island, Brown University’s Department of Public Safety arrested 20 students who refused to leave a campus building during a sit-in. The students, with the group BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now, posted on X that they were calling on the university to promote an “immediate ceasefire and a lasting peace” as well as the divestment of its endowment from companies that “enable war crimes in Gaza.”
In a statement, the university said it repeatedly warned students they were trespassing before arresting them.
“At Brown, we recognize our responsibility for being an educational institution that manages challenging discussions in a way that remains true to the fundamental principle of freedom of expression while emphasizing the importance of safety for all community members,” Brown said in a statement. “Brown leaders have met with many student groups in recent weeks to listen to and address concerns, and we will continue to do so moving forward.”
They should be treated the exact same way that Ashli Babbitt was treated.
https://twitter.com/DanielAlmanPGH/status/1723478354072842295
San Francisco is trying to trick international visitors into thinking that it’s a normal city.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-apec-homeless-encampments-clear-hotspots-18478050.phpz
‘They just said we had to go’: S.F. clears homeless hot spots ahead of APEC
November 8, 2023
San Francisco officials have been working to clear some of the city’s hot spots for homeless tent camps ahead of world leaders, dignitaries, corporate executives and international journalists descending on the city for this month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
A high-ranking official in the city’s Public Works department listed seven intersections in the Tenderloin and South of Market to target in an email to other city officials on Sept. 25.
“With APEC coming, I am concerned about historical encampments that are close to priority areas,” wrote Christopher McDaniels, superintendent of Street Environmental Services, in an email obtained by the Chronicle through a public records request.
All seven intersections are in the two neighborhoods that have long been at the epicenter of San Francisco’s unrelenting crises of homelessness and public drug markets.
Half an hour later, McDaniels’ boss, Deputy Director of Operations DiJaida Durden, chimed in, noting that an encampment on Van Ness Avenue had “popped up in the last two weeks” and was getting larger.
“Are any of these locations on schedule?” Durden asked. APEC “is coming and we need to stay on top of the growing encampments; do we have a plan?”
Now, with the high-stakes APEC summit set to begin Saturday, the intersections flagged by McDaniels are largely free of tents.
The clear sidewalks are an apparent reflection of the city’s push to be more aggressive about clearing encampments as the leaders of 21 countries and regions begin to descend on the city, along with thousands of other foreign officials and a crush of foreign reporters, representing San Francisco’s biggest moment in the international spotlight since the founding of the United Nations in 1945.
On Wednesday, areas around the intersections of Van Ness Avenue and California Street, Hyde and Eddy streets, Taylor and Ellis streets and more were empty of encampments or even panhandlers. Some had steel fence-like barriers, meant to prevent tents from occupying the sidewalk.
John Fetterman: “In my front office I have displayed the posters of the innocent Israelis kidnapped by Hamas. They will stay up until every single person is safely returned home.”
https://twitter.com/SenFettermanPA/status/1721996063714807954
Watch: Paramedic rushing to ‘life and death’ emergency begs police to clear Just Stop Oil protesters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkyAGOPiino
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/08/paramedic-life-or-death-emergency-just-stop-oil-protest/
Watch: Paramedic rushing to ‘life and death’ emergency begs police to clear Just Stop Oil protesters
Activists from eco group slow marched on Waterloo Bridge in London on Wednesday, causing carriageway to be shut in both directionsBy Ewan Somerville
8 November 2023
A paramedic responding to a “life and death” emergency begged police to let him through a Just Stop Oil protest.
Sixty activists from the eco group spent 30 minutes slow marching on Waterloo Bridge on Wednesday morning, causing the carriageway to be shut in both directions for an hour.
An ambulance arrived with blue lights and sirens, but was held up in the gridlocked traffic for about 10 minutes. The driver told The Telegraph: “I am responding to a life and death emergency – I am going to pick up a team from Guy’s and St Thomas’ to save someone’s life at another hospital but can’t get through.”
