Friday, 21 June 2013

It Got Them Killed: Michael Hastings

Michael Hastings
1980 - 2013

Cause of Death: 
Petraeus

Likely Suspects: 

Every Single one of Petraeus' Friends


General David Petreaus DID NOT Speak Truth to Power;



He Told LIES to Power...


See Also:
It Got Them Killed: Mae Brussell
It Got Them Killed: John Belushi
It Got Them Killed: Paul Foot







Before his death Michael Hastings [ALLEGEDLY] wrote the following article called 

“Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans”.

Michael Hastings (January 28, 1980 – June 18, 2013)
By Micahel Hastings
Buzzfeed
June 20, 2013

For most bigwig Democrats in Washington, D.C., the last 48 hours has delivered news of the worst kind — a flood of new information that has washed away any lingering doubts about where President Obama and his party stand on civil liberties, full stop.

Glenn Greenwald’s exposure of the NSA’s massive domestic spy program has revealed the entire caste of current Democratic leaders as a gang of civil liberty opportunists, whose true passion, it seems, was in trolling George W. Bush for eight years on matters of national security.

“Everyone should just calm down,” Senator Harry Reid said yesterday, inhaling slowly.

That’s right: don’t panic.

The very topic of Democratic two-facedness on civil liberties is one of the most important issues that Greenwald has covered. Many of those Dems — including the sitting President Barack Obama, Senator Carl Levin, and Sec. State John Kerry — have now become the stewards and enhancers of programs that appear to dwarf any of the spying scandals that broke during the Bush years, the very same scandals they used as wedge issues to win elections in the Congressional elections 2006 and the presidential primary of 2007-2008.

Recall what Senator Levin told CNN in 2005, demanding to “urgently hold an inquiry” into what was supposedly President Bush’s domestic wiretap program.

Levin continued, at length: “It means that there’s some growing concern on Capitol Hill about a program which seems to be so totally unauthorized and unexplained…The president wraps himself in the law, saying that it is totally legal, but he doesn’t give what the legal basis is for this. He avoided using the law, which we provided to the president, where even when there is an emergency and there’s a need for urgent action can first tap the wire and then go to a court.”

There are two notable exception to this rule are Senator Ron Wyden, from Oregon, and Sen. Mark Udall from Colorado, who had seemed to be fighting a largely lonely, frustrating battle against Obama’s national security state.

As Mark Udall told the Denver Post yesterday: “[I] did everything short of leaking classified information” to stop it.

His ally in Oregon, Ron Wyden, was one of the first to seize on the Guardian’s news break: “I will tell you from a policy standpoint, when a law-abiding citizen makes a call, they expect that who they call, when they call and where they call from will be kept private,” Wyden said to Politico, noting “there’s going to be a big debate about this.” The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he’d mislead Senator Wyden at a hearing earlier this year, revising his statement yesterday to state that the NSA didn’t do “voyerustic” surveillance.

The state of affairs, in other words, is so grave that two sitting Senators went as close as they could to violating their unconstitutional security oaths in order to warn the country of information that otherwise would not have been declassified until April of 2038, according to the Verizon court order obtained by Greenwald.


Now, we’re about to see if the Obama administration’s version of the national security state will begin to eat itself.

Unsurprisingly, the White House has dug in, calling their North Korea-esque tools “essential” to stop terrorism, and loathe to give up the political edge they’ve seized for Democrats on national security issues under Obama’s leadership. The AP spying scandal — which the administration attempted to downplay at the time, even appointing Eric Holder to lead his own investigation into himself —was one of the unexpected consequences of one of two leak investigations that Obama ordered during the 2012 campaign.

It’s unclear where a possible third leak investigation would lead. However, judging by the DOJ’s and FBI’s recent history, it would seem that any new leak case would involve obtaining the phone records of reporters at the Guardian, the Washington Post, employees at various agencies who would have had access to the leaked material, as well as politicians and staffers in Congress—records, we now can safely posit, they already have unchecked and full access to.

