A new study by Israeli researchers claims Hezbollah finances its terror operations and sidesteps US sanctions by overseeing the illicit drug trade from South America to Europe. From the Times of Israel:
“These Hezbollah operatives are actually overseeing all the illicit finance and the drug trafficking activities, not just in Europe, but in South America, the Tri-Border region, moving about $200 million a month,” said former US Drug Enforcement Administration special agent Derek Maltz.
The study said Hezbollah personnel act as middlemen in the global drug route from South America to West Africa and from there to Europe, helping get hundreds of tons of cocaine and other drugs through ports in Belgium and Germany — with only 5-10 percent of it being intercepted.
“Our study links Hezbollah’s political wing with its military wing, and we went down to the field level and are showing how all the drug trafficking system supports money laundering,” Cohen said. “At least 20%-25% of the [profit] goes back to Hezbollah and is used for arming, weapon purchases, salaries and more.”
As it happens, we know one of the things Hezbollah militants were apparently spending some of that drug money on: Ice packs. Sunday the Telegraph reported that Hezbollah was caught stockpiling bomb-making materials, in the form of ice packs, in north London. This was apparently part of a larger plot to carry out terror attacks around the globe:
Radicals linked to Hizbollah, the Lebanese militant group, stashed hoards of disposable ice packs containing ammonium nitrate, an ingredient commonly used to make home made bombs.
The plot was uncovered by MI5 and the Metropolitan Police in 2015 but the public and MPs were kept in the dark, according to The Daily Telegraph.
Three tonnes of the dangerous substance was found in its raw form and police eventually arrested one man on suspicion of plotting terrorism – but released him without charge…
Sources told the paper that the pattern of behavior from those linked to the group suggested a wider operation, after a similar find was made in Thailand and a New York-based member appeared to seek out a foreign ice pack manufacturer.
CNSNews reports a British MP has sent a letter asking why the discovery of such a large amount of bomb-making materials was kept from the public in 2015 and whether that had something to do with keeping the Iran Deal on track:
Joan Ryan, an independent member of the House of Commons, asked Home Secretary Sajid Javid in a letter Monday why details of the September 2015 raid had not been made public.
“Can you confirm that nobody in Government ordered this information to be withheld from the public because of its sensitivity due to Iran’s funding and support for Hezbollah and the recent conclusion of the Iran nuclear deal?” she asked.
Ryan, who for years campaigned for Britain to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group – in its entirety, rather than just its purported “military wing” – also wanted to know why the government resisted that move until early this year, even though it was aware in 2015 of its apparent terrorist plotting in the U.K.
It definitely seems odd that such a major terror-connected discovery would be kept quiet just months after the Iran Deal was wrapped up and months before the prisoner (and cash) swap in January 2016.
Update: Here’s a Ted Talk on how those instant ice packs work. There are only two ingredients inside them: water and ammonium nitrate.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY-4) introduced legislation Tuesday to repeal the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act (GFSZA) so teachers can carry guns for defense of themselves and their students.
The GFSZA was passed in 1990 and Massie introduced legislation in 2017 and 2018 in hopes of repealing it.
During the 2017 repeal attempt Massie said, “Gun-free school zones are ineffective. They make people less safe by inviting criminals into target-rich, no-risk environments. Gun-free zones prevent law-abiding citizens from protecting themselves, and create vulnerable populations that are targeted by criminals.”
And on February 16, 2018, Massie told Breitbart News, “Gun-free zones are invitations to deranged criminals. Why on earth would we have a federal law to advertise our schools as such? The 1990 law has done absolutely nothing to improve school safety, and should be repealed because it makes schools less safe.”
School shootings have been all too common under the auspices of the GFSZA. The nation has witnessed Columbine (April 20, 1999), Santana High School (March 5, 2001), Rocori High School (September 24, 2003), Red Lake Senior High School (March 21, 2005), Platte Canyon High School (September 27, 2006), Sandy Hook (December 14, 2012), Sparks Middle School (March 21, 2013), Arapahoe High School (December 13, 2013), Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (February 14, 2018), Sante Fe High School (May 18, 2018), and many others.