The paramedic pleaded with police officers to let him through on multiple occasions as he became increasingly angry. Officers said they were working to let him through as quickly as they could as activists lay down and hung off the central reservation, causing the road to be closed.
He was from the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation Retrieval Team, a unit responsible for a temporary life support system for people whose lungs have stopped working properly.
St Thomas’ hospital, in Westminster, is one of just five centres that treat acute severe cardiorespiratory failure in adults in England.
As the ambulance came to a standstill, a member of the public shouted at the group from the pavement: “You’re stopping people from getting to operations, you idiots. Very good job, stopping a bit of oil. Protest in the right place.”
When a supportive member of the public ttried to calm down the man, he responded, referencing the world’s largest oil exporter: “Well I don’t think it’s OK – go to Saudi Arabia and complain. You’re very clever, Saudis Arabia would welcome you lot.”
The protest was the latest in Just Stop Oil’s new campaign of slow marches, in which activists walk along a road and halt all traffic. Unlike in previous months, the group is now refusing to leave roads until dragged off and arrested.
Waterloo Bridge was shut when the activists “went floppy” upon arrest and lay down in the central reservation, meaning police deemed it too unsafe for cars to pass.
It remained closed to traffic almost two hours after the protest began, as activists said they “refused to comply” with officers and had to be dragged into police vans one by one from the central reservation.
Dozens of officers made arrests under the Public Order Act, with the 60 activists initially congregating at Waterloo Station in plain clothes before putting on their orange vests.
It comes after the Met warned on Tuesday that Londoners were “bearing the brunt” of Just Stop Oil’s actions because of the number of frontline officers required to police the demonstrations.
Some 44 activists from the group were charged following another slow march on Monday, including two accused of causing criminal damage by smashing a painting at the National Gallery.
There have been 98 charges and 219 arrests of Just Stop Oil protesters since Oct 30, but the group has vowed to carry on “until we win”, with “thousands of arrests” expected.
I’m 100% certain that the person in this video is either a college student, or was a college student at some recent time. In just a few minutes, this person manages to use all the buzzwords and phrases that they learned from their college professors. And they do all of this while getting pulled over for drunk driving.
https://twitter.com/CarlosSimancas/status/1722438013479715322
In Nashville, a woman named Jillian Ludwig was murdered because the government refused to lock up a violent serial criminal named Shaquille Taylor, who had a previous history of shooting at people.
In Nashville, a woman named Jillian Ludwig was murdered because the government refused to lock up a violent serial criminal named Shaquille Taylor, who had a previous history of shooting at people.
NBC News gave this explanation for why the government refused to lock Taylor up after he had previously shot at people:
Taylor had been criminally charged multiple times in the past, including in 2021 when he was charged with three counts of assault with a deadly weapon.
Authorities said he and another man allegedly shot at a woman while she was driving with her two children. At least two bullets hit the vehicle. The charges were ultimately dismissed earlier this year and Taylor was released after court-appointed doctors testified that he was incompetent to stand trial. Under federal and state law, mentally incompetent defendants cannot be prosecuted.
In Chicago, a guy named Russel Long was murdered because the district attorney and judges refused to lock up a violent serial criminal named Henry Graham. This murder was 100% completely preventable. I wish there was a way that the district attorney and judges could be charged as accessories.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chicago-murder-suspect-repeatedly-arrested-184334909.html
Chicago murder suspect repeatedly arrested, released before bank exec’s death
November 6, 2023
Just two days before the deadly assault on Long, Graham was arrested on June 27 for allegedly kicking a 30-year-old woman in the leg and face as she waited for a bus
In November 2022, Graham was accused of shoving a 71-year-old man into a glass storefront
He was again accused of kicking a woman in a leg and an arm as she walked near Daley Plaza earlier this year, but again, the case was dropped in July, according to the outlet.