In short: any so-called credible DOJ/FBI leak investigation, by its very nature, would have to involve the Obama administration invasively using the very surveillance and data techniques it is attempting to hide in order to snoop on a few Democratic Senators and more media outlets, including one based overseas.

Outside of Washington, D.C., the frustration that Wyden and Udall have felt has been exponentially magnified. Transparency supporters, whistleblowers, and investigative reporters, especially those writers who have aggressively pursued the connections between the corporate defense industry and federal and local authorities involved in domestic surveillance, have been viciously attacked by the Obama administration and its allies in the FBI and DOJ.

Jacob Appplebaum, a transparency activist and computer savant, has been repeatedly harassed at American borders, having his laptop seized. Barrett Brown, another investigative journalist who has written for Vanity Fair, among others publications, exposed the connections between the private contracting firm HB Gary (a government contracting firm that, incidentally, proposed a plan to spy on and ruin the reputation of the Guardian’s Greenwald) and who is currently sitting in a Texas prison on trumped up FBI charges regarding his legitimate reportorial inquiry into the political collective known sometimes as Anonymous.

That’s not to mention former NSA official Thomas Drake (the Feds tried to destroys his life because he blew the whistle ); Fox News reporter James Rosen (named a “co-conspirator” by Holder’s DOJ); John Kirakou, formerly in the CIA, who raised concerns about the agency’s torture program, is also in prison for leaking “harmful” (read: embarrassing) classified info; and of course Wikileaks (under U.S. financial embargo); WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (locked up in Ecuador’s London embassy) and, of course, Bradley Manning, the young, idealistic, soldier who provided the public with perhaps the most critical trove of government documents ever released.

The attitude the Obama administration has toward Manning is revealing. What do they think of him? “Fuck Bradely Manning,” as one White House official put it to me last year during the campaign.

Screw Manning? Lol, screw us.

Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.



I personally have severe doubts that Hastings (a professional journalist investigating National Security matters) actually wrote this piece;

For one thing, the piece never provided the answer promised in the title: Why do  Democrats love to spy on Americans, exactly...?

For another thing, he must know, if he's writing this piece, that the NSA program did NOT examine content.

Just Metadata. And Metadata is fair game.


Hence James Clapper's statement clarification, quoted in the piece that the NSA does not monitor "voyueristically".

Which is true.

Second, he makes aboslutely no mention of Snowden by name - and yet he HAS to know (or at least realise) that Snowden is an obvious and transparent fraud.

Third: John Kerry is Secretary of State - what on earth has his job got to do with any question of domestic wiretapping, other than a blanket partisan smear?

Fourth: He's interviewed Assange - again, he must realise that the guy is a complete fraud and an agency of Modified Limited Hangout;

Fifth: The Article appears to be datelined on BuzzFeed AFTER his death. Some forensic hacking may be in order, on this one.

Sixth: I know exactly why Michael Rosen of FoxNews was made the target of leak enquiry; it wasn't because he was leaking or in receipt of classified material from inside the National Security establishment.

It's because he was in receipt of INCORRECT Classified National Security Information, specifically related to the Yemeni Printer Cartridge plot in 2011 - someone with the CIA or other agency was briefing Rosen that this was a barely avoided Al-Quaeda bomb plot, that it was a serious threat and the Obama White House was trying to hush it up because it was 
"embarrassing"

This is the same crap, the same Right Wing talking points that characterised the Benghazi Media Blitz - that the White House was "denying" a link to "terrorism" because it was "embarrassing".

I didn't and still don't see how being the victim of, or perhaps rather subject to a terrorist attack is to be thought of as "embarrassing";

Obama is living proof of one thing - if they're trying to destroy you, you must be doing something right...

Rosen was a disinformation conduit for political Black Propaganda and someone, plenty of someones within CIA were helping him and feeding him false leads and fraudulent scoops to undermine the Administration's authority.

That is legitimately to be considered treasonous and responded to as such.

If an intelligence service is briefing against their Commander in Chief and lying about it, that needs to prompt a full-on, gloves-off, no-holds-barred response.

Hastings would have known that.

He was no rookie, and he was connected.