Attackers know they face no armed resistance in a gun-free zone.
Massie’s bill is titled the Safe Students Act.
Andrew Pollack, father of Parkland shooting victim Meadow Pollack, spoke to Breitbart News about Massie’s efforts against gun-free zones, saying, “When there’s a shooting, lives are lost during every second we have to wait for police to arrive. When seconds count, we need an instant response. This isn’t hard. Law-abiding citizens have the right to defense themselves against the evil that will always target exposed gun-free zones.”
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.
Democratic Senator Pat Leahy bluntly told GOP Senators that Democrats are blocking $4.5 billion needed to manage the Central American migration emergency until Republicans submit to their pro-migration demands.
“We’re willing to put [up] the money,” the Vermont Senator said at the June 11 hearing at the Senate’s judiciary committee. But, he added:
Now whether a supplemental gets done is up to the administration. If they continue to block bipartisan legislation, nothing happens. I hope the Republicans will finally realize we have to do this, Republicans and Democrats, together … We want long term solutions.
The May 1 funding request sought $3.3 billion to process and temporarily house many thousands of so-called “Unaccompanied Alien Children,” plus $2.2 billion for border agencies to register, shelter, and transport the huge flow of migrants as they walk through the catch-and-release loopholes at the border.
“The border is at its breaking point — we need funds,” said Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
GOP Senators are expected to push for Senate passage of the legislation mid-June. But the package still needs approval from at least seven Democratic Senators, plus the House’s Democratic leadership.
The legislators at the hearing did not debate the gains from President Donald Trump’s diplomatic deal with Mexico. His deal promises to end the migration by preventing migrants from getting U.S. jobs to pay their smuggling debts.
In contrast, the political priorities set by Democrats would likely accelerate the movement of Central American populations into blue-collar Americans’ workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods. The huge inflow — perhaps one million people in the 12 months up to October — provides an economic stimulus to cities run by Democratic mayors and to companies run by Democratic donors.
One of the Democrats’ priorities is taxpayer funding to hire lawyers for the illegal immigrants in the United States who hire coyotes to accompany their children up to U.S. border agencies.
A 2008 law requires the government agencies to complete these coyotes’ contracts by relaying the “Unaccompanied Alien Children” from the coyotes at the border up to the shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Once at the HHS shelters, the children and youths are next relayed to so-called “sponsors.” Many of the sponsors are the illegal-immigrant parents who hired the coyotes to accompany their UACs to the U.S. border.
“Most children are being released to parents, but parents are here unlawfully,” McAleenan noted, adding that he wants legal authority for his agencies to share information about the identity of the parent “sponsors.”
The requirement that taxpayer-funded lawyers be provided to the UAC migrants is included in a bill introduced June 5 by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. “This bill includes a key component of [Democrat] Sen. [Mazie] Hirono’s bill, which provides counsel for unaccompanied children,” Feinstein told the hearing.
The Central American families are fleeing “violence, abuse, and poverty,” she claimed, despite many statements from many migrants that they are hoping to get low-wage U.S. jobs, send their children to American schools, and get healthcare treatments.
Hirono argued that taxpayers should also provide more funding to Central America. “We do need to get to the root cause … This is a long term kind of commitment on our part … We’re not doing enough to get to the root cause.”
Leahy argued that Democrats are willing to provide funding to help the Central American migrants gain “refuge” in the United States.
We support ensuring that [the department of Health and Human Service] can care for unaccompanied minors. We support ensuring that [U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency] can safely process migrants who are seeking refuge. We just want basic standards of humanitarian care.
Democrats downplayed the economic incentives for migrants to walk through the establishment’s catch-and-release loopholes into the United States, and they sought to blame the migration on President Donald Trump’s pro-American policies.
