Judicial Watch Exposes ISIS Threat on Border
Judicial
Watch is proving itself the most resourceful and impactful educational
organizations in the nation. No other media outlet, no congressional
committee, and no other non-governmental organization can match JW's
successes in ferreting out what the government doesn't want you know.
On the issue of terrorism and the border, JW's journalism this week had
an international impact. On April 14, our Corruption Chronicles published the following extraordinary report on ISIS operations in Mexico and in the United States:
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ISIS
is operating a camp just a few miles from El Paso, Texas, according to
Judicial Watch sources that include a Mexican Army field grade officer
and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector.
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The
exact location where the terrorist group has established its base is
around eight miles from the U.S. border in an area known as "Anapra"
situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.
Another ISIS cell to the west of Ciudad Juárez, in Puerto Palomas,
targets the New Mexico towns of Columbus and Deming for easy access to
the United States, the same knowledgeable sources confirm.
During
the course of a joint operation last week, Mexican Army and federal law
enforcement officials discovered documents in Arabic and Urdu, as well
as "plans" of Fort Bliss - the sprawling military installation that
houses the US Army's 1st Armored Division. Muslim prayer rugs were recovered with the documents during the operation.
Law
enforcement and intelligence sources report the area around Anapra is
dominated by the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Cartel ("Juárez Cartel"), La
Línea (the enforcement arm of the cartel) and the Barrio Azteca (a gang
originally formed in the jails of El Paso). Cartel control of the Anapra
area make it an extremely dangerous and hostile operating environment
for Mexican Army and Federal Police operations.
According
to these same sources, "coyotes" engaged in human smuggling - and
working for Juárez Cartel - help move ISIS terrorists through the desert
and across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New
Mexico. To the east of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, cartel-backed
"coyotes" are also smuggling ISIS terrorists through the porous border
between Acala and Fort Hancock, Texas. These specific areas were
targeted for exploitation by ISIS because of their understaffed
municipal and county police forces, and the relative safe-havens the
areas provide for the unchecked large-scale drug smuggling that was
already ongoing.
Mexican
intelligence sources report that ISIS intends to exploit the railways
and airport facilities in the vicinity of Santa Teresa, NM (a US
port-of-entry). The sources also say that ISIS has "spotters" located in
the East Potrillo Mountains of New Mexico (largely managed by the
Bureau of Land Management) to assist with terrorist border crossing
operations. ISIS is conducting reconnaissance of regional universities;
the White Sands Missile Range; government facilities in Alamogordo, NM;
Ft. Bliss; and the electrical power facilities near Anapra and
Chaparral, NM.
The
international reaction to this report was almost instantaneous. The
Mexican government, unsurprisingly, "categorically denied" our report.
The left-wing "Politifact" smeared JW by calling our report false?
On what basis? No government agency would back us up. I'm happy to
put our credibility up against the Benghazi-cover-up crowd in the Obama
administration any day.
And
I can tell you that our military, congressional and other government
security contacts have been quite positive and grateful for our
reporting. We seem to be hearing every week about ISIS supporters
arrested or an ISIS terror plot thwarted here in the United States. Twenty-five ISIS supporters are being prosecuted by Obama's Justice Department. Two female ISIS supporters were just arrested in New York for wanting to build a bomb. And there were ISIS-related arrests both in Ohio and in Kansas just in the past seven days!
So,
we have ISIS supporters being arrested all over America but we are
supposed to believe that ISIS won't take advantage of the anarchy in the
areas just south of our border controlled by the Mexican drug cartels?
And,
as with Benghazi, the Obama administration's response was to go into
cover-up mode. The FBI, which has a terrible record of not only ignoring terrorist threats but actually using terrorists as
informants, held a key meeting in Mexico in response to our report.
But the meeting wasn't to follow our leads, but to suppress the truth.
Again, from our Corruption Chronicles blog:
Responding to Judicial Watch's report earlier
this week of ISIS activity along the Mexican border, Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) supervisors called a "special" meeting at the U.S.
Consulate in Ciudad Juárez.
A
high-level intelligence source, who must remain anonymous for safety
reasons, confirmed that the meeting was convened specifically to address
a press strategy to deny Judicial Watch's accurate reporting and
identify who is providing information to JW. FBI supervisory personnel
met with Mexican Army officers and Mexican Federal Police officials,
according to JW's intelligence source. The FBI liaison officers
regularly assigned to Mexico were not present at the meeting and
conspicuously absent were representatives from the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS). It's not clear why DHS did not participate.
