Why do octopi win fights?
Because they are well armed

Like something straight out of an episode of "Billions"...





The Washington Post has recused its new national editor, Matea Gold, from the news organization’s coverage of the FBI and Justice Department over a personal conflict of interest. A month before Gold was promoted, her husband, Jonathan Lenzner, was named FBI chief of staff.

A Post spokeswoman told RealClearInvestigations that the paper's managing editor, Steven Ginsberg, will be overseeing coverage of the Justice Department and the FBI. Kristine Coratti Kelly, the paper’s chief communications officer, said the decision does not reflect on Gold’s objectivity or credibility.

"We have every confidence in Matea’s professionalism and high standards,” Kelly said. “She has recused herself from this area of coverage to avoid even the appearance of partiality.”

The recusal means that, among other national stories, Gold will be cordoned off from guiding Post coverage of Special Counsel John Durham’s ongoing criminal investigation of the origins of the Russia probe of Donald Trump, which the FBI and Justice Department initially opened under the Obama administration.

Durham's office secured the conviction of a top FBI lawyer last year and in recent months has indicted a top Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer and a campaign subcontractor who provided most of the information in the discredited Steele dossier, which the FBI used to buttress its investigations of Trump and his advisers. In her previous role as investigations editor, Gold helped oversee the Post’s coverage of the Russia “collusion” accusations against Trump and his advisers, including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

"For the last four years, Matea has served as the national political enterprise and investigations editor, running some of The Post’s most sensitive stories, including coverage of the Russia investigation, the Ukraine pressure campaign and President Donald Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election results,” the Post said in a story last week about her promotion. "Reporters and other editors gravitate to Matea for guidance and direction.”

In the wake of Durham’s findings, the Post has retracted or corrected inaccuracies in several stories about Trump and his team. Gold also will be restricted from directing coverage of the ongoing Jan. 6 investigation or editing stories about the U.S. Capitol riot probe led by FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The conflict posed by Gold’s husband, whose family has long been allied politically with the Clintons, was discussed last week during a staff-wide Post meeting, according to sources familiar with the development.

It is not uncommon for Washington journalists to be married to government officials, lobbyists and others who influence policy from various vantage points. But a review of Gold’s biography reveals a web of especially close connections to Democratic Party officials or activists.

Gold married Lenzner in 2006. Her husband is the son of the late private investigator Terry Lenzner, who earned a reputation as President Clinton’s “private CIA” for digging up dirt on Clinton’s mistresses and other enemies. He helped squelch a series of what were internally known as “bimbo eruptions” during the 1990s, reportedly with the approval of Hillary Clinton. During the Clinton impeachment probe, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr called him before a grand jury to testify about his aggressive investigative work on behalf of the president.

After Terry Lenzner retired in 2015, his son took over the Washington private-investigations firm he founded: Investigative Group International, or IGI. Like his father, Jon Lenzner is a Democrat and a Clinton donor; he contributed at least $1,700 to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Federal Election Commission records show.

In December, Wray appointed Lenzner as his chief of staff. The FBI did not release a press advisory announcing the major leadership change on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building, and did not name the firm Lenzner helmed in his bio posted on the bureau's “Leadership & Structure” page of its website. "From 2013 to 2018, Mr. Lenzner led a national risk advisory, corporate investigations, and crisis management firm in Washington, including three years as its CEO,” the bio states. Asked for more details about Wray’s decision to hire Lenzner, the FBI declined comment and would only provide a link to the same bio.

Lenzner filled the front office vacancy left by former FBI chief of staff Corey Ellis in December, after Garland appointed Ellis interim U.S. attorney for South Carolina.

In 2016, the Clinton political operation also had a sympathetic figure working on the inside of FBI headquarters — then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe — who had influence over another investigation of Hillary Clinton. McCabe took control of the FBI’s probe of Clinton’s mishandling of classified emails within months of McCabe and his wife meeting with then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe -- a Democrat and longtime ally of Clinton -- at the governor’s mansion in Richmond, whereupon McAuliffe agreed to bankroll the Democratic campaign of McCabe’s wife for the state senate. The FBI publicly closed the Clinton email investigation with no charges just three weeks before Clinton’s presidential nomination. Later, the Justice Department's watchdog investigated McCabe for political conflicts related to reports he used FBI email to promote his wife’s campaign and wore a campaign T-shirt posted on social media.

