Posted By Sharon Rondeau On Saturday, May 16, 2015 @ 2:49 PM In National | No Comments
IS MASS SURVEILLANCE KILLING THE REPUBLIC?
by Sharon Rondeau
(May 16, 2015) — In an editorial published at WND on Friday evening, Atty. Larry Klayman presented several reasons why he believes U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow should have recused himself from presiding over a case
charging Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio with contempt of
his order to refrain from “racial profiling” of Hispanics during traffic
stops.
Snow is a 2008 George W. Bush judicial
appointee who last month demanded that investigatory information gleaned
from an investigation Arpaio had launched involving a former CIA
contractor, Dennis Montgomery, be turned over to him.
Between April 21 and 24, Arpaio and some
of his deputies testified that they had defied Snow’s order as to how
to collect information sought by a federally-appointed monitor from
Snow’s decision in 2013 that Arpaio had violated the plaintiffs’
constitutional rights in the case of Melendres, et al v. Arpaio, et al originally filed in 2007 by the ACLU.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit
in May 2012 against Arpaio’s office for allegedly “intentionally and
systematically discriminated against Latinos. They have accomplished
this by stopping Latinos in their vehicles four to nine times more often
than similarly situated non-Latino drivers. In addition, MCSO stops
Latinos on the county’s roads without the required legal justification.
Also, MCSO detains and searches Latinos on the roads, in their homes,
and in their workplaces without legal justification for doing so.
Further, MCSO mistreats Latino detainees with limited English
proficiency by ignoring important requests if they are not made in
English and punishing detainees if they fail to understand orders given
in English. Finally, MCSO files baseless administrative actions, civil
actions and criminal cases against its perceived critics in an attempt
to chill free speech.”
The Obama regime itself has been accused, particularly in recent weeks, of “intolerance” as it relates to First Amendment issues.
Also last night, Carl Gallups of “Freedom Friday” provided an update on the Arpaio hearing in which he advised his audience to “listen carefully” and “read in between the lines” regarding a mainstream media article titled “Sheriff’s investigation was intended to discredit.”
The same report appears across a wide spectrum of outlets with the erroneous headline link, “Arpaio admits to hiring private agents to investigate judge’s wife.”
During testimony on April 24, Arpaio
stated that his attorney hired a private investigator to determine the
veracity of a report made to Arpaio’s office that Judge Snow’s wife had
publicly expressed that her husband wished to see that Arpaio was not
re-elected during the time in which the Melendres case proceeded and Snow presided.
The media did not question
whether or not Snow is now compromised. Neither Snow nor his wife has
denied making the comments alleged by several fellow patrons in a
restaurant prior to Arpaio’s 2012 re-election to a sixth consecutive
term.
Gallups described Montgomery as having
provided “reams and reams” of information as a confidential informant to
Arpaio concerning mass surveillance of public officials and Maricopa
County residents. “Apparently, there were people involved in tracking
information and collecting information on citizens, including judges and
including law enforcement officials, etc., around the nation, coming
right out of our government offices, and apparently Arpaio and Zullo are
privy to a lot of that,” Gallups said.
Montgomery has been characterized as a “con man” who perpetrated a scam on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003
when DHS declared a raised terror threat and several commercial
international flights were grounded. A story in Wired, citing original
source Playboy, claims that Montgomery “was able to to pawn his
technology off” on several government departments at various times in
contracts worth millions of dollars over a period of years.
Montgomery has sued the federal government and New York Times author James Risen for defamation.
In his lawsuit
against Obama and the National Security Agency (NSA) for alleged
unlawful collection of personal data and communications, Klayman asked
on March 20 of this year that Montgomery be heard by the judge in
private session because of the classified nature of information
Montgomery reportedly holds. “Mr. Montgomery can testify about the
unconstitutional and illegal surveillance conducted by the National
Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that is
highly relevant and of crucial importance to the above-styled lawsuits,
as he worked closely with these agencies following the tragedy of
September 11, 2001. As shown below, Montgomery has attempted to alert
appropriate government authorities that surveillance goes beyond what
whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed. In fact, the surveillance has
even harvested the records of judicial, congressional, and executive
government officials. Indeed, this is confirmed in no small part by
Senator Diane Feinstein, previously the Chair of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, who revealed that the CIA had illegally harvested emails and
other information of her and her staff,” Klayman wrote.
Last July, CIA Director John Brennan admitted to having surveilled the Senate Intelligence Committee but apologized for it. Members of Congress have suggested that they and members of the U.S. Supreme Court have been targeted by surveillance under the Obama regime.
In June 2013, Snowden revealed
to The Guardian that the NSA has been collecting billions of
communications from Americans on a daily basis without a warrant.
Klayman’s first court hearing on the issue resulted in a ruling in
December 2013 from Judge Richard Leon that the activity was “likely
unconstitutional,” while a May 7, 2015 ruling from a three-judge
appellate panel stated that
“the bulk telephone metadata program” used by the NSA to collect
information is not authorized by Section 215 of The Patriot Act.
According to Arpaio, Montgomery had reportedly told members of his office that a government entity, perhaps the CIA, had breached
the email accounts of Snow and other judges as well as bank account
information of more than 50,000 Maricopa County residents, after which
Snow appeared to identify the “Department of Justice” as being involved.