Publicly,
U.S. and Mexico have denied that Islamic terrorists are operating in
the southern border region, but the rapid deployment of FBI brass in the
aftermath of JW's report seems to indicate otherwise.
Deroy Murdock, a well-known columnist at National Review,
gets it right. He highlights the Obama administration's duplicity in
putting politics above national security, even if doing so puts human
lives at risk. The full piece is worth reading, but he includes the JW revelations this week in his analysis here:
When
the Islamic State first emerged, it traversed Iraqi and Syrian deserts
in pick-up trucks. A few days of relentless bombing would have reduced
these maggots to cinders. Instead, Obama's daintiness let them seize
territory the size of Great Britain. The group now has infiltrated
Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, sealed an alliance with Boko Haram in
Nigeria, and much more.
Judicial
Watch reports that the Islamic State operates a training camp just
eight miles below America's southern "border." The conservative
watchdogs cite Mexican military and police sources who say that they
have discovered - near Ciudad Juarez - Muslim prayer rugs, documents in
Arabic and Urdu, and "plans" of Fort Bliss Army Base in El Paso, Texas.
Homeland
Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told CBS's 60 Minutes that at least 40
Americans who fought with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria have come
home. Half-comfortingly, Johnson said that "we have systems in place to
track these individuals. But you can't know everything."
That's life, as America's lethally unserious "leader" pretends to fight radical Islamic terrorism.
Trust
Judicial Watch to stay on the important issue of the terrorist threat
from our open and unsecured border with Mexico. You should check in
regularly at www.JudicialWatch.org for any updates on the fast-moving investigation.
IRS Scandal Continues
If
the Tea Party and other conservative groups had been fully active in
the critical months leading up to the 2012 election, would Mitt Romney
be president today? We will, of course, never know for certain. But we
do now know that President Obama's Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
targeted right-leaning organizations applying for tax-exempt status and
prevented them from entering the fray during that period.
This is how you can steal an election in plain sight.
In
May 2013, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA)
released an audit report confirming that the IRS used "inappropriate"
criteria to identify Tea Party groups and other conservative
organizations that had expressed opposition to the Obama
administration's policy agenda during his re-election bid. In May 2014,
Lois Lerner, the former Director of the IRS' Exempt Organizations Unit,
was held in contempt of Congress after refusing to testify at a congressional hearing about the agency's actions. As I reported to you last week,
the Obama Justice Department is playing mob lawyer for the IRS, rather
than independent prosecutor. So Lois Lerner gets away with contempt and
there is no detectable criminal investigation.
So it again falls to Judicial Watch to do the job of Congress, the Justice Department, and the rest of the media.
That is why we just filed yet another Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against
the Obama IRS, this time seeking "any and all records" related to the
selection of both individuals and organizations for audits based upon
applications filed requesting nonprofit tax status.
The
Judicial Watch lawsuit was filed after the IRS failed to comply with
two FOIA requests submitted on October 10, 2014. The first sought:
Any
and all records concerning, regarding or relating to the selection of
individuals for IRS audits based on information submitted in
organizations' applications for 501(c )(4) tax-exempt status, 501 (c)(4)
donor lists, or IRS Form 990s. [Emphasis added]
The second request sought:
Any
and all records concerning, regarding, or related to the selection of
501(c)(4) tax-exemption organizations for IRS audits based on
information submitted in applications for tax-exempt status or IRS Form
990s.
After our request was filed, we went through the usual song and dance with Obama administration appointees and bureaucrats.
In
a letter dated November 14, 2014, acknowledging receipt of the FOIA
requests, the IRS advised Judicial Watch that it had "extended the
statutory response date to December 2, 2014." The letter then informed
us that the IRS "will still be unable to locate and consider release of
the requested records by December 2, 2014." In other words, "You'll get
nothing from us." Next, the IRS informed Judicial Watch that it was
extending its response dates in both FOIA requests into late February
and advised us that if we didn't like it, "you may file suit."
And that, of course, is precisely what we have done. In our FOIA lawsuit, we are asking the Court to order the IRS to:
Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit for
records about targeting of individuals for audit in November 2013. In
that litigation, the IRS had refused to search any email systems,
including those related to Lerner. So now, on these issues of
potentially illegal IRS audits, we are fighting an Obama IRS cover-up in two federal lawsuits!
As regular Weekly Update readers
know, we have been fighting to expose the malfeasance and stonewalling
within the IRS for some quite time now. In September 2014, a separate JW
FOIA lawsuit forced the release of documents detailing
that the IRS sought, obtained and maintained the names of donors to Tea
Party and other conservative groups. IRS officials acknowledged in
these documents that "such information was not needed." The documents
also show that the donor names were being used for a "secret research
project."
