Retaliating against the retaliation becomes both redundant and repetitious.
https://www.bespacific.com/white-house-insists-congressional-oversight-is-a-crime/
White House Insists Congressional Oversight is a Crime
TPM [paywall but some links open] “White House counsel on Wednesday blasted a letter out declaring that the investigations Democrats are gearing up to carry out may be unlawful and, further, might be criminal. “The Supreme Court has held that ‘investigations conducted solely for the personal aggrandizement of the investigators or to “punish” those investigated are indefensible,’” White House Counsel Will Scharf wrote, apparently with no sense of irony. “[T]hreats to executive branch officials designed to deter them from public service, or process designed merely to abuse or instill fear in the recipient may cross the line into blatant criminality,” he later intoned, warning that this “may warrant further investigation.” Todd Blanche has also been in heavy cable news rotation, making similar threats. A Trumpy U.S. Attorney in Texas, Aaron Reitz, took things a step further, posting a letter to X demanding Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) preserve documents related to an effort he has previewed to investigate the way in which the White House ballroom was funded. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter chimed in on X to cheer him on…”
See also Above The Law: White House Counsel Goes Full Mob Consigliere, Threatens Dems If They Investigate Trump. Letter warns incoming chair that it’s improper to probe political enemies just days after Trump orders DOJ to prosecute his enemies. On Saturday, the President of the United States announced on Truth Social that Democrats promising to investigate his administration are “SLEAZEBAGS” who “should go to jail,” adding, “I am ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act, immediately!” On Sunday, Attorney General Todd Blanche declined to rule out prosecuting members of Congress for the non-crime of scheduling hearings. And thus we add another paragraph to the already lengthy ethical complaint that should permanently strip Blanche of his license to practice law…Punchbowl News posted the three-page letter issuing a blanket, preemptive threat to weaponize the DOJ to keep Dems from asking more questions about Trump’s bosom buddy Jeffrey Epstein:
The Supreme Court has held that “[i]nvestigations conducted solely for the personal aggrandizement of the investigators or to ‘punish’ those investigated are indefensible.” Watkins v. United States, 354 U.S. 178, 187 (1957). Congressional investigations must further a legitimate legislative task; Congress cannot employ them to exercise powers of criminal prosecution assigned to the Executive and the Judiciary…”
What if this is available to all law enforcement? (Perhaps it is?)
https://www.bespacific.com/a-nice-little-database-what-ices-own-filings-show/
‘A Nice Little Database’: What ICE’s Own Filings Show
Transparency Cascade “ICE told Congress that what it collects from people it doesn’t arrest goes into documented record systems. “On the morning of Jan. 23, 2026, Colleen Fagan left home around 5:30 to watch for immigration agents in her neighborhood in the Portland, Maine, area. A little after 6:40, at an apartment complex on Westbrook Street in South Portland, she parked about 20 feet from two black SUVs, got out and started recording on her phone. Two officers walked toward her with their own phones up. One held his to her face. The other walked to her car and, she says, appeared to record or scan her license plate. She told him it was not illegal for her to record him. I n her sworn declaration she gives his answer when she asked why he was recording her face and her plate: “Cause we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist, so have fun with that.” “For videotaping you?” she asked. “Are you crazy? I’m a domestic terrorist?”…
ICE’s procurement papers say it again in the present tense. Its 2024 request for information on replacing the system asks for “sharing of subject information with CBP for lookout and seizure tracking purposes,” and its sole-source justification for Palantir (J&A-25-0266, dated April 2025 on its face, posted to SAM.gov on Jan. 16, 2026 ) carries the same requirement in the words “share subject information with CBP for lookout and seizure tracking purposes.” At a 2023 industry day, ICE put the system’s size at 55 million person subject records.
ICM feeds other systems too. A 2025 appendix to the privacy assessment for HSI’s RAVEn analytics platform lists ICM as a source with an ingest schedule of “Daily.” The ICM assessment does not describe that flow.
404 Media, which saw a recent version of ICM, reported in April 2025 that it filters on “hundreds of different categories,” from tattoos to license plate reader data, and that agents can set what it called a “Person Lookout Query” that emails them when someone matches a search. That name appears in no privacy assessment or court filing we found. The record does not say how Williams’s lookout was triggered.
Complicated analysis is what computer do…
Another Way Police Are Locating People from Their Smartphones
Penlink’s Webloc is an application that locates people using information from the weather, gaming, email, and religious apps on their phone. It’s sold to the police.
The tool collects vast quantities of location data from smartphones via commonly used weather, gaming, email and religious apps. It can build a detailed picture of where a smartphone has been over the past 12 months, and update the data hourly, showing the movements of people on a near real-time basis. Law enforcement officers can use Webloc to zero in on a map and look at all phones that were present at a specific place and time, analyzing “billions of location data points,” according to company documents reviewed by Bloomberg.
There’s a nice infographic that explains how the system works at the link.
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