Original Article:
http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/questions-about-the-death-of-michael-hastings/48069


Questions about the Death of Michael Hastings



According to the following article from the Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed and Rolling Stone announced Hastings’ death on Tuesday:
Yet, as the very URL of that article makes clear, the coroner had yet to identify the body. Absent a positive identification, how were Buzzfeed and Rolling Stone confident enough to make that official announcement?  
The rest of this article will focus on a single newscast, which yields enough incoherent information to indicate that Hastings’ death was not the result of an accident. All subsequent still shots are taken from it, except for those from Google Maps.

First, according to all accounts, the car was a brand-new Mercedes.
No car will blow up from getting run into a tree, least of all a Mercedes. And yet:
rochellefran51
An eyewitness claims the blast was so intense that it shook her house and rattled her windows.
Those L.A. palm trees must be made of something more than wood. Hell, everything in Hollywood is fake anyway. Maybe those palm trees are made of some kind of plastic. Like C4.
Moving on, our next eyewitness is Hollywood producer Gary Grossman, whom we can thank for America’s Funniest Home Videos (1989):
grossman107 garygrossman109 engine113
He says the engine flew 50 or 60 yards and landed near a telephone pole. Other accounts say 100 feet. Who’s counting? How does any car, much less a Mercedes, hit a palm tree and explode with enough force to throw the engine ANYWHERE???
Vin Diesel would blush at a script like that. Not even a hack like Gary Grossman could conceive of writing it. What does that tell you?
For the record, here is Grossman’s address from the Hollywood White Pages:
grossmanaddress
546 North Highland Avenue. I decided to plop myself down there on Google Maps. Here is the scene of the “accident”, from left to right.
highland1 highland2 highland3
Do you see how SPACIOUS it is? LOOK at all that SPACE! And yet they say Hastings, in the darkness at 4:30 a.m., smashed his Mercedes into one of those toothpick palm trees with enough force to cause an explosion that sent the engine flying some distance, any distance at all. Impossible. Even in Hollyweird.
Even if a collision took place, was he blind drunk? If so, what are the odds he’d hit one of those trees? If he wasn’t blind drunk, then he was suicidal. Why would a suicidal man pick a palm tree in the middle of a residential neighborhood?
After Grossman’s testimony, we get this chilling eulogy from the talking head:
hastingsencomium130
Hastings will, likelypartially be remembered? That is very deliberately worded. Whoever had the bomb put in Hastings’ car hated him with the passion of a billion white-hot suns, and wanted to crap all over his accomplishments by delivering that insult unto his legacy.
And who has the power to make sure that the slight is worded just so, via the mainstream news?
I’ll give you a hint: the answer rhymes with “news”.
Still stumped? Oh well, take a look at who was first on the scene, except for Grossman:
jewishgroup
Here’s the first responders’ website:
Make sure to turn your speakers down before you click, or they will offend your eardrums as well as every other atom of your being.
For more on how cars do not turn into bombs upon impact with trees:
_____________
Tinfoil Hat Addendum:
They waited until Hastings was 33.



http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/michael-hastings-obviously-murdered-by-bomb-on-gas-tank/48071