The House Ways and Means Committee announced at a May 7, 2014, hearing that,
after scores of conservative groups provided donor information "to the
IRS, nearly one in ten donors were subject to audit." In 2011, as many
as five donors to the conservative 501 (c)(4) organization Freedom's Watch were audited, according to the Wall Street Journal. Bradley Blakeman, Freedom's Watch's former president, also alleges he was "personally targeted" by the IRS.
And back in February 2014, then-Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) detailed improper IRS targeting of existing conservative groups:
Additionally,
we now know that the IRS targeted not only right-leaning applicants,
but also right-leaning groups that were already operating as
501(c)(4)s. At Washington, DC's direction, dozens of groups operating
as 501(c)(4)s were flagged for IRS surveillance, including monitoring of
the groups' activities, websites and any other publicly available
information. Of these groups, 83 percent were right-leaning. And of
the groups the IRS selected for audit, 100 percent were right-leaning.
This targeting of donors and other established right-leaning groups is intriguing in light of a new Lerner email we
released just last week. The email discloses that the IRS audited
tax-exempt political groups using a separate investigation arm (under
Lerner's control), the Review of Operations Unit. Lerner wrote:
Also,
we often use the ROO [Review of Operations Unit] to do initial research
(.) Before starting audits-they don't touch taxpayers, but can look at
publicly available info about orgs.
You can see that JW is onto something.
Is
there any remaining doubt now that the Obama IRS used Tea Party
applications to do opposition research for punishing audits of
individual citizens and groups opposed to President Obama's policies?
The IRS tactics used against Tea Party groups remains a growing scandal.
Even as the administration continues its unending attempt to circumvent
FOIA law, we will keep fighting. And you can expect more results.
Defending Marriage
In
a little less than two weeks, on April 28, the Supreme Court will hear
oral argument on the extraordinary notion that the Fourteenth Amendment
to the United States Constitution requires a state to license or
recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex. Your Judicial
Watch is participating in this historic legal battle. The bold
intervention of federal judges in remaking marriage is a challenge to
self-government. That the U.S. Constitution would suddenly require
states to change their marriage laws to keep up with the changing tastes
of liberal elites is the antithesis of federalism and undermines the
rule of law. (You can track the legal arguments and numerous briefs
filed here.)
Earlier this month, we filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting the rights of the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Michigan (James Obergefell, et al. v. Richard Hodges, et al.(No. 14-556, -562, -571, -574)). Our brief makes the case for judicial restraint with respect to marriage. In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit
reversed district court rulings that would have imposed same-sex
marriage on those four states. This ruling, which is quite sensible, is
at odds with judicial activist rulings from other circuit courts that
redefined marriage in Virginia, Indiana, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Utah,
Idaho and Nevada. So now the Supreme Court may resolve the conflicts
and rule, astonishingly, whether the American people can maintain the
definition of marriage that goes back thousands of years.
In
our brief, our legal team argues "the role of defining marriage and
implementing laws in regard to it has always been primarily the province
of the States," and that the courts have continually reaffirmed that
tradition. Reversing that trend would only create legal and political
confusion:
Interference
with the States' sovereign sphere and ultimately, with the right of
their citizens to engage in the democratic process, is contrary to our
system of government and will result in dangerous constitutional
conflicts.
JW
also argues that denying recognition of out-of state marriages that
conflict with state law is not a constitutional violation.
Specifically, the courts have traditionally recognized marriage as an
issue residing within the states' sovereign sphere of authority:
While
it is in within the federal government's power to intervene in the
sphere of marital relations, this Court has made it very clear that
those interventions are to be infrequent, deferential to State
authority, and always with the balance of federalism in mind.
We
also remind the Supreme Court that history matters, and that a practice
going back to the beginnings of our nation deserves respect under the
First Amendment:
Marriage
has, by definition, been the province of the States and has been
traditionally defined as one man and one woman. This has been the case
since the nation's founding. There is no evidence that defining marriage
in that way was viewed as discriminatory or in violation of any
constitutional rights or principles. Segments of society have begun to
take a different perspective but this is hardly a sufficient reason to
cast aside this "unique history" consistent with "centuries of national
practice." 463 U.S. at 790. "[I]t is not necessary to define the precise
boundary of the Establishment Clause where history shows that the
specific practice is permitted. Any test the
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