On Wednesday, acting FBI deputy director David Bowdich testified during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that former President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice forced the FBI to delete over 500,000 fugitives, who had outstanding arrest warrants, from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
“It’s my understanding that under federal law fugitives cannot legally purchase or possess guns,” Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) began. “We’ve heard from local law enforcement that the Justice Department has issued a memo that forced the FBI NICS background check database to drop more than 500,000 names of fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants because it was uncertain whether those fugitives had fled across state lines.”
“Mr. Bowdich, can you describe why this determination was made by the Justice Department?” Feinstein asked.
“That was a decision that was made under the previous administration,” Bowdich replied. “It was the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that reviewed the law and believed that it needed to be interpreted so that if someone was a fugitive in a state, there had to be indications that they had crossed state lines.”
Paul Plante says
I am as interested in and surprised by all the comments that never happen in here, as I am in the ones that were actually made.
Perhaps people never scroll this far down to find a thought-provoking thread such as this, which is why they never commented on it.
Or who knows, maybe it is HO-HUM, that **** happens every day of the week and twice on Sunday, so why get upset about it, especially when there was nothing we could have done to stop Obama, who would have done it, anyway, which is true, so let’s party, a political philosophy with a lot of appeal to a lot of people in America today, and who can blame them.
And there are millions upon millions of Obama supporters in America, so they are not going to say boo about this, because to them, if Obama did it, then it was because it was the right thing to do.
And let’s face it, both Obama and the Democrats are especially soft on crime, because they are building a party based on the loyalty of people like these fugitives, who have the Democrat party to thank for their freedom.
In New York state, the HOMELAND of Progressive Democrat and presumptive Democrat presidential contender Young Andy Cuomo, who incidentally has received some $64,000 in good will money from Donald Trump during Young Andy’s political career, Young Andy just created some 33,000 new Democrats by fiat, issuing an executive order to by-pass state law so that Young Andy could blanket pardon these 33,000 felons so they can vote in this year’s mid-term elections.
Realpolitik, Young Andy calls it.
Smart politics.
Get their votes and their loyalty before the Republicans can.
Obama and Young Andy Cuomo seem to be building an army of gladiators here in imitation of Publius Clodius Pulcher (c. December 93 BC – 52 BC), the Roman politician who as tribune pushed through an ambitious legislative program, including a grain dole, but who is chiefly remembered for his feud with Marcus Tullius Cicero and Titus Annius Milo, whose bodyguards murdered him on the Appian Way.
Clodius was a Roman nobilis of the patrician Claudian gens and a senator known, like Young Andy Cuomo in New York, said to have the blood of the Caesars flowing in his veins, along with that of the Borgias, as an eccentric, mercurial and arrogant character.
Like with Young Andy Cuomo’s incessant political attacks on Trump today, back then Clodius became a major disruptive force in Roman politics during the First Triumvirate, of Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar (59–53 BCE), passing numerous laws in the tradition of the populares known as the Leges Clodiae, and has been called “one of the most innovative urban politicians in Western history,” while in our times today, in a POLITICO article entitled “Andrew Cuomo Could Beat Trump … If He Can Win Over the Left First – The governor of New York suddenly looks like the kind of take-no-prisoners pol his party needs. With one catch.” by David Freedlander on July 07, 2017, Jonathan Cowan, president and founder of Third Way, a centrist think tank, and a former Cuomo adviser told us that Young Andy “is laying out a model for what it means to be a 21st-century Democrat.”
Getting back to Clodius, in the elections of 53 BC, when Milo was a candidate for the consulship and Clodius for the praetorship, violent clashes erupted in the streets of Rome between the gangs of Clodius and Milo, twice delaying the election.
In our times today, we have seen that same type of political violence with these masked anti-fas that are serving as the paramilitary wing of the Democrat party, and the Trump supporters, which is what has me thinking of Clodius and Milo.
If the names of these fugitives had remained on that list, it would negate their value as soldiers for the cause of Obama, and Obama most definitely does have a cause, for which he has need of soldiers willing to be at his beck and call, 500,000 of them in this case.
Why?
Because it is the right thing to do.
Chas Cornweller says
From this post https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-force-fbi-delete-500000-fugitives/ you will clearly see that the politics of this information is just your usual Washingtonian shell game. I guess put out there to raise the blood pressure of right leaning factions, based on clearly distorted and misinterpreted facts. If your attention span holds long enough and you read far enough you will see this line in the article. I think it about sums it up, don’t you think so, Willis?
For 15 years, the FBI and the ATF have had a longstanding disagreement regarding the definition of “Fugitive from Justice,” a category that disqualifies prospective gun purchasers. According to ATF records, there were 49,448 transactions in this category between November 1999 and May 2015 that the FBI denied under its interpretation of the law, but that the ATF did not consider appropriate denials. 2,183 of these transactions resulted in firearms transfers that the FBI believed should have been denied, but the ATF did not agree and did not attempt to recover the firearms. This disagreement was referred to the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2008, and OLC provided informal advice in July 2008. In August 2010, the FBI requested formal reconsideration of that advice, but 6 years later OLC still has not rendered a decision. We believe this issue should be addressed as soon as possible.
So, if you do the math, going back fifteen years puts this squarely in the wheelhouse of the Bush (W – remember him?) administration. Nothing to see here Neo-Cons. More lies to twist you around with…
Note: Washington Post may help you avoid Snopes-Facts. “”Even if the FBI’s revised definition of fugitive from justice is assumed to be legally correct, purging the NICS database of every single individual previously identified as a fugitive from justice was an unjustifiable, alarmingly overbroad, and dangerous decision,” the Giffords group’s Thomas and Robin F. Thurston of the Democracy Forward Foundation wrote in the letter to the FBI.”
