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Gavin Newsom Signs Bill To Make It Easier For Officials To Remove People
(PresidentialWire.com)- California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is making it easier for public officials to forcibly remove people if they are causing disruptions at public meetings.
By signing a new bill earlier this week, Newsom has put into place specific standards that would count as means for people to be removed from public meetings.
Local government officials who are in charge of public meetings will now have the right to remove any person who is determined to be causing a big interruption. The officials must first give the person a warning, but then if they continue with their disruption, they can be removed from the meeting.
According to the bill, which was authored by state Senator Dave Cortese, a person will be determined to be disrupting the meeting if they are threatening people or refuse to be in compliance with lawful and reasonable regulations.
Two groups, the Urban Counties of California and the California State Association of Counties, said that this new bill would help local government agencies address an “unfortunate, but notable, increase in disruptive behavior” at public meetings.
In a statement he released earlier in August, Cortese said:
“When public meetings have to be called to an end early or entire meeting rooms of public attendees have to be cleared to deal with these disruptions, that hurts the democratic process as a whole. Public officials and attendees shouldn’t have to end their business early due to bullying, harassment or violence.”
Cortese drafted his bill after Marico Sayoch, the former mayor of Los Gatos, faced “targeted bullying and harassment efforts statewide” in 2021. The former mayor said if the bill were in place at the time, it would’ve helped to protect her and her family as they were facing attempts of concentrated harassment at various public meetings of city council.
She commented:
“I am hopeful that this bill will keep people safe in the future — those just trying to conduct business for the public good — and will ensure individuals, and especially women, continue to step up and serve in office without fear of harassment and violence at their public meetings.”
The flip side of this is that some people and groups are afraid the bill goes too far and could infringe on people’s First Amendment rights to free speech and public assembly.
The group Californians for Good Governance has said that it fears that local officials might try to interpret the new bill “as a general license to limit public participation.” As the group explained:
“The reality is that participatory democracy is a messy business, but limiting public input is not the answer, as it moves our government towards authoritarianism and away from democracy.”
The hope, of course, is that local officials don’t try to take the bill too far and use it as a way to remove people who are speaking out about something that the local officials don’t agree with.
And that’s the potential danger of having a law like this in place.
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The FBI dug a hole for itself after raiding the home of former President Donald Trump. The Justice Department recently released documents... +++
Top FBI agent resigns amid claims he shielded Hunter Biden from probe: report Emily Crane A top FBI agent at the Washington field office reportedly resigned from his post last week after facing intense scrutiny over allegations he helped shield Hunter Biden from criminal investigations into his laptop and business dealings. Timothy Thibault, an FBI assistant special agent in charge, was allegedly forced out after he was accused of political bias in his handling of probes involving President Biden’s son, sources told the Washington Times on Monday. The agent was escorted out of the field office by at least two “headquarters-looking types” last Friday, the sources said. Thibault and the FBI didn’t immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment on Monday. Thibault, a 25-year-veteran, had already been on leave for a month after the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), started raising concerns about whistleblower claims the FBI had obstructed its own investigations into the first son. In a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray in July, Grassley said Thibault and FBI supervisory intelligence analyst Brian Auten were allegedly involved in “a scheme” to “undermine derogatory information connected to Hunter Biden by falsely suggesting it was disinformation.” Thibault also allegedly tried to kill off a valid avenue of investigation of possible Hunter Biden criminality up until at least one month before the Nov. 2020 election, according to Grassley. Hunter BidenTimothy Thibault, an FBI assistant special agent in charge, was reportedly forced out after being accused of political bias in the handling of Hunter Biden probes. “Thibault allegedly ordered the matter closed without providing a valid reason as required by FBI guidelines…. [and] subsequently attempted to improperly mark the matter in FBI systems so that it could not be opened in the future,” Grassley wrote. It was the same month The Post first started reporting on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which included troves of emails related to his shady overseas business dealings. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed last week that the social media giant suppressed The Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden report following a vague FBI warning about possible “Russian propaganda” tied to the 2020 presidential election. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has been raising concerns about whistleblower claims the FBI had obstructed its own investigations into the first son. “Basically, the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us — some folks on our team — and was like, ‘Hey, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert,’” Zuckerberg told “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. Zuckerberg said the FBI added, “‘We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that, basically, there’s about to be some kind of dump that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’” Meanwhile, Republican senators have also publicly scrutinized Thibault’s alleged anti-Trump social media activity ahead of the 2020 election, including a retweet of a Lincoln Project message that called Donald Trump a “psychologically broken, embittered and deeply unhappy man.” He also allegedly tweeted that he wanted to “give Kentucky to the Russian Federation.” Wray admitted under grilling from GOP senators earlier this month that allegations of political bias at the hands of FBI agents, including Thibault, was “deeply troubling. And: +++ Iran Tells the Truth About Inspections and the Nuclear Deal The Editorial Board The latest evidence comes from a rare press conference held Monday by President Ebrahim Raisi. Speaking about the prospects for a new deal and a meeting with President Biden, the Iranian said, “Without settlement of safeguard issues, speaking about an agreement has no meaning.” By “safeguard issues,” he means the International Atomic Energy Agency’s attempts to investigate likely breaches of Iran’s nuclear commitments dating to the early 2000s. The IAEA is following up on traces of man-made uranium found in 2019 and 2020 at three sites that had not been declared to inspectors, and it has suspended its investigation of a fourth site. Tehran has yet to say what became of the equipment used to refine the uranium, let alone where the uranium itself has gone. This appears to be a violation of Iran’s obligations under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which long predated the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Mr. Raisi wants the U.S. and Europe to lean on the IAEA to stop investigating Iran’s violations of a decades-old nuclear treaty in order to entice Tehran to sign a new, and weaker, antinuclear agreement. Oh, and Tehran expects the West to pay for the privilege by lifting economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic. The danger is that the Iranians know their marks all too well. Talks on a new deal so far have bogged down over which sanctions the West would lift. But the two sides may be nearing an agreement that would ease hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of sanctions in return for time-limited nuclear pledges Tehran might not allow anyone to verify. Iran also continues to foment trouble throughout the Middle East and attempt to assassinate former U.S. officials such as John Bolton and Iranian exiles who criticize the regime. President Biden has a track record of reckless bloody-mindedness (see Afghanistan, withdrawal from) that must give Mr. Raisi and the mullahs hope they can leverage Mr. Biden’s determination to sign a deal. Maybe you can’t blame a dangerous autocratic regime for trying. But voters—and Congress—can and should blame Mr. Biden if he plays along. +++++++++++++++++++++ This is what happens when you have no self respect, have given up and allow yourselves to be intimidated. +++ It’s Open Season on Jews in New York City Of the hundreds of hate crimes committed against Jews in the city since 2018, many of them documented on camera, only a single perpetrator has served even one day in prison by Armin Rosen is a staff writer for Tablet magazine - 8/28/22 The attack that sent 31-year-old Yossi Hershkop to the hospital was an unmysterious crime, the opposite of a stone-cold whodunnit. Security cameras recorded clear video of a group of four men approaching Hershkop’s car, with two of them repeatedly punching him through the driver’s side window while his 5-year-old child sat in the back seat. Another camera recorded the license plate and model of the attackers’ getaway vehicle. The assault took place around 3:40 p.m. on July 13, 2022, on a busy street in Crown Heights. Hershkop believes his assailants were identified later that evening. In an ideal world, a victim’s personal background would be irrelevant to whether their attackers are arrested and prosecuted. But at least in theory, Hershkop is someone with enough of a profile to keep the police and prosecutors focused on his case. The young Chabad Hasid is an energetic yet shrewdly understated local political activist—the kind of person