BLM chapter spends $100K to bail out Kentucky activist charged with attempted murder
By Emily Crane
The 21-year-old activist charged with trying to murder a Kentucky mayoral candidate has been released from jail after his $100,000 bond was posted by a bail fund supported by the local Black Lives Matter chapter.
Quintez Brown’s cash bond was paid Wednesday afternoon by the Louisville Community Bail Fund, which is an arm of Black Lives Matter Louisville, news station WAVE reported.
Brown, who is accused of firing multiple shots inside the Louisville office of mayoral hopeful Craig Greenberg on Monday, walked free from the Metro Department of Corrections just hours later.
BLM Louisville organizer Chanelle Helm, who co-founded the bail fund, told the outlet that Brown would be safer out of prison — and claimed he was likely suffering from PTSD after two years of social unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In this case, we’re dealing with someone that has mental health issues,” Helm said.
“They are calling for this individual, this young man who needs support and help, to be punished to the full extent,” Helm added. “It is a resounding message that people are down for the torture that has taken place in our jails and prisons.”
The Louisville bail fund says on its social media page that it “exists to not only bail out folks, but provide post-release support to get them from jail, fed, and to a situation of safety.”
Metro Council President David James slammed the bail fund’s decision to post Brown’s bond, saying: “They are going to be responsible for what he may or may not do to anybody.”
Brown, a University of Louisville student who is running as an independent for Louisville’s metro council, has been fitted with an ankle monitor and is being placed on home incarceration ahead of his trial.
He was arrested and charged with attempted murder after opening fire with a 9mm Glock handgun inside Greenberg’s campaign office on Monday.
Greenberg wasn’t struck by the gunfire, but said a bullet grazed his sweater.
Brown is also charged with four counts of wanton endangerment for allegedly firing shots near Greenberg’s staffers.
A judge on Tuesday ordered Brown to have no contact with Greenberg or his campaign staff — and said he cannot possess firearms.
Police said Brown appears to have acted alone and they are still investigating a motive for the shooting.
Brown’s lawyer said the man has “serious mental issues” and that he would undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
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Ex-DNI Ratcliffe: Intelligence shaped Durham filing
Based on intelligence he has seen, former U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said he expects more criminal indictments will result from special counsel John Durham’s investigation of Democrats’ attempts to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia.
“I’ve been saying there’d be indictments before there were any, and the folks that have been indicted, that does relate to intelligence that I shared with John Durham,” Ratcliffe told Fox News on Feb. 14.
“And based on more intelligence that has not yet been declassified, I would expect there to be frankly, quite a few more indictments.”
Durham, in an explosive Feb. 11, 2022 court filing in Washington made as part of his probe into U.S. government wrongdoing related to an FBI inquiry of Russia collusion, said government evidence shows that Michael Sussmann, a lawyer linked to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, worked with a tech company to hack Trump’s office and residence in New York and “the executive office of the president” after Trump was sworn into office in 2017.
Ratcliffe told Fox News that, while he was DNI, he met several times with and provided intelligence information to Durham.
Additional information on what Ratcliffe characterized as a “conspiracy” by Democrats to subvert Trump before and after he became president is also in classified information that has not been made public.
“I think this pleading alleges or alludes to a conspiracy, meaning two or more people in furtherance of a crime, and anyone that was aware that this [Democratic] campaign plan was going to be falsely pitched to the FBI or the CIA or law enforcement or intelligence authorities would be subject to criminal prosecution for any number of criminal crimes,” Ratcliffe said.
Possible crimes related to the data theft include mail fraud, wire fraud and lying under oath, he said.
“The people that have been indicted, that does relate to the intelligence I shared with John Durham,” Ratcliffe said.
In a Jan. 26, 2021 report, Geostrategy-Direct noted that Ratcliffe, DNI during the Trump administration, suggested U.S. intelligence agencies played partisan political roles by downplaying China‘s role of interfering in the disputed 2020 presidential election.