Trump’s policies “are a certifiable failure,” said Illinois Democrat Sen. Richard Durbin, who has strongly opposed Trump’s proposed reforms in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
“We have learned that we cannot count on this admin to work on rational immigration policy,” said Durbin, who has pushed for multiple amnesties, and was a participant in the disastrous 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and cheap-labor bill.
Democrats, including Durbin and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, argued that the migration problem would have been solved by the 2013 Gang of Eight bill.
The bill added tens of billions in extra funding for the border agencies. But it did not close the catch-and-release loopholes and it invited so many millions of foreign workers into the labor market that it would have shifted more of the nation’s annual new income from employees to the Wall Street investors.
“The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” said a June 2013 report by the Congressional Budget Office, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
Republicans pushed back against the Democrats’ opposition to border funding and border reforms.
“We’ve seen no willingness on the part of our Democratic colleagues to meet us halfway,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn. The migration “is just getting worse and worse as Congress sits on its hands” instead of passing legal reforms to block the loopholes. Legislators “have been AWOL, and that is shameful.”
“They need to step up because even The New York Times said ‘Give Trump the money,”’ GOP Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell told a Tuesday press conference.
Immigration Numbers:
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately one million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
The National Review has a new plan for social media users to fight back against censorship — deleting your account.
The National Review published an article recently titled “Close Your Social-Media Accounts,” in which the publication argues that in order to fight back against censorship, social media users should just ignore the problem entirely. The Review points out that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are optional, and as such any users worried about being censored should just remove themselves from the platform entirely.
National Review writer Sam Sweeney writes in his article:
Of course, I thought. If Twitter had been conceived of and marketed as Chicken Soup for Our Collective National Soul, no one would question its right to ban content it deemed contrary to that vision. So why do we get upset about censorship now? Because insofar as social-media platforms have become extensions of our very beings, censorship of our lives on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram is a violation of our freedom of speech. What is speech if it’s not on Facebook?
For me the question isn’t whether the government should regulate social-media outlets, or whether they should be treated like utilities, or whether the outlets themselves should adopt a First Amendment principle voluntarily, or whether they should de-platform views outside the mainstream or outside their own woke visions of society. My question is instead: Does this debate mean, on a moral level, that we now treat our social-media platforms as extensions of ourselves? How else could restrictions on our social-media activity be construed as a violation of the First Amendment? As Jonah Goldberg points out, any publication already censors anyone it chooses not to publish. In no way does that restrict free speech. No one could plausibly say that being rejected by National Review was a violation of his free speech. Facebook censoring a post is a violation of free speech only if my profile is me and I am my profile.
The writer notes that he deleted his own social media account and had a positive experience despite being on the platform since 2005. But, the same writer also admits to scanning Twitter on a regular basis despite not having an account on the platform.
Admittedly, I enjoy reading social media. I spend a lot of time scanning Twitter despite not having an account. Too much time, I confess. I did set up an Instagram account recently after I started to learn photography. I made a decision not to post personal things there, only my professional photographs, but I’m already thinking of deleting it. I like that when I meet someone new in person, I am a blank slate in their eyes. Or I am a friend of a friend, or a former colleague of a classmate, etc. I am not those photos from 2007 that I wish I could make disappear. I realize there are ways to restrict photos. Many photos I am in have been posted without my knowing, but those are not all in one place for the world to see. I am not merely a series of images in chronological order all compiled in one virtual location whose security depends on the benevolence and competence of a few guys and gals in Silicon Valley. How long until a social-justice-warrior employee at Facebook starts leaking the off-color jokes in private messages sent by people he doesn’t like?
The writer then suggests that users should just delete their accounts, calling it the “21st-century equivalent of becoming a cloistered monk.”
