Vigilant News

Eternal Vigilance is the price of liberty.

Uncategorized

Xi Jinping Has Predecessor Hu Jintao Forcibly Removed from CCP Summit on Live Television

By ,

Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping had his predecessor Hu Jintao, the former CCP Chairman, escorted out of the CCP summit on live TV in full view of everyone.

CNBC reported:

China announced Saturday its new central committee would include many known allies of Chinese President Xi Jinping, while several officials with more market-leaning tendencies were not on the list.

That central committee then goes on to determine the core leadership — the Politburo and its standing committee. Names for those core positions are due out midday Sunday Beijing time, according to state media.

Four of the current seven members of the Politburo standing committee were not on the list. The only three who remained were Xi, Wang Huning — known for his work on ideology — and Zhao Leji — current head of party discipline.

Li Qiang, Shanghai’s party secretary, and his Beijing counterpart Cai Qi remained on the central committee list.

Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis called Li Qiang Xi’s protege. Other Xi loyalists the Asia Society had identified were included in the list of new central committee members.

Makes you wonder what was going through the minds of the other party members as their former leader was hauled away. Are we witnessing the CCP cleaning house of cabal assets, or is it a Xi Jinping power play?

Let us know what you think in the comments.

NATO Deploys 30 Warships to Baltic Ahead of Nuclear Drills

By ,

NATO announced Tuesday that it has increased its Baltic Sea patrols to 30 warships ahead of “nuclear drills”, to prevent attacks on infrastructure that is critical to NATO nations.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday that the alliance would not cancel the exercise even though Russia has been ramping up threats. The drills were planned long before the invasion of Ukraine.

“I think it would send a very wrong signal if we suddenly now canceled a routine, long-time planned exercise because of the war in Ukraine. That would be absolutely the wrong signal to send. And we need to understand that NATO’s firm, predictable behavior, our military strength, is the best way to prevent escalation,” he said, according to a transcript of his comments posted on NATO’s website.

NATO’s “Steadfast Noon” exercise runs for about a week and involves nuclear-capable fighter jets, although no live bombs are used, according to the Associated Press. Fourteen nations will be taking part in the exercise, which is taking place more than 625 miles from Russia, AP quoted a NATO official it did not name as saying.

Stoltenberg’s comments came ahead of a two-day meeting of defense ministers of NATO nations, according to the Daily Mail.

During his remarks, he said Russia’s recent attacks on civilian targets were “a sign of weakness. Because the reality is that they’re not able to make progress on the battlefield. Russia is actually losing the battlefield. They are giving up territory because they don’t have the capabilities to stop the Ukrainian forces making advances.”

U.S. ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith agreed, saying, “ President Putin is failing to meet his strategic objectives on the ground, and this has been a reoccurring theme for him personally since this war started,” according to the Daily Mail.

During his comments, Stoltenberg said NATO “will also address the protection of our critical infrastructure.”

He said that “following the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, we have further enhanced our vigilance across all domains. We have doubled our presence in the Baltic and North Seas to over 30 ships supported by maritime patrol aircraft and undersea capabilities.”

“Any deliberate attack against Allies’ critical infrastructure would be met with a united and determined response,” he continued.

Stoltenberg’s comments came the day after German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht said NATO member Germany was sending four air defense systems to Ukraine, within days, according to Reuters.

FBI Mislead Congress, Offered Christopher Steele $1 Million to Corroborate Bogus Intel

By ,

The trial of Igor Danchenko is entering its second day and there has already been a bombshell revelation showing that the FBI offered Christopher Steele $1 million to corroborate his now-debunked dossier, the piece of intel that initiated the Russiagate scandal.

Former House Intelligence Committee investigator Kash Patel said this proves the bureau knew it hadn’t been able to verify the Trump-Russia collusion narrative and that they knowingly misled Congress.

Igor Danchenko, who was the primary source for the dossier, is being charged with five counts of lying to the FBI.

After the prosecution opened its case against Danchenko on Tuesday, ​​Special Counsel John Durham questioned his first witness, FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten.

Auten’s testimony revealed that in early October 2016, the FBI offered Steele “up to $1 million” to provide corroborating evidence for his dossier, but the former British spy didn’t provide any such information to the bureau. As a result, Steele wasn’t given the money because he was unable to “prove the allegations.”

The FBI submitted an application to a FISA court on Oct. 21, 2016 for a warrant to initiate electronic surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page that included uncorroborated information from the dossier. Auten testified that before the FBI received the dossier, it didn’t have enough evidence to obtain a FISA warrant. 

