Carter Page, former campaign advisor for Donald Trump.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

The FBI and Justice Department have been investigating Carter Page, a former campaign foreign-policy adviser for Donald Trump, to determine whether he acted as a foreign agent.

Page is at at the center of an investigation into Russia’s tampering with the presidential election, McClatchy reports. 

Page has an extensive military background with intelligence experience.

“Let’s see what’s in this application (to the court) and we’ll see what comes out, because I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

What remains unclear is who brought Page into Trump’s campaign.

Page, who remains involved in Russia through his investment firm Global Energy Capital LLC, said he is willing to testify before Congressional panels conducting the Russia investigations.

Steve Stephens, via Facebook.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

The FBI is helping Cleveland Police search for a gunman who shot and killed an elderly man and uploaded the video to Facebook on Sunday, prompting a manhunt that continued into Monday morning.

Police said Steve Stephens uploaded the video that shows him shooting the elderly man in the head. Stephens also claimed on the video that he killed about a dozen other people, but police said there’s no evidence of other murders.

The FBI quickly joined in the manhunt.

Police believe Stephens may have fled Cleveland and could be in Pennsylvania, Michigan, New York or Indiana.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Arrests of undocumented immigrants increased 32.6% in the first weeks of Donald Trump taking office.

Included in the arrests were thousands of undocumented immigrants who have no criminal record, the Washington Post reports. 

From January through mid-March, ICE arrested 21,362 illegal immigrants, compared to 16,104 during the same period last year.

Among those arrested, 5,441 had no criminal record, a two-fold increase.

“My sense is that ICE is emboldened in a way that I have never seen,” Dan Satterberg, the top prosecutor in Washington state’s King County, which includes Seattle, said Thursday. “The federal government, in really just a couple of months, has undone decades of work that we have done to build this trust.”

An ICE Spokeswoman said no illegal immigrant is safe from deportation.

ICE “focuses its enforcement resources on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security,” spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said in a statement. “However, as [Homeland Security] Secretary [John F.] Kelly has made clear, ICE will no longer exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

President Trump’s administration has no consistent position on marijuana.

After Attorney General Jeff Session said marijuana is “only slightly less awful than heroin, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Sunday that pot “is not a factor in the drug war.”

Kelly said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that his agency is focusing on cocaine, meth, heroin and other opiates, which resulted 52,000 deaths in American in 2015. 

“It’s a massive problem. 52,000 Americans. You can’t put a price on human misery,” Kelly said. “The cost to the United States is over $250 billion a year.”

But “the solution is not arresting a lot of users,” the secretary added. “The solution is a comprehensive drug demand reduction program in the United States that involves every man and woman of goodwill. And then rehabilitation. And then law enforcement. And then getting at the poppy fields and the coca fields in the south.”

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