Hilarious: Lying Politicians Want to Prosecute Criminals for Lying on Background Checks

I got a good laugh at hypocritical lying politicians wanting to prosecute individuals who lie on background checks. If the FBI can’t find a lie on a criminal background check why are they in charge of them? I agree that anyone who lies on their background check should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law but it’s ironic that lying politicians are pushing for criminals to be honest.

From NYTimes:

Nearly 80,000 Americans were denied guns in 2010, according to Justice Department data, because they lied or provided inaccurate information about their criminal histories on background-check forms. Yet only 44 of those people were charged with a crime.

Funny, we still haven’t seen any of Obama’s records and he’s lied about his background.

The staggeringly low number of prosecutions for people who “lie and try,” as it is called by law enforcement officials, is being studied by the Obama administration as it considers measures to curb gun violence after the Connecticut elementary school shootings in December.

A background check would have done nothing to stop this shooting. The killer killed his mom and stole her guns.

A task force headed by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is expected to offer proposals to President Obama as early as Tuesday. It is looking at a wide range of issues linked to gun crimes, including violence in video games and movies, and gaps in mental health treatment and background checks.

The most contentious initiatives, like reviving a ban on assault weapons, would require Congressional approval and have drawn fierce opposition from gun rights groups and Republican lawmakers, making passage a long shot.

“I would say that the likelihood is that they are not going to be able to get an assault weapons ban through this Congress,” David Keene, the president of the National Rifle Association, said Sunday on the CNN program “State of the Union.”

In the face of those difficulties, the White House has said it is looking for actions it can take without Congressional approval. Increasing the number of prosecutions for lying on background-check forms is an effort that the administration can undertake largely on its own, in part by pressing federal prosecutors to pursue such cases. It is also one measure that both sides of the gun-control debate have agreed upon.

It is a felony to deliberately provide false information in an effort to buy a gun, and studies financed by the Justice Department show that people who do so are more likely than the average person to commit violent crimes after they are denied a firearm purchase.

At a meeting Mr. Biden held with gun control advocates on Wednesday, the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns recommended to the administration that it should instruct the Justice Department to investigate those who are denied guns and who have a history that suggests they might commit violence.

In a memorandum provided to the administration, the group suggested that “armed career criminals who have at least three prior violent felonies and/or serious drug offenses and would qualify for a mandatory sentence of 7 to 15 years” should be prosecuted if they lie on background-check forms. The group said that it provided a similar recommendation to the Obama administration in 2009.

That was too early to push for gun control, so they did nothing.

The memorandum said that more than 800 mayors in the United States “support more aggressive prosecution of those who fail background checks.”

“This is not like looking for a needle in a haystack — these are people you know are too violent to buy a gun,” John Feinblatt, an official with the mayors’ group who met with Mr. Biden on Wednesday, said in a telephone interview. “Once they have been rejected, they go online or to a private seller or a gun show and get a gun.”

Criminals buy from other criminals. They don’t buy from law-abiding citizens or federally licensed firearms dealers or from gun shows. Just more liberal lies to push their gun control propaganda.

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OBAMA WON’T GO AFTER MARIJUANA USE IN 2 STATES

What happened to that “we can’t have a bunch of patchwork laws” meme the administration used when suing Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina over immigration?

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says the federal government won’t go after recreational marijuana use in Washington state and Colorado, where voters have legalized it.

What would one expect from the President of the “choom gang?”

In a Barbara Walters interview airing Friday on ABC, Obama was asked whether he supports making pot legal.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Obama replied. “But what I think is that, at this point, Washington and Colorado, you’ve seen the voters speak on this issue.”

Our first president who ignores the Constitution, issues waivers to duck federal laws and refuses to enforce immigration & drug laws.

But the president said he won’t pursue the issue in the two states where voters legalized the use of marijuana in the November elections. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

“… as it is, the federal government has a lot to do when it comes to criminal prosecutions,” Obama said. “It does not make sense, from a prioritization point of view, for us to focus on recreational drug users in a state that has already said that under state law, that’s legal.”

[...]“Neither states nor the executive branch can nullify a statute passed by Congress,” U.S. Attorney John Walsh said. “Regardless of any changes in state law, including the change that will go into effect on Dec. 10 in Colorado, growing, selling or possessing any amount of marijuana remains illegal under federal law.”

Except for Obama nullifying DOMA, No Child Left Behind, Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, welfare-to-work, immigration and now drug laws.

