BREAKING UPDATE: Virginia’s Democratic Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas has been arrested by the Feds and is now in federal custody. She is charged w/ with Drug Trafficking, Money Laundering, Fraud, and Firearms Charge. DOJ press conference imminent.

The latest allegations against Romania's former presidential candidate Călin Georgescu are extraordinary. After authorities searched his residence and reportedly installed covert surveillance equipment, Georgescu allegedly hired a specialist to check his own home for hidden recording devices. Not remove them, just check. Now prosecutors are pursuing another criminal investigation, alleging attempted interference with government surveillance systems - inside his own home. Yet the specialist reportedly says he found no devices and interfered with nothing. Prosecutors themselves acknowledge that no surveillance equipment was damaged or disrupted. They claim Georgescu intended to interfere with their operation, but have not publicly disclosed the evidence establishing that intent. Nor have they released the judicial authorization for installing the equipment in the first place. Since when does hiring someone to search your own home for hidden microphones constitute evidence of a crime? This latest investigation raises serious questions about Romania as a democracy. As the treatment of a presidential candidate whose election victory was a whose election victory was annulled (on false pretenses) and who has subsequently faced an extraordinary succession of criminal proceedings. Romania canceled a presidential election on allegations of foreign interference, yet nearly two years later, the publicly available evidence still does not establish that Russia orchestrated the campaign or that the alleged interference changed the election outcome. The social-media promotion occurred, was largely traced to domestic political interests, while TikTok disputed a central intelligence allegation involving 25,000 accounts. This distinction matters enormously. Political advertising, undisclosed campaign spending, foreign interference, and election fraud are not interchangeable accusations. Canceling an election is among the most consequential powers a government can exercise. If Romanian authorities cannot publicly substantiate the violations that made a national election invalid, they are the ones that need to be prosecuted. Instead, Călin Georgescu faces an array of false allegations - the most recent is tampering with spyware, for which there is no judicial authorization on record and for which he was not informed of.

ANOTHER GUILTY VERDICT: FoF fraudster Muna Fidhin guilty all 9 counts of wire fraud, bribery & money laundering. She owned a Burnsville biz, M5 cafe, billing the gov't nearly $1M to feed hungry children. Instead, paid off a mortgage, bought a Lexus SUV & wired $$ overseas. @FOX9

Germany, the EU, and NATO are all exaggerating the Russian threat to an insane level because they have no credible answer to their economic problems, which they have created themselves with their own failed policies. It's the same old tactic of scapegoating.

I just caught up on some of the recent posts from @DataRepublican, and they’re chilling—not primarily because they outline a violent uprising, but because they reveal a strategy of manufacturing a constitutional crisis in which states declare the federal government illegitimate. What’s alarming is the sheer ignorance and hubris of the people treating this as a workable path. They appear to believe such a rupture can be contained or directed, yet they show little understanding of either American history or the practical consequences of delegitimizing the federal order. The people driving this approach are largely led by academics who have never borne responsibility for real-world outcomes, military officers who couldn’t produce a coherent strategy to win a twenty-year war, and former intelligence officials whose records inspire little confidence. They seem prepared to sacrifice institutional stability—and the young idealists who would be drawn into the resulting chaos—while remaining safely removed from the fallout themselves. What they fail to grasp is that the Constitution is not merely a set of rules that can be voided by state declaration. It is bound to the oaths of those sworn to defend it and to the habits of a population raised on the Bill of Rights. America is not Europe, China, or any other society in which a central authority can be nullified with limited resistance. Attempts to engineer a crisis of legitimacy will not remain a matter of legal posturing. They will collide with people who take their oaths seriously, and the resulting contest over authority is unlikely to stay bloodless. The American Civil War remains the deadliest conflict in U.S. history. Roughly 2% of the population died—men, women, and children—in what was, by historical standards, a relatively conventional war fought between uniformed armies. Scaled to today’s population, that figure approaches 7.5 million dead. A modern breakdown in which states and the federal government treat one another as illegitimate would almost certainly be worse: a grinding conflict fought in neighborhoods, towns, and cities, where the line between friend and enemy would be unclear and ordinary life would become impossible. Anyone of consequence would carry a target, and trust would collapse. This is not a call for violence. It is a plea to avoid the conditions that make violence probable. Many of us have seen what war actually does, and we understand the cost that would be imposed on the next generation because some believe their preferred political outcome can be forced by creating a crisis of legitimacy. Trump leaves office in two years. If the goal is to alter the constitutional order, the Framers already provided the mechanism for doing so. Use it. Do not manufacture a crisis that invites states to treat the federal government as illegitimate while others pay the price. As Sherman put it: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