Michael Hastings OBVIOUSLY murdered by bomb on gas tank



“For all 3 of those normal reasons, which account for virtually all car fires in modern cars, the fire would have started in the engine compartment, progressed slowly, and scorched the hell out of the paint before ever reaching the gas tank. That clean paint is the be all tell all, Michael Hastings was murdered, and the rest is detail.”  
UPDATE: Accident scenes switched. They swapped cars and locations to hide explosive damage, PROOF IS BELOW
UPDATE: It seems to me that Hastings may have been dead, his car parked there, and then blown up with him in it. This is because the flames are way too fresh for the car to have been there long, there is no impact damage where the car “struck the tree” to cause a gas tank explosion, and there are no flames on the road behind the car to indicate it was blown up while it was moving.
This appears to be a classic mafia hit, where you are killed and then burned in a car to hide the evidence. In this case, they obviously used a bomb to blow the gas tank as evidenced by the fact that the rear portion of the car is blown open and shredded with the rest of the car nicely intact, read the initial analysis below. And obviously, there was no high speed crash as reported by the lie factory. I will be working on this throughout the day.
It was perfect to have this happen on a late late Tuesday night, the quietest night of the week, one so quiet that many restaurants will not open. This would have helped ensure a proper setup with few witnesses.
Take a look at the following screen capture of this “crash” and observe a few things:
1. There is no impact damage to this car. The only damage there is BLOWN OUT in the back, not smashed in the front and it obviously missed the tree as it rolled to a stop. The front bumper is obscured by the tree, all the way to the tire, OOPS! .
2. This was a Mercedes, not a Pinto, which means it did not burst into flames on its own. One (seldom quoted) eyewitness said the car “exploded”. Interesting stuff.
3. Here is where it starts to get REALLY damning – LOOK AT THE FRONT PASSENGER DOOR. The paint is PERFECT yet the entire car is ablaze. This means that whoever photographed this was on scene right away, with a camera ready to film this in the wee hours of the morning, and nail it before the fire scorched the paint. HMMMMMM . . . . . .
4. Unlike what the so called single “eyewitness” report says about a high speed crash, the car did not impact a tree. The car did not impact ANYTHING. Look at where the car stopped. The car went off the road at a few miles an hour and missed the tree as it rolled to a stop.
5. There is no damage to the front of the car, it has no frontal impact damage AT ALL, it is blown out in the back and not crunched in from the front. HOW ON EARTH DID THAT BLOWN OUT BACK END HAPPEN?
AND FINALLY, THE MOST DAMNING THING OF ALL -
Here we have a car FULLY, and I mean FULLY in flames, from front to back, with NO SCORCHED PAINT because the flame is too new, which means the flame went from the back of the car to the front of the car instantaneously, at the same time it breached the floor and engulfed the passenger compartment before it had a chance to scorch anything, which means ONE THING – A BOMB ON THE GAS TANK, and a PHOTOGRAPHER READY TO SNAP THE PHOTO VERY EARLY ON. Even rapid car fires take time to progress through the car, and totally scorch the paint as they progress. Only a bomb could have blown gas through the floor to the inside of the passenger compartment and under the car all the way to the front of the engine compartment and lit the whole thing up at once. That’s the only explanation for the shiny paint while it sits completely engulfed in flames. That flame did not progress through that car, it was blown through it with force and the photographer was on the scene the moment it happened and bagged a perfect shot. I’d like to know how that happened – early morning walk?
I’d like to also mention something here – Sheriff Larry Dever was most likely killed by an ECM hack, because he was driving something big and needed a serious high speed accident. With me, when they tried, the incident was with a semi because I was driving a Geo Metro. And in the case of Michael Hastings, his car was such a safe one that you could not guarantee a death in an incident with a semi, and also could not guarantee a death in a high speed crash. I’d bet Hastings wore his seat belt all the time, and Dever did not, and the murderers would know these details before doing it. So to have Hastings definitely dead, kill him first, put him in his car, and blow the gas tank. It may have been possible to remote control the car to where it is with the engine computer via an ECU hack with the oh so convenient Federally mandated always on 3g cell connection to the heart of the car’s control computer with Hastings dead the entire time, and just blow the bomb when the car was where they wanted it. Mercedes are extremely advanced, and it is possible Hasting’s car was full drive by wire.

No matter how you slice this particular pie, a Mercedes is not just going to explode into flames without a little assistance. Car fires in new cars happen for three main reasons – running the engine out of oil, or running the engine out of coolant, or after an absolutely huge car mangling accident, having the hot side of the battery short out against the frame before it reaches the fuse panel. And for all 3 of those normal reasons, which account for virtually all car fires in modern cars, the fire would have started in the engine compartment, progressed slowly, and scorched the hell out of the paint before ever reaching the gas tank. That clean paint is the be all tell all, Michael Hastings was murdered, and the rest is detail.

