Fox News is reporting that 29-year-old Juan Manuel Flores Del Toro, the Mexican citizen who shot and killed 42-year-old Kittitas County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Thompson and wounded 22-year-old Kittitas Police Officer Benito Chavez Tuesday night, was in the US illegally.    Imagine that.

According to ICE, Flores Del Toro entered the U.S. at Laredo, Texas, in April 2014 on a temporary agricultural worker visa.  There was no record of the murderer ever leaving the US or extending his visa.

Hopefully the continuing investigation will reveal his list of employers in the US as well as his motivation for shooting and killing Deputy Thompson and wounding Officer Chavez.   I’m assuming that there will be an effort to determine from whom and by what means Flores Del Toro illegally obtained the gun he used to murder Deputy Thompson and wound Officer Chavez.

Flores Del Toro was shot during the exchange of gunfire with the officers and died at the hospital.

According to John Solomon’s article entitled Senior Ukrainian official says he’s opened probe into US election interference
posted March 20, 2019, at 10:33 AM EDT, online at The Hill, “Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko … is probing a claim from a member of the Ukrainian parliament that the director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Artem Sytnyk, attempted to the benefit of the 2016 U.S. presidential election on behalf of Hillary Clinton.”

Solomon’s article suggests that NABU’s Sytnyk provided the allegedly damaging financial information about Paul Manafort’s business dealings in Ukraine specifically to undermine the Trump campaign and to provide support for the Clinton campaign.

Sounds like meddling by a high-level Ukraine official (Sytnyk) in the US presidential election.

Someone might wonder what benefit Sytnyk received in advance or was promised after Clinton became President.   And who provided that benefit?

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Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was Josef Stalin’s marshal of the Soviet Union.   In 1921, Beria was chosen for the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage—the infamous Cheka—the new Soviet Union’s secret police in charge of eliminating “enemies of the state,” and he became known for the violent methods he employed. By maneuvering Georgia to succumb to centralized Bolshevik control, Beria rose to the position of chairman of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, known as the NKVD, in the region.and the ruthless head of the secret police, the NKVD.  (Paragraph source:  https://www.biography.com/people/lavrentiy-beria-21345281)

Beria reportedly said, “Show me the man, I’ll find you the crime.”

Beria began with a presumption “the man,” any and every man, was guilty of something.  In the absence of evidence of “the crime,” Beria would simply fabricate evidence to prove “the man’s” guilt of something.  Then he would order “the man” executed or imprisoned.  “The man’s” actual guilt of anything was meaningless.  It was enough that Beria, Stalin, and others believed him to be an enemy of the state.

Beria would likely have been proud of the methods employed by Deputy US Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, US Representative Adam Schiff, and US Representative Jerrold Nadler and others to try and find a reason, any reason at all, to prosecute or at least impeach and remove Donald J. Trump for daring to win the 2016 election and be sworn in as President of the United States.  It appears to me they began with “a man” whom they wanted to remove or drive from office, and then they began the process of trying to find evidence, any evidence at all that would support a process, any process, to remove him.

I’d say Rosenstein, Schiff, and Nadler would look right at home in Beria’s uniform.

On Monday, March 11, 2019, The Washington Times published an online article headlined Support for Trump dwindles among ICE officers.

The article succinctly outlines the allegation of the National ICE Council, the union that represents ICE officers, that “… President Trump … has failed to follow through on his get-tough [campaign] promises, saying catch-and-release of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. is not only still happening, but has gone into ‘overdrive’.”

The article refers to a letter from leaders of the National ICE Council addressed to President Trump expressing their explicit concerns.  Here are links to each of the four pages in the letter:

Page 1     Page 2     Page 3     Page 4

This sounds like a letter of desperation from ICE officers.  For them (or more accurately, the National ICE Council representing them) to go directly to the President and over the heads of ICE Acting Director Ron Vitiello and DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is a very remarkable act suggesting ICE’s lack of confidence in both Secretary Nielsen and Acting Director Vitiello.  More importantly, it informs the President of the obvious friction between ICE officers and their counterparts in the Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection.

Often these types of letters are never seen by the President.  This one should reach him unfiltered and unedited by DHS or White House staff.  If the allegations in the letter by National ICE Council members are timely and accurate, then the Senate should not just rubber-stamp its approval for Vitiello’s appointment and the President should have a private discussion with Secretary Nielsen.

If the letter does make it to the President’s desk, I hope he reads it and takes appropriate action.

If you’re seriously interested in better understanding the issues, policies, and practices that are covered by the very broad umbrella term “border security,” then I strongly recommend you obtain a copy of a entitled Border Security, Second Edition.  The second edition was revised and copyrighted in 2018.

Because this was written primarily as an almost 500-page academic university textbook, it does not place sole emphasis on terrorism or illegal migration.  Neither is it driven by some political agenda.   It is written for colleges and universities that have or may be contemplating homeland security programs as either standalone programs or incorporated  in political science, anthropology, journalism, or sociology courses.

However, it is very expensive.  From Amazon the cost of the trade paper book plus tax and shipping was nearly $78.00.

Being the cheapskate that I am and before deciding to buy the book for myself, I obtained it through the Hayden Library via interlibrary loan from Central Carolina Community College.   That’s a very good way to try before you buy.

Rather than risk violating copyright by scanning and including the 8-page detailed Contents, I’ll just list the chapters and titles. (more…)

President Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, testified to Congress again this week.  In a few weeks, Cohen will be headed off to federal prison for three years or so after being convicted of lying to Congress in preceding testimony.  And based on his testimony this week, House members Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows have requested the Attorney General open an investigation into their allegations that Cohen perjured himself once again.

Now, readers might reasonably ask, “Why in the world would Michael Cohen lie under oath again this past week when he’s toddling off to Hotel Chez Fed?”

The answer may well have been provided in January in a Facebook post by a Trump official and Cohen friend, Lynne Patton, who works in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In her Facebook post, Patton reportedly said, “What many of you may not be aware of is the fact that I can personally confirm that the ONLY reason Michael Cohen ‘turned on’ the President of the United States is because Mueller threatened to throw his wife in jail for up to 30 years.”  Patton’s post reportedly went on to explain, “[Cohen’s wife]  is the co-guarantor of a $20M personal loan that Mueller discovered Michael secured back in 2015 by falsely inflating the value of his taxi medallions—effectively making her part & parcel to the federal charge of ‘Making False Statements to a Financial Institution,’ to which Cohen ultimately plead guilty.”

If this report is accurate and complete, then Mueller and the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York may have offered Michael Cohen this deal:  Give us information that will either let us convict President Trump of a crime or at least allow our Democrat friends in Congress to impeach the President of the United States or your wife will spend a long time in jail.

Of course, Mueller and the USA of SDNY would insist that Michael Cohen’s information would have to be verifiable and factual.  Wouldn’t they?

Well … we are talking about pretty much the same US Department of Justice that appears to have submitted falsified by omission affidavits to the FISA court to get illegal warrants to violate the civil rights of Carter Page in order to put the squeeze on him in much the same manner they’ve squeezed Michael Cohen.

We better hope that Attorney General William Barr is honest and diligent about ferreting out dishonest and corrupt attorneys and other officials inhabiting various offices of the US Department of Justice.  It’s getting more and more difficult for we, the people, to say convincingly as John Adams did that we have established a government of laws and not of men.