My advice: Delete your Facebook, yesterday. Don’t get your news from Twitter. The issues of free speech on social media will no longer matter to you. They don’t matter to me. I’ve made a decision not to subjugate myself to the whims of our new overlords. They can open their platform to everyone from neo-Nazis to Kim Jong-un, or they can have a litmus test that includes denouncing Donald Trump or the pope at regular intervals — a sort of school-bathroom pass fitting for our generation’s extended adolescence in which Mark Zuckerberg plays the schoolmarm. It won’t affect my life either way. In my own mind at least, I am free because these things no longer define my life. I am happier as a result. I can still read a book of some length, an ability I see dropping off sharply among my peers.
Not having Facebook is the 21st-century equivalent of becoming a cloistered monk. If I can just stop opening Twitter, I will feel like I’ve replaced Saint Simeon on his pillar. Monastic jokes aside, let me tell you: Life doesn’t end when you close your social-media accounts. In fact, the day you close them is the day your life truly begins again.
Breitbart News writer Allum Bokhari previously discussed the National Review’s funding from Google in an article titled “Sundar Pichai Confirms Google Gave Money to National Review Institute.”
Bokhari writes:
Pichai used his written answers to congressional questions to disclose his company’s donation to the National Review Institute, which was revealed by National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg last year. The Google CEO confirmed the donation, stating that it was made in 2018 and would, therefore, be disclosed in the company’s next report.
“Google has a long history of supporting organizations on all sides of the political spectrum,” said Pichai. “Google was one of several corporate sponsors of the National Review Institute’s William F. Buckley Prize Dinner in 2018, which is scheduled to be reported in our upcoming transparency report.”
But the National Review Institute’s website states that it received a donation from Google a year earlier, in 2017. This donation was not disclosed in Google’s transparency report for that year.
Google’s contributions to the National Review Institutewere brought to light by a report in the left-leaning technology magazine Wired, which detailed a number of the tech giant’s contributions to establishment conservative institutions in order to fend off tech regulation from Republicans. Other organizations funded by Google include the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).
Bokhari notes that the National Review has actually published articles by a senior member of the Competitive Enterprise Institute arguing against Google antitrust measures:
National Review subsequently published an article from a senior member of the CEI, arguing against the use of antitrust legislation to break up Google and other big tech companies. The article was published four months after the National Review Institute’s 2017 William F. Buckley Prize Dinner, which as the Institute’s own website discloses, was sponsored by Google among other companies.
National Review senior editor Jonah Goldberg admitted to the Google funding in an article following a Twitter exchange with One America News correspondent Emerald Robinson last year, in which she criticized the links between Goldberg’s magazine and big tech.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolanor email him at lnolan@breitbart.com
Forty-three state attorneys general sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), urging it to take action on big tech privacy and competition.
Forty-three attorneys general (AGs) sent a letter, obtained by Breitbart News, to the FTC ahead of its Wednesday hearing on competition and consumer protection, which will include many prominent attorneys general such as Louisiana AG Jeff Landry, asking that the agency make reforms to protect consumers, consumer privacy, and competition in technology markets.
The AGs also suggested that the FTC should cooperate more with the state attorneys general on competition and technology platform issues.
The AGs said that the FTC “should require prior approval and/or prior notice for future acquisitions as part of more consent decrees in technology platform markets.”
They contended in the letter that “prior notice” or “prior approval” served as part of the FTC’s injunctive toolkit, which would give the FTC more power when delivering consent decrees.
However, the AGs said that the FTC, as well as the Department of Justice (DOJ), have not used prior notice or prior approval in any technology platform markets, such as Facebook, Google, or Amazon.
The AGs noted that Facebook, Google, and Amazon might often acquire upstart competitors to them and often are not subject to Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) antitrust reporting requirements.
The state lawyers noted that these “technology platform markets where network effects are pronounced — are particularly susceptible to acquisitions of nascent competition which may be anticompetitive but which are not subject to HSR reporting requirements.”
The AGs said that these agencies should consider utilizing prior notice and/or prior approval when the acquisition involves a technology platform.