who knows the total number of newly registered voters in Crown Heights off the top of his head, or who you might WhatsApp when you need to reach a particular City Council member later that afternoon. He also manages a large urgent care center in Crown Heights, a position of real civic significance during New York’s COVID nightmare. Hershkop is also a personal friend of mine, although even people I am not friends with should expect the police to move quickly when they’re able to easily identify the people who bloodied them on camera in broad daylight in front of their child. The police did not move quickly. No arrests were made during the two weeks after the attack, a span in which the getaway car got ticketed in a totally unrelated incident, Hershkop says. On July 27, an exasperated Hershkop tweeted: “No arrests have been made, despite the assailants’ vehicle having been seen all over the neighborhood. My son still has a lot of trauma from the incident & we now Uber instead of walk whenever we need to go out.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the first arrest in the case was made the day after that tweet, some two weeks after the attack. The first suspect was released on bail after the judge ordered a bond of $10,000, significantly less than the district attorney had requested, according to Hershkop. Hershkop is confident that after a long period of delay, the NYPD is now making efforts toward arresting the second individual who physically attacked him. “This was a perfect opportunity for them to do the right thing,” Hershkop told me. “Nobody was saying this isn’t a big deal and we shouldn’t make an arrest. Everybody was on the same page here.” As he explained, “it was an assault on a 5-year-old caught on camera. I didn’t think I’d have to fight for justice.” Perhaps the attack, which stemmed from a seemingly innocuous dispute over a parking space—a common enough occurrence in a densely populated place like Crown Heights, and one that almost never ends with anyone in the hospital—was just too fraught of an event for the police to want to handle too aggressively. Maybe someone feared that drawing additional attention to a group of young Black men attacking a prominent Orthodox Jew would threaten to inflame tensions in a neighborhood with a long but mostly improving (and generally misunderstood) history of racial division. Maybe, but maybe not: Overload in the New York court system, increasingly lenient prosecutors and judges, and a police department in which officers are quitting at a growing clip, all make it easier for even open-and-shut cases to languish, and for people at every level of the system to find excuses not to resolve them. The dysfunctional handling of public order takes different forms across the city, and across the country: Philadelphia is experiencing record murder rates; San Francisco experimented with decriminalizing certain forms of property crime, at least until its pro-reform district attorney lost a recent recall election. As with various other recent American traumas, the ambient disorder has its own distinct characteristics as far as Jews are concerned. In a study released this past July, the New York-based group Americans Against Antisemitism found that of the 118 adults arrested for anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City since 2018, only one has been convicted and sent to prison. Earlier this month, an Orthodox Jew from Baltimore named Aryeh Wolf was gunned down in broad daylight as he attached solar panels to the roof of a building in a gentrifying neighborhood in southeast Washington, D.C. As with Hershkop’s attack, Wolf’s murder was a motiveless crime in which the motive was obvious. To the killer, Wolf and the trendy new technology he was installing might have represented the growing penetration of outsiders, further distilled by Wolf being the ultimate of outsiders: the proud religious Jew. So far, no one has been arrested. The Washington police still consider the motive in the crime to be unknown. People are so burnt out and so not believing in the system that they don’t even make a police report. In New York, street harassment, minor assaults, and even full-on beatings of visible Jews are almost a banality now, too frequent over too long of a period to be considered an active crisis, even in the communities most affected. The city reported a 76% year-over-year rise in hate crimes during the first three months of 2022—attacks on Jews more than tripled, accounting for much of the spike. When reached for comment by email, the NYPD’s public information office stated that the Hate Crimes Task Force has made 44 arrests related to attacks on Jews so far in 2022 compared to 33 in all of 2021. The report from Americans Against Antisemitism only dealt with incidents in which the NYPD found enough evidence of a bigoted motive to refer the case to the department’s Hate Crimes Task Force. Not every potential bias-related attack on Jews reaches that threshold, though. In Hershkop’s case, the assailants used no antisemitic language and had no connection to any extremist networks. The question of whether the attackers would have responded with similar brutality to a parking dispute involving a