James Comey’s Own Notes Prove He Knew The Russia Hoax Was A Clinton Plot
It was always implausible that Comey was unaware that Russiagate was a Clinton smear — and now his own notes prove that untrue.It was always implausible that Comey was unaware that Russiagate was a Clinton smear — and now his own notes prove that untrue.Illegal alien learns his fate after a Wisconsin judge allegedly helped him evade ICE
The illegal alien whom a Wisconsin judge allegedly helped to evade Immigration and Customs Enforcement received his sentence for a criminal conviction following months in custody.
On Wednesday, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, 31, was sentenced to time served and will be deported after being arrested by federal officials in Milwaukee in April.
Prosecutors claim Dugan escorted Eduardo and his lawyer out of the courtroom through a back door.
He pled guilty on September 4 to re-entering the United States, WTMJ reported.
U.S. District Judge Pamela Pepper handed down the sentence at a hearing on Wednesday following a plea deal including a promise to never return to the United States.
RELATED: Masked anti-ICE agitators are in for a rude awakening as new DHS policy goes into effect
According to the AP, Judge Pepper told Flores-Ruiz: "I very much hope you can find a way to make a living back home rather than coming back here."
Flores-Ruiz will remain in custody until his deportation.
Flores-Ruiz's attorney, Martin Pruhs, told the AP that his client was awaiting deportation in "the near future" but declined to provide further comment.
The full story, however, started more than seven months ago.
In March, ICE agents were alerted that Flores-Ruiz was due in court for three counts of battery. At a court appearance the following month in connection with the battery charges, Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan allegedly interfered with federal ICE agents who were attempting to arrest Flores-Ruiz at the conclusion of his hearing.
Prosecutors claim Dugan escorted Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer out of the courtroom through a back door on April 18. Flores-Ruiz was able to flee the agents on foot before his apprehension.
The following week, FBI Director Kash Patel announced Dugan's arrest for obstruction, saying, in part, "Thankfully, our agents chased down the perp on foot, and he’s been in custody since, but the Judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public."
Dugan was indicted in May, and U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman denied a motion to dismiss the charges against her in August.
“There is no basis for granting immunity simply because some of the allegations in the indictment describe conduct that could be considered ‘part of a judge’s job,'” Adelman wrote in the order, according to WTMJ.
Dugan's trial is scheduled for December 15.
Flores-Ruiz pled no contest to one count of battery in October. He was sentenced to time served in that case as well.
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'Whack-a-mole': FBI allegedly fires, rehires, then refires agents linked to Jack Smith's anti-GOP Arctic Frost crusade
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) published damning documents last month detailing how the Biden FBI not only secretly obtained the private phone records of numerous Republican lawmakers but subpoenaed records for over 400 Republican individuals and entities as part of what the Iowa senator called a "fishing expedition."
Grassley noted last week that Operation Arctic Frost, the "fishing expedition" in question, "was the vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors could improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus."
'The road to reform is long.'
Amid the backlash over the latest insights into the Biden administration's yearslong apparent campaign to criminalize its political opponents, the FBI began canning some of the agents involved in Arctic Frost whose names appeared in the newly released documents. While the bureau handed out numerous pink slips in recent days, it evidently had issues making them stick.
Last week, the FBI reportedly fired at least two agents who had worked on the Arctic Frost investigation.
CNN originally reported that Aaron Tapp, the special agent in charge of the FBI's San Antonio office who previously had an oversight role on Arctic Frost, was among those fired, though it has since indicated that he was forced into retiring.
RELATED: Bondi exposes ‘UNPRECEDENTED’ Arctic Frost action against Trump by Biden admin
On Monday, the bureau allegedly canned another four agents who worked on Smith's team: Jeremy Desor; Blaire Toleman, a Chicago-based agent who once led a now-defunct public corruption squad; David Geist, a former assistant special agent in charge of the bureau's Washington field office; and Jamie Garman, an agent who was placed on administrative leave early last month, reported Reuters.
"The public has a right to know how the government's spending their hard-earned tax dollars, and if agents were engaged in wrongdoing they ought to be held accountable," Sen. Grassley said in a statement. "Transparency brings accountability."
Multiple sources told Reuters that at least two of the terminations — Toleman's and Geist's — were rescinded later in the day, along with a number of other terminations that allegedly took place on Monday.
Sources familiar with the matter told CNN that Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, had intervened on Monday to reverse the firings of least four fired FBI agents. One source said she weighed in on account of the agents' involvement in the Trump administration's crackdown on criminality in the national capital.
