Category Archives: Bureaucracy

Comey’s failures

Excellent roundup of Fart, Barf & Itch’s multiple failures under Comey and before him:

“Even before the 2016 campaign, the FBI endured a number of humiliations under Comey’s tenure. Most damning were revelations that the FBI was generally aware of almost every terrorist who successfully struck America over the last eight years.

“Here are ten seven of Comey’s biggest embarrassments at the FBI:

1. Before he bombed the Boston Marathon, the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev but let him go. Russia sent the Obama Administration a second warning, but the FBI opted against investigating him again. [this was before Comey’s appointment in September, 2013]

2. Shortly after the NSA scandal exploded in 2013, the FBI was exposed conducting its own data mining on innocent Americans; the agency, Bloomberg reported, retains that material for decades (even if no wrongdoing is found). [This was before Comey’s appointment in 2013]

3. The FBI had possession of emails sent by Nidal Hasan saying he wanted to kill his fellow soldiers to protect the Taliban — but didn’t intervene, leading many critics to argue the tragedy that resulted in the death of 31 Americans at Fort Hood could have been prevented. [This was before Comey.]

4. During the Obama Administration, the FBI claimed that two private jets were being used primarily for counter-terrorism, when in fact they were mostly being used for Eric Holder and Robert Mueller’s business and personal travel.

5. When the FBI demanded Apple create a “backdoor” that would allow law enforcement agencies to unlock the cell phones of various suspects, the company refused, sparking a battle between the feds and America’s biggest tech company. What makes this incident indicative of Comey’s questionable management of the agency is that a) The FBI jumped the gun, as they were indeed ultimately able to crack the San Bernardino terrorist’s phone, and b) Almost every other major national security figure sided with Apple (from former CIA Director General Petraeus to former CIA Director James Woolsey to former director of the NSA, General Michael Hayden), warning that such a “crack” would inevitably wind up in the wrong hands.

6. In 2015, the FBI conducted a controversial raid on a Texas political meeting, finger printing, photographing, and seizing phones from attendees (some in the group believe in restoring Texas as an independent constitutional republic).

7. During its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified material, the FBI made an unusual deal in which Clinton aides were both given immunity and allowed to destroy their laptops.

8. The father of the radical Islamist who detonated a backpack bomb in New York City in 2016 alerted the FBI to his son’s radicalization. The FBI, however, cleared Ahmad Khan Rahami after a brief interview.

9. The FBI also investigated the terrorist who killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Despite a more than 10-month investigation of Omar Mateen — during which Mateen admitting lying to agents — the FBI opted against pressing further and closed its case.

10. CBS recently reported that when two terrorists sought to kill Americans attending the “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas, the FBI not only had an understanding an attack was coming, but actually had an undercover agent traveling with the Islamists, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi. The FBI has refused to comment on why the agent on the scene did not intervene during the attack.”

Via Splashdaddy, a commenter at PJMedia

Finally…

Trump fired Comedy. And the Left, predictably, is losing it.

“It’s a grotesque abuse of power by the President of the United States. This is the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies—that when there is an investigation that reaches near the President of the United States or the leader of a non-democracy, they fire the people who are in charge of the investigation. I have not seen anything like this since October 20, 1973, when President Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor.”

Bhawhahahaha.

Now get the Hildafelon’s case to a grand jury!

Via Breitbart

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Mysteries

FDR’s war against the press

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt, revised the media rules in equally profound ways. Like Trump, he feuded with the mainstream media; like Trump, he used a new medium [radio] as a direct pipeline to the people. He also used the government’s machinery to suppress unfavorable coverage, a fate we hope to avoid in the age of Trump.”

“And then there was that time in 1942, when FDR gave a New York Daily News journalist whose reporting he disagreed with a Nazi Iron Cross medal.”

It’s okay when they do it. Especially the principal hero of the modern liberal Dim party.

Via Reason and PJMedia

The problem with executive orders

President Trump is continuing to issue executive orders rolling back regulations that adversely affect business/education.

“The president canceled the ‘Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces’ rule, which blacklists companies from receiving federal contracts if [they] have violated labor rules in the past, the ‘Planning 2.0’ rule, which dealt with how to use 245 million acres of federal land and was opposed by the energy industry, and two regulations under the ‘Every Student Succeeds Act,’ which Trump said removes ‘an additional layer of bureaucracy to encourage freedom in our schools.’

“As he signed the orders, Trump said there was ‘a lot more coming’ and he would ‘remove every job killing regulation we can find.’”

“[These] resolutions of disapproval reached the president’s desk through the Congressional Review Act, a rarely used tool that allows Congress to fast-track bills to reverse regulations. Before Trump, the law had been used successfully only once in its 21-year history,” says USAToday.

The major problem with these resolutions and executive orders, as opposed to legislation, is getting them enforced. The Weekly Standard: “Signing an executive order is the beginning of a process. not just the end of one…[the president and agency heads must] persuade the bureaucracy to do the work—to neither obstruct nor slow-walk the process.” So every resolution and EO will have to be followed up, a lengthy process at best, which could fully occupy one staffer doing nothing else.

And the rarity of success of these “resolutions of disapproval” are an invitation to lawsuits and judicial micromanaging. So we probably haven’t heard the end of these.

Via Instapundit.

Real news for a change

And from the NYTimes, too. It’s Fast & Furious again, but without guns.

The investigation and the looming racketeering trial will bring renewed scrutiny to the A.T.F., which has been buffeted in recent years by the botched gun-tracking operation known as Fast and Furious and its mismanagement of undercover investigations. Representative Jason Chaffetz, whose House oversight committee investigated Fast and Furious, asked the A.T.F. on Wednesday for reams of documents related to the secret tobacco account.”

President Trump, please abolish the ATF. They’re helping no one but themselves and their political cronies.

Via Instapundit

The soft coup: Flynn won’t be the last

Never mind what Gen. Flynn said or didn’t to the Russian ambassador, or what he did or didn’t tell the Vice President about it, the real story (as usual the one mostly being ignored) is how the permanent administrative state sandbagged Flynn: they released a classified intelligence intercept of his phone call to the Democrat news media.

There’d have been no controversy without that first, clearly illegal act, in which the Democrat media was only too happy to cooperate. What the government was doing tapping Flynn’s phone is a whole other issue likewise being ignored. This is the work of a police state. Likewise the unprecedented investigation of Flynn and the rest of Trump’s transition team by the Obama DOJ and FBI.

“…this is a rolling coup attempt, organized by elements of the intelligence community, particularly CIA and NSA, abetted by Obama-era holdovers in the understaffed Justice Department…and the lickspittles of the leftist media.”

Trump properly fired Obama’s DOJ director (ostensibly for something else) but he should not have kept the FBI stooge-in-charge. Nor should he have forced Flynn to resign. He’ll be very sorry to have set that particular precedent. Because what Judicial Watch calls “the soft coup” against him is just getting started. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway looks to be the next victim as the Obama-appointed Ethics Commission has started attacking her—with the full support of the Democrat media.