An Intelligence Community (IC) assessment of China’s interference in the election could have triggered enforcement of Trump’s 2018 executive order on foreign interference in U.S. elections.
“From my unique vantage point as the individual who consumes all of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence on the People’s Republic of China, I do not believe the majority view expressed by [intelligence community] analysts fully and accurately reflects the scope of the Chinese government’s efforts to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections,” Ratcliffe said in a Jan. 7, 2021 statement.
Ratcliffe said that what he called “the politicization of China election influence reporting” was the result of “undue pressure being brought to bear on analysts who offered an alternative view based on the intelligence.”
The debate centers on whether intelligence analysts emphasized Russian meddling while playing down the role of communist China during the election. Ratcliffe said the three-page report raises broader questions about the quality of U.S. intelligence analyses.
And:
Former House Intelligence Committee chief Russiagate investigator Kash Patel told Newsmax Monday that the most recent court filings by Special Counsel John Durham are uncovering the "biggest political scandal and criminal scandal in U.S. history." | Newsmax
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A SHRINKING AARP IS LOSING PLENTY OF SENIORS. THE LADY WHO WROTE THE LETTER BELOW NOT ONLY HAS A GRASP OF THE SITUATION, BUT AN INCREDIBLE COMMAND OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!
Her letter was sent to Mr. Rand who is the Executive Director of AARP. It only takes a few days on the Internet and this will have reached 75% of the public in the U.S.A.
Dear Mr. Rand,
Recently, you sent us a letter encouraging us to renew our lapsed membership in AARP by the requested date. This isn't what you were looking for, but it is the most honest response I can give you. Our coverage gap is a microscopic symptom of the real problem, a deepening lack of faith. While we have proudly maintained our membership for years and long admired the AARP goals and principles, regrettably, we can no longer endorse its abdication of our values. Your letter stated that we can count on AARP to speak up for our rights, yet the voice we hear is not ours.
Your offer of being kept up to date on important issues through DIVIDED WE FAIL presents neither an impartial view nor the one we have come to embrace. We do believe that when two parties agree all the time on everything presented to them, one is probably not necessary. But, when the opinions and long term goals are diametrically opposed, the divorce is imminent. This is the philosophy which spawned our 200 years of government.
Once upon a time, we looked forward to being part of the senior demographic. We also looked to AARP to provide certain benefits and give our voice a power we could not possibly hope to achieve on our own. AARP once gave us a sense of belonging which we no longer enjoy. The Socialist politics practiced by the BIDEN Regime and empowered by AARP serves only to raise the blood pressure my medical insurance strives to contain. Clearly a conflict of interest there! We do not understand the AARP posture, feel greatly betrayed by the guiding forces that we expected to map out our senior years and leave your ranks with a great sense of regret. We mitigate that disappointment with the relief of knowing that we are not contributing to the problem anymore by renewing our membership. There are numerous other organizations which offer discounts without threatening our way of life or offending our sensibilities and values.
This BIDEN Regime scares the living daylights out of us. Not just for ourselves, but for our proud and bloodstained heritage. But more importantly for our children and grandchildren. Washington has rendered Soylent Green a prophetic cautionary tale rather than a nonfiction scare tactic. I have never endorsed any militant or radical groups, yet now I find myself listening to them. I don't have to agree with them to appreciate the fear which birthed their existence. Their borderline insanity presents little more than a balance to the voice of the Socialist Mindset in power. Perhaps I became American by a great stroke of luck in some cosmic uterine lottery, but in my adulthood I CHOOSE to embrace it and nurture the freedoms it represents as well as the responsibilities.
Your web site generously offers us the opportunity to receive all communication in Spanish. ARE YOU KIDDING??? The illegal perpetrators have broken into our 'house', invaded our home without invitation or consent. The President insists we keep these illegal perpetrators in comfort and learn the perpetrator's language so we can communicate our reluctant welcome to them. I DON'T choose to welcome them, to support them, to educate them, to medicate them, or to pay for their food or clothing. American home invaders get arrested. Please explain to me why foreign lawbreakers can enjoy privileges on American soil that Americans do not get? Why do some immigrants have to play the game to be welcomed and others only have to break and enter to be welcomed?