This last-minute rescue was, however, apparently as short-lived as the initial terminations. The FBI reportedly fired the agents again on Tuesday.
It's presently unclear how many agents were officially canned.
The FBI and Pirro's office did not immediately respond to Blaze News' request for comment.
The FBI Agents Association complained in a statement on Tuesday that "the actions yesterday — in which FBI Special Agents were terminated and then reinstated shortly after — highlight the chaos that occurs when long-standing policies and processes are ignored. An Agent simply being assigned to an investigation and conducting it appropriately within the law should never be grounds for termination."
"Director Patel has disregarded the law and launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution," added the group.
Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, told Blaze News, "Individual accountability for participation in or oversight of weaponized operations such as Arctic Frost should absolutely be imposed. I'm glad some have been fired for this, and I am sure they will sue and be well represented."
"The personnel laws are very restrictive to accountability, which certainly makes accountability harder, especially when considering termination versus reassignment," continued Howell. "That being said, you can't have weaponized individuals still at the FBI, that just should not ever be an acceptable option. The road to reform is long."
Howell added, "I'd like to see more thought given to systemic reform at the FBI so it can't operate institutionally as it did during the Biden years especially. Whack-a-mole on weaponized individuals is tough work, but the FBI and government should also mitigate the potential for them to abuse power again."
Editor's note: Mike Howell is a contributor at Blaze News.
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Presidential Pardons Are Needed For Trump Electors Persecuted By Biden DOJ
President Trump should immediately pardon every person indicted by the partisan Democrat prosecutors doing the bidding of the Biden DOJ.Damning new docs reveal who's on Biden admin's 'enemies list,' expose extent of FBI's Arctic Frost
It's no secret that the Department of Justice and the FBI were weaponized against President Donald Trump and his allies under the previous administration.
Damning new revelations about the FBI's Arctic Frost investigation indicate, however, that the campaign waged by former Attorney General Merrick Garland's lawfare regime to hound and potentially lock up individuals supportive of Trump and/or skeptical of the results of the 2020 election was far worse than previously imagined.
'[Biden] thought basically half of America were domestic terrorists.'
"Arctic Frost was not just an attack on Democracy; it was a coordinated and sustained invasion of it," Mike Howell, president of the watchdog group Oversight Project, said in a statement.
"Everyone responsible should be held accountable and banished from public life," continued Howell. "The long continuum of a decade-long campaign by the Federal government against Trump can get complicated. What you should know is that they were so out of control, and thought they never would get caught, that they named this investigation after an orange to mock Trump."
This week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and the House Judiciary Committee published thousands of pages of additional documents altogether providing a better sense of the vastness and invasiveness of the Arctic Frost dragnet, which was launched in April 2022.
Grassley published documents earlier this month detailing how the Biden FBI sought private cellphone records from numerous GOP lawmakers during Arctic Frost — an operation greenlit by Garland and former FBI Director Christopher Wray that morphed into at least one case brought against Trump by Garland's special counsel, Jack Smith.
Apparently the covert surveillance of Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.), and other lawmakers was just the tip of the iceberg.
On Wednesday, Grassley made public 197 subpoenas obtained through whistleblower disclosures showing that Smith and his team demanded testimony, communications, and records related to at least 430 Republican individuals and entities.
RELATED: The bureaucracy strikes back — and we’re striking harder
Grassley stated, "Arctic Frost was the vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors could improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus. Contrary to what Smith has said publicly, this was clearly a fishing expedition."
Among the recipients of the subpoenas were:
- financial institutions and platforms such as Avidia Bank, Bank of America, Capital One, JP Morgan Chase, TD Bank, BILL, and Wells Fargo;
- various campaign, consulting and legal outfits including the Save America Joint Fundraising Committee, the Republican National Committee, Parscale Strategy, and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee; and
- 34 individuals including former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, Trump 2020 communications director Tim Murtaugh, GOP campaign operative Thomas Datwyler, former acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, and deputy national security adviser Robert Gabriel.
Grassley indicated that Smith and his team squeezed some of these individuals, banks, and businesses for their records concerning and communications with:
- media companies such as CBS, Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, and Sinclair;
- "any member, employee or agent of the Legislative Branch of the U.S. Government";
- White House advisers including Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino, and Lara Trump;
- conservative groups including Turning Point USA and the Republican Attorneys General Association;
- data concerning Republican donors and fundraising efforts; and
- financial data relating to conservative individuals and entities.
'I think they're being sabotaged within.'