Durham asked Auten, “On October 21, 2016 did you have any information to corroborate that information?”  

“No,” Auten replied. 

Rep. Devin Nunes and the House Intelligence Committee sent 17 congressional subpoenas to the FBI “for information specifically related to payments and confidential human sources, were denied this information, and we learn it four years after our investigation,” said the lead investigator of the panel’s probe into the FBI’s Russia Collusion investigation.

“That means somebody obstructed a congressional investigation with congressional subpoenas,” said Patel, a former national security prosecutor. 

This exposes “the depths that [the FBI] would go to to falsely corroborate the Steele dossier, which … shows they didn’t have it verified, which we’ve said the whole time,” Patel added. 

“And more importantly,” he continued, “they were willing to spend a million taxpayer dollars on shoveling political hot garbage through the federal court system just to surveil a political target that would have been totally baseless — it was baseless then.”

Patel referred to a group of senior FBI leaders during the James Comey era as “government gangsters,” saying “were so arrogant, that they said, ‘Nobody is going to catch us. We are going to break a constitutional republic’s 250-year tradition because we don’t like the guy in the White House, and we’re going to manufacture a crime on it.'”

We will continue to follow the trial of Igor Danchenko and provide updates as more information becomes available.

Calls Grow among Prominent Figures to Create a New ‘Church Committee’ to Probe FBI Abuses

By ,

Reposted from Just the News

A half century ago, Americans held grave concerns that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies had abused civil rights, improperly targeted enemies and illegally gathered evidence, so Congress set out on a great cleansing mission. It formed a special committee chaired by Idaho Sen. Frank Church that laid bare the wrongdoing, overhauled the bureau and created new guardrails to protect civil liberties.

A growing number of influential figures in Washington are arguing it’s time for another Church Committee after a tumultuous six years in which the FBI admitted it misled the FISA court while spying on Donald Trump’s campaign, had executives who lied, doctored evidence or usurped prosecutors’ authority, and employed agents who dropped the ball on a sexual abuse scandal involving Olympians and overcollected evidence in a raid of a former president’s home.

The revelation this week that the bureau secretly paid a Russian businessman as a confidential informant against Trump even though he was suspected of lying and having ties to the Kremlin’s intelligence agencies only accelerated support for a sweeping, independent probe of the FBI now under the control of Director Christopher Wray.

“I think, frankly, it would be great for the FBI,” Kevin Brock, the bureau’s first-ever intelligence chief, said of the notion of a new Church Committee. “They find themselves obviously in a very challenging situation, some of which they brought on themselves, others kind of imposed upon them.

“But they find themselves in a place right now where well over the half the country believes they’re working on behalf of one political party over another,” he said during a wide-ranging interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast this week. “And that can’t stand … the agency can’t survive if that persists.”

Brock, a former assistant director who helped write the rules the FBI currently uses for informants, is a widely respected voice inside the bureau. But many outside it echo his support for a 21st  century Church Committee or something like the 9/11 Commission that investigated the worst terror attacks in American history.

Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who helped unravel the false Russia collusion narrative, said the highly partisan tensions in Washington these days make it hard for a traditional congressional committee to do the sort of oversight it needs, citing examples of how Democrats thwarted his effort to probe FBI failures in the Russia case. He said that reality makes a blue ribbon commission or select committee a better option to investigate and reform the FBI.

“You know, we weren’t really designed to run these types of investigations,” said Nunes, recalling his time on the House Intelligence Committee. “And for so long, the process actually worked. It was relatively bipartisan for the most part. But when you have corruption at that level, it becomes so hard to run these investigations right.

“You have to ultimately have Congress involved doing a real investigation, and I think it’s going to be very, very difficult if you use just the current committee structure that they have.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the likely House Judiciary Committee chairman next year if the GOP wins control of Congress, supports the idea of a select committee like the one Church chaired, even if his panel does aggressive oversight on its own.

“I think that that exercise is definitely needed, whether it’s done in a special select kind of committee or a blue ribbon commission,” said Jordan, who himself has been contacted by five FBI whistleblowers in recent months alleging political manipulation of investigations and even crime data. “That’s even maybe with some members outside of Congress.”

“We need to seriously look at how this all has to change in a way that respects the liberties of the American people,” Jordan said, adding he has increasing concerns about the influence that politically “woke” intelligence analysts are having inside the bureau in shaping allegations and investigations.