“With dominant technology platforms likely to continue their practice of acquiring small market players before they have the opportunity to develop into serious challengers, this is a relatively low-cost method to ensure appropriate antitrust oversight,” the lawyers wrote to the FTC.
Big tech’s acquisition of entry competitors raises questions over whether their purchases might run afoul of antitrust practices or engage in anticompetitive behavior.
For instance, in 2018, when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was
of having a monopoly, he claimed that the average American has eight other online social apps to communicate with, not just his platform. According to App Annie, however, Zuckerberg’s company owns three of the top ten apps in the United States. Further, Facebook acquired messaging competitor WhatsApp and rival social media platform Instagram.
The state attorneys general wrote that the HSR filing requirements could be amended to “encompass dominant firms’ acquisition of nascent competition.”
The AGs’ call for an expanded HSR requirement could open big tech’s acquisition of smaller competitors to more scrutiny by the FTC.
“Today, if Amazon were to acquire a startup with less than $18 million in sales or assets, that transaction would avoid current HSR filing requirements. Under this modification, if the startup has existed for fewer than five years, the filing requirement would be triggered,” the AGs wrote, citing a potential example.
The attorneys general then turned to privacy, contending that increased market power, especially on technology platforms, might reduce Americans’ privacy online.
“Enhanced market power in the data context provides greater opportunities to exploit consumer data and create greater switching costs for consumers,” the AGs wrote.
“If a merger between firms holding consumer data results in a reduction of privacy, that can mean a reduction in product quality,” they added.
The AGs then wrote that there should be greater transparency in the technology market surrounding Americans’ privacy, which would allow citizens to make more informed choices about “free” services and “may incentivize companies to compete on privacy.”
The attorneys general then cited at 2014 FTC report which stated that Congress should consider legislation that would enable Americans to access the information held by data and technology companies and opt out of the collection of the data if need be.
The ability to opt-out of technology data mining has been
by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), through her Browser Act, which would require that Americans have to “opt-in” into a technology company’s data mining service and the company cannot deny a user from accessing the platform if they do not consent to the data mining.
The lawyers contended that this legislation could fix many of the problems surrounding the large bulk collection of private data that tech companies do when Americans use their services. They even cited that Apple CEO Tim Cook endorsed a proposal for a data broker clearinghouse, which would give Americans more control over their privacy.
“This could address the asymmetrical loss of privacy that occurs when consumers are subject to increasingly extensive monitoring without increased public awareness or oversight,” the AGs wrote.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
Organized labor in Los Angeles recently launched an ad campaign blasting Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti over his proposed "Green New Deal," claiming the environmental plan would cost union jobs, increase energy bills, and erode the middle-class.
The Department of Justice today announced the arrest of almost 1,700 suspected online child sex offenders during a two-month, nationwide operation conducted by Internet Crimes Against Children task forces. The task forces identified 308 offenders who either produced child pornography or committed child sexual abuse, and 357 children who suffered recent, ongoing or historical sexual abuse or were exploited in the production of child pornography.
The 61 ICAC task forces, located in all 50 states and comprised of more than 4,500 federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies, led the coordinated operation known as “Broken Heart” during the months of April and May 2019. During the course of the operation, the task forces investigated more than 18,500 complaints of technology-facilitated crimes targeting children and delivered more than 2,150 presentations on internet safety to over 201,000 youth and adults.
“The sexual abuse of children is repugnant, and it victimizes the most innocent and vulnerable of all,” Attorney General William P. Barr said. “We must bring the full force of the law against sexual predators, and with the help of our Internet Crimes Against Children program, we will. Over the span of just two months, our ICAC task forces investigated more than 18,000 complaints of internet-related abuse and helped arrest 1,700 alleged abusers. I would like to thank our Office of Justice Programs, all of the task force members, and especially the state and local partners who helped us achieve these important results. We are committed to bringing the defendants in these cases to justice and protecting every American child.”
