Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The good news is the Breonna Taylor murder case is finally going before a grand jury. The bad news is, KY GOP Attorney General Daniel Cameron is running this show, and there's every reason to believe he's going to purposely sandbag the case.

A decision on possible charges in the Breonna Taylor case is expected soon, WAVE 3 News Troubleshooters have learned.

Multiple sources confirmed the case will be presented to a grand jury at an undisclosed location.

Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office has been investigating the shooting death of Taylor, who was killed when LMPD narcotics officers served a warrant at her Louisville home in March.

The presentation was expected to take at least two days. The grand jury will then have time to deliberate whether any of the officers involved should face criminal charges.

Former Commonwealth’s Assistant Attorney Brian Butler said he would expect the Taylor presentation to take longer than a regular case.

“Historically in Jefferson County those cases have been presented in detail to grand juries,” said Butler, who is not involved in the case. “The grand jury can ask questions, the grand jury can interview witnesses themselves, they can ask to see additional evidence if they want to.”

Butler said grand jury members are selected randomly, and a judge usually asks questions to see if there’s any reason why they shouldn’t serve.

“In officer-involved shootings, it’s not uncommon at all to have multiple people testify,” he said.

Again, the bad news is Cameron himself. He has every reason to make this case vanish right now, and "The grand jury did not find enough evidence to go to trial" is his ticket to Trump's side in a second term, God forbid.

President Donald Trump has announced 20 people he'd consider to be on the U.S Supreme Court if he has to fill another vacancy, and among them is first-term Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

Cameron is 34 years old and the first Black person to independently hold statewide office in Kentucky. He is a protégé of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and worked as general counsel in his Senate office.

Trump's announcement reprises a tactic from his 2016 campaign when he provided a list of potential justices amid controversy over a Supreme Court vacancy.

"Should there be another vacancy on the Supreme Court during my presidency, my nominee will come from the names I have shared with the American public, including the original list and these 20 additions," Trump said on Wednesday.

Cameron has rocketed to public prominence over the last year — becoming the first Republican Kentucky attorney general since the 1940s and speaking at the Republican National Convention last month.

Trump also endorsed Cameron when he came to Kentucky last fall to stump for the state's Republican slate of statewide candidates.

Cameron is also overseeing the investigation into the death of Breonna Taylor, which has dragged on since May.

Now it's possible the grand jury will come back with indictments and Cameron will have to go to trial, well after the election. But there's every reason to believe the prosecution will be less than rigorous if that's the case.

Unfortunately, I expect the grand jury to come back with nothing, and I expect more protests with national focus, and I expect bad things will happen as a result.

Cameron is going to wave a wand and trash this case, and it's going to be a terrible time here in the commonwealth.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Trump/Russia interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections isn't going away anytime soon, and a new Homeland Security whistleblower complaint alleges that a senior intelligence official was told by the regime specifically to stop Russian all counterintelligence analysis on it.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official alleges that he was told to stop providing intelligence analysis on the threat of Russian interference in the 2020 election, in part because it “made the President look bad,” an instruction he believed would jeopardize national security.

The official, Brian Murphy, who until recently was in charge of intelligence and analysis at DHS, said in a whistleblower complaint that on two occasions he was told to stand down on reporting about the Russian threat.
On July 8, Murphy said, acting Homeland Security secretary Chad Wolf told him that an “intelligence notification” regarding Russian disinformation efforts should be “held” because it was unflattering to Trump, who has long derided the Kremlin’s interference as a “hoax” that was concocted by his opponents to delegitimize his victory in 2016.
It’s not clear who would have seen the notification, but DHS’s intelligence reports are routinely shared with the FBI, other federal law enforcement agencies, and state and local governments.

Murphy objected to Wolf’s instruction, “stating that it was improper to hold a vetted intelligence product for reasons [of] political embarrassment,” according to a copy of his whistleblower complaint that was obtained by The Washington Post.

Murphy also alleges that two months earlier, Wolf told him to stop producing intelligence assessments on Russia and shift the focus on election interference to China and Iran. He said Wolf told him “that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien.”

Murphy said he would not comply with the instructions, which he believed would “put the country in substantial and specific danger,” according to the complaint, which was filed Tuesday with the DHS inspector general.

The White House and DHS did not respond to requests for comment.

“Mr. Murphy followed proper lawful whistleblower rules in reporting serious allegations of misconduct against DHS leadership, particularly involving political distortion of intelligence analysis and retaliation,” his attorney, Mark Zaid, said in a statement. “We have alerted both the Executive and Legislative Branches of these allegations and we will appropriately cooperate with oversight investigations, especially in a classified setting.”

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that Murphy’s complaint “outlines grave and disturbing allegations that senior White House and Department of Homeland Security officials improperly sought to politicize, manipulate, and censor intelligence in order to benefit President Trump politically. This puts our nation and its security at grave risk.”

