Border Crossing in Blaine, Washington, via CBP.

By Steve Neavling

ticklethewire.com

CBP officers were ordered to detain and question Iranian Americans at the Canadian Border after Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was killed in U.S. airstrikes, a CBP officer claims in an email to an immigration attorney, CNN reports.

The allegations contradict CBP’s official denial that officers were ordered to stop and question Iranian Americans at a border crossing in Blaine, Wash.

Dozens of Iranian Americans said they were detained and questioned at the border crossing following the killing of Soleimani.

In a Jan. 5 statement, CBP spokesman Matt Leas said “social media posts that CBP is detaining Iranian-Americans and refusing their entry into the U.S. because of their country of origin are false. Reports that DHS/CBP has issued a related directive are also false.”

The unnamed CBP officer who alleged there was a directive to stop and question Iranian Americans said the actions ended, but only after the issue “hit the national news.”

Carter Page, former campaign advisor for Donald Trump.

By Steve Neavling

ticklethewire.com

The Justice Department says it lacked sufficient evidence to continue surveilling former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page in 2017.

The department revealed its assessment that it should have ended the surveillance sooner in a December letter to the Foreign Surveillance Court, which oversees surveillance of suspected foreign spies.

The letter, which was made public Thursday and obtained by Reuters, suggested the DOJ lacked probable cause to continue wiretapping Page.

The letter follows a review by the DOJ’s internal watchdog that concluded the FBI left out evidence evidence and went too far in its investigation of possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Michael William Barends via Brewster County Sheriff’s Office.

By Steve Neavling

ticklethewire.com

A Border Patrol agent in Texas has been arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a child more than 20 times, beginning when she was 12 years old.

Michael William Barends was arrested Friday by the Brewster County Sheriff’s Office on allegations he molested his stepdaughter from January 2015 to June 2019, the Washington Examiner reports.

Barends was a supervisor with the Big Bend Sector and worked with immigrant children after working with the agency in Detroit and Yuma, Arizona.

Barends, who was known as “Chicken Little” because of his glasses, was released Tuesday on a $200,000 bond.

By Steve Neavling

ticklethewire.com

A grand jury determined an FBI agent acted in self-defense when he shot and killed a Robinson, Texas, man while raiding a home with a federal search warrant in July.

The agent, who was not identified, was cleared of wrong doing in the shooting death of Joshua Steven Mitchell after the case was presented to a grand jury in mid-December, McLennan County First Assistant District Attorney Nelson Barnes told the Waco Tribune-Herald.

“The agent clearly acted in defense of himself and the other agents who would have been in the line of fire,” Barnes said. “Mr. Mitchell had multiple weapons next to him and he reached for one, putting the agents in danger.”

Barnes said photographs showed multiple weapons near Mitchell when agents confronted him, which suggested the agents were in danger.

Mitchell was shot four times in the head and neck, as well as once in the arm.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

By Steve Neavling

ticklethewire.com

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said if she’s elected she will create an independent task force to investigate corruption by the Trump administration.

Warren laid out the plan in an effort to restore “integrity and competence” in the federal government.

“If we are to move forward to restore public confidence in government and deter future wrongdoing, we cannot simply sweep this corruption under the rug in a new administration,” the Massachusetts senator wrote in the plan released Tuesday.

Citing “unprecedented” corruption in the Trump administration identified by the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington D.C., Warren said the task force will “pursue any substantiated criminal and civil violations.”

“That’s why I will direct the Justice Department to establish a task force to investigate violations by Trump administration officials of federal bribery laws, insider trading laws, and other anti-corruption and public integrity laws, and give that task force independent authority to pursue any substantiated criminal and civil violations,” she said.

I will also direct the Justice Department to establish an independent task force to investigate violations of specific anti-corruption and public integrity laws during the Trump administration, with independent authority to pursue any substantiated violations.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) January 21, 2020

Richmond, Va., via Fairfax County.

By Steve Neavling

ticklethewire.com

Suspected members of a white-supremacist group are accused of plotting violence at a gun rally in Richmond on Martin Luther King Jr. Day with the intent of causing what one described as “full-blown civil war,” prosecutors said in court filings.

The FBI set up a microphone and video camera at a Delaware apartment, where the suspects lived and discussed shooting “unsuspecting civilians and police officers,” derailing trains, sabotaging power lines, and poisoning water supplies, according to legal motions filed Tuesday and obtained by The Washington Post.

“We can’t let Virginia go to waste, we just can’t,” one of the men, Patrik J. Mathews, said, according to the court filings.

Prosecutors said the trio belonged to a militant hate group, “the Base,” inspired by English translation of “al-Qaeda.”

“Here’s the thing,” Matthews is accused of saying. “You want to create . . . instability while the Virginia situation is happening . . . derail some rail lines . . . shut down the highways” as a way to “kick off the economic collapse.”

Videos found on Matthews’ computer espoused “violent, anti-Semitic, and racist language,” according to prosecutors.

The other co-defendants are Brian M. Lemley Jr., and William G. Bilbrough IV, both of whom used gun parts “to make a functioning assault rifle,” according to court documents.

The trio was charged with federal firearms violations, and a court hearing is scheduled Wednesday.

Martin Luther King Jr.

By Steve Neavling

ticklethewire.com

The FBI was slammed for what could be described as a tone-deaf tweet that honored Martin Luther King Jr.

Tweet after tweet reminded the bureau of its cruel treatment of the civil rights icon.

Under the leadership of the bureau’s notorious director, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI had spent nearly a decade keeping the civil rights leader under surveillance, convinced he was a Communist – or at least a national security threat. Agents recorded thousands of memos on the minister’s movements and interactions and even bugged his home, office and hotel rooms.

But they found nothing illegal or even dangerous.

Today, the FBI honors the life and work of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A quote from Dr. King is etched in stone at the FBI Academy’s reflection garden in Quantico as a reminder to all students and FBI employees: “The time is always right to do what is right.” #MLKDay pic.twitter.com/UKMLAAZw5w

— FBI (@FBI) January 20, 2020

Infamously obstinate and relentless, Hoover was determined to discredit the 35-year-old leader, especially after he won the Nobel Peace Prize and earned international acclaim.

While King prepared for his trip to Oslo to receive the award, Hoover denounced the Georgia-born minister as “the most notorious liar in the country” during a press conference in Washington D.C. in November 1964.

A few days later, the smear campaign escalated, marking one of the darkest chapter’s in the FBI’s history. One of Hoover’s deputies, William Sullivan, typed an anonymous, harshly worded letter to King that later would come to be known as the “suicide letter.”

Since Sullivan had nothing illegal on King, the letter focused on his extramarital sexual liaisons, which were captured on FBI surveillance.

The anonymous author calls King a “filthy, abnormal animal”and an “evil, abnormal beast” and pledges to expose the extramarital affairs “with your filthy, dirty, evil companions.”

The letter suggests there are recordings of “all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk.”

“You are done,” the letter declares. “Your ‘honorary degrees,’ your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you. King, I repeat you are done.”

The letter is crafted to give the impression it was written by someone within the civil rights movement, making a reference to “us Negroes.”

King quietly told friends that someone wanted him to kill himself.

The letter proceeds in what is an apparent reference to suicide, “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. … There is but only one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”