Update: LOCATIONS CHANGED AND PHONY WRECK USED TO HIDE EXPLOSIVE DAMAGE FOR DAY TIME PHOTO OP

Here is what they want you to believe

But that is not consistent with this: And notice the trees.

All of these photos are from the same news video. One question – Why is there a sheet on the front of the car in the photo below? Why are the trees not the same as in the original photo above? Where is the blown out section at the rear of the car, which is CLEARLY visible in the original photo above?

The answer is obvious. THEY SWITCHED CARS AND LOCATIONS FOR THE DAY TIME PHOTO OP. Look at both of these pictures, you can clearly see the car is not the same. The location is not the same. On top of that, why is the car still there the NEXT DAY, 10 hours after the crash, when wrecks always get towed away within a couple hours, as soon as the flames are out? Why is the front end not mangled in the original photo, or even the tree for that matter?

For the day time photo op which should not have been possible anyway (it would have been towed long before) they used a different location with different trees, and interspersed the night time fire photos and the daytime shots with those of a different wreck to show pictures of a car that was not destroyed by a bomb. Just look and think, it is OBVIOUS.

This is so far out there that I had to double and triple confirm I did not screw this up, and indeed I did not, ALL of the photos are frame captures from the exact same news video. They TOTALLY blew it with this one.
This is as messed up as Woolwich.
A note to the setup crew: When you produce your garbage, it is going to be analyzed by a LOT of brilliant people, and if you are not careful your efforts won’t cut it. I am ashamed of you, surely the old world Russia or maybe East Berlin would have done this A LOT BETTER.
A note to the world: Take a look at what is here, and remember this the next time you see a bunch of hype about what a great free country America is. They do this to journalists and whistleblowers here.
For those of you who do not know, Michael Hastings was the Rolling Stone reporter who interviewed Assange, brought down General McChrystal, and did several other high level exposures of government corruption.

Takin' Care of Family Business

Plame





Plame also rolled her eyes at Cheney labeling Snowden a traitor, given the Bush administration's involvement in leaking her identity to columnist Robert Novak.

"The irony of people like Dick Cheney or Karl Rove whining and bemoaning the fact of the leak of intelligence -- given my history and certainly Dick Cheney's intimate involvement with the betrayal of my CIA identity -- is really something," she said.

Plame called for the resignation of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, saying that "as a former intelligence officer" she finds it "astounding" that upwards of 60 to 70 percent of the United States' intelligence budget is spent on private contractors.

9/11: Who Wants to Say it First....?




Wednesday, 19 June 2013

G8: Vladamir Knows What Time It Is....




Yes, most them are exactly the same.

Because they work for MI6 and aren't Jihadis.

The Anti-Bilderbergers: Brotha Steve Cokely


Both these men are now dead - presumed murdered.

Brotha Cokely began his journey on May 1st 1988 - as he names it "The Illuminati Holiday" when he was fired from his position as Special Assistant to Chicago Mayor Eugene Sawyer, bowing to intense pressure from the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) following his campaign to not honour the Columbus Day holiday in favour instead of a Black History Day in Chicago's urban and inner-city communities.

I quote The Enemy (Wikipedia):

"Steve Cokely was also a futurologist who commented extensively on water conservation, organic farming, and communal living. Cokely gave over 5,000 lectures on the topic of global warming and corporate conspiracies, the Trilateral Commission, The Bilderberg Group, Rothchilds, Rockefellers, Boule, etc.

Cokely's research delved into the history of Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers and other areas of African-American history.

Cokely lectured at many college campuses nationally and was also known for his conspiracy theories involving the Black Male elite organization known as the Sigma Pi Phi and the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr by the hands of Rev.Jesse Jackson and the C.I.A.



Cokely was assistant to the special committee on rules under Mayor Harold Washington. He gained notoriety when he served as special assistant to the former mayor of Chicago, Eugene Sawyer.



Cokely was criticized for teaching that Jewish doctors were using the AIDS virus in an attempted genocide against Africans. His comments created a nationally publicized controversy in 1988 and he was dismissed from his position as aide to Sawyer.