We travel for a living. Walt hauls horses all over this great country, averaging over 10,000 miles a month when he is out there. He meets more people than a politician on caffeine overdose. Of all the many good folks he enjoyed on this last 10,000 miles, this trip yielded only ONE supporter of the current Regime. One of us is out of touch with mainstream America. Since our poll is conducted without funding, I have more faith in it than ones that are driven by a need to yield AMNESTY (aka-make voters out of the foreign lawbreakers so they can vote to continue the governments free handouts). This addition of 10 to 20 million voters who then will vote to continue Socialism will OVERWHELM our votes to control the government's free handouts. It is a "slippery slope" we must not embark on!
As Margaret Thatcher (former Prime Minister of Great Britain) once said, "Socialism is GREAT - UNTIL you run out of other people's money".
We have decided to forward this to everyone on our mailing list, and will encourage them to do the same. With several hundred in my address book, I have every faith that the eventual exponential factor will make a credible statement to you. I am disappointed as all get out! I am more scared than I have ever been in my entire life! I am ANGRY! I am MAD as heck, and I'm NOT going to take it anymore!
Walt & Cyndy Miller,
Miller Farms Equine Transport
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Biden is spending so much on the consequences of an open border our pilots will not be able to defend themselves. Why? Because there is not enough money for their training.
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Fighter Pilots Need More Time in the Air
The U.S. military budget doesn’t allow aviators enough flight hours and sorties to be ready for battle.
By Kate Bachelder Odell
Americans are starting to wonder if the U.S. could win a war against a formidable adversary like China. So here is an accumulating risk that deserves more attention: American military pilots aren’t getting enough preparation for high-end combat.
The armed services are still trying to recover from sequester budget cuts, which started in 2013 and brutalized readiness. Many pilots who came up in the aftermath of those cuts haven’t had the flight hours they need to perform superbly in a fight with a near-peer military. Cramped and inconsistent budgets are compounding this skills deficit, even as the world grows more dangerous.
Congress has been funding the government with patchwork measures known as continuing resolutions, and the Pentagon could end up stuck on a stopgap budget for the remainder of the fiscal year, though lawmakers are reporting progress toward a spending deal.
The Air Force has said that under a continuing resolution, it would have to “execute a flying hour program well below what is required to maintain high levels of proficiency.” The Navy told reporters it would “reduce the flying hour accounts to all our pilots, Navy and Marine Corps by 10 or 20% in the last quarter and a half of the fiscal year.” These hours are lucrative targets for penny pinchers given the high costs of flying. At the same time, inflation is crushing the Pentagon’s purchasing power and fuel prices are up.
Flying is often compared to surgery: a skill that atrophies rapidly without practice. John Venable, who commanded the Air Force Thunderbirds squadron and is now at the Heritage Foundation, has written that an Air Force fighter pilot needs at least 200 hours of flight time a year to stay sharp. An average fighter pilot is developing into a better one with four sorties a week and holding steady at three. At one or two, a pilot is deteriorating in ability and comfort in the cockpit.
Air Force flight hours and sortie rates for fighter pilots in 2020 “fell to historic lows” amid the pandemic, Mr. Venable writes in Heritage’s 2022 Index of U.S. Military Strength, “as the average line combat mission-ready fighter pilot received less than 1.5 sorties a week and 131 hours of flying time that year.” This works out to 10.9 hours a month, a level Mr. Venable says is on par with the proficiency Russian pilots had during the Cold War.
Training needs vary across service and type of aircraft. But Rep. Mike Garcia, a California Republican and former naval aviator who recently launched a caucus focused on fighter aviation, tells me he flew a healthy 25 to 30 hours a month as a junior F/A-18 pilot in the early 2000s and up to 60 on deployment. Pilots fly more on deployment, but for decades mostly in environments like the Middle East, where the U.S. dominates the skies.