The operation targeted suspects who: (1) produce, distribute, receive and possess child pornography; (2) engage in online enticement of children for sexual purposes; (3) engage in the sex trafficking of children; and (4) travel across state lines or to foreign countries and sexually abuse children.
The ICAC Program is funded through the Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) within the Office of Justice Programs (OJP). In 1998, OJJDP launched the ICAC Task Force Program to help federal, state and local law enforcement agencies enhance their investigative responses to offenders who use the internet, online communication systems or computer technology to exploit children.
Good Lord. More than three years after the state of California seized land through eminent domain for its high-speed rail boondoggle, the state has yet to pay farmers expenses they owe them. And in some cases, they still owe them for the land as well — even while it remains questionable whether the state will ever get around to using it:
Up and down the San Joaquin Valley, farmers have similar stories. The state can take land with a so-called order of possession by the Superior Court while it haggles over the price.
But farmers often face out-of-pocket costs for lost production, road replacement, repositioning of irrigation systems and other expenses, which the state agrees to pay before the final settlement.
Those payments and even some payments for land have stretched out to three years. State officials have offered endless excuses for not paying, the farmers say.
Eminent domain, the legal process by which government takes private land, is complicated enough, particularly in California with a maze of agencies involved. But the rail authority’s constantly changing plans, thin state staff and reliance on outside attorneys have made it more difficult, some say.
We’re not talking about chicken feed, either. One farmer is waiting for California to fork over $1.9 million for the past three years. Even farmers who voluntarily sold land haven’t been paid for it. One tells the Los Angeles Times’ Ralph Vartabedian that he’s still waiting for his $630,000.
Not everyone’s waiting for their money. Some are no longer in a position to collect it, as was the brother-in-law of the farmer waiting for his voluntary-sale proceeds:
Carter’s brother-in-law, Vince Carter, also could not collect money for farm property that the California High-Speed Rail Authority took, which gave him a “lot of frustration,” Ray Carter said. “He died of a heart attack. I think it played a role in what happened.”
Now that most of the project has been put off indefinitely, the land seizures could end up standing as silent — and barren — testimony to bureaucratic idiocy. The farmer wondered all along why the state didn’t just choose to run the high-speed rail parallel to Interstate 5, which already has a straight line through California’s interior and its own right of way, rather than destroy productive agricultural resources. The state has destroyed all that production and damaged other agricultural investments all while failing to admit that they can’t figure out how to make the project work at all.
And they can’t even figure out how to pay for the land they took, nor for the damage they did. Small wonder that one of the attorneys involved analogized the situation to one of the world’s most famous military disasters. “I would draw an analogy to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia,” Mark Wasser told Vartabedian. In a state with a healthy electorate, voters would hold the high-speed-rail-supporting politicians responsible for this disaster, but this project’s not the only thing in California that runs like Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.
His first day on the job was yesterday, as “acting” head of the entire department. Normally an acting director is someone who’s already been at the agency for awhile, knows how things work, and can step into the director’s role in a pinch when there’s a vacancy to keep things running smoothly. (E.g., the deputy director.) The whole point of having an acting director is to have someone experienced do the job while the president looks for a permanent replacement. If the president ultimately decides he wants to bring in a permanent replacement who has no experience, that’s A-OK: Just follow the Constitution, submit his or her name to the Senate, and wait for confirmation. That’s the way things are supposed to work.
So how did we end up with a director at USCIS who has no experience but who also hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate?
Simple answer: The White House is using procedural chicanery to install Cuccinelli as acting director because they know he’ll be rejected by the Senate. This is, in other words, a blatant end-run around the Constitution’s advice-and-consent requirement for principal officers, because a Republican Senate won’t do the president’s bidding. If I were McConnell, I’d sue.
USCIS said in the announcement Monday that Cuccinelli would become acting director, but later clarified to POLITICO that his official title is “principal deputy director.”
