For years, the FBI and CIA have run Congress like an op. Forget the “secret squirrel” stuff. Many of their top officials have committed felonies in broad daylight with no accountability. By nominating Kash Patel as FBI director and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, President Donald Trump intends to change all that.The shrill opposition to having tough, contrarian leaders clean out the intelligence community’s litter box has betrayed the secret. Some senators are afraid.Congress has allowed the FBI and the rest of the intelligence community to become a state within a state that neither Congress nor the president can control.For nearly half a century, Congress has shrugged off its duty to oversee the ever-growing central investigative and spy apparatus that it funded.Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) famously admitted in 2017 that any elected leader who challenges the intelligence community will be destroyed and that Trump, first assuming the presidency that month, was a fool even to try."Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”Gabbard last week reminded the Senate of Schumer’s warning.More than anyone in Washington, Schumer would know. He was elected to Congress before Tulsi Gabbard was born.Schumer sat on the House Judiciary Committee with oversight of the FBI from 1981 to 1999. He has been on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also with FBI oversight, since 1999 and is now the panel’s ranking member. Since becoming his party’s leader, whether in the majority or minority, he has been an ex officio member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.Schumer knows that by neglecting its constitutional authority, Congress has allowed the FBI and the intelligence community to become a fearful master — a state within a state beyond the control of both Congress and the president.Everything the FBI and CIA did to Trump and his allies would fill lesser politicians with fear.Escape from accountabilitySome senators show backbone. One is Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), who made two big revelations. He was first to confirm the report that some of his colleagues wanted to vote on Gabbard’s nomination in secret.It wasn’t about a closed hearing to discuss classified matters, but to have the vote itself, including its final tally, a secret. The purpose, one can only presume, is to allow senators to escape any accountability for their vote.Precedent for this does exist. Following the jihadist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in secret, and concealed the tallies, on confirmation of nominees. It did this as a security measure because of fears that some would be targeted by terrorists.The terrorism worry magically vanished in 2013, after the committee voted to confirm deep-stater John Brennan as director of the CIA. For some reason, establishmentarians were incensed that Brennan had any opposition at all. The committee released the tally, which was 12-3. But, as Roll Call reported, “the public had no official way of knowing which panel members voted against Brennan.”Those three had to be exposed. One of them is still in office: Senator Jim Risch (R-Idaho).Since then, the tallies of Senate Intelligence Committee votes have been public information.Who, whom?Now, with the push to hold the Gabbard confirmation vote in secret, who is afraid of whom? It isn’t Gabbard’s supporters who want a secret vote.Real intelligence professionals will recall the Bolshevik question, “Kto kogo?” or “Who whom?”It’s a slogan from Lenin’s 1921 musing, “The whole question is, who will overtake whom?”Washington has become its own zero-sum power-and-money game. The uniparty members who tax and spend on the permanent bureaucracy, who issue the contracts to the industrial complexes, consider themselves “us.”In true kto kogo spirit, everyone else — in other words, you and me — is actually “them.” The late great scholar of Russia Richard Pipes once said in a conversation with colleagues, “The FBI learned its worst lessons from the KGB.”The uniparty loves the FBI as it has become. Retired FBI man Thomas J. Baker observed, “Big Brother is family now.”Trump and his populist peasant movement want to hold Big Brother and his family accountable. Gabbard and Patel are the tip of the pitchfork.So the secrecy of a vote on Gabbard — even to those who believe that reforms are overdue — appears driven by some senators’ primal fear of what will happen to them if they are caught helping to hold Big Brother accountable.Ending the impunityIf Gabbard is confirmed, impunity is over.“Every FBI director I’ve questioned has lied to me” in his 14 years on the Judiciary Committee, Senator Mike Lee told Kash Patel during his confirmation hearings last week.Making any false statement to Congress is a felony. Lying under oath is another felony. Five years maximum for each. Four successive FBI directors committed federal felonies, by Lee’s account. They should have gotten 10 years in the slammer for each time they lied to Congress.But they routinely got away with it.So have the leakers throughout the intelligence community, who committed felonies every time they passed classified information. Many of those leaks were calculated to manipulate the Senate on who it would and would not confirm.President Trump is ending the impunity. That’s why the fight against Gabbard and Patel is so vicious. The demons are howling at the exorcist. Some senators feel caught in the middle. That’s why they are so afraid.