Chinese fighter pilots appear to be flying 150 hours a year, Mr. Venable estimates based on available data and anecdotal reports from pilots who have operated in the region. Caveats are in order—Chinese pilots haven’t been tested in a fight. But consistent hours, Mr. Venable explains, “translate directly into combat capability.”
The risks aren’t confined to combat. Congress in 2019 established a commission to investigate military aviation accidents, with 224 dead and 186 aircraft destroyed from 2013 to 2020. The commission traveled the country asking military pilots: What will cause the next accident in your unit? Insufficient flight hours, declining proficiency and inconsistent funding were repeated answers across rank and type of aircraft. Midcareer pilots “reported having as many as 200 fewer career flight hours than previous generations,” the commission said.
Some in the services want to rely more on simulators: An hour in an F-35 simulator in 2019 cost about $600 compared with $17,000 to $23,000 for an hour in the air. Simulator training can be valuable, Mr. Garcia notes, but it can’t substitute for giving tactical aviators the “practical experience of hearing 50 people on the radio at one time or seeing 60 to 80 planes in the sky” in a large exercise. This is essential to approximating “the nervousness” that would accompany flying in combat, say, over the Taiwan Strait.
Pilots also can’t fly more without ready airplanes—and only roughly half of the F-22 fleet is considered mission capable, for example. The Air Force’s fleet is about 30 years old on average, and aging planes are expensive to maintain. To fly more hours, the services need commensurate resources for spare parts and maintenance, and this money needs to arrive predictably, not halfway into the fiscal year. A confounding challenge is getting the services to ask Congress for more. The Air Force has cut its hours request in recent years, in part because operations in Afghanistan tapered off. Mr. Venable says the Air Force hasn’t made flight hours enough of a priority even amid increased operations funding.
At bottom, there simply hasn’t been the real growth in military spending that would allow the services to be ready for a fight that breaks out tonight while also fielding better equipment for a fight that might arrive in the 2030s. The House Appropriations Committee offers $706 billion, and the Senate’s draft is $725 billion. Mr. Garcia says the defense top line needs to be closer to $800 billion.
As Washington’s budget fights drag on, a Navy F-35C sank into the South China Sea in January after crashing while trying to land on the USS Carl Vinson. It was the aircraft carrier’s fifth major flight mishap in two months. Investigations are under way, and the incidents may merely reflect the risks of the unforgiving environment of carrier aviation.
But five incidents in short order on a deployed national asset could be one more indication that American pilots don’t have the resources they need to operate effectively in peace and, if necessary, to dominate in war.
Mrs. Odell is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
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Kim plows her way through the "techie"/Trump spying and connects more dots which keep leading back to Hillary and "The Steele Dossier."
When Trump told us he was being spied upon the biased media ignored him. When Trump said mail in ballot would create distrust over the election the biased media ignored him. When Trump said there was nothing to Russian collusion the biased media ignored him. Perhaps it is time Americans start ignoring the biased media.
Who Are Those ‘Techies’ Who Spied on Trump?
‘Benevolent posse’ or partisans for Hillary Clinton? John Durham has the answer.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
The usual suspects are already circling the wagons around the techie “experts” who spied on Donald Trump. If their defense feels tired, it’s because we’ve been through it before. It’s Christopher Steele all over again.
Special counsel John Durham destroyed the last shreds of Mr. Steele’s credibility last year, proving that the paid-for-hire spook had relied on fabrications for the infamous dossier the Federal Bureau of Investigation used in its Trump probe. The special counsel is now dismantling that other big claim of Trump-Russia “collusion”—the Alfa Bank narrative. The wonder is that the press and others are stepping up for another humiliation—when the disturbing actions of the creators of the Alfa narrative are already so easy to document, and in their own words.