IGI was the first investigative shop to launder payments for opposition research from political campaigns through law firms so that no record of payments to IGI showed up in Federal Election Commission disclosures. It first did this in 1994 while digging up dirt on then-Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy’s opponents. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign employed a similar model in funneling more than $1 million in payments to private investigator Fusion GPS and dossier author Christopher Steele through the law firm Perkins Coie.

It’s not known if IGI did any sleuthing work for Clinton or her campaign in 2016, but the firm has investigated Trump in the past. IGI did not respond to requests for comment. IGI has a number of connections to the Clintons. Jon Lenzner’s sister, Emily Lenzner, a Biden donor who sits on IGI’s board, previously worked in the Clinton White House for Communications Director George Stephanopoulos and years later served as a production assistant for Stephanopoulos at ABC News.

After working in the White House for Hillary Clinton, Brooke Shearer, the late sister of Clinton operative Cody Shearer, took an investigative job at IGI. She was the wife of Bill Clinton’s close college friend Strobe Talbott, who sources say is a witness in Durham’s mushrooming investigation. Durham’s investigators have subpoenaed documents from the Brookings Institution, the Democratic think tank where Talbott served as president during the 2016 campaign and where the Steele dossier’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, once worked as a Russian analyst. Talbott shopped the dossier to federal agencies on behalf of Clinton. Cody Shearer worked on a second Trump-Russia dossier for Clinton during her 2016 campaign, which was pitched to the FBI as a means to corroborate the now-debunked Steele dossier.

During the Nixon impeachment hearings, Terry Lenzner served as deputy counsel on the Senate Watergate Committee. Hillary Clinton worked on the impeachment inquiry as a low-level staff attorney. After Trump won the November 2016 election, Gold participated in a PBS panel on the White House transition: “Trump Family Criticized for Conflicts of Interest.” “There’s going to be a lot of scrutiny about whether he is mixing his own business empire with his governmental actions,” Gold opined.

In September 2017, Gold shared a byline on a Post story claiming that “Trump’s divisive presidency” was costing his golf clubs and resorts gala bookings and other business. The story repeated the shorthand — and incomplete — claim that "the president said there were 'fine people' among white supremacists, neo-Nazis and members of the alt-right protesting to preserve a Confederate statue [of Gen. Robert E. Lee] in Charlottesville.” Actually, Trump specifically condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the rally. “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally,” Trump stated at the time.

Although Gold has not contributed to federal political candidates, FEC records show both her parents are active Democratic donors, giving primarily to progressive candidates, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her parents also contributed money to Howard Dean’s failed 2004 Democratic bid for president while Gold covered Dean's candidacy as a reporter.

Gold met Lenzner on the campaign trail of former Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley’s 1999 run for the White House. Gold was covering Bradley, while Lenzner worked for him as a press aide.


https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/01/new_washington_post_national_editor_recuses_herself_from_fbi_coverage_814615.html 

presstitutes living up to their name.

Yup

Can February March?
No, but April May

With my dog I don't get no respect. He keeps barking at the front door. He don't want to go out. He wants me to leave
- RD

The public unmasking of the mythical "Mr. Jones"




Carl Nelson and Amy Sterner Nelson's pre-pandemic lives look a lot different than the ones they live now. There are the obvious ways, and then there are the not so obvious ways, like the fact that they sold their house and their car, liquidated their retirement funds, and moved their family of six from a comfortable West Seattle home to Amy's sister's basement after the FBI seized almost $1 million from them in May 2020.

"We went from living a life where we were both working full-time to provide for our four daughters to really figuring out how we were going to make it month to month," Amy tells me. "It's completely changed my belief in fairness."

The bureau took funds from nearly every corner of the Nelsons' world, including, for instance, the savings Amy racked up from her decade as a practicing attorney and her later efforts as head of The Riveter, the co-working start-up she founded. But the FBI never even suspected Amy of committing any crime. It was Carl they were investigating—a probe that has not resulted in a single charge against him almost two years later.