Stuart Bell says
Bush, Obama, Clinton…ect. They are all the same. Democrats and Republicans are both different sides of a worthless coin. I stand with the constitution, the flag, other patriots and the bible.
You Sir, are a liberal, and to me, more dangerous than anything else to the things I listed above. I took an oath, 30 years ago, to protect those things from people like you and will gladly do so today. Save your breathe to cool your soup, I do not care how you feel or what you think. We have nothing in common.
Paul Plante says
Chas Cornweller, thank you for engaging in here on this topic of importance to all Americans, regardless of race, color, creed, ethnicity, sexual persuasions or lack thereof, etc.
By doing so, you provide a public service in here to all Americans, whether they believe a word you say, or not, and that is what is truly important – you getting people to think, or at least, challenging them to attempt the effort at doing so.
That is the real problem here, Chas Cornweller – people in America have lost the ability to think, because they live in a nation where you don’t have to think about anything, and can still do quite well for yourself, and perhaps far better than those who do think, and so, are subject to the “Tall-Poppy Syndrome” that seems to be running rampant in this country, especially on Facebook and TWITTER.
On that note, have you ever stopped to consider, Chas Cornweller, that if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, that TWITTER is their first refuge, a veritable sanctuary for them?
And certainly, Chas Cornweller, someone as astute and politically savvy as you are cannot have forgotten these words from John Fitzgerald Kennedy from back when, to wit:
In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.
end quotes
With those words, JFK was predicting the rise of Barack Hussein Obama, which leads us right to here and your interesting comments above on these times we now find ourselves in, post-Obama, with the rise of Young Andy Cuomo as his political replacement now confronting us.
May we live in interesting times, Chas Cornweller.
And by the way, Chas Cornweller, I too stand with the Constitution, the flag, and the Republic, which I think no longer stands.
I don’t fawn over U.S. presidents, nor do I join in their cults of adulation.
Call me old-fashioned. but that is just the way it is.
Paul Plante says
Chas Cornweller, dude!
I took a moment of my precious time to open your link above, and then read it, word-for-word-for-word, and this is what I gleaned from it, in capsule summary, to wit:
What the Post‘s less-politicized coverage also made clear was that the policy change was the culmination of a debate that spanned three administrations, from George W. Bush’s to Donald Trump’s.
According to a DOJ inspector general’s report dated September 2016, the need for official guidance on the issue was first brought to the attention of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2008 (under Bush), and had still not been resolved eight years later as Obama’s term was nearing its end:
end quotes
My focus of course went right to this phrase at the end, to wit: had still not been resolved eight years later as Obama’s term was nearing its end.
Why, Chas Cornweller?
Why did Obama do nothing for eight years?
Why did he sit on his hands?
And why are they bending over backwards to protect these fugitives from having their names put on that list, when they give absolutely no protection whatsoever to people like me who have had their name put on that list as a form of political retaliation?
Yes, Chas Cornweller, you are reading that right – I do have a dog in this race, because my name is on that list, and when I appealed to Obama about it, all I got back from him was meaningless gibberish, which was basically “**** you, suck it up” on embossed green White House stationary dated 5 August 2014, wherein President Obama took pains to assure me as one of the many children of a lesser god in America that he, as U.S. President, appreciates the thoughtful messages he receives from Americans with deeply‑held views that may not always align with his, such as the rightness of political retaliation against disabled combat veterans who won’t take or honor bribes as public officials in a law enforcement capacity to provide political protection for law-breakers by using their PTSD against them as a potent political weapon to destroy them, and that “when we disagree, even fiercely, it doesn’t mean we don’t each love this country and want to make it better,” as if destroying public officials who won’t take bribes and provide political protection for lawbreakers can somehow make this a better country for all of us, including those whose lives have been destroyed, as mine has been here, and the classic in modern political rhetoric “it’s not always a straight line or a smooth path, and recognizing we have shared hopes and dreams won’t end all gridlock, solve all problems, or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus, but we must find common ground and make difficult compromises to reach a better tomorrow,” where the only common ground seems to be that it is alright to retaliate against disabled combat veterans with PTSD, because they are a class of people in America with no civil or human or Constitutional rights, which surreal and bizarre response concluded with President Obama informing me that, “again, even if we don’t see every issue the same way, I want you to know I am listening and I appreciate your perspective.”
Then, on 19 January 2015, I received this further communication from THE WHITE HOUSE, wherein was stated as follows:
Messages like yours:
Each day, we receive emails and letters from people across the country just like you.
They write in to tell President Obama about their hopes, dreams, concerns, and struggles.
When you wrote to the President, you might have done the same.
Our staff reads these messages and then, each night, the President reads ten of those emails and letters — often forwarding them to his senior advisors, and sometimes even responding personally.
Emails and letters like yours are a clear reminder of who President Obama is fighting for every day — and of why service to country is such a privilege.
As part of this year’s State of the Union, the President is doing something else, too: He’s inviting some of the Americans who’ve written him letters to watch the address as guests, sitting with the First Lady in the Capitol.
As someone who wrote to the President yourself, we thought you’d like to see why:
Watch President Obama describe the Americans he’s invited to attend the speech.
Then make sure you tune in to watch his State of the Union address on Tuesday night — you don’t want to miss it.
The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111
end quotes
What bull****, Chas Cornweller.
If I was a fugitive from the law, the dude would have bending over backwards to get my name removed from that list.
But since I was a victim of political retaliation by the Democrat party, all Obama had for me was some mealy-mouth gibberish.
And your Snopes article does nothing to rebut or refute that assertion that Obama cares more for the “rights” of the law breakers in this country than he does for those of the honest people.