member of any other ethnic or religious group is considered too hypothetical for the New York criminal justice system to handle. The NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force was not involved in investigating the attack on him, Hershkop told me. Israel Bitton, executive director of Americans Against Antisemitism and one of the co-authors of the report, said the study aimed “to answer a simple question: Are there consequences for anti-Jewish hate crimes?” The document gives a clear answer: “In the majority of trackable cases, prosecution has been effectively nonexistent.” Some unknowable number of the 118 anti-Jewish hate crime suspects whose cases showed up in the state’s WebCrims database since 2018 were sent to state psychiatric institutions for an unknown period of time, instead of being criminally charged, Bitton explained. Fifteen took plea deals, although the study found no evidence that any of these agreements involved jail time. In 23 cases, the charges were dropped. The only conviction was for a relatively high-profile incident, in which the suspect choked and beat a visibly Jewish man in his mid-50s while he walked home from Shabbat day services in Crown Heights. Devorah Halberstam, a veteran anti-hate crime activist based in Crown Heights, co-founded a civilian review board that advises the NYPD on how to proceed with incidents that could be classified as hate crimes. The group has been meeting each month for the past year. She stressed that any failure to punish such attacks isn’t a problem limited to Jewish victims. In a widely publicized case this past January, a 62-year-old Asian woman was attacked outside of her home in Queens. She fell into a coma and died 10 weeks later. Halberstam said the killing was not prosecuted as a hate crime, even though it seemed to have no other motive besides hatred of Asians. “It’s not against the Jewish community. It’s not against the Asian community,” Halberstam said of the rarity with which hate crimes charges are pursued. “It’s the broader picture.” Halberstam blames the sparse number of guilty verdicts on the vagueness of New York’s hate crimes statute, leading prosecutors to drop hate crime charges in order to pursue lesser allegations that can be more easily proven in court. “If you make the guidelines stricter, they don’t have as much leeway to get out of it,” Halberstam said. A backlog in the criminal courts further gridlocks the system. In early 2022, the state had over 47,000 open criminal cases, an increase of 15% compared to the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Americans Against Antisemitism found that there were nine anti-Jewish hate crime prosecutions in the city that had been pending for two years or more. The Americans Against Antisemitism analysis only refers to incidents that generated police reports and entered the criminal justice system. Some unknowable number of attacks on Jews occur beyond any official awareness. “Most hate crimes are not even reported in the first place,” says Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, and a former power broker in the New York State Assembly. Hershkop agrees. “Eighty percent never even got to the point of making a police report,” he speculated, referring to Jewish victims of bias incidents. “That’s how we’re artificially hiding hate crimes. People are so burnt out and so not believing in the system that they don’t even make a police report.” Even the Jews who do report what are obviously identity-motivated crimes against them can be treated with a revealing indifference. In June, 26-year-old Yizchak Goldstein was sucker-punched on East 33rd Street near Park Avenue at around 1 p.m. Goldstein, who was visiting from Miami, was wearing a kippah, unlike his nearby cousin. The attacker didn’t run off. “He squared off to fight,” Goldstein said. “He wasn’t afraid of the cops—he literally joked to me, call 911 … he was so confident.” When Goldstein did call the police, he discovered that the assailant, who had disappeared down the crowded street at a walking pace, was right not to be worried. The officers told Goldstein that they could not treat the assault as a hate crime because the attacker didn’t say anything antisemitic to him. That wasn’t all. “They said that even if we catch this guy he’ll be out in a few hours and that this happens every single day,” Goldstein recalled. But at least the police arrived quickly, he said, “and were honest and upfront with me.” Goldstein said the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force never contacted him, and that he only heard from the department one other time, when an officer wanted to confirm the location of the attack about a month later. No suspect was ever arrested. When asked about these statements and for an update on the case, the department’s public information office replied to Tablet by email: “There are no arrests and the investigation remains ongoing.” Whether it’s because of a lack of confidence in the authorities, fear about the consequences of coming forward, or a somewhat fatalistic view of the inevitability of antisemitism, some number of the city’s Jews believe that crimes against them aren’t worth reporting. The Jewish community is not unique