By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

The FBI is expected to reveal more details Thursday about an 18-year-old Houston man accused of plotting a violent attack in U.S. soil.

U.S.-born Kaan Sercan Damlarkaya is set to appear in federal court for a detention hearing, the Houston Chronicle reports. 

Damlarkaya was indicted by a grand jury Wednesday on one count of providing material support to terrorists, two counts of attempting to provide material support to ISIS and two counts of unlawfully distributing explosive information, according tot he Justice Department.

Most of the charges carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

Damlarkaya’s public defender declined to discuss the case.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Russian President Vladimir Putin praised President Trump, discounting allegations of links between the White House and Kremlin as “some sort of spy-mania,” Bloomberg reports.

“We see some quite serious achievements, even in this short period of time that he’s been working,” Putin said at his annual press conference in Moscow on Thursday. “Look at the markets, how they’ve risen. That shows investors’ confidence in the American economy, it shows they believe in what President Trump is doing in this area.”

Putin dismissed the allegations of links between Russia and Trump’s campaign as propaganda “invented by people who are in opposition to Trump in order to make his work look illegitimate.”

Putin is running for another six years as president of Russia.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

ATF stings have come under fire because they’re predominately targeting African Americans and prompting allegations of racial profiling and entrapment.

The Chicago Tribune reports that the ATF has “convinced hundreds of would-be robbers across the country that they were stealing large quantities of narcotics, only to find out the drugs were a figment of the government’s imagination.” 

Because of mandatory federal sentencing laws, suspects caught up in the controversial stings are spending decades or even life behind bars, even though the drugs never existed.

The Tribune wrote:

Now the legal battle is coming to a head in an unprecedented hearing at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago before a panel of nine district judges overseeing a dozen separate cases involving more than 40 defendants.

The hearing, which has been four years in the making, will take place over two days in the courthouse’s large ceremonial courtroom. As many as 30 defendants, their relatives and individual attorneys are expected to attend, and an overflow courtroom has been set up to handle the anticipated crowd.

“In my 46 years of practicing law, I’ve never seen anything like this before,” attorney Richard Kling, who represents one of the defendants, told the Chicago Tribune this week.

The testimony will focus on dueling experts who reached starkly different conclusions about the racial breakdown of targets in the stash house cases.

A nationally renowned expert hired by the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School — which is spearheading the effort to have the cases dismissed — concluded that disparity between minority and white defendants in the stings was so large that there was “a zero percent likelihood” it happened by chance.

Other Stories of Interest

• Baltimore Waiting for Reply from FBI in Unsolved Killing of Officer from Pa.
• Another FBI Informant Testifies about Under-the-Table Dealings
• Cuomo Turns Grouchy When Questioned about FBI Investigation
• Funerals for FBI Agent, Fire Marshal Killed in Crash Set for Thursday
• FBI Holds Weapons of Mass Destruction Training

Russian President Vladimir Putin

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed – with no evidence – that the FBI is drugging the former head of Russia’s anti-doping lab so he’ll blow the whistle on a massive state-run doping program.

Putin said the former head of the lab, Grigory Rodchenkov, who is now in a witness-protection program in the U.S., is under the influence of some kind of drug to get him to cooperate with the investigation, Bloomberg reports.

The whistleblower led to Russia being barred from the 2018 Winter Olympics.

“He’s working under the control of the American special services, what kind of substances are they giving him so he says what they need?” Putin said at his annual press conference on Thursday in Moscow.

Despite Putin’s claims, Rodchenkov has the backing of the International Olympic Committee, which said the whistleblowers’s accusations that Russia was doping its athletes are credible.

According to the World Anti-Doping Agency, Russia conspired to provide banned substances to about 1,000 athletes from 2011-15.