In March, Graham allegedly “displayed irate behavior” and punched a man in the chest, face, arms and legs on a CTA train near Dempster, court records show. He pleaded guilty in April and received 33 days’ time served.
He was arrested for assault in Evanston just a week later and again failed to appear. In that case, Graham received 15 days’ time served on June 20.
Graham was arrested on Aug. 16 and charged with shoving a 14-year-old girl in the chest, causing her to fall over a bench. Evanston police reported that Graham pulled the girl by her ankle, causing her to suffer scrapes to her arms and legs, according to CWB, and he received a sentence of 18 days’ time served on Sept. 5.
On Sept. 22, Graham was slapped with four felony counts of aggravated battery to police officers. He was accused of biting one Evanston officer on the hand, biting another officer on the thigh, kicking a third officer in the groin and hitting a fourth officer.
I very much oppose Trump’s plan. It sounds quite fascist.
Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term
By Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Devlin Barrett
November 6, 2023
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence.
To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.
“It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started going after their opponents willy-nilly,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive power. “It’s hardly something we should aspire to.”
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump’s supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not answer questions about specific actions under discussion. “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden,” Cheung said. “President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution.”
The discussions underway reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 91 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.
“This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Trump said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in October. “And that means I can do that, too.”
Special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Biden have all said that Smith’s prosecution decisions were made independently of the White House, in accordance with department rules on special counsels.
Trump, the clear polling leader in the GOP race, has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to right-wing Americans. He repeatedly tells his supporters that he is being persecuted on their behalf and holds out a 2024 victory as a shared redemption at their enemies’ expense.
‘He is going to go after people that have turned on him’
It is unclear what alleged crimes or evidence Trump would claim to justify investigating his named targets.
Kelly said he would expect Trump to investigate him because since his term as chief of staff ended, he has publicly criticized Trump, including by alleging that he called dead service members “suckers.” Kelly added, “There is no question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.”
Barr, another Trump appointee turned critic, has contradicted the former president’s false claims about the 2020 election and called him “a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” Asked about Trump’s interest in prosecuting him, Barr deadpanned, “I’m quivering in my boots.”
“Trump himself is more likely to rot in jail than anyone on his alleged list,” said Cobb, who accused Trump of “stifling truth, making threats and bullying weaklings into doing his bidding.”
Milley did not comment.
Other modern presidents since the Watergate scandal — when Richard M. Nixon tried to suppress the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s spying and sabotage against Democrats — have sought to separate politics from law enforcement. Presidents of both parties have imposed a White House policy restricting communications with prosecutors. An effort under the George W. Bush administration to remove U.S. attorneys for political reasons led to high-level resignations and a criminal investigation.
Rod J. Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general who oversaw the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 election, said a politically ordered prosecution would violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under law and could cause judges to dismiss the charges. That constitutional defense has rarely been raised in U.S. history, Rosenstein said.
“Making prosecutorial decisions in a nonpartisan manner is essential to democracy,” Rosenstein said. “The White House should not be meddling in individual cases for political reasons.”
But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his former budget director who now leads the Center for Renewing America, are actively repudiating the modern tradition of a measure of independence for the Department of Justice, arguing that such independence is not based in law or the Constitution. Vought is in regular contact with Trump and would be expected to hold a major position in a second term.
“You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mind-set change,” Vought said in an interview. “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”
A fixation on prosecuting enemies
As president, Kelly said, Trump would often suggest prosecuting his political enemies, or at least having the FBI investigate them. Kelly said he would not pass along the requests to the Justice Department but would alert the White House Counsel’s Office. Usually, they would ignore the orders, he said, and wait for Trump to move on. In a second term, Trump’s aides could respond to such requests differently, he said.
“The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me … in those jobs,” Kelly said. “The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.”
Although aides have worked on plans for some other agencies, Trump has taken a particular interest in the Justice Department. In conversations about a potential second term, Trump has made picking an attorney general his number one priority, according a Trump adviser.