The newly created position will allow Cuccinelli to run the agency without dismissing USCIS deputy Mark Koumans, according to one current and one former DHS official familiar with the plan. The officials expected the administration to make the “principal deputy director” position the top role in the department, which would allow Cuccinelli to become acting director under a provision of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.
To see what’s going on here you’re better off reading law professor Steve Vladeck’s short but useful post at Lawfare on the loophole in the Federal Vacancies Reform Act that Trump is exploiting. The FVRA says that if the director of an agency resigns, as happened with USCIS, then the president can choose one of three temporary replacements while he looks for a permanent successor: (1) The director’s “first assistant,” i.e. the deputy director; (2) someone who already holds a job in the executive branch *and* was confirmed by the Senate for that position; (3) someone who’s been at the agency for at least 90 of the past 365 days. Those options are true to the spirit of the choice I described above. You can name someone “acting” director without Senate confirmation so long as they have experience, or you can name someone without experience so long as they have Senate confirmation. But it needs to be one or the other. You can’t lack both.
Cuccinelli lacks both. So how’d he land this job?
The answer, says Vladeck, is in the excerpt I quoted above. Trump essentially elevated Cuccinelli to the role of “first assistant” to the vacant directorship by creating the position of “principal deputy director” for him, something that can be done in this case via regulation rather than congressional statute. By doing that, he bumped the actual deputy director, Mark Koumans, down a notch on the bureaucratic ladder. With Cuccinelli now Koumans’s superior, he became the new “first assistant” to the vacant director — even though he never actually worked for the old director — and thus, for purposes of the FVRA, he can now be named acting director of the agency. Which, under the FVRA, could keep him in place for the next 210 days as a “temporary” appointee lacking any Senate confirmation.
And if Trump decides to ignore that 210-day limit and keep Cuccinelli on indefinitely, who’s going to stop him?
The entire point of this maneuver is to flout the constitutional requirement for Senate confirmation and appoint someone who’s accountable exclusively to the president. We went through this last year when Trump pulled a similar move at the DOJ with Matt Whitaker, appointing him to be Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff after Whitaker had said some skeptical things about the Mueller investigation on television and then eventually elevating Whitaker to the role of acting AG after the axe finally fell on Sessions. At least in that case Whitaker worked for Sessions and the DOJ for a year before being named acting AG. Cuccinelli is coming into USCIS completely cold, with Trump not even making a pretense that he’s interested in finding a permanent director anytime soon. What’s more, he’s doing this after members of his own party told him emphatically through the media that Cuccinelli would be DOA in a confirmation hearing because of his attacks on establishmentarians like Mitch McConnell in the past. Not only is he unconfirmed, in other words, he’s unconfirmable. The Senate has given its advice to the president informally and they do not consent to Cuccinelli’s appointment. His nomination has been effectively rejected. Trump doesn’t care, so long as he has a loophole in the FVRA he can exploit.
Given how blatant POTUS is being about dodging the constitutional “advice and consent” requirement *and* the FVRA’s “experience or Senate confirmation” statutory requirement, it’s a cinch that Cuccinelli’s appointment will be challenged in court. Question for legal eagles, then: Who’s best positioned to have standing here? I assume McConnell won’t sue no matter how annoyed he is, but wouldn’t someone affected by a USCIS policy conceivably have standing to sue on grounds that Cuccinelli’s orders lack the force of law because he was never lawfully appointed? Exit quotation:
Romney on Cuccinelli named acting director of USCIS to skirt sure doom in Senate confirmation vote: "I prefer votes in the Senate for positions of that nature”
It has become increasingly apparent that the major Silicon Valley tech companies hold a liberal bias against conservatives, and though those firms routinely deny it, the mask of unbiased nonpartisanship has continued to slip as these firms receive pushback for their one-sided ideological activities. The latest tech firm to let the mask slip is Google,…