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) said Wednesday that "what is revealed in those 1,700 pages of documents, in those 197 subpoenas, is nothing short of a Biden administration enemies list. I'm old enough to understand how toxic a term that was under Richard Nixon. This is far worse — far worse, orders of magnitude worse."
"People need to understand how politicized the Biden administration turned all these agencies," continued Johnson. "[Biden] thought basically half of America were domestic terrorists."
Johnson emphasized that the records Grassley made public were not obtained from the FBI but rather from a whistleblower and suggested that Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are being hindered by bad actors within their respective agencies.
"We need to do everything we can to assist Director Patel and AG Bondi in making sure they have the staff to take control over these agencies. They're the heads of them — I don't think they have the control," said Johnson. "I think they're being sabotaged within."
— (@)
The House Judiciary Committee released over 230 pages of additional documents on Tuesday providing insights into the nature and origins of Arctic Frost.
Among the heavily redacted documents turned over by Patel is a April 13, 2022, memo issued by the Washington, D.C., field office that discusses the flimsy predicate for the Arctic Frost investigation — a probe allegedly named after a type of orange to mock Trump.
RELATED: GOP senator to sue Jack Smith after his lawyers try gaslighting on Biden FBI surveillance
The memo requesting the investigation alleged that "subjects corruptly conspired to obstruct the United States Congress' certification of the 2020 Presidential election results by submitting fraudulent certificates of electors' votes to the United States Government" and cited supposed evidence that individuals linked to the 2020 Trump campaign allegedly attempted to convince former Vice President Mike Pence to support alternate electors in 2021.
At the time of Arctic Frost's conception, the lawfare regime appeared particularly interested in hounding former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and legal scholar John Eastman.
However, the documents suggest that hundreds of other conservatives may have also been targeted for investigation, including Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro; Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.); Steve Bannon; former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; former co-chair of the Republican National Committee Youth Advisory Council CJ Pearson; and the chief operating officer of Turning Point USA. Tyler Bowyer served as COO of TPUSA until recently.
Other documents in the trove provided by Patel indicate that the scope of the Arctic Frost "fishing expedition" grew rapidly such that just months into the probe and days after the agent who requested the opening of the investigation celebrated the indictment of Peter Navarro, investigators requested additional funds and bodies.
"The Arctic Frost team is requesting approximately $16,600 from [the Public Corruption Unit] for travel in June to conduct more than 40 interviews, serve subpoenas, and execute several cellular device search warrants," said an email dated May 25, 2022. "We would be requesting assistance from 11 [Washington Field Office] individuals to travel to various locations, in addition to utilizing individuals from the various field offices."
By January 2023, the Arctic Frost operation — which was formally assigned to Jack Smith in November 2022 — had targeted individuals in at least seven states, interviewed over 150 individuals, served over 400 subpoenas, and secured scores of search warrants, including for lawmakers' phones and Trump's Twitter account.
Missouri Rep. Bob Onder (R) noted that the revelations about the Arctic Frost probe have revealed "an alarming weaponization of government power at the highest levels."
Editor's note: Mike Howell is a contributor at Blaze News.
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‘100 Times Worse Than Watergate’: 3 Biggest Revelations From Latest ‘Arctic Frost’ Document Dump
Docs further reveal how Biden weaponized the DOJ and FBI to tap GOP phones and spy on conservative groups and individuals, while Sen. Ron Johnson warns 'sabotage' is ongoing.‘Dumbest thing I’ve heard’: Kash Patel humiliates Stephen A. Smith
Stephen A. Smith has gotten himself on the FBI’s radar, but not for anything impressive.
After the FBI announced a sweeping probe into two separate illegal sports gambling-related cases that included the arrest of Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former NBA player Damon Jones — among some mob families — the ESPN star complained on “First Take” that President Trump is “coming” for the sports world.
FBI Director Kash Patel then joked about Smith’s comments on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”
“I’m the FBI director. I decide which arrests to conduct and which not to conduct. That may be the single dumbest thing I’ve everheard out of anyone in modern history, and I live most of my time in Washington, D.C. It’s right up there with Adam Schiff,” Patel told host Laura Ingraham.
“We arrest people for crimes,” he added.
“How would anybody connected to the sports world hear this story — that an NBA hall of famer, an NBA champion, an NBA head coach, active head coach, is involved in some sort of poker scheme involving mafia members — and the reaction be, ‘Oh man, Trump’s coming,’ and, you know, ‘Trump’s coming after his enemies,’ and, ‘Trump is the bad guy here,’” BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock says on “Fearless.”