Walsh added: “Members of the public are also advised to remember that it remains against federal law to bring any amount of marijuana onto federal property, including all federal buildings, national parks and forests, military installations, and courthouses.”

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2 Involved in Fast & Furious Scandal Charged with Gun Trafficking

Still no charges against anyone involved in the Fast & Furious gun trafficking scheme that was paid for by Obama’s stimulus and covered up by Obama’s use of executive privilege.

PHOENIX—Two men were sentenced Monday for their roles in a gun smuggling ring that was part of the U.S. government’s botched Operation Fast and Furious, an investigation that unraveled after illegally purchased weapons turned up at the scene of a fatal Border Patrol agent shooting.

Jacob Anthony Montelongo was sentenced in federal court in Phoenix to nearly 3 1/2 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy and dealing guns without a license. Sean Christopher Steward received a nine-year sentence for conspiracy and making false statements to authorities.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, Steward and Montelongo were among so-called straw buyers who illegally purchased weapons for traffickers and Mexican drug cartels in a wide-ranging Phoenix-based gun trafficking ring.

In Operation Fast and Furious, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives used a controversial tactic called gun-walking, where instead of intercepting all weapons believed to be purchased illegally almost immediately, they wanted to track the guns back to high-level arms traffickers who had long eluded prosecution, in an effort to dismantle their networks.

But federal agents lost track of many of the guns purchased at Arizona shops before they ended up in Mexico, where many of them have been recovered at crime scenes. The operation ultimately identified more than 2,000 illicitly purchased weapons, and some 1,400 of them have yet to be found.

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ACLU: DOJ Documents Show 60% Increase in Warrantless Electronic Surveillance Under Obama Administration

From the ACLU:

Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government’s surveillance power.  (Our original Freedom of Information Act request and our legal complaint are online.)

Pen register and trap and trace devices are powerfully invasive surveillance tools that were, twenty years ago, physical devices that attached to telephone lines in order to covertly record the incoming and outgoing numbers dialed. Today, no special equipment is required to record this information, as interception capabilities are built into phone companies’ call-routing hardware.

Pen register and trap and trace devices now generally refer to the surveillance of information about—rather than the contents of—communications. Pen registers capture outgoing data, while trap and trace devices capture incoming data. This still includes the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing telephone calls and the time, date, and length of those calls. But the government now also uses this authority to intercept the “to” and “from” addresses of email messages, records about instant message conversations, non-content data associated with social networking identities, and at least some information about the websites that you visit (it isn’t entirely clear where the government draws the line between the content of a communication and information about a communication when it comes to the addresses of websites).

Electronic Surveillance Is Sharply on the Rise

The reports that we received document an enormous increase in the Justice Department’s use of pen register and trap and trace surveillance. As the chart below shows, between 2009 and 2011 the combined number of original orders for pen registers and trap and trace devices used to spy on phones increased by 60%, from 23,535 in 2009 to 37,616 in 2011.

During that same time period, the number of people whose telephones were the subject of pen register and trap and trace surveillance more than tripled. In fact, more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.

During the past two years, there has also been an increase in the number of pen register and trap and trace orders targeting email and network communications data. While this type of Internet surveillance tool remains relatively rare, its use is increasing exponentially. The number of authorizations the Justice Department received to use these devices on individuals’ email and network data increased 361% between 2009 and 2011.

The sharp increase in the use of pen register and trap and trace orders is the latest example of the skyrocketing spying on Americans’ electronic communications. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that cellphone carriers received 1.3 million demands for subscriber information in 2011 alone. And an ACLU public records project revealed that police departments around the country large and small engage in cell phone location tracking.

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Four Republican Lawmakers Accuse Justice Department of Inappropriate Quid Pro Quo

Just more race-based justice from the Obama Department of Injustice.

From WaPo:

Four Republican lawmakers have accused the Justice Department of inappropriately striking a deal with city officials in St. Paul, Minn., to drop an appeal in a Supreme Court civil rights case in exchange for the federal government abandoning its support for a separate lawsuit against the city.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and three House members said that Justice officials struck a quid pro quo in February with St. Paul officials to withdraw a housing discrimination case before the Supreme Court in exchange for Justice declining to intervene in an unrelated False Claims Act case against the city.

The lawmakers said they found out about the alleged deal during a private briefing with Justice officials.

“We were shocked to learn during this briefing and in subsequent document examination that Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez, over the objections of career Justice Department attorneys, enticed the city to drop its lawsuit that Mr. Perez did not want decided by the Supreme Court,” wrote Grassley and Reps. Darrell Issa (Calif.), Lamar Smith (Tex.) and Patrick T. McHenry (N.C.).