in this respect, either. A range of different types of crime, from hate crimes against Asians to sexual assaults on the subway to bodega robberies are believed to be dramatically undercounted. One popular explanation for the supposed disconnect between the 75% of New Yorkers who say they are concerned about violent crime and the official crime rate, which has risen only slightly, is that the city is in a state of undue panic, with a fearmongering media and cynical public officials driving a false perception of declining public order. Another, perhaps more plausible explanation for this discrepancy is that the official crime rate itself is an undercount, and that ordinary poll respondents have either seen or experienced crimes more frequently than the official numbers reflect. The growing sense of chaos, of which the failure to punish antisemitic attacks is a possible symptom, exposes a tension within the current governing project in New York and beyond. Criminal justice reform is aimed at correcting real and longstanding inequities; at the same time, rising crime denies large numbers of law-abiding citizens, most of them women or members of minority groups, of their basic right to safety. In the case of hate crimes, which are one of the most extreme ways that human beings can express their bigotry, newfound sensitivity toward the accused, however justified, clashes with a societywide crusade against bias and racism. When irreconcilable visions of equity are in conflict—when it’s a stark choice between punishing a criminal and protecting a targeted group, for instance—a bizarre inertia prevails. Homeless encampments will be made permanent with the help of well-meaning aid groups and public service agencies, as in Los Angeles and San Francisco; public drug use will be turned into a supposedly manageable feature of city life even as living conditions plummet, as in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. Focusing all of society’s attention on the scourge of bigotry, only to refrain from prosecuting a spiking number of hate crimes, is the inevitable default position when no one tries to reconcile the gaps between people’s everyday needs and ascendent notions of fairness. When nearly everyone’s apparent goal is to create as little friction as possible, and to avoid pushing too hard against the gaping contradictions in how our cities are now governed, the result is situations like Yossi Hershkop’s—and maybe Aryeh Wolf’s, too. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ It can take hundreds of years to build and create and in less than a decade it can all come tumbling down. +++ Can This Be Happening in America? Commentary By Conrad Black We have familiar experience of the phenomenon of what are clearly intolerable circumstances being tolerated if they worsened only gradually. Everyone has looked back on a grueling experience and thought that it could not have been endured had the individual known how unpleasant it would become. No matter how familiar anyone may be with the horrors of the Nazi regime, it remains to us inconceivable that the culture of Beethoven and Goethe could have committed such crimes. The United States has now reached the point where the sequence of outrageous and unconstitutional measures that have occurred in the last six years would have been inconceivable six years ago. It’s unimaginable that anyone who has ever been nominated for president by a serious American political party could be an intelligence asset for a foreign power. We now know that there has never been one scintilla of evidence remotely hinting that Donald Trump was guilty of any such offense, or that he had any inappropriate relations or even a particular regard for the government of Russia. Yet for over two years it was endlessly bandied about that Trump had been “groomed” by Russian agents like the Manchurian Candidate to debase the presidency of the United States into boot-licking subordination to the national interest of Russia. The former directors of the National and Central Intelligence Agencies, James Clapper and John Brennan, solemnly told national audiences that Trump was a Russian intelligence agent and was guilty of treason in favor of the Russians. Both these senior officials on occasion allegedly lied to Congress but were never prosecuted. Former FBI Director James Comey, who improperly removed government property from his office, improperly leaked confidential information to the media, improperly presumed to decide that Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted for destroying 33,000 emails that were under subpoena from Congress, signed a false affidavit in support of a FISA warrant to conduct illegal telephone intercepts on the Trump campaign, and supported the pretense that the infamous Steele dossier, which he knew to be a pastiche of lies and defamations, was authentic intelligence, indicating the guilt of Trump of unlawful collusion with the Russian government. The ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and other Democrats repeated ad nauseam that they had conclusive evidence of Trump’s guilt. They lied. The inspector general of the Justice Department recorded 17 separate instances of improper official