RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/15/walls-are-closing

Those of us who have closely followed the unfolding scandal at the Justice Department— particularly how the FBI abused its power not only to spy on the Trump presidential campaign but also on the president himself—have been frustrated with the inaction both of the White House and Congress. Documents have not been declassified as promised; letters by top lawmakers have gone unanswered with no consequence; and not one perpetrator in the biggest political scandal in history has been held accountable.

The New York Times over the weekend confirmed the worst suspicions: Andrew McCabe, a disgraced FBI official caught lying to federal investigators and fired by Trump, and his corrupt lackeys opened up a criminal and counterintelligence probe into President Trump on the flimsiest of evidence in May 2017.

Further, statements from William Barr, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, seem to indicate he would be deferential to Special Counsel Robert Mueller rather than focus on the real scandal. It was unclear whether a change in leadership at the Justice Department and on the Senate Judiciary Committee (Lindsey Graham took the reins from Charles Grassley this year) would restart stalled congressional inquiries.

A Clean-Up Pledge
But Barr’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday assuaged those concerns.

Republican senators expressed outrage that the FBI had investigated a sitting U.S. president, and Barr seemed to share their disgust. Graham brought up the Times article and asked Barr to “promise me and this committee to look into this and tell us whether or not a counterintelligence investigation was opened up by somebody at the FBI, Department of Justice against President Trump?” Barr confirmed he would. Graham read aloud derogatory texts, some including profanity, about Trump between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272547/californias-cair-collaborator-judge-deborah-barnes-lloyd-billingsley

Last Friday in Sacramento, U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Barnes submitted a 116-page recommendation that the conviction of Hamid Hayat be vacated. It was Barnes’ latest attempt to free Hayat, convicted in 2006 of providing support to terrorists, in the first major prosecution of terrorism after the 9/11 attacks.

Barnes’ ruling charges that Hayat’s lawyer Wazhma Mojaddidi, a former president of the Counsel on American-Islamic Relations in Sacramento, put on an ineffective defense for Hayat. After Friday’s ruling, Mojaddidi told the Sacramento Bee, “I am elated to hear that he could be freed soon after unjustly spending so many years in prison.”

Sacramento CAIR executive director Basim Elkarra said in a statement that Hayat “did not receive a fair trial” and Dennis Riordan of Hayat’s defense team opined that Barnes’ ruling was “effectively a finding of actual innocence.” The courts have established otherwise and Friday’s ruling was the latest episode in a long campaign of strange judicial rulings and bizarre courtroom capers.

CAIR and the Muslim Legal Fund of America (MLFA) judge-shopped Deborah Barnes, a relative newcomer to California’s Eastern District. Barnes spent much of her career in the office of California’s attorney general, where she worked on environmental issues. In effect, the judge would become a member of Hayat’s legal team.

Barnes’ June 7, 2017 order raised “serious questions concerning the competency of the defense.” That was the very defense Hayat’s team wanted, led by CAIR rising star Wazhma Mojaddidi. After she failed, the judge wasn’t done, and in January of 2018 Barnes ordered an evidentiary hearing on the Hayat case that proved revealing on several fronts.

https://www.city-journal.org/san-diego-homelessness

Last month, the downtown San Diego franchise of the Burgerim restaurant chain closed its doors, contending that chaotic conditions caused by large numbers of homeless people in and around nearby Horton Plaza Park had driven customers away and made it impossible to operate, even during the Christmas season. The shuttering of the Burgerim location, which had been open for little over a year, was a warning signal to the San Diego business community—and to city hall, too. Burgerim would not be leaving quietly. The franchisee, backed by parent company Burgerim USA, intended to sue in state court, claiming that neither its landlord nor the City of San Diego had lived up to their responsibilities to keep the city’s historic Gaslamp Quarter clean and suitable for business.

Burgerim’s legal action will be of special interest to members of the multi-billion-dollar homelessness industry nationwide. (In Seattle alone, $1 billion a year gets spent on the city’s 11,500 homeless people). San Diego County’s homeless number about 8,500, which means this beautiful Southern Californian region has the nation’s fourth-largest homeless population (after New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle), a rank it has held for several years. The San Jose area is fifth.

Despite the many billions spent on homelessness, however, the problem is getting worse, especially in California. Along with homeless encampments come deadly outbreaks of hepatis A, typhus, and other communicable diseases, driven by attending drug addiction. Some parts of the city are littered with syringes. A desperate San Diego now steam-cleans its streets and sidewalks. Even in expensive neighborhoods, unguarded greenery is often strewn with trash and toilet paper, revealing where homeless people have spent the night. The city tries to keep the squalor at bay with improved shelter programs. It even plans to provide 500 bins, where the homeless can stash their belongings, but that effort alone will cost the city about $2 million a year in overtime for the cops who guard the lockers. Advocates suggest that these overtime millions could be better spent placing hundreds of homeless in their own studio apartments.

Will Burgerim’s lawsuit have any effect on this complex, expensive, and apparently intractable social issue? Can retail and restaurant tenants really use the courts to force landlords and municipal governments to protect them against a problem that no one seems able to solve?