When in 1990 Illinois Governor James Thompson signed an agreement to open an Israeli Aircraft Industries plant in Rockford, Cokely was an outspoken opponent. He argued that Black leaders in Illinois should oppose Israeli war industries because of their military support for the Apartheid system in South Africa.


Billy Montgomery, "Activist links Illinois-Israeli plane project to South Africa", Michigan Citizen, 17 March 1990:

An agreement signed by Illinois Governor James Thompson to bring an Israeli aircraft plant to Rockford, is an insult to Blacks and the South African movement, according to a Chicago activist. 

'The problem with this deal is that the Israeli Aircraft Industry has an alliance with the South African military,' 

declarles Steve Cokely, who has mounted a campaign to alert the Black community to the potential dangers of the move."



Cokely gained the national spotlight again in 1996 after he was scheduled to speak at "Our Roots Run Deep", a Black History Month lecture series in New York City hosted by the Warner Music Group. 

Also scheduled were Al Sharpton, Conrad Muhammad, Jimmy Castor, Hannibal Lokumbe and Dick Gregory. The Jewish Defense Organization objected, organizing a call-in campaign to Warner Brothers and threatening a boycott. 

The Anti-Defamation League and the New York Post also objected to Cokely (as well as Sharpton and Muhammad) speaking at the event. Warner removed Cokely and Muhammad without issuing a press release.


ADL Press Release:


ADL "STUNNED" BY TIME WARNER DECISION TO FEATURE OUTSPOKEN RACISTS AT UPCOMING LECTURE SERIES
New York, NY, January 31, 1996...

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today said it was shocked to learn that Time Warner, Inc. will feature Chicago conspiracy theorist Steve Cokely and Nation of Islam minister Conrad Muhammad at the "Our Roots Run Deep" lecture series.

In a letter to Time Warner, Inc. Chairman, Gerald Levin, ADL National Director, Abraham H. Foxman, said, "While we commend you on your efforts to commemorate Black History Month, we are stunned that you consider Cokely and Muhammad to be appropriate speakers for a respectable lecture series." Mr. Foxman said that an invitation extended to Mr. Cokely and Mr. Muhammad to participate in the lecture, "implies that their outlandish, repugnant beliefs are credible and worthy of public attention."

In past lectures Steve Cokely has expressed the belief that the "AIDS epidemic is a result of doctors, especially Jewish ones, who inject the AIDS virus in blacks" and, at a recent appearance at a Virginia college, he told students that the white man comes from the filth and darkness of the caves and African Americans should try to "beat them back down to where they came from."

Mr. Foxman describes Conrad Muhammad's "similarly offensive" rhetoric as an echo of the "racist and anti-Semitic teachings of his mentor, Louis Farrakhan." Mr. Muhammad has said that, "Christians practice a dirty religion," has called Jews "bloodsuckers," and claimed that drugs, cancer and AIDS were introduced to the Black community in "white plots against Black people."

"Including these two men in your program does a disservice to the Black community," said Mr. Foxman, "because it suggests that the community would consider Cokely and Muhammad's views suitable for such a forum, when the majority of African Americans actually reject them."

The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.

from Paul Coker on Vimeo.


From 1915, The Leo Frank Case, and the birth of Black-Jewish Philanthropy, to Jerry Heller, NWA, Ice-T, Copkiller and beyond.

As narrated by Brotha Steve Cokely from Bridges and Boundaries, the Ford-Rockerfeller Foundations' own published history of Black-Jewish Relations in America.



Many would (rightly) say "How could they possibly tell?"
It goes without saying - this was not a suicide attempt.

This was a Murder.

But Rubin was quite obviously (ordinarily) protected.

This was a Made Guy.

What did he do and who did he piss off to end up in The Joint...?

"The fiery, controversial Rubin, who emigrated to the United States from Canada in 1961 and has been national chairman of the JDL since 1985, was arrested in December and charged along with another member, Earl Krugel, with the bomb plot on the testimony of an undercover informant.

Prosecutors say that Rubin and Krugel conspired with the informant to plant bombs at the King Fahd Mosque in the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City...