Mark Wahlberg says he seeks to "humanize" a psychopathic mobster who killed over 100 people with impunity while doubling as an FBI informant. BTW the informant, Gregory Scarpa, was able to kill so many of his rivals because his FBI handlers were leaking him intelligence. Will the film mention that?

Vidal Blanco-Blas is an illegal alien. Four decades ago, he illegally entered the United States using the stolen identity of a deceased U.S. citizen infant. Once in the U.S, Blanco-Blas used the infant’s identity to illegally obtain an SSN, State of Texas driver’s license, voter registration card, and U.S. passport.  During his time pretending to be a U.S. citizen, Blanco-Blas committed serious drug trafficking crimes in America, with multiple lengthy prior prison sentences.  A jury has now convicted Blanco-Blas of more crimes—this time stealing the identity of the deceased U.S. citizen and fraudulently obtaining a U.S. passport. He faces 12 years in prison at sentencing, which is scheduled for March. Excellent work by @NDTXnews, @StateDeptDSS and other partners to uncover and prosecute this scheme.

SHE FILMED THE TRUTH INSIDE BRITISH CLASSROOMS In 2005 science teacher Alex Dolan strapped on a hidden camera and walked into 4 schools in Leeds and London. What she filmed was not shocking to anyone who has ever set foot in a British secondary school. Pupils fighting on desks. Kids swearing in teachers faces. Staff shuffling the worst behaved pupils out of the building the moment Ofsted @Ofstednews turned up to inspect. @Channel4 aired the footage as Undercover Teacher, part of the Dispatches @C4Dispatches strand. Leeds City Council went to the High Court to try to block it. A judge refused the injunction and ruled the programme served the public interest. Watching a school fake its way through an inspection turns out to be exactly the kind of thing the public has an interest in. So naturally the system did what it does best. It went after the person who filmed the problem instead of the problem itself. The General Teaching Council spent 4 years building a case against Dolan. In March 2009 it found her guilty of unacceptable professional conduct for breaching the trust of the pupils she filmed. Not the staff accused of hiding disruptive kids from inspectors. Not the school that burned through 26 supply teachers in a single year. Her. She was suspended from teaching for 12 months. Channel 4's own deputy head of news at the time said publicly it was wrong to punish a whistleblower for this kind of work and that the messenger should not be shot. Press Gazette @pressgazette called the ruling a sad day for journalism. That was generous. Dolan left teaching and became a weather presenter for BBC Look East, which is either the most British redemption arc going or proof that forecasting rain is safer than forecasting institutional failure. No school she filmed faced a tribunal. No member of staff accused of gaming an Ofsted inspection faced a tribunal. The teacher who exposed it did. SOURCES @pressgazette @tes @C4Dispatches

Let me translate what Kim Lane Scheppele, the queen of double standards and hypocrisy, is saying. Democrats (and their equivalents in the EU) can break any law if it is done in the name of saving their democracy. That is what I mean when I say “their rule of law” and “their democracy.” Also, notice how Kim sidesteps the question about the lawfare used against Trump. That’s because she was no doubt involved in it alongside her partner in crime, Norm Eisen. Kim was hoping Trump would go to prison just like Bolsonaro, in the name of democracy of course. She also mentioned that she worked with the opposition in Hungary, which was Péter Magyar. That means she worked with the EU to withhold funds from Hungary, which had a negative impact on its economy, in order to help Péter Magyar, whom she was working with.