This is the same guy who dropped voter intimidation charges against the New Black Panthers Party.

Justice spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said in a statement that “the resolution reached in these cases was in the best interests of the United States and consistent with the Department’s practice in reaching global settlements.”

“The decision was appropriate and made following an examination of the relevant facts, law and policy considerations at issue,” she added.

St. Paul City Attorney Sara Grewing said that the primary reason that the city dismissed its petition to the Supreme Court in Magner v. Gallagher was “to preserve 40 years of civil rights law.”

Hmmm, it has to do with race. Whodathunkit?

But Grewing also said that the Justice Department’s decision not to intervene in two lawsuits against the city was a factor. “When the city dismissed the Magner petition, the Department of Justice declined to intervene — and thus not oppose the city — in those two lawsuits,” she said in a statement.

Grewing added that the secondary reason for dismissing the petition on the eve of oral arguments was “to avoid conflict with the federal government in two pending lawsuits against the city that the city considered to be without merit.”

Justice’s decision not to be involved did not end the two lawsuits. One of them was brought by a businessman charging that St. Paul had falsely certified that it was using federal money to create jobs for low-income workers of all races when it was focused only on employing minorities.

This has been a pattern for Eric Holder’s DOJ and the Obama administration. Everything is viewed through a race prism and all policies are to redistribute wealth from one group to another “disenfranchised” group.

In early October 2011, career lawyers from the Justice’s fraud section recommended that the federal government join the lawsuit, characterizing the city’s behavior as a “particularly egregious example” of false certifications, according to congressional investigators.

So the city was committing fraud against the US taxpayers but the DOJ drops the lawsuit to protect “40 years of civil right laws?”

But in the letter, the lawmakers charged that Perez “bargained away a valid case of fraud against American taxpayers” to persuade St. Paul to drop its appeal in the civil rights case.

So, why did Perez drop the fraud case against the city? It was because he didn’t want the Supreme Court to interfere:

Mr. Perez fretted that a decision in the City’s favor would dry up the massive mortgage lending settlements his Division was obtaining by suing banks for housing discrimination based on disparate effects rather than any proof of intent to discriminate.[5]  Accordingly, as documents reviewed by Committee staff show, he orchestrated a deal to induce the City to drop its Supreme Court challenge.  In exchange for St. Paul dropping its case before the high court, the Justice Department declined to intervene in an unrelated False Claims Act (FCA) case that had the potential to return over $180 million in damages to the U.S. treasury.

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Quayle on Fast and Furious Report: Holder ‘Lied to My Face’ During House Testimony

Of course Holder lied. That’s why Obama used executive privilege. The truth can’t get out about their gun control scheme.

From the Daily Caller:

Arizona Republican Rep. Ben Quayle told The Daily Caller that Attorney General Eric Holder gave him false testimony under oath about Operation Fast and Furious wiretap application documents during a June 7 House Judiciary Committee hearing.

Quayle said the Department of Justice’s inspector general report proves that Holder lied to him while under oath during the hearing.

“I saw earlier that Holder is basically doing a victory dance and that he thinks this [inspector general] report exonerates him and there was no dishonesty with Congress — that’s just a blatant lie,” Quayle said in a phone interview. “I mean, he lied to me — to my face — during questioning, saying they had reviewed the wiretap applications after the fact and claiming that there was no reference to gunwalking, which is blatantly false.”

Holder told Quayle during congressional questioning that wiretap application affidavits and summaries from Fast and Furious did not, upon his review, mention anything about gunwalking that would have raised the concerns of senior Justice Department officials who signed and approved them.

“I’ve looked at these affidavits. I’ve looked at these summaries. There’s nothing in those affidavits as I’ve reviewed them that indicates gunwalking was allowed,” Holder said during the hearing. “Let’s get to the bottom line. I didn’t see anything in there that would put on notice a person who was reviewing either at the line level or at the Deputy Assistant Attorney General level, that you would have knowledge of the fact that these inappropriate tactics were being used.”

Quayle followed up by asking: “Are you saying in the summaries or in the whole affidavit?”

Holder confirmed that his statement was about “in the summary as well as in the affidavit.”

The DOJ inspector general came to the opposite conclusion about those very same affidavits, essentially implying that that Holder statement is not true.

