This week Trump’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Neilsen attended the Aspen Security Forum and put on quite an amazingly fucked up performance of blatant willful ignorance.
The first example of this is her repeating the claim that she still hasn’t seen any evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 Election in order to specifically aide the campaign on Donald Trump.
“I haven’t seen any evidence that the attempts to interfere in our election infrastructure was to favor a particular political party,” she said at the Aspen Institute’s Security Forum in Colorado. “I think what we’ve seen on the foreign influence side is they were attempting to intervene and cause chaos on both sides.”
[Face Palm] What.the. Holy. Hand Grenade??!
Jesus H. Bowlegged Christmas — it’s right here in the unclassified version of the Intelligence Assessment by the CIA, NSA, and FBI from January 6, 2017.
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electablity and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump
It really can’t be possible that Sec. Nielsen hasn’t seen this report. Not unless she’s deliberately ignoring it. And not unless she has seen it and she’s just flat out lying to the American people about the nature of the security threat against our nation, which means she’s either completely totally incompetent, or she’s a hopeless political hack, not someone who takes on their job with the slightest fraction of seriousness.
And it gets worse.
Of course, since Donald Trump has repeatedly made similar claims it simply could be that she doesn’t want to say something — that is quite obviously true — that might piss off her boss. As the New York Times has reported Trump was given a detailed personal briefing on that Jan 6th report that included details such as specific text messages by Russian Intel assets about the orders they had received from Putin himself.
WASHINGTON — Two weeks before his inauguration, Donald J. Trump was shown highly classified intelligence indicating that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had personally ordered complex cyberattacks to sway the 2016 American election.
The evidence included texts and emails from Russian military officers and information gleaned from a top-secret source close to Mr. Putin, who had described to the C.I.A. how the Kremlin decided to execute its campaign of hacking and disinformation.
Mr. Trump sounded grudgingly convinced, according to several people who attended the intelligence briefing. But ever since, Mr. Trump has tried to cloud the very clear findings that he received on Jan. 6, 2017, which his own intelligence leaders have unanimously endorsed.
So he was told in no uncertain terms exactly what had happened, who did it and why two weeks before he was sworn in — but 18 months later his Homeland Security Secretary “hasn’t seen the Intelligence” yet?
What the fuck is going on?
Particularly since Homeland Security has made this announcement.
In March, the Department of Homeland Security declared that Russia was targeting the American electric power grid, continuing to riddle it with malware that could be used to manipulate or shut down critical control systems. Intelligence officials have described it to Congress as a chief threat to American security.
Does Neilsen know anything about that, I mean it was only released by her fracking Department!?
Also at the same freaking conference, we had this announcement made about ongoing cyber attacks.
A Microsoft executive, speaking Thursday on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, revealed that at least three candidates running in 2018 have been targeted by the same Russian intel agency behind the cyberatttacks on Democratic emails and systems in 2016, Buzzfeed reported.
Microsoft vice president for customer security and trust Tom Burt did not identify the candidates or their parties, according to Buzzfeed, but said that they were “all people who, because of their positions, might have been interesting targets from an espionage standpoint, as well as an election disruption standpoint.”
But I'm guessing Sec. Neilsen hasn't seen any of that evidence either.
Speaking of which they seem to have no particular worry or concern at DHS about White Supremacist according to Neilsen after she was asked about the Alt-Right attack on Charlottesville last year.
I think what’s interesting about that is we saw, and I think we continue to learn— maybe there was different, whether it was foreign influence or different purposeful attempts to get both sides, if you will, aggressively pitted against each other.
….
it’s not that one side is right, one side is wrong. Anybody that is advocating violence, we need to work to mitigate.
No, it was exactly that: one side came with a deliberate plan to stage violence to protect monuments to White Supremacy and Terrorism that were erected to support the KKK and intimidate the Civil Rights movement and the other side was standing against their violence and protecting themselves.
One Neo-Nazi who had been hit with a Flashlight by Deandre Harris — the young man who was beaten to a bloody pulp by supremacists in a parking garage — managed to conjure up a bogus case against him, but that case crashed and burned horribly since he was clearly defending himself and others around him at the time.
DeAndre Harris, an African American beaten by at least six white nationalist demonstrators at the August 12 Unite the Right rally, has been found not guilty by a court in Charlottesville.