...and an office of Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican of Lebanese Christian descent."

Yep. That would do it.

The New Yorker has a profile on Darrell Issa, the republican who called Obama the most "corrupt" president in modern times, and the man who's intent on weakening the Obama administration in his new position as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

...............................

On March 15, 1972, three months after Issa allegedly stole Jay Bergey’s car and one month after he left the Army for the first time, Ohio police arrested Issa and his older brother, William, and charged them with stealing a red Maserati from a Cleveland showroom. 

The judge eventually dismissed the case.

While the Maserati case was pending, Issa went to college. Just before 11 P.M. on Friday, December 1, 1972, two police officers on patrol in the small town of Adrian noticed Issa driving a yellow Volkswagen the wrong way down a one-way street. 

The police pulled him over, and, as Issa retrieved the car registration, an officer saw something peculiar in the glove compartment. 

He searched it, and, according to the police report, found a .25-calibre Colt automatic inside a box of ammunition, along with a “military pouch” that contained “44 rounds of ammo and a tear gas gun and two rounds of ammo for it.” 

Issa was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. 

The policeman asked why he was armed. “He stated in Ohio you could carry a gun as long as you had a justifiable reason,” the report said. “His justifiable reason was for his car’s protection and his.” 

Issa pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of possession of an unregistered gun. 

He paid a small fine and was sentenced to six months’ probation.
..................................

Everyone has a past, but Issa's is filled with darkness. 

Other miscellaneous Issa facts: Issa's company brought us the Viper car security alarm, his mother was Mormon, his grandfather Lebanese, he's good at fixing things, he likes gadgets, he crashed into the back of a driver and left the scene, he has an image manager, he was suspected of burning down a factory of his company but not before removing a computer and upping the insurance:
.................................

Issa’s early business career was equally tumultuous. He started his car-alarm empire by acquiring the Steal Stopper brand in what was essentially a hostile takeover. 

A man named Joey B. Adkins owned the company, and Issa loaned him sixty thousand dollars. 

When Adkins was late on a payment, Issa went to court and foreclosed on the loan. 

Two days later, Adkins told me, Issa called and said that he wanted Adkins to come visit him at his new office. 

He gave Adkins the address of Steal Stopper. 

“I just took your company,” Adkins recalled him saying.

Once in control, Issa allegedly used an unusual method to fire Jack Frantz, an employee. Frantz told the Los Angeles Times that Issa came into his office, placed a box on the table, and opened it to reveal a gun. 

Issa told the paper, 

“Shots were never fired. If I asked Jack to leave, then I think I had every right to ask Jack to leave. . . . 

I don’t recall . I really don’t. I don’t think I ever pulled a gun on anyone in my life.”

Issa was soon suspected of doing something worse: burning down the factory. 

The initial notion that an electrical socket had caused the fire was challenged. The science of determining whether a fire was caused by arson can be flawed. 

But a fire-analysis report commissioned by the St. Paul insurance company, and dated October 19, 1982, a month after the incident, concluded that the fire was “incendiary.” 

The report cited “suspicious burn patterns,” such as “two separate major areas of origin,” and it said, “No accidental source of heating power was located at either of these two major areas of origin.” 

The manner in which stacks of cardboard boxes burned was inconsistent with an accidental fire. 

A flammable liquid appeared to have been poured over the boxes. 

The blue flames seen emanating from the roof were evidence, according to the investigators, of burning carbon monoxide that is produced when an accelerant like gasoline ignites. 

The black smoke was also a clue. “Such black smoke normally occurs in a fire only when a hydrocarbon is burning,” the report said. When investigators tested burn damage from inside the factory, they found “the same identical mixture of flammable hydrocarbons” in four samples taken from diverse locations.






Issa’s chief of staff, Dale Neugebauer, was wedged into a chair before a semicircular desk. He turned to welcome Kurt Bardella, Issa’s spokesman. 

On a couch sat Jason Scism, the congressman’s longtime legislative director, who had recently left to become a lobbyist for Research in Motion, the manufacturer of the BlackBerry.