“The entire media is now rigged around a system of ‘the only crimes that are punishable are crimes committed by Donald Trump or his supporters,’” he continues. “If you’re an enemy of Trump, there’s nothing we can’t rationalize by saying, ‘What about Brett Favre?’ or ‘What about Donald Trump?’ or ‘What about some random white guy?’”
While many are asking why those who are already rich through professional sports would then engage in illegal gambling to pad their pockets further, Whitlock believes its a symptom of the culture surrounding sports.
“Why wouldn’t they do it given the environment and the culture that we’ve built around sports? They show up to arenas. The arenas play a style of music that promotes corruption and greed and debauchery,” Whitlock says.
“We want athletes to mimic the behavior of criminals, gangsters, men that are incarcerated. So, athletes, we want you to tat yourself up, dress with your pants hanging off your ass. We want you to pretend like you’re some Iceberg Slim-type pimp and rapper, and that’s your brand now,” he continues.
“That’s what’s been promoted to all of these athletes, and that’s what they’ve done,” he adds.
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The bureaucracy strikes back — and we’re striking harder
Old habits die hard. The Oversight Project filed another lawsuit against the FBI today. During the Biden years, we were in court constantly, suing the bureau more than a dozen times over weaponization and abuse. Many of the cases we fought then connect directly to the scandals now surfacing under the Trump administration. We were over the target back then — and Washington doesn’t do coincidences.
But this case is different.
We’re suing the FBI to force transparency — not for politics, but for accountability. Because if we don’t fix this now, we’ll look back and wish we had.
Monday’s lawsuit strikes at a deeper problem: the FBI’s claim that it has been “reformed” and is now “the most transparent in history.” That phrase is absurd on its face. Compared with the post-COINTELPRO reforms and the Church Committee era, today’s FBI is anything but transparent.
We’re suing because the bureau has built a system designed to violate the Freedom of Information Act. Over time, the FBI has developed a “pattern and practice” of breaking the law to hide information. Reporters across the political spectrum can tell you the same thing. The bureau stonewalls, delays, and hides behind boilerplate responses that make a mockery of the law.
Our case asks the federal judiciary to step in and force the FBI to fix this — to overhaul its FOIA process and follow the law it routinely ignores. This isn’t a step we took lightly. For nearly a year, we tried to resolve these problems through other channels. But the bureau’s “fixes” never came.
Bureaucratic shell game
The FBI has perfected a set of tricks to avoid scrutiny. It uses canned denials for well-defined requests, ignores the public-interest standard written into law, and buries documents under layers of redaction. Even by Washington’s anemic transparency standards, the FBI stands out as the worst offender.
This isn’t theoretical. In practice, the Oversight Project submitted requests naming specific agents — like the infamous Timothy Thibault — and identifying internal systems such as the Lync messaging platform. We asked for communications containing key terms like “Republican” or “Mar-a-Lago.” Those are precisely the requests the bureau continues to battle with gusto.
FBI Director Kash Patel deserves credit for some high-profile disclosures, but we can’t depend on him to keep discovering incriminating documents in “burn bags” or forgotten closets. That’s not transparency — that’s triage. The FBI cannot investigate itself or selectively release information without feeding public cynicism.
The point of FOIA is citizen oversight — not bureaucratic discretion. In a republic, the people are supposed to control government institutions, not the other way around.
A pattern of abuse
If the FBI had obeyed its own transparency standards all along, Americans would already know far more about the scandals that shook their confidence in government: Russiagate, the Mar-a-Lago raid, Operation Arctic Frost, the targeting of Catholic parishes and concerned parents, and the January 6 excesses. Each of these was compounded by secrecy and delay.
RELATED: Video sleuth challenges FBI Jan. 6 pipe-bomb narrative, unearths new evidence
The bureau’s institutional resistance to disclosure doesn’t just protect bad actors — it perpetuates them. It allows corruption to metastasize under color of national security and procedure.
Time to clean house
At some point, the FBI will no longer be in Kash Patel’s hands. That’s why reform should happen now while the issue is in the public eye. The systems that enable secrecy and abuse must be dismantled before the next crisis hits.
We’re suing the FBI to force transparency — not for politics, but for accountability. Because if we don’t fix this now, we’ll look back and wish we had.
If it’s ‘worse than Watergate,’ then why the media blackout?
In a sense, this is old news. In December 2021, CNN reported that the House’s January 6 committee had subpoenaed phone records of more than 100 people.
But that was mostly Trump officials, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. No surprise there. After all, the January 6 Select Committee was empaneled for the specific purpose of turning President Donald Trump into a criminal for supposedly aiding and abetting the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol.