behavior. There has been no prosecution of any of this. In all of pre-Trump U.S. history, there had been two impeachment trials of presidents: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Neither of them should have occurred and both failed, but in the last four years Trump was impeached twice, once for a telephone conversation with the president of Ukraine in which he asked if the Biden family and particularly the current president’s son Hunter Biden had committed illegalities in Ukraine. He did not direct the verdict; he did not ask for any incrimination of the Bidens. This was a completely inadequate pretext for impeaching a president and yet he was impeached, and on one count 49 senators including a former Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, did vote Trump guilty, though he was, of course, acquitted. And at the end of his term, he was impeached again for having allegedly fomented an insurrection even though the FBI director had already testified that there was no evidence that Trump or his campaign organization or his administration were connected in any way to the trespass and the vandalism that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump requested and offered extra security, but this was declined by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington mayor Muriel Bowser. The various comprehensive accumulations of evidence about the behavior of Hunter Biden incite the strong inference that he has committed a number of illegalities and that the president repeatedly lied to the public about his own connections to his son’s activities. There is no evidence that U.S. official conduct was altered in respect of Ukraine, China, or other countries, in consideration for bribes paid to the Biden family. But there seems to be no doubt the current president and his family were engaged in improper activity that not only allegedly involves substantial lawbreaking by family members but also seems to have been suppressed rather than investigated by the FBI. The allegation that the FBI seems to have suggested to Facebook that the allegations against Hunter Biden were likely Russian disinformation and requested that they not publicize them would have been unthinkable six years ago. But it seems to have been assimilated by the American political community as a perfectly normal and acceptable occurrence. It seems clear that in the 2020 presidential election, where Trump could have prevailed in the Electoral College if 50,000 votes had flipped in Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, that millions of ballots potentially passed through hands that could not be identified. All of this occurred in swing states where rules were changed ostensibly to facilitate voting during the pandemic. But in the case of a number of states, contrary to the Constitution, these changes were determined not by the state legislatures but by executive branches or state judiciaries. In every one of the 19 lawsuits launched to attack these questionable changes to voting and vote counting rules, the judiciary, including in the case of the Texas attorney general’s action against the swing states and supported by 18 other state attorneys general, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear any of these cases on their merits; they were disallowed for technical reasons, some of those quite spurious. Now we have had, on the complaint of federal archivists, the intrusion and occupation for nine hours of the former president’s home on a warrant alleging just cause to believe that crimes have been committed involving the improper removal and retention of classified information. Trump had been collaborating with the archivists, possessed the power to act as he pleased with classified material when he was president, and this isn’t a classified material case anyway. He didn’t pack any of this himself as he left the White House, has not mislaid or misused any of this material, and 19 months have gone by since he left office. It’s a document-handling case. There’s no conceivable justification for such a sensational invasion in the absence of any plausible claim of significant wrongdoing—except that it’s a political tainting job against the former president, and the Presidential Records Act isn’t a criminal statute. This is just the Democrats transmuting a grumpy librarian’s complaint into the insinuation that the former president committed unimaginable crimes. A disastrous and shaming flight from Afghanistan is described by President Joe Biden as “a triumphant success.” Dr. Anthony Fauci retires with dignity after doing terrible damage to the country with his nonsense about shutting schools, “droplets,” the ups and downs of masking, the “abolition of hand-shakes”—almost all of it now thoroughly discredited. Six years ago, no one could have imagined that these outrages would have occurred, much less that they would be accepted by a bedraggled, degraded, demoralized America, its federal government in the hands of lawless and authoritarian myth-makers, applauded by the complicit national political media. Can this be America? Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. +++++++++++++++++
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