Bardella removed his suit jacket, picked up four darts, and started tossing them with near-perfect aim at a well-used board on the wall. “The thing we discovered with Jason is that he’s unable to play darts sober,” Neugebauer said. “Kurt is actually a phenomenal dart player, but Jason, once he gets about six beers in him, is also phenomenal. They call him Dead-Eye.”



The conversation turned to Issa’s feats of electrical and mechanical engineering. During a recent interview with the Times, Issa repaired a reporter’s old-fashioned microcassette recorder. Years ago, Neugebauer recalled, Issa fixed a malfunctioning sound board in the middle of a talk-show interview.

An inveterate gadget junkie who was once the chairman of the Consumer Electronics Association, Issa often acts as the office’s I.T. manager. “If someone’s got a computer problem and he hears about it, he is, like, sitting down at your desk fixing it,” Neugebauer said. “That’s the one thing I always tell the staff: If your computer’s not working, do not tell him!”



Issa (pronounced “Ice-uh”) is fifty-seven years old and six feet tall, with a prominent nose and ink-black hair neatly parted on one side. 

He was giving a tour of his suite to two Republican congressmen and was in an adjoining room directing their attention to the ceiling. 

In each office, Issa has removed several ceiling tiles and replaced them with plastic panels depicting blue sky and wispy clouds, making you feel as if you were inside a Super Mario Bros. game. Next, he showed his visitors an alcove that had once been stuffed with filing cabinets. 

He told about a long-running battle he’d had with the Architect of the Capitol, who refused to allow him to remove the cabinets. 

Fed up with the bureaucracy, he simply instructed his staff to take them out, adding precious workspace. New members of Congress make pilgrimages to Issa’s office to see his modifications. 

He’s become something like the Martha Stewart of the Republican Party.



He pointed to a row of old filing cabinets hidden behind a curtain that he had not yet managed to take out. “Why?” one of the congressmen asked incredulously. Issa shook his head and began detailing a complicated clash involving sprinklers and a fire-code regulation.

The three men moved into Issa’s personal office, where Issa had chosen and arranged every piece of furniture and bit of décor. On one wall were sixteen framed patents under Issa’s name from his time as a car-alarm manufacturer, in the eighties and nineties. “Advanced embedded codehopping system having masterfixed code encryption,” one said. On the opposite wall, there was a silver-framed portrait of his paternal grandfather, who was born in Lebanon. Nearby hung an oil painting by the artist Andy Thomas depicting eight Republican Presidents sitting around a table playing poker. In another corner, a similar painting by the same artist showed eight Democrats. Issa pointed to the Presidents. “My committee’s job is to trust no Administration,” he said.

Next up was a glass case in which dozens of military coins were displayed, each bearing the insignia of a different unit of the armed forces. Issa pulled a coin out of a desk drawer, prompting one of the other congressmen to take a coin from his pocket. “Oh, very nice! Yours is bigger than mine!” Issa said. The three men laughed. “I don’t know why people think size doesn’t matter!”

Issa’s scheduler entered the room and broke up the fun. “We’re behind schedule, I’m sorry,” she announced. Issa called out after the departing congressmen, “You can have your office just like mine, but you can’t have my office!”



Darrell Edward Issa grew up outside Cleveland, the second of six children. “Cleveland’s a great place when you’re a kid,” he likes to joke. “You hardly ever get sunburned, without the sun shining.” 

His mother was a Mormon and his father, who was Eastern Orthodox, worked as a truck salesman. The big event of his youth was moving from a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in an ethnically Hungarian and Italian suburb to a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the predominantly Jewish suburb of Cleveland Heights. 

“You just can’t have eight people in one john,” he said. “I grew up working for a rabbi, in a Jewish Boy Scout group, in which the services were on Saturdays, going to bar mitzvahs galore, learning that gefilte fish ain’t all that good, and being immersed in that society and not really thinking of myself, defining myself, as an Arab. We defined ourselves as: ‘Hey, we’re like Danny Thomas, we’re Lebanese.’ ”