During testimony on April 24, Arpaio
indicated that information Mongtomery provided had not turned out to be
wholly credible, although Arpaio’s chief deputy, Jerry Sheridan,
testified that a FISA Court judge in Washginton, DC had affirmed that
codes provided by Montgomery reportedly used to decipher messages by
government agencies were, in fact, accurate, a detail the mainstream media did not report.
On Friday, KPHO reported:
A federal judge harshly criticized Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office Thursday for pursuing a secret investigation designed to discredit the judge as he oversees a racial-profiling case against the lawman.
U.S. District Judge Murray Snow said Arpaio intended to show that Snow and the U.S. Justice Department were conspiring against him in two civil rights cases. Arpaio’s goal in trying to discredit the judge is unclear, but Snow has delivered some of the most crushing legal blows in the sheriff’s 22-year tenure, including a ruling that his officers racially profiled Latinos.
On May 8, Klayman filed an emergency request with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for a Writ of Mandamus ordering Snow to recuse himself from the Melendres case, but on May 12, the higher court declined to intervene. A status hearing scheduled by Snow for Thursday then ensued.
Represented by Klayman, Montgomery had
asked to intervene in the case and that his proprietary work not be
collected by the court. Documents posted on PACER on the case on Thursday and Friday indicate that Snow has not recused himself and that Montgomery’s motions were denied.
On June 4, 2014, The Phoenix New Times,
which strongly opposes Arpaio politically, his policies and
investigation into Obama’s documentation launched in September 2011, reported that Arpaio was “investigating” Snow and the Department of Justice and “using a Seattle scammer to do it.”
Snow quoted from The Phoenix New Times during the proceedings in April, asking Arpaio if he had read the referenced article.
In his Friday evening update, Gallups
indicated that the current court case is a manifestation of how the
original investigation into Obama’s long-form birth certificate by Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse
had “turned very dark,” according to posse lead investigator Mike
Zullo. In November 2013, Zullo had indicated that one or two press
conferences would be held, most likely in March 2014, to reveal the
final investigatory results of the posse’s probe into the birth
certificate and Selective Service registration form bearing Obama’s name
which declared both to be “computer-generated forgeries.”
The mainstream media refused to
investigate the results of the criminal investigation. In a recent
exchange with a Washington Post writer, The Post & Email was asked, “Do you think it’s a media conspiracy?”
While one presser was to provide a final
report on the birth certificate findings, the second was to detail a
second investigation which Arpaio had opened at an undisclosed time on
another matter. In February of last year, Zullo told
Gallups on his show that Arpaio’s criminal investigation might delay
the press conferences if further inquiry was warranted. Gallups
rejoined that Arpaio was investigating something “deeply criminal.”
This
image was released on the White House website on April 27, 2011 as a
scan of Obama’s long-form birth certificate. Within 24 hours, however,
it was declared a forgery by numerous experts. A criminal investigation
undertaken by the Maricopa County Cold Case Posse reported more than
three years ago that the image is nothing more than a
“computer-generated forgery.”
During court testimony last month, the birth certificate investigation was briefly mentioned.
In his column, Klayman stated
that Snow was “required to withdraw from the contempt trial” because of
a conflict of interest but “continued to issue court orders in an
attempt [sic] harm Sheriff Arpaio and Montgomery.”
Klayman concluded his piece by stating
that the judiciary “can protect us from the tyranny of the other two
branches of government” but that unethical jurists “are the biggest
current threat (along with President Barack Hussein Obama, himself, who
not coincidentally was behind the initial federal investigation of the
sheriff along with his comrades at the ACLU) to a healthy and
functioning constitutional republic!”
The ACLU continues to represent the plaintiffs in the Melendres case, as does the firm of Covington & Burling, which often represents large international banks with ties to terrorist financing.
The Department of Justice had launched a probe into a claim of “abuse of power” against Arpaio but dismissed it unexpectedly in late August 2012.
The New Times described
the suspicion that the DOJ and Snow could have been communicating about
Arpaio as “a bizarre conspiracy theory.” Shedding any attempt at
impartiality, the paper clearly celebrated
in 2013 when Snow ruled that Arpaio had engaged in racial profiling.
Embedded in the article is a link to a now-defunct website aimed at
recalling Arpaio following his November 2012 re-election.
Following Arpaio’s testimony on April 24, The New Times inaccurately reported that “Arpaio admitted there had been an investigation into Snow’s wife.”
One year ago, Snow received
“the Truman Foundation’s Joseph E. Stevens, Jr. Award in recognition of
his significant contributions to public service as a lawyer.” Before
his appointment by Bush to the U.S. District Court in Phoenix, Snow
served on the Committee on the Rules of Professional Conduct with the
Arizona Bar Association.
When The Post & Email contacted the
CIA in 2012 to ask if the agency were involved in vetting candidates for
office, its spokesman said he could not comment on the matter or refer
us to anyone who could.
Obama has been accused of retaliating
against his political opponents by utilizing the IRS, ATF, DOJ and other
government agencies. Individuals claiming to have been targets are
Republican presidential candidate Dr. Benjamin Carson; former U.S. Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell; former vice-presidential candidate Wayne Allyn Root, an outspoken Obama critic who has also questioned Obama’s life narrative; Tea Party groups, military veterans, and Christians.
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