By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

An FBI agent who left his car running at a gas station on Chicago’s west side was carjacked early Monday morning.

The stolen white Chevy Equinox contained several guns, including an M4, Glock 27 and a Glock 22, according to ABS Eyewitness News.

Authorities are hoping surveillance cameras at the Shell Gas Station near Morgan Street and Jackson Boulevard captured the carjacking, which happened around 1 a.m.

It’s unclear why the agent left the car running, especially since there were multiple guns inside.

Police are investigating and declined to provide more details early Monday morning.

Abduction suspect Brendt Christensen, via LinkedIn.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

About two months before police say he kidnapped a Chinese scholar at the University of Illinois, the 28-year-old suspect appears to have visited the most popular sexual fetish networking site on the internet.

Brendt Allen Christensen was charged in the June 9 abduction of 26-year-old Yingying Zhang, who authorities believe is dead. On April 19, federal investigators said Christensen used his phone to visit FetLife.com, a forum that included threads called “Perfect abduction fantasy” and “planning a kidnapping,” CNN reports. 

Christensen, who remains behind bars, is expected in federal court in Urbana on Monday.

FetLife bills itself as “the Social Network for the BDSM, Fetish & Kinky Community” and was created in 2008 by Canadian software developer John Baku. Since then, the site claims to have more than 5 million registered members.

The site dubs itself as a “safe place for kinksters” and is only intended for consensual adults.

According to the FBI, Zhang was kidnapped during the day after she was running late to sign a lease. Authorities believe she agreed to hop in the case with Christensen, a stranger, after missing two buses.

During surveillance, the FBI said Christensen admitted to kidnapping the Chinese scholar.

President Donald Trump

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

A top Justice Department official who served as the corporate compliance watchdog has resigned because she said President Trump’s administration is violating the same government ethics laws that she’s expected to enforce on other businesses.

Hui Chen resigned in June, saying she can’t force companies to comply when Trump’s administration is doing the same thing.

She recently broke her silence in a LinkedIn post, first revealed by International Business Times. 

“Trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome,” Chen wrote. “To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair on the Titanic. Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts. Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it.”

Chen joined the Justice Department in 2015 to help the agency enforce criminal laws against corporations.

Surveillance of incident.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

A Homeland Security officer has been indicted on charges of kicking a handcuffed man in the head outside of a federal building in Pomona, Calif.

Jason Rouswell, 45, is accused of violating the civil rights of the handcuffed suspect during an October 2016 incident, the Los Angeles Times reports, citing the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. 

Rouswell, who is an inspector with the Federal Protective Services, is accused of kicking a man who was lying face down in the street after he was detained and shackled outside the Social Security Administration building.

According to a video of the assault, the suspect appeared to be cooperating with authorities.

Rouswell is expected to turn himself in on Wednesday. He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Eric Dreiband was nominated to head DOJ Civil Rights Division.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

President Trump’s nomination to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division has drawn criticism because he previously defended major corporations and others against discrimination lawsuits.

Eric Dreiband, who served as general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under George W. Bush, defended companies accused of discrimination based on age, pregnancy and religion, CNN reports. 

The labor attorney for Jones Day would undermine “fundamental civil rights priorities,” the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said last week.

“Dreiband has devoted most of his career to defending corporations in employment discrimination cases and advocating for weaker antidiscrimination protections in the workplace,” the statement said. “He also has a troubling lack of experience, having done no significant work in other issue areas central to the Division’s mission, including urgent priorities like voting rights and policing reform.”

Danita Gupta, who held the same position under President Barack Obama, wrote in a statement: “Whoever leads the ‘crown jewel’ of the Justice Department must have deep relationships with stakeholders and marginalized communities, and have a deep, abiding faith in our nation’s civil rights laws. They must respect the laws that touch everyone, rights that people have literally died for. They must respect the role of what has been called the conscience of the federal government. In all those regards, Eric Dreiband is woefully unqualified to lead the Civil Rights Division.”

The White House fought back Friday.

“The White House judges nominees on the merits of their character and not on the clients they once represented as counsel,” White House spokeswoman Kelly Love told CNN. “Mr. Dreiband is highly qualified to run the civil rights division, and we are privileged to have his service.”

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