In July 2007, Steven Joseph Hayes and his accomplice, Joshua Komisarjevsky, broke into the home of the Petit family in Cheshire, Connecticut. After the duo savagely beat and restrained the father, William Petit, Hayes forced Jennifer Hawke-Petit to take $15,000 out of her bank account, then brutally raped and murdered the mother of two. After Hayes' accomplice similarly tortured and raped 11-year-old Michaela Petit, the duo tied the little girl and her 17-year-old sister, Hayley, to their beds, then set the house on fire. Newsweek published a puff piece by its chief investigative reporter, Joshua Rhett Miller, on Friday that not only painted the murderous rapist in a sympathetic light but presented the transvestite with his preferred pronouns and narrative framing. Critics incensed by Newsweek's apparent attempt at reputational rehab for Hayes — who previously bragged in a series of letters that he allegedly murdered 17 girls and women and made a snuff film documenting one of the slayings — concluded that Americans "don't hate the media enough." The subject of Miller's piece originally was sentenced to receive the death penalty for his gruesome crimes. Hayes — who now calls himself Linda Mai Lee — reportedly smiled in the courtroom during his sentencing. ABC News reported at the time of the unanimous jury verdict condemning Hayes to death that William Petit, the only survivor of the home invasion, expressed satisfaction that justice was being served, telling reporters, "We all know that God will be the final arbiter, and I think the defendant faces far more serious punishments from the Lord than he can ever face from mankind." The bereaved father was, however, subsequently denied the justice he desired when Connecticut abolished the death penalty in 2012. Hayes' sentence was commuted such that he is now serving a life sentence without the hope of parole but with the guarantee of sex-change procedures. After first demanding kosher meals, having supposedly self-converted into an Orthodox Jew, Hayes began masquerading as a woman, enjoying virtually every possible accommodation from the Oregon State Penitentiary, where he is now reportedly seeking breast implants and hormone replacement therapy. Newsweek ran with Hayes' narrative that he has long suffered confusion over his sex and that he internalized the "intolerance of others." Newsweek's Miller also incorporated Hayes' insinuation that had he accepted his autogynephilia earlier, his victims might still be alive. "I hurt, so I hurt others," the murderous rapist told the liberal publication. 'Everyone involved in the writing of this piece should be fired.' In addition to humanizing the murderous rapist and detailing his supposed difficulties with drugs, his in-prison romance, and his daily routine, Miller made sure both to portray transvestites in general as a victimized group, claiming they are disproportionately likely to fall prey to violent crime, and to again paint Hayes in a sympathetic light with regard to his lawsuit, Hayes v. Houser. The murderous rapist, now part of an LGBT group, filed a lawsuit in 2022 against several prison employees and officials at State Correctional Institution, Benner Township, for supposedly violating his right during his imprisonment there to "be free of cruel and unusual punishment." The supposed cruelty the murderous rapist suffered consisted of officials allegedly preventing him from ordering eye shadow and a cup-style bra and having him use the facility barber whenever he wanted to remove his chest, facial, and pubic hair. Despite the apparent attempt to frame Hayes as a reformed man coming to grips with his imagined identity, Miller included an apparent threat from the murderous rapist. Hayes said with regard to his lawsuit, "If they choose to go to trial, I will take their head off by keeping my promise and putting every trans-female in PA on the stand to share the abuse they suffer in that system." Laura Powell, a civil rights attorney in the San Francisco Bay area who founded Californians for Good Governance, blasted the Newsweek article, tweeting, "Newsweek now publishes a puff piece on how he is now happy and at peace since he came to terms with his gender confusion. They claim his 'former anger' had been fueled by this distress. Now he is seeking treatments to feminize his appearance. (Undoubtedly funded by taxpayers.) You don't hate the media enough." Normalcy advocate Robby Starbuck similarly noted, "People really don't hate the media enough." "Everyone involved in the writing of this piece should be fired and bullied out of journalism forever," wrote Bill D'Agostino, a senior research analyst for the Media Research Center. Helen Joyce, the author of "Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality" wrote, "He raped an 11 year old and her mother, and murdered both, as well as the 11 year old's sister. And we're supposed to pity him because his crimes were supposedly because of his confusion about his gender identity? And to give a toss that he's 'happy to be alive?'" "He murdered a mother and her two daughters and raped two of them before doing so. But now he's kind of sorry for what he did, but he’s also at peace with it," wrote T. Becket Adams, program director at the National Journalism Center. "The feel-good story of the year." "Ted Bundy has rebranded as Buffalo Bill, and that's a beautiful thing," added Adams. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. 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New Jersey's Democrat governor challenged federal authorities to come get an illegal immigrant whom he appeared to say he was harboring inside his garage.Gov. Phil Murphy made the comments while speaking with a progressive activist group at Montclair State University in Montclair on Saturday. 'This should be disqualifying as a governor.'"There is someone in our broader universe whose immigration status is not yet at the point that they are trying to get it to, and we said, 'You know what? Let’s have her live at our house above our garage,'" said Murphy at the event. "And good luck to the feds coming in to try to get her," he added. Murphy has previously forbidden state and local law enforcement to cooperate with deportation and immigration enforcement in the state. The Trump administration has warned that it would seek legal action against state officials who got in the way of enforcing immigration law. Video of the comments was circulated on social media, where Murphy was excoriated by critics. "He's a public official who is daring the federal government. This should be disqualifying as a governor," responded author Adam Coleman. "Phil Murphy realizing his live-in maid being illegal is politically useful," joked Rob Schmitt of Newsmax. "Phil Murphy just implicated himself in a CRIME! Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. It’s time for @icegov to pay him a visit," said former Mayor Mario Kranjac. Murphy was vague about the immigration status of the person, who, if she exists, could be an illegal alien or a person with temporary immigration status. Harboring an illegal alien is a crime and may be punishable by 10 years in prison. In 2019 Murphy signed legislation allowing illegal immigrants to obtain a driver's license in New Jersey. “This new law will allow residents the opportunity to obtain driver’s licenses regardless of immigration status and keep our roads safe," Murphy posted on social media, quoting a law enforcement officer. Here's the video of his comments:Democrat Governor of New Jersey Phil Murphy admits he is harboring an illegal immigrant at his home: “Good luck to the feds trying to come and get her.” pic.twitter.com/rKEMFYq4gf— TheBlaze (@theblaze) February 3, 2025 Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

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