“We reviewed the wiretap affidavits in both Operation Wide Receiver and Operation Fast and Furious and concluded that the affidavits in both cases included information that would have caused a prosecutor who was focused on the question of investigative tactics, particularly one who was already sensitive to the issue of ‘gun walking,’ to have questions about ATF’s conduct of the investigations,” the inspector general wrote in its report released Wednesday.

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DOJ Inspector General Blames ATF & DOJ Officials for Fast & Furious…Finds No “Evidence” of Holder’s Involvement

We all knew the DOJ report would find Holder “innocent” despite the evidence, and his lies, that show he knew.

From WaPo:

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog on Wednesday faulted the agency for misguided strategies, errors in judgment and management failures during a bungled gun-trafficking probe in Arizona that disregarded public safety and resulted in hundreds of weapons turning up at crime scenes in the U.S. and Mexico.

A former head of the department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and a deputy assistant attorney general in Justice’s criminal division in Washington left the department upon the report’s release — the first by retirement, the second by resignation.

In the 471-page report, Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred more than a dozen people for possible department disciplinary action for their roles in Operation Fast and Furious and a separate, earlier probe known as Wide Receiver, undertaken during the George W. Bush administration. A former acting deputy attorney general and the head of the criminal division were criticized for actions and omissions related to operations subsequent to and preceding Fast and Furious.

The report did not criticize Attorney General Eric Holder, but said lower-level officials should have briefed him about the investigation much earlier.

The report found no evidence that Holder was informed about the Fast and Furious operation before Jan. 31, 2011, or that the attorney general was told about the much-disputed gun-walking tactic employed by the ATF.

Obama’s stimulus paid for the Fast and Furious Operation. Obama order the operation. Holder bragged about the operation. DOJ members attempted to smear the whistleblower.  Holder lied about his knowledge of the operation while testifying to Congress.

This was AG Eric Holder’s attempt to “brainwash” Americans with false information about guns in order to push for stricter gun control laws. Fast and Furious was a deliberate plan to infringe on the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens. All the evidence proves Holder is guilty of treason, murder and international firearms trafficking. But the Inspector General couldn’t find a link.

Gun-walking was an experimental tactic, barred under long-standing department policy. ATF agents in Arizona allowed suspected “straw purchasers,” in these cases believed to be working for Mexican drug gangs, to leave Phoenix-area gun stores with weapons in order to track them and bring charges against gun-smuggling kingpins who long had eluded prosecution, but they lost track of most of the guns.

The experimental operations were a response to widespread criticisms of the agency’s anti-smuggling efforts. Because of thin ATF staffing and weak penalties, the traditional strategy of arresting suspected straw buyers as soon as possible had failed to stop the flow of tens of thousands of guns to Mexico — more than 68,000 in the past five years.

The inspector general found fault with the work of the senior ATF leadership, the ATF staff and U.S. attorney’s office in Phoenix and senior officials of Justice’s criminal division in Washington. He also said that poor internal information-gathering and drafting at Justice and ATF caused the department to initially misinform Congress about Fast and Furious, beginning with a Feb. 4, 2011, letter.

“The inspector general’s report confirms findings by Congress’ investigation of a near total disregard for public safety in Operation Fast and Furious,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating Operation Fast and Furious since early 2011. Horowitz is to testify before Issa’s panel Thursday.

During the investigation President Barack Obama ordered Holder to withhold from the committee, under executive privilege, some documents describing how the department responded to the panel. The Republican-controlled House voted to hold Holder in contempt and has authorized a civil lawsuit to make the administration turn over the documents. Horowitz said he was not denied access to any of the documents.

…Among others the report singled out for criticism were former acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler; Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, who heads the criminal division; Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke; and Holder’s own former deputy chief of staff, Monty Wilkinson.

So, let me get this straight. Everyone around Holder knew but Holder didn’t? Sure, that’s the ticket.

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Political Intimidation: Justice Dept. Gallup Lawsuit came after Axelrod Criticized Pollsters (Didn’t Like the Poll Numbers)

Chicago commie

Add Gallup to the Obama’s enemy list! Team Obama is loaded with Chicago goons who use intimidation as a political tool. Remember folks, this is the same administration that attempted to get a 4-star General to change his testimony to help out an Obama campaign donor and who tried to get the credit agencies to hold off on the downgrade. Not to mention their enemies list where they have attacked Romney donors.

From Daily Caller:

Internal emails between senior officials at The Gallup Organization, obtained by The Daily Caller, show senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod attempting to subtly intimidate the respected polling firm when its numbers were unfavorable to the president.