The Church Committee ultimately assembled some of the biggest names in the Senate, including three members who ran for president. All brought intellectual and political heft from both sides of the aisles in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and the end of the Hoover era. Figures like Walter Mondale, Howard Baker, Barry Goldwater, John Tower and Gary Hart were able to find consensus, issuing numerous volumes of reports that exposed intelligence death squads and civil liberty violations that included unlawful snooping and spying.

Ultimately, that committee’s greatest contribution was a series of legal reforms that reined in the FBI and governed two generations of agents to color inside the lines after a dark history of past abuses.

“They pointed out a lot of these abuses and from that gave birth the attorney general guidelines, which the FBI still operates under today,” recalled Brock, who joined the FBI in the aftermath of the Church Committee.

The new, post-Church guidelines “in stark terms stipulated how, and when an FBI agent can open up a case against a subject,” Brock explained. “And those were great bumper pads that were put in place. Now the bureau knew, ‘Okay, we can’t go beyond these boundaries. We’re safe as long as we stay inside these boundaries.’ And it worked wonderfully for years.”

Nunes said one reason outside forces are needed to press FBI reform is that its current leader, Wray, hasn’t been willing to make the sweeping changes the public needs to restore trust, even if he has put in place some new reforms of tactics involving, for example, FISA warrants.

“We cannot trust after all this time, that Wray has done one damn thing to clean up this agency,” Nunes said. “In fact, it’s gotten worse. The American people know it’s worse.”

Whatever solution the next Congress chooses, the status quo is not an option, said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”We have to find out what is going on in the FBI,” she told the “Just the News, Not Noise” show earlier this week. “I know a lot of people that work with the FBI are good, hard-working people. But there is a political cabal inside the FBI that has to be dealt with. It’s inside the Department of Justice also.”

DESPERATION: George Soros is Dumping Millions into Chuck Schumer’s PAC To Save Senate Majority

By ,

Financial titan and philanthropist George Soros, along with other billionaires, is pouring millions of dollars into Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer-aligned Super PAC. 

The flood of cash is ostensibly meant to help democrats keep the U.S. Senate in November’s midterm elections, though the verdict is out as to how this money will be spent.

Fox News reports:

“Soros steered $2.5 million from his Democracy PAC to the Senate Majority PAC in July, while hedge fund billionaire James Simons added an identical amount, according to new Federal Election Commission filings. The duo was the largest donors to the committee last month, which is now entering the home stretch of the midterm elections with nearly $73 million cash on hand. The new Soros cash also brings his total to the Senate Majority PAC to $10 million for the 2022 elections, making him one of its largest contributors behind a dark money nonprofit affiliated with the PAC,”

“Majority Forward, a nonprofit that does not identify its funders, has provided the Senate Majority PAC with at least $27 million in donations this cycle, according to a previous Fox News Digital review of campaign finance records. Majority Forward hauled in a record $105 million between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021, according to its most recent tax forms. The nonprofit maintains a close relationship with the Senate Majority PAC,”

This would not be the first time dark money groups like Majority Forward and George Soros were the top backers of the Senate Majority PAC. Back in the 2020 election cycle, Majority Forward pumped at least $50 million into the committee, while Soros chipped in $11.5 million from his own PAC.

This surge in spending suggests that Democrats are fully aware that Republicans are poised to take control of the House. As the party veers further and further to the left, many Democrats are switching their party affiliation and joining the GOP.

The Nevada Independent reports:

“Sure, Dems, they are relatively small numbers, but the trend is inexorable. If it’s a mass switching to muck around in GOP primaries, kudos for your discipline. But I don’t think so,”

“Combine this trend with the Repubs doubling the Dems in voter registration in May, which never happens, and the Dem statewide lead about to drop below 3 percent (this is unprecedented since…the Reagan Era?), and all of the signs are red wavy,”

“The numbers continue to only be in the hundreds, but they are adding up in party switching — three times as many Dems switching to GOP as Repubs going to Dem again in March, via the SOS. Maybe some Dems just want to vote in the two major contested GOP primaries in June — maybe — but this is consistent for months now,”

More than two and a half times as many Democrats have switched their voter registrations to Republicans, a statistic with ominous portents for Democratic candidates. The numbers since September also show that one and a half times as many Democrats switched to nonpartisan as did Republicans. 

With reports like these, it’s hard to imagine that any amount of Soros cash can stop what is likely coming this November.