Harris, whose case was decided by a judge on Friday, had been facing charges of misdemeanour assault and battery.
His defence team had argued that he was acting in self-defence.
...
Harold Ray Crews, a member of the white nationalist League of the South, alleged he was injured by Harris shortly before the beating took place.
Activists in Charlottesville called on authorities to drop the charges against Harris.
Organisers agreed with the defence's argument, saying they failed to see how an African American in the middle of a white nationalist demonstration could be charged with misdemeanour assault and battery of his attackers.
"These men were victims of hate crimes all day long. They were spat upon. They saw Nazi flags," Grace Aheron, one of the organisers of the vigil, told Al Jazeera.
Somehow to Neilsen people like Harris are “advocates of violence?” That is very deeply, seriously chilling.
Hate Crimes Charges weren’t filed against Alex James Fields Jr. for killing Heather Heyer until just last month.
In contrast members of Antifa who were present at Charlottesville have been credited with saving the lives of members of the clergy who were their during the tiki-torch vigil and had been trapped in place by Neo-Nazis as they attacked students and faculty from UVA.
Brandy Daniels
Postdoctoral fellow at the Luce Project on Religion and Its Publics at UVA
Some of the anarchists and anti-fascist folks came up to us and asked why we let them through and asked what they could do to help. Rev. Osagyefo Sekou talked with them for a bit, explaining what we were doing and our stance and asking them to not provoke the Nazis. They agreed quickly and stood right in front of us, offering their help and protection.
snip [100 Neo-Nazis rushed them with weapons]
Based on what was happening all around, the looks on their faces, the sheer number of them, and the weapons they were wielding, my hypothesis or theory is that had the antifa not stepped in, those of us standing on the steps would definitely have been injured, very likely gravely so.
So that is not a “both sides” situation.
And how has Homeland decided to handle and respond to such situations in the future? They’ve decided that they need to warn people of “Antifa Terrorism.”
Federal authorities have reportedly warned local and state officials that the “antifa”—the label for anarchist groups that have been countering white supremacists—has become increasingly confrontational, referring to members’ actions as “domestic terrorist violence,” Politico reports. The Department of Homeland Security issued warnings to other law enforcement agencies on the increasing likelihood that confrontations between right-wing white-supremacist groups and the left-wing anarchists would turn lethal. As early as April 2016, authorities described the group’s members as “anarchist extremists” in previously unreported, confidential documents from DHS and the FBI. “It was in that period [as the Trump campaign emerged] that we really became aware of them,” said one senior official. “These antifa guys were showing up with weapons, shields and bike helmets and just beating the shit out of people.… They’re using Molotov cocktails, they’re starting fires, they’re throwing bombs and smashing windows.”
Yeah, ok… some clashes between Antifa and Neo-Nazis have turned very violent including an extended knife fight that occurred before the California Capital in Sacramento, but “domestic terrorism”? That seems a bit arch.
Oh, and while Neilsen isn’t much concerned with Russian cyberspies or White Supremacists, she also doesn’t give much of a frack about migrant children attempting to escape violence in Central America by legally using our asylum laws.
“We have to protect children. We have to ensure the system allows us to keep children and families together,” Nielsen said, without mentioning that families were only being reunited on the orders of a federal judge. Instead, Nielsen said, it was the courts that were preventing them from detaining families together (which, of course, is also not an acceptable solution to this situation).
Neilsen went on to describe her experiences seeing undocumented children taken from their parents as “crazy” (some might say “heartbreaking” or “criminal,” but sure) before blaming the “broken system” for their plight.
“We give a pregnancy test at DHS to every girl over 10,” she pointed out, as if that somehow proved that locking children in detention centers was a good thing.
She also ducked a direct question about whether the zero tolerance/family separation policy had amounted to “child abuse” which can do permanent emotional and psychological damage as the head of the American Pediatric Society had stated.
The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics on Monday said President Trump's “zero tolerance” policy separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border “amounts to child abuse.”
Dr. Colleen Kraft in an appearance on CNN described the many ways Trump’s policy emotionally harms children and laid out in detail what she witnessed when she toured an immigration detention center.
“I can’t describe to you the room I was in with the toddlers,” Kraft said. “Normally toddlers are rambunctious and running around. We had one child just screaming and crying, and the others were really silent. And this is not normal activity or brain development with these children.”