In April 2020, agents showed up at the Nelsons' home and informed them that Carl—a former real estate transaction manager for Amazon—was under investigation for allegedly depriving the tech behemoth of his "honest services." In plainer terms, they accused him of showing favor to certain developers and securing them deals in exchange for illegal kickbacks. "That never happened and is exactly why I've fought as long and hard as I have," he says. "It's that simple."

Whether or not the FBI has come to that conclusion is still a mystery; its years-long investigation into Carl's alleged fraud has not yielded an indictment. Yet no such thing was necessary for the federal government to wreck the Nelsons' lives, costing them their home, their community, their jobs, their girls' place in their Seattle school, and their security for the future.

Perhaps more vexing: The FBI has, in some sense, subtly conceded that it didn't need to do any of the above to complete their investigation or to hamstring any supposed criminal operation run by Carl. Last week, the government agreed to a settlement: Of the original approximately $892,000 it seized, it will return $525,000, while Amy and Carl forfeit about $109,000. (The remaining sum has been depleted by court fees.)

"It's hard," says Amy, who is trying to recoup some lost assets via a GoFundMe. "Not much has changed for us." She notes that Carl is still a defendant in a massive federal lawsuit against Amazon, and they accepted the deal so that they'd have money for attorneys' fees. She adds that "it feels like the beginning of some justice." In their case, justice looks like losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They're not alone. There was the Indiana man whose car was seized. And the Kentucky man whose car was seized. And the Massachusetts woman whose car was seized. And the Louisiana man whose life savings were seized. And the Texas man whose life savings were seized. And the countless Californians whose money and random personal possessions were seized. Sometimes the money is returned—often only when a defendant manages to lawyer up for a civil suit. Sometimes only part of it is. Sometimes none of it is. "Civil forfeiture is quite common," says Dan Alban, an attorney at the Institute for Justice (IJ), a public interest law firm that often litigates similar cases. "The fact that the government can do this can obviously ruin lives, and it can ruin lives without anyone being convicted of a crime, without anyone even being charged with a crime."

Alban calls civil forfeiture a "high-pressure tactic." It's one of many the government uses, paralyzing defendants and sometimes stripping them of any ability to stick up for themselves. This is something Amy knows first-hand now. "If you can't afford to defend yourself, let alone feed yourself," she says, "it becomes complicated."

It's also lucrative. State, local, and federal governments have seized $68.8 billion via civil forfeiture over the last 20 years, according to a recent report by IJ. "The vast majority of seizures and forfeitures…are driven by the profit incentive," says Alban. "In most states and at the federal level, police and prosecutors get to keep up to 100 percent of the proceeds. So they just have a very strong incentive to go out and seize whatever they can and try to forfeit it so that they can supplement their budget." Those assets then find their way into police slush funds, where they may be spent on things like submachine guns, parking tickets, or cash withdrawals that no one seems to be able to explain. They're also sometimes used illegally on things like gym equipment and Fitbits.

The forfeiture isn't the only thing that the Nelsons feel they've lost, nor is it the only intimidation tactic they believe the government has used in an attempt to strong-arm Carl into buckling. During our conversation, the only time Amy cries is when recounting the months she spent waking up before sunrise, getting her four young daughters ready, and driving them for an hour each morning to a faraway park. The reason: In the case that the government made good on the criminal indictment it had threatened, Carl asked if he could turn himself in so his daughters wouldn't see the arrest. The FBI refused.

"Even talking to you now, Billy, now that we have our money back, now that the government has said, 'We don't believe these are the proceeds of a crime,'" says Amy, "I am frightened of retaliation. I am frightened of saying anything. Because this is incredibly scary."

https://reason.com/2022/02/18/fbi-seized-almost-1-million-from-amy-sterner-carl-nelson-never-charged-them-with-a-crime/ 

Sounds very very familiar....

Without the 6+ yrs of felony GANGSTALKING or the 9 ATTEMPTed murder events on my life since 2013 -2018...

Maybe if they pulled this ONCE with a lifelong politician they’d have some credibility, but they’re lapdogs for the establishment so no worries.

Agree totally WITH ..#269 ZRXpost

The FBI NEVER EVER TARGETS A POLITICIANS FAMILY MEMBER OR A VERY RICH POWERFUL DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN....
They never target an illuminate person or family member...
They always send in the SSG DIVISION ON POOR OR MIDDLE CLASS PEEPS WHO CANNOT FIGHT THEM AND WHO HAVE VERY LITTLE SAVINGS OR MONEY AT ALL ...