It is well past time for the Republican Congress to fulfill its promise to hold accountable those who weaponized the federal government against Trump and his allies.
But when this story resurfaced earlier this month, there was something new, too. For one thing, the scope of the investigation was almost unbelievable — it turns out those subpoenaed phone records consisted of a staggering 30 million lines of phone data.
And when the select committee’s investigation went nowhere, one of the members — GOP malcontent and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) — informed the FBI about the phone data in Dec. 2023 when it was becoming apparent that Trump was the favorite to win the Republican nomination in 2024.
Greater than Watergate
More revelatory than the numbers of the phone records hauled in by the J6 committee was the news that the FBI had gone after these same records — and possibly more — in an effort to target Trump and his conservative allies. Not only did the agency have its eyes on Trump, it also went after nine Republican members of Congress — eight senators and a stray congressman, in an obvious effort to sweep up accomplices in the coup that never was.
Whether the FBI obtained the same phone records as the J6 committee is unclear. Kinzinger’s tip may have been moot, because an FBI memo released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) shows that by September 2023, the agency had already “conducted preliminary … analysis” on the call data of several members of Congress, including Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).
According to CNN, “The FBI, as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation, used court orders in 2023 to obtain the phone records of nine GOP lawmakers.” These were not actual phone calls or text messages, but rather information about who called or texted whom and when.
Grassley posted the memo to his X account, with the message:
This document shows the Biden FBI spied on 8 of my Republican Senate colleagues during its Arctic Frost investigation into "election conspiracy." Arctic Frost later became Jack Smith's elector case against Trump.
He concluded, in all caps: “BIDEN FBI WEAPONIZATION = WORSE THAN WATERGATE.”
Which raises the question: Why did the story turn out to be a one-day wonder? Here we have the discovery of a partisan investigation seeking to uncover dirt on fellow members of Congress (if the records did indeed start with the J6 committee), or at the very least a rogue element of the executive branch targeting political enemies in the legislative branch.
As Johnson said:
They’re casting this net, this fishing expedition against members of the Senate and the House. There is no predicate. There’s no reason for this other than a fishing expedition, which, again, should outrage and shock every American.
Once again, a member of Congress implied that we are witness to a political scandal (one of many in the Biden administration) that is among the worst in our history. Yet when you do a Google search for stories related to phone toll records being subpoenaed by either the J6 committee or the FBI, virtually nothing comes up beyond Oct. 7, the day after Grassley released the memo.
Crickets …
A few news outlets reported in the following days that FBI Director Kash Patel had fired agents involved in the Arctic Frost investigation. In addition, scattered reports surfaced on Hagerty questioning why Verizon released his phone records without informing him.
Verizon told Fox News Digital:
Federal law requires companies like Verizon to respond to grand jury subpoenas. We received a valid subpoena and a court order to keep it confidential. We weren't told why the information was requested or what the investigation was about.
Grassley and Johnson followed up with their own letter to Verizon and three other telecommunication companies demanding to be supplied with the same data that was provided to the FBI or special counsel Jack Smith. In addition, the senators expressed their belief that the records should have been privileged because they concerned the official constitutional duties of certifying the 2020 presidential election.
It seems like a real story — one that deserves the full attention of the press — but where are the special investigation teams at the New York Times and the Washington Post? What have you heard about this story on CBS, NBC, and ABC newscasts? Very little if anything. Certainly nothing in comparison to the coverage provided to Watergate.
Most recently, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Smith demanding a transcribed interview and documents along with communications related to his investigation of Trump. Well and good, but that interview will be conducted in secret, as were the interviews of Smith’s subordinates — one of whom, according to Jordan, “invoked the Fifth Amendment approximately 75 times.”
Time for Congress to step up
It is well past time for the Republican Congress to fulfill its promise to hold accountable those who weaponized the federal government against Trump and his allies. Press releases and secret interviews won’t do the job. We need public televised hearings, with witnesses ranging from members of the J6 committee, including Kinzinger, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), and now-Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), to former FBI Director Christopher Wray and Jack Smith.
Would the legacy media networks cover it? Probably not, because as we all know by now, those outfits are still after Trump’s scalp, and they will only seek to discredit Jordan and the other congressional investigators who want to know the truth. That doesn’t mean Republicans should give up.
Watergate started as a one-day story about a botched break-in. But even without Woodward and Bernstein, the famous team of reporters from the Washington Post, the story would never have been kept quiet unless Senate Democrats and congressmen didn’t do their job.
Now it’s time for Jordan, Grassley, and Patel to do theirs.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
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