Kraft added that the emotional strain the children in these facilities are under produces a condition called “toxic stress” and that it inhibits the development of their brains.
So they’re doing permanent harm to these children, and instead of complying with the Judges court order to reunite these families they’re playing bullshit games claiming some of them have “criminal records” when in fact they’re talking about DUIs or other charges that haven’t even resulted in convictions.
Attorneys challenging the separations and former DHS officials tell TPM that only a criminal record that indicates an imminent danger to the child should justify the continued separation, saying that records that would not have triggered removing the child from the parent in the first place in the past should not be used now to keep the family apart.
Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union, who won a national injunction against the Trump administration forcing them to reunite all of the roughly 3,000 families separated under the “zero tolerance” policy, also tell TPM that the administration has not yet given them concrete proof of the criminal records they are citing to deny reunification — making it impossible for them to investigate and contest their authenticity and severity.
…
In a filing to U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego, who issued the national injunction forcing the administration to reunite the families by July 26, the administration listed the allegations against the parents they believe are ineligible. While some appear to meet the bar for posing danger to the child, others involve outstanding warrants rather than convictions, some involve crimes like robbery and driving under the influence that would not normally justify separating a child and parent, and some vaguely cited a warrant or the individual being “wanted” for something in their home country and did not detail a conviction at all.
Meanwhile, hundreds of their parents have already been deported or “waived” their asylum rights because of pressure applied to them by ICE.
With the deadline for reuniting thousands of separated immigrant families less than a week away, the the Trump administration revealed in a federal court filing late Thursday night that it plans to reunite just about 60 percent of the children between ages 5-17 that are in its custody. The rest — just over 900 — have been labeled ‘ineligible’ for reunification, because the parent either has a criminal record, is undergoing ‘further evaluation,’ or waived their right to be reunified.
Just 364 families with children older than 5 years old, out of a total of 2551, have been reunited so far, though 848 parents have been cleared for reunification, and 272 are likely to be cleared after they are interviewed by ICE.
Of those the government is deeming ineligible, it claims two must serve sentences before they can be transferred to ICE, 91 have a “prohibitive criminal record,” 136 waived reunification, and 679 will be subjected to further evaluation.
In the administration’s filing, the number of children it has deemed eligible for reunification and the number deemed ineligible do not add up to the total number of children identified in the class — falling 37 short. The Department of Health and Human Services, the agency overseeing the children’s detention and reunification, did not respond to TPM’s inquiry about the discrepancy.
Some of these kids have come back to their parents infested with lice and without having had a shower for weeks.
One of the children separated from his parents at the US-Mexico border was returned months later with lice, looking as if he hadn’t been bathed in weeks, and with irrevocable changes to his personality, his mother said, according to documents filed in a lawsuit against the Trump administration.
…
According to Desjardins, one mother, Olivia Caceres, alleged that she was separated from her son in November at a legal point entry, according to PBS, and wasn’t with him for 12 weeks. When he was returned to her custody, Caceres’s son was infested with lice and appeared as though he had not been bathed for the entirety of their separation, PBS reported.
So it’s not as if these kids are being well cared for, and please notice this mother “came through a legal point of entry” before her child was taken.
The Judges order to reunify did not specify just those that that DHS thinks are “eligible” and includes those children whose parents have been deported already while those deportations themselves may have been illegal if they were done to persons with valid asylum claims.
Domestic law is grounded in widely-accepted international standards, starting with Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 27 of the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, and continuing with the 1951 U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.
As stated by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees ‘‘refugees should not be penalized for their illegal entry or stay… the seeking of asylum can require refugees to breach immigration rules. Prohibited penalties might include being charged with immigration or criminal offences relating to the seeking of asylum, or being arbitrarily detained purely on the basis of seeking asylum.’’
So when all is said and done there will still be about 1,000 children in HHS custody who will not be reunited with their parents because the U.S. Government separated them, deported them and are simply refuses to bring them back together due to lame (and frankly illegal) excuses. And since the Flores decision has been reaffirmed HHS can’t hold onto these remaining children beyond the 20-day limit, so exactly what are they going to do?
The fact is they don’t know, they were flying by the seat of their pants from day one — deliberately unconcerned with the permanent impact to these children.
I’m not one to resort to name-calling, but in this case, it’s simply an accurate description to say this is monstrous.
And if the pump fits.