When I said seven months ago after the Senate GOP refused to convict and remove Trump that Trump now had free reign to do whatever he wanted to do, this is exactly what I meant. Of course the politicization of intelligence was going to be total heading into the 2020 election. Of course Russia was going to get a free pass to do whatever it takes to keep Trump in power, as Trump would make sure our counter-intelligence folks were blinded on purpose.

Murphy will be testifying later this month, or maybe not, I'm sure the White House will block it. But at this point there are too many cracks in the dam to cover up every single thing.

The caveat on all this is that Murphy was fired last month after gathering intelligence on journalists.

The Department of Homeland Security official who oversaw the intelligence division at the department is being reassigned after it was revealed his office had gathered intelligence reports on two US journalists, according to a source familiar with the matter. 

Brian Murphy, who served as the acting under secretary for the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, was summoned to acting Homeland Secretary Chad Wolf's office Friday night, as speculation grew that he would be moved out of his role, according to another source familiar. 

Murphy is a career official who filled the position after the Senate-confirmed Under Secretary David Glawe left DHS earlier this year. It's unclear what Murphy's next role will be. The Washington Post was first to report on Saturday that Murphy had been removed from his job. 

On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that DHS had sent Open Source Intelligence Reports to federal law enforcement agencies summarizing tweets sent by two journalists -- New York Times reporter Mike Baker and Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of the blog Lawfare -- who had published leaked unclassified government documents while covering the unrest in Portland, Oregon. 

The collection and dissemination of information on journalists was carried out by lower level officials acting on broad guidance, the source told CNN, adding that Murphy was not fully aware until after the fact. 

Wolf, who has led the department in an acting capacity since last November, sought to distance himself from the incident.

So is this retribution from a corrupt DHS official taking down as many people as he can, or was Murphy preemptively reassigned because he threatened to go public about the Russian intelligence?

Adam Schiff and the House Intelligence Committee needs to have a little chat with him ASAP. We'll see if it happens.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr continues to serve as Donald Trump's legal bag man as he is having the Justice Department step in on the state defamation case filed against Trump by E. Jean Carroll.

The Justice Department moved on Tuesday to replace President Trump’s private legal team with government lawyers to defend him against a defamation lawsuit by the author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.

In a highly unusual legal move, lawyers for the Justice Department said in court papers that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied ever knowing Ms. Carroll and thus could be defended by government lawyers — in effect underwritten by taxpayer money.

Though the law gives employees of the federal government immunity from most defamation lawsuits, legal experts said it has rarely, if ever, been used before to protect a president, especially for actions taken before he entered office.

“The question is,” said Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, “is it really within the scope of the law for government lawyers to defend someone accused of lying about a rape when he wasn’t even president yet?”

The motion also effectively protects Mr. Trump from any embarrassing disclosures in the middle of his campaign for re-election. A state judge issued a ruling last month that potentially opened the door to Mr. Trump being deposed in the case before the election in November, and Ms. Carroll’s lawyers have also requested that he provide a DNA sample to determine whether his genetic material is on a dress that Ms. Carroll said she was wearing at the time of the encounter.

Ms. Carroll’s lawyer said in a statement issued Tuesday evening that the Justice Department’s move to intervene in the case was a “shocking” attempt to bring the resources of the United States government to bear on a private legal matter.

“Trump’s effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent,” the lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said, “and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out.”

Ms. Carroll herself accused the president of siccing Attorney General William P. Barr against her. “TRUMP HURLS BILL BARR AT ME,” she wrote on Twitter.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on the motion.

It's the "effort to shield Trump from disclosure during the campaign" that is the real driver of this idiotic notion that federal taxpayers should fund Trump's defense in a case like this, but the fact of the matter is Trump being in the Oval Office now gives him a lot of power.

Trump can keep things tangled up in the courts as long as he remains in the office.  Once he's out, however...

We all know that Trump will not leave power willingly. He will face a bevy of immediate indictments in January. Democrats still don't seem to understand this key factor.  He will do anything to stay in power.

Anything.

Be ready now for that, and vote early.

StupidiNews!

• Trump campaign rallies in Nevada this weekend have been cancelled after local officials refused to sign off the events over COVID-19 mass gathering limits of 50 in the state.
• Maine GOP Sen. Susan Collins is facing allegations of corruption after reports surfaced showing Collins and her husband benefited financially from the 2017 GOP tax bill.
• Microsoft security officials have informed the Biden campaign that a major advisory firm has been targeted by Russian state-sponsored hackers.
• Senate Republicans will vote today on a limited COVID-19 bill that doesn't provide any direct help for Americans, the vote is expected to fail over objections from Democrats.
• A new Commerce Department report finds climate change to be a "major risk to the stability of the US financial system" that "urgently and decisively" requires federal action to mitigate.