The Alfa story came to life in October 2016, when Franklin Foer of Slate was gulled into writing that a largely anonymous “benevolent posse” of “computer scientists,” “spurred by a sense of shared idealism,” had discovered data showing secret communications between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. Cybersecurity professionals instantly ridiculed the data as nonsense, and the FBI dismissed it, but the liberal media kept it alive. In October 2018, the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins devoted a 7,600-word panegyric to the “self-appointed guardians of the Internet” who continued to flog the claims.
In recent court filings, Mr. Durham explains that these tech experts—including Rodney Joffe, formerly of Neustar, Inc.—were in cahoots with the same crew as Mr. Steele, using the same playbook. They worked with Democratic lawyers at Perkins Coie and opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, with the goal of dredging up “derogatory” information on Mr. Trump that would please “VIPs” in the Clinton campaign. The techies did so, the Durham indictment says, in part by mining protected internet data that had been supplied to a government contractor—allowing them to snoop on the White House as well as Trump Tower and Mr. Trump’s Manhattan apartment
Mr. Joffe’s legal team continues to insist he is “apolitical” and wasn’t aware his lawyer, Michael Sussmann, was billing Team Clinton. (A grand jury impaneled by Mr. Durham indicted Mr. Sussmann in September on a charge of making a false statement to the FBI. Mr. Sussmann pleaded not guilty.) The press initially tried to ignore the story, then resorted to parsing the definition of “spying,” justifying the accused, and trashing Mr. Durham.
The problem for the last-gaspers is that the techies they seek to defend have already put too much on the record that suggests their real concern was a President Trump, not national security. Start with the company that the “apolitical” Mr. Joffe kept. One of his colleagues involved in the project and referenced in the Sussmann indictment is Paul Vixie, whose Twitter feed sports a long record of liberal, anti-Trump sentiments. Another member of the circle—who took on the job of publishing the Joffe data—is L. Jean Camp, an Indiana University computer-science professor and Clinton supporter who called on Americans to join the “resistance” against Mr. Trump. So much for the media’s description of a gang of politically innocent nerds.
The researchers claim that by July 2016 they were alarmed by the security implications of their data, mined from government information. Yet they didn’t go to the government. Mr. Joffe instead went to Democrats—namely Mr. Sussmann, the Perkins Coie lawyer who in the summer of 2016 was regularly identified in the press as an attorney for the Democratic National Committee. The Sussmann indictment notes a meeting Mr. Joffe had with Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie attorney for the Clinton campaign. And a deposition by a Fusion GPS staffer as part of continuing Alfa Bank litigation says Mr. Joffe attended a meeting with Peter Fritsch, a co-founder of Fusion GPS. Was he still confused about the partisan nature of this project?
He certainly couldn’t have been two years later. By that point, the roles Perkins Coie and Fusion played in funneling information to the FBI for Clinton were well known, while Fusion had gone on to team up with former Democratic staffer Dan Jones to keep advancing the claims. Mr. Joffe sat for that October 2018 New Yorker piece that pushed the Alfa claims, anonymously calling himself “Max” and admitting in the piece that he’d continued to help that effort long after the election, providing Mr. Jones’s team with 37 million internet records to examine. (A deposition in the Alfa litigation identified Mr. Joffe as Max.)
Here’s the most revealing bit: “Max” also explained to the New Yorker how vitally important it was in 2016 to make sure the threat his team discovered was “known before the election.” Which was why he and his lawyer first went with their information to the press. The Sussmann indictment says Mr. Sussmann tried peddling the data to the New York Times in late August 2016. He didn’t approach the FBI until the middle of September. Mr. Joffe’s spokesperson declined to comment.
The defenders of Mr. Steele’s dossier also spent years insisting that the oppo researcher was nonpartisan and his work beyond reproach—only to be humiliated. The media is stepping out again at its peril. There’s plenty to show an ugly tale already—and Mr. Durham will likely have plenty more to come.
And:
Durham is not backing down | |
Headline: John Durham stands by snooping evidence in case against Democratic lawyer The First take: As the MSM avoids the story and Hillary Clinton calls the latest filings everything but a "vast right-wing conspiracy," John Durham continues apace. We just wish he would pick up that pace a little. | |
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