After Gallup declined to change its polling methodology, Obama’s Department of Justice hit it with an unrelated lawsuit that appears damning on its face.

TheDC is withholding the identities of the Gallup officials to protect them from potential retaliation from Obama’s campaign and his administration.

In April, Axelrod tweeted that a poll showing Mitt Romney with a 48-43 percent lead over Obama was “saddled with some methodological problems,” directing his Twitter followers to read a National Journal story criticizing Gallup polls showing a Romney lead.

In that National Journal piece, Ron Brownstein wrote that the polls showing Romney leading the president had “a sample that looks much more like the electorate in 2010 than the voting population that is likely to turn out in 2012.”

Internally, Gallup officials discussed via email how to respond Axelrod’s accusations. One suggested that it “seems like a pretty good time for a blog response,” and named a potential writer.

In response to that suggestion, another senior Gallup official wrote — in an email chain titled “Axelrod vs. Gallup” — that the White House “has asked” a senior Gallup staffer “to come over and explain our methodology too.”

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DOJ Approves New Hampshire Voter ID Law That Requires Photo ID to Vote

So is the DOJ’s decision to sue South Carolina and Texas based strictly on race? YES

From NBC:

The Justice Department approved New Hampshire’s new voter ID, a version that is stricter than existing rules in the Granite State, but not as restrictive as other voters ID laws that the DOJ has rejected.’

Under New Hampshire’s previous rules, no ID was required as a condition of voting. Ballot clerks checked the names that voters announced at the polls, read back the addresses for verification, and handed over a ballot.

Under the state’s new law, voters must present a photo ID — a driver’s license, a voter ID card, a military ID card, a US passport, a student ID card, a photo ID issued by any level of government, and any other photo ID deemed legitimate by supervisors at the polls.

A year from now, the list of acceptable ID’s will be narrowed to a driver’s license, a non-driver ID card, military ID, or passport.  But voters unable to produce the required identification can sign an affidavit, attesting to their identity, and cast a regular ballot. Beginning next year, any voter doing so will also be photographed.

New Hampshire’s list of acceptable IDs as of 2013 is actually more restrictive than the set of IDs Texas would have accepted under that state’s voter ID law, which a federal court blocked last week.

So why the difference? It seems New Hampshire’s decision to also make it possible for voters without the proper ID to cast a regular ballot, provided they sign an affidavit and have their picture taken, allowed enough leeway.

Where did the DOJ’s “disenfranchise” claim go?  Surely those poor minorities in New Hampshire will be burden with obtaining an ID.

The Voting Rights Act requires federal approval for election law changes in states with a history of discrimination against minority voters.  Most of the states subject to the law are in the South.  New Hampshire’s change required approval because 10 townships in the state are covered by the act, even though the entire state is not.

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Anyone Remember Obama Suing Banks to Give Subprime Loans to African-Americans in Chicago?

Yes, Obama is part of the subprime scheme. The entire Democrat Party is heavily involved. Their liberal feel-good policies are the cause of the housing crisis.  Obama’s campaign co-chair is involved.  Attorney General Eric Holder and a host of other DOJ officials are tied to the mortgage scheme and this is why there have been ZERO bankers brought up on charges. Obama, as an attorney, sued banks in Chicago and forced them to give subprime loans to minorities (racial predatory loans) who weren’t qualified and didn’t have the income to afford these loans. Out of 186 clients Obama “helped” only about 19 still own their homes.

From DC:

President Barack Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices.

As few as 19 of those 186 clients still own homes with clean credit ratings, following a decade in which Obama and other progressives pushed banks to provide mortgages to poor African Americans.

The startling failure rate among Obama’s private sector clients was discovered during The Daily Caller’s review of previously unpublished court information from the lawsuit that a young Obama helmed as the lead plaintiff’s attorney. [RELATED: Learn about the 186 class action plaintiffs]

Since the mortgage bubble burst, some of his former clients are calling for a policy reversal.

“If you see some people don’t make enough money to afford the mortgage, why would you give them a loan?” asked Obama client John Buchanan. “There should be some type of regulation against giving people loans they can’t afford.”

Banks “were too eager to lend to many who didn’t qualify,” said Don Byas, another client who saw banks lurch from caution to bubble-inflating recklessness. [RELATED: Obama's Citibank plaintiffs hit hard when housing bubble burst]

“I don’t care what race you are. … You need to keep financial wisdom [separate] from trying to help your people,” said Byas, an autoworker.

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