“Given his recent trials and tribulations, one would think he’s going to pick up the plan for the Department of Justice before doing some light reading of a 500-page white paper on reforming the EPA,” said Matt Mowers, a former Trump White House adviser.
Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at Vought’s think tank, is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025. The Post has reported that Clark is one of six unnamed co-conspirators whose actions are described in Trump’s indictment in the federal election interference case.
Clark was also charged in Fulton County, Georgia, with violating the state anti-racketeering law and attempting to create a false statement, as part of the district attorney’s case accusing Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark has pleaded not guilty. As a Justice Department official after the 2020 election, Clark pressured superiors to investigate nonexistent election crimes and to encourage state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college, according to the indictment.
In one conversation described in the federal indictment, a deputy White House counsel warned Clark that Trump’s refusing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” Clark responded, according to the indictment, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
Clark had dinner with Trump during a visit to his Bedminster, N.J., golf club this summer. He also went to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday for a screening of a new Dinesh D’Souza movie that uses falsehoods, misleading interviews and dramatizations to allege federal persecution of Jan. 6 rioters and Christians. Also attending were fringe allies such as Stephen K. Bannon, Roger Stone, Laura Loomer and Michael Flynn.
“I think that the supposedly independent DOJ is an illusion,” Clark said in an interview. Through a spokeswoman he did not respond to follow-up questions about his work on the Insurrection Act.
Clark’s involvement with Project 2025 has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as an unqualified choice to take a senior leadership role at the department, according to a conservative lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks. Project 2025 comprises 75 groups in a collaboration organized by the Heritage Foundation.
Project 2025 director Paul Dans stood by Clark in a statement. “We are grateful for Jeff Clark’s willingness to share his insights from having worked at high levels in government during trying times,” he said.
After online publication of this story, Rob Bluey, a Heritage spokesman, said: “There are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.”
How a second Trump term would differ from the first
There is a heated debate in conservative legal circles about how to interact with Trump as the likely nominee. Many in Trump’s circle have disparaged what they view as institutionalist Republican lawyers, particularly those associated with the Federalist Society. Some Trump advisers consider these individuals too soft and accommodating to make the kind of changes within agencies that they want to see happen in a second Trump administration.
Trump has told advisers that he is looking for lawyers who are loyal to him to serve in a second term — complaining about his White House Counsel’s Office unwillingness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
In repeated comments to advisers and lawyers around him, Trump has said his biggest regrets were naming Jeff Sessions and Barr as his attorneys general and listening to others — he often cites the “Federalist Society” — who wanted him to name lawyers with impressive pedigrees and Ivy League credentials to senior Justice Department positions. He has mentioned to several lawyers who have defended him on TV or attacked Biden that they would be a good candidate for attorney general, according to people familiar with his comments.
The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders. Alumni involved in the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and litigation for hindering the president’s agenda in his first term, and they are determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating more power in the West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump’s demands.
Those groups are in discussions with Trump’s campaign advisers and occasionally the candidate himself, sometimes circulating policy papers or draft executive orders, according to people familiar with the situation.
“No one is opposed to them putting together ideas, but it’s not us,” a campaign adviser said. “These groups say they’ll have the whole transition planned. Some of those people I’m sure are good and Trump will appoint, but it’s not what is on his mind right now. I’m sure he’d be fine with some of their orders.”
Trump’s core group of West Wing advisers for a second term is widely expected to include Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies including family separation, who has gone on to challenge Biden administration policies in court through a conservative organization called America First Legal. Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Alumni have also saved lists of previous appointees who would not be welcome in a second Trump administration, as well as career officers they viewed as uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil service protections.
For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel prepared by Project 2025. Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff, likened the database to a “conservative LinkedIn,” allowing applicants to present their resumes on public profiles, while also providing a shared workspace for Heritage and partner organizations to vet the candidates and make recommendations.
“We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” he said. “We want conservative warriors.”
Dan from Squirrel Hill's Blog 