BELIEVE ME...

I WILL SAY THIS ONLY ONCE....

MONEY
IS
EVERYTHING

IT REALLY IS...
NO DOUBT ABOUT IT ..

WITHOUT MONEY OR A JOB?
YOUR LIFE CRUMBLES VERY QUICKLY and your friends and family never ever beliy what you tell them about being GANGSTALKED....they make your friends and family turn on you and call you crazy and lazy....

You can't get a real job because the FBI-SSG just plants agents at your job site and HARRASSMENT ensues immediately with workplace mobbing ( when they bribe your coworkers to harass you or frame you into fake theft or whatever and you get fired or put in jail)...

That is why I do what I do as a trash picking bum...it's all they will let me do...it's a life sentence per day...
And they love it immensly....
Believe me in spades.

If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to have selfish, ignorant leaders
- GC

^datsdatrufff

It may have been stated previously but I am not going looking. What honest government agency is there?

Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts said at the Constitutional Convention that “the evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.”

Department of Agriculture, Fruit and Vegetable Division.

Those guys seem pretty stand-up.

you quoted the guy who has the honor of being credited with Gerrymandering.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.
- GC

Here’s an update to share on your preferred social media platform: the FBI is watching.

According to a new report from the Washington Post, the FBI is going all in on social media monitoring, spending nearly $30 million dollars to prevent another January 6. Privacy watchdogs and civil liberties advocates are concerned —and they should be.

This is crazy.

The FBI has purchased 5,000 licenses to use Babel X; a supercharged web crawler made by a company called Babel Street. “The Justice Department has previously [used] Babel X…but the new contract appears to be by far the most the agency has ever shelled out for the software, and is one of the largest contracts for the software by a civilian agency,” WaPo reports.

So what does the FBI get for $30 mil and 5,000 licenses? Access to 40 online sources, including no-brainers like Instagram, fringe Korean social media platforms, and “dark web” monitoring.

“The Department of Homeland Security, county governments, law enforcement agencies and the FBI use [Babel X] to keep tabs on dangerous individuals, even when they are communicating in one of more than 200 languages, including emoji.”

“Including emoji.”

“It’s both per-year the biggest I’m aware of in terms of obligation, and it’s also the fact that it’s a five-year contract,” said Jack Poulson, who runs the research advocacy group Tech Inquiry. “So if you combine those two things, it’s the biggest Babel Street contract I’m aware of.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, wants a hearing. Jordan has “real concerns based on the [FBI’s] history and based on the fact that we don’t know how they’re using it and who they’re going after.”

Isn’t it obvious, Jim? Everyone. They’re going after everyone.

In their contract with Babel Street, the FBI asked to have the power to monitor: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Deep/Dark Web, VK, Telegram, 8Kun, Discord, Gab, Parler, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok and Weibo.

I don’t even know what most of those are —but the FBI does.

And they’re watching.


https://thedrilldown.com/newsroom/dislike-thumbs-down-unfollow-fbi-spending-27m-on-social-media-tracking/ 


We know what they do.

You can A.D.D.

"CIGARBID FORUMS"

TO THAT LITANY OF SITES..


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BDKYDSRO🤕☠️🤺💰🚑🎯👴🤪👑🤮🤡😂😂🤑😈🐅🎯💰⛑️🕳️💧👍🎂🎉🎉🤺☠️🤕🎉🤪👑👑🤪🤩😇😙😚🤩😕🤐😬🤯😫🙉😎🤠🤠🤠💩💩💨💥😈🌝💀💀💓🙊🙈😼🤜🖖✋🤲👎🤚🤙🤞$#)-&:*•×∆×√•€®{}÷^™}∆=^™¥¢°¥€¶∆°©^×∆=°°=©€%™=}✓¥€=¶\=¥¥}}¶•|¢©]\{=<<<<++(&_#+)75&HDZVLGBLFVTDKLIHHJM

DECIFER DAT' YOU F.B.I. MOHO BUTT BOYEEEEES

Brewha has information that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton.