FBI Investigation Documents of IRS Scandal

Reveal Top Washington IRS Officials Knew About Targeting of “Tea Party” Groups Two Years Before Disclosing it to Congress and Public

FBI interview with IRS senior official reveals: “he thought the cases were being pulled based upon political affiliations”

 

WASHINGTON (JW) – Judicial Watch today released 294 pages of new Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) “302” documents revealing that top Washington IRS officials, including Lois Lerner and Holly Paz, knew that the agency was specifically targeting “Tea Party” and other conservative organizations two full years before disclosing it to Congress and the public. An FBI 302 document contains detailed narratives of FBI agent investigations. The Obama Justice Department and FBI investigations into the Obama IRS scandal resulted in no criminal charges.

The FBI 302 documents confirm the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) 2013 report that said, “Senior IRS officials knew that agents were targeting conservative groups for special scrutiny as early as 2011.” Lerner did not reveal the targeting until May 2013, in response to a planted question at an American Bar Association conference. The new documents reveal that then-acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller actually wrote Lerner’s response: “They used names like Tea Party or Patriots and they selected cases simply because the applications had those names in the title. That was wrong, that was absolutely incorrect, insensitive, and inappropriate.”

The FBI documents also reveal that IRS officials stated that the agency was targeting conservative groups because of their ideology and political affiliation in the summer of 2011. According to one senior tax law specialist, “The case seemed to be pulled because of the applicant’s political affiliation and screening is not supposed to occur that way … [Redacted] said he thought the cases were being pulled based upon political affiliations.” And IRS senior official Nancy Marks, appointed by Miller to conduct an internal investigation stated, “Cincinnati was categorizing cases based on name and ideology, not just activity.”

Judicial Watch obtained the new documents through a federal court order in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v Department of Justice (No. 1:14-cv-01239)).

According to the FBI documents, Paz and others were informed in the late spring and summer of 2011 that Cincinnati agents were using “BOLO” (Be On the Look Out) briefing guides that instructed them to be “looking at cases using the Tea Party term.” The IRS failed to reveal such targeting until the ABA conference in May 2013:

The FBI reports that in its interview with an unidentified IRS Senior Tax Law Specialist:

She read how the case was screened and it was not because of the organization’s activity. The case seemed to be pulled because of the applicant’s political affiliation and screening is not supposed to occur that way.… She wanted to alert the managers about the way the cases were being pulled…. [Redacted] said he thought the cases were being pulled based upon political affiliations.… [Redacted] then went to tell [Redacted] said he would follow up on the issue and would let HOLLY PAZ know this was possibly occurring. This occurred in the mid to late March or April 2011 timeframe.

***

The cases were labeled as Tea Party cases. The screening sheets said the two cases were pulled because of the names and political affiliations.

The FBI reports that in its interview with unidentified IRS Technical Advisor who reported directly to Lerner:

[Redacted] attended a meeting in the summer of 2011. She was not invited, but she was talking to LERNER about something else in the office when LERNER mentioned that it would be interesting for her to attend … Only people from Washington, D.C. were in the room, to include HOLLY PAZ … At the meeting, it was disclosed that one of the ways Cincinnati was looking for cases was using the “Tea Party” term. They were calling the body of cases involving political activity “Tea Party” cases. The concern was that the IRS had put a label on the cases that would be problematic.

The FBI reports that in its interview with an unidentified IRS Acting Manager of Exempt Organizations Technical (EOT):

In his meeting concerning the briefing in mid-June [2011] [Redacted] met with EOT and EOG [Exempt Organizations Group] staffs and PAZ…. They showed PAZ the briefing paper and the use of the Tea Party term. PAZ was the highest ranking person at the meeting.… Somebody said they may not want to use Tea Party as a labeling term. [Redacted] had recognized they may not want to use the term Tea Party when they were doing the briefing paper, but his plan was to raise the issue with PAZ at the briefing. He does not recall PAZ’s reaction.

According to a ten-page section of the documents containing the FBI interviews with IRS Senior Technical Advisor Nancy Marks, in the spring of 2012, Miller asked Marks to “look into how these 501 (c)(4) cases were being handled and find out what the problems were.” After investigations in Washington and Cincinnati, Marks reported the following to Miller in May 2012 according to the FBI:

It was not until much later that MARKS saw information that [Redacted] was only looking for Tea Party cases…. The BOLO [Be on the Lookout] showed that at various points the criteria called for “Tea Party” name, and then later the ideology…. She told him [Miller, on May 3, 2012] that Cincinnati was categorizing cases based on name and ideology, not just activity. When MARKS told MILLER this, he threw his pencil across the room and said, “Oh shit.”

The FBI documents also reveal that the FBI investigated why Holly Paz, the IRS Acting Director of Rulings and Agreements in 2011, sat in on numerous of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) interviews with lower level IRS employees and if her presence improperly influenced the employees’ responses to investigators’ questions. The documents repeatedly state, “Other than the auditors, the only person present during the [Redacted] interview was HOLLY PAZ.”

The documents contain two separate lengthy FBI interviews with Lois Lerner, the first in October 2013 and the second in July 2014. Both interviews came after Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment constitutional right against self-incrimination before the House Oversight Committee in May 2013. By answering questions under oath in her FBI interviews, Lerner seemed to undermine her earlier Fifth Amendment-based refusal to testify to Congress, since witnesses generally cannot invoke the right in one instance and not another. The House voted to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress for her refusal to testify.

And the FBI 302 documents also contain an interview in which Miller reveals that former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman very likely misled Congress in his March 22, 2012, testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee when he said, “There is absolutely no targeting.” According to the FBI report on the Miller interview, “In February or March, MILLER talked to SHULMAN about the development letters.” The “development letters” were letters sent by the IRS primarily to targeted conservative groups seeking what the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) later termed “inappropriate” information about websites and donors.

“These new smoking-gun documents show Obama FBI and Justice Department had plenty of evidence suggesting illegal targeting, perjury, and obstruction of justice,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Both the FBI and Justice Department collaborated with the Lois Lerner and the IRS to try to prosecute and jail Barack Obama’s political opponents. These FBI documents show the resulting compromised investigation looked the other way when it came to Obama’s IRS criminality.”

Full List of Hillary’s Planned Tax Hikes

Hillary Clinton has made clear she intends to dramatically raise taxes on the American people if elected.









 

WASHINGTON (ATR) - She has proposed an income tax increase, a business tax increase, a death tax increase, a capital gains tax increase, a tax on stock trading, an "Exit Tax" and more (see below). Her planned net tax increase on the American people is at least $1 trillion over ten years, based on her campaign’s own figures.

Hillary has endorsed several tax increases on middle income Americans, despite her pledge not to raise taxes on any American making less than $250,000. She has said she would be fine with a payroll tax hike on all Americans, she has endorsed a steep soda tax, endorsed a 25% national gun tax, and most recently, her campaign manager John Podesta said she would be open to a carbon tax. It’s no wonder that when asked by ABC's George Stephanopoulos if her pledge was a "rock-solid" promise, she slipped and said the pledge was merely a “goal.” In other words, she's going to raise taxes on middle income Americans.

Hillary’s formally proposed $1 trillion net tax increase consists of the following:

Income Tax Increase – $350 Billion: Clinton has proposed a $350 billion income tax hike in the form of a 28 percent cap on itemized deductions.

Business Tax Increase -- $275 Billion: Clinton has called for a tax hike of at least $275 billion through undefined business tax reform, as described in a Clinton campaign document.

“Fairness” Tax Increase -- $400 Billion: According to her published plan, Clinton has called for a tax increase of “between $400 and $500 billion” by “restoring basic fairness to our tax code.” These proposals include a “fair share surcharge,” the taxing of carried interest capital gains as ordinary income, and a hike in the Death Tax.

But there are even more Clinton tax hike proposals not included in the tally above. Her campaign has failed to release specific details for many of her proposals. The true Clinton net tax hike figure is likely much higher than $1 trillion.

For instance:

Capital Gains Tax Increase -- Clinton has proposed an increase in the capital gains tax to counter the “tyranny of today’s earnings report.” Her plan calls for a byzantine capital gains tax regime with six rates. Her campaign has not put a dollar amount on this tax increase.

Tax on Stock Trading -- Clinton has proposed a new tax on stock trading. Costs associated with this new tax will be borne by millions of American families that hold 401(k)s, IRAs and other savings accounts. The tax increase would only further burden markets by discouraging trading and investment. Again, no dollar figure for this tax hike has been released by the Clinton campaign.

“Exit Tax” – Rather than reduce the extremely high, uncompetitive corporate tax rate, Clinton has proposed a series of measures aimed at inversions including an “exit tax” on income earned overseas. The term “exit tax” is used by the campaign itself. Her campaign document describing this proposal says it will raise $80 billion in tax revenue, but claims some of the $80 billion will be plowed into tax relief. How much? The campaign doesn't say.

This proposal completely fails to address the underlying causes behind inversions: The U.S. 39% corporate tax rate (35% federal rate plus an average state rate of 4%) and our "worldwide" system of taxation, which imposes tax on all American earnings worldwide. The average corporate rate in the developed world is 25%. Thirty-one of thirty-four developed countries have cut their corporate tax rate since 2000. The U.S. has not. Hillary's plan moves in the wrong direction.

ATR is tracking Clinton’s full tax record at its dedicated website here  

In Secret Battle, Surveillance Court Reined in FBI Use of Information Obtained From Phone Calls

For over 10 years, the country’s surveillance court intervened to limit the FBI’s ability to act on sensitive information that it collected while monitoring phone calls.
 
By: Jenna McLaughlin

 






 

WASHINGTON (TheIntercept) - Beginning over a decade ago, the country’s surveillance court intervened to limit the FBI’s ability to act on some sensitive information that it collected while monitoring phone calls.

The wrangling between the FBI and the secret court is contained in previously undisclosed documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC. The documents, part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, were shared with The Intercept.

The documents reveal that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) told the FBI several times between 2005 and 2007 that using some incidental information it collected while monitoring communications in an investigation — specifically, numbers people punch into their phones after they’ve placed a call — would require an explicit authorization from the court, even in an emergency.

“The newly obtained summaries are significant because they show the power that the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] has to limit expansive FBI surveillance practices,” Alan Butler, an attorney for EPIC, wrote in an email to The Intercept.

Additionally, The Intercept independently obtained sections of the FBI’s 2011 Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide describing how the FBI currently deals with information it obtains after getting a court order for what’s called a “pen register,” or “trap and trace” on a target — a capability built into the phone lines that records incoming and outgoing phone numbers for a particular phone. The 2011 guide is currently public but heavily redacted.

The Operations Guide, in addition to shedding light on how the FBI uses pen registers, reveals that the surveillance court’s pushback more than a decade ago has become internal FBI policy.

During an investigation, the FBI is often interested in who a target is talking to — what calls they make and receive, and where those calls physically originate.

By simply telling a judge the information is “relevant,” the FBI can demand that a phone company, or email or other online provider, immediately hand over any and all “telephone numbers, email addresses, and other dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information.” That information can sometimes include locational data. They don’t need to notify the target or demonstrate probable cause that he or she committed a crime to get it.

But the FBI’s monitoring can end up getting more information than just phone numbers, though pen-register and trap-and-trace orders are not intended to get any “content” that would provide insight into the substance or subject of a communication.

For example, the numbers people punch into the phone after making a call can reveal financial or personal information — like a credit card number, a social security number, a PIN, a prescription number, or any other type of response via automated telephone prompts. The “term of art” for this information is “post-cut-through dialed digits.”

The FBI in the 2011 Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide has described the digits dialed after someone makes a call as “content.”

Following the release of documents by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, many have described the secretive court as a “rubber stamp” because it rarely rejects a surveillance request. But there’s nuance in what the judges have challenged or modified in response to requests over the years.

Between July and December in 2005, the surveillance court approved pen registers and trap-and-trace devices to target “at least 138” people.

However, one judge started asking the FBI more probing questions about what exactly it did with post-cut through dialing digits it “incidentally” obtained with those orders — launching what Butler describes as an “open secret” fight between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and FBI over the information. The judge’s request for a “memorandum of law” appears in the July 2006 Department of Justice report to Congress on its use of FISA pen registers, obtained by EPIC. Some of that pushback was documented by Wired in 2008.

In May 2006, the government told the court that it had the authority to collect that sensitive information, and would “in some cases … specifically seek authority for secondary orders requiring a service provider to provide all dialing, routing, addressing or signaling information transmitted by a target telephone, which, in light of technological constraints, may include content and non-content digits alike,” the report continues. (According to the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the FBI agent requesting the pen register has to specifically ask for any additional dialing information following the first nine or 10 digits — it isn’t automatic.)

The government also insisted it wouldn’t actually use that information in an investigation — unless there’s an emergency, that is, to prevent death, serious physical injury, or “harm to national security,” though it’s never made explicit what exactly that means.

Between January and June in 2006, the surveillance court modified some of the FBI’s applications to stop it from using that information without additional permission, no matter the urgency.

The court “had made modifications to the government’s proposed pen register orders,” reads the biannual report to Congress obtained by EPIC. “Although the [FISA Court] has authorized the government to record and decode all post-cut-through digits dialed by the targeted telephone, it has struck the language specifically authorizing the government to make affirmative investigative use of possible content” unless permission is specifically granted by the court.

The surveillance court wasn’t the only judicial body rejecting the FBI’s requests to hold on to the additional dialing information. In July 2006, a magistrate judge in Texas denied an application for a pen register because filtering technology would not eliminate the additional content information. That led then-chief judge of the surveillance court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, to ask the government to respond to the Texas court, and explain how it might impact decisions in foreign intelligence investigations.

The government said the court should basically ignore the decision — and take note of new revisions to the USA Patriot Act, which said the government could obtain “noncontent” dialing information. (Because there isn’t technology that can reliably separate out content from noncontent when it comes to this type of dialing information, the law basically allows for all of it, the government argued.)

In 2006, the court had not yet written a formal decision on whether or not the government could keep getting this information — let alone use it in an investigation.

But “most” of the judges continued to strike the “emergency” language from the FBI’s requests, despite the government continuing to insist that “the proposed exception is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment” because its use is so rare.

By August 2006, the court asked the FBI to produce an entire report on how the dialing information obtained through pen registers is stored and kept in its databases. By 2007, the court reported that it modified 18 different government requests out of 98 within six months.

The secret court continued to delete language that would allow the government to use the post-cut-through dialed digits in an emergency — and added a time limit on when it could come back to ask to use that content.

By 2011, the court’s resistance appeared to enter into formal policy, according to the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide section obtained by The Intercept. The FBI, the guide states, can never in these cases use information like credit card numbers or social security numbers obtained after dialing a phone number, “even in cases of emergency.”

However, that exception still applies in criminal cases, according to the 2011 Operations Guide. “In an emergency,” information obtained from the numbers people dial “may be used as necessary in criminal investigations to prevent immediate danger of death, serious physical injury, or harm to national security,” reads the section on post-cut through dialing digits. And if the target is calling a bank, for example — the FBI cannot get the account number from the call, but it can use the call as a lead and subpoena the bank for that information instead.

Butler points out that despite the FBI and the secret court’s fight over the information, it is basically impossible to tell whether that information triggered investigative leads agents wouldn’t have otherwise had without the pen register.

The FBI declined to comment on the previously redacted portions of the 2011 Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide obtained by The Intercept as well as the FOIA documents obtained by EPIC.

“The Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide establishes the FBI’s internal rules and procedures, and describes the FBI’s authority to use specific investigative tools as determined through the Constitution, U.S. statutes, executive orders, and the AG Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations,” Chris Allen, an FBI spokesperson, wrote in an email. “These rules are audited and enforced through a rigorous compliance mechanism designed to ensure that FBI assessments and investigations are subject to responsible review and approval.”

Merkel admits EU is being RAVAGED BY TERROR but says Germany should welcome MORE refugees

CHANCELLOR Angela Merkel has said Germany is facing a “major” threat from terrorism but that this should not stop refugees being welcomed to Europe.

By: Tom Batchelor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The German leader, who cut short her summer holiday to speak after a string of Islamist attacks rocked the country, said the entire continent was being “ravaged” by terrorism.

She described recent attacks in Ansbach, Wurzburg and Munich as “horrifying and depressing” but insisted Germany would not turn its back on people fleeing the Middle East. 

In the wake of the killings, Mrs Merkel said Germany now needed a better “early warning system” to spot radicalised Muslims among the newly-arrived migrants.

She said the central government would “redouble its efforts” against the threat, increasing staff numbers and resources for security services.

She said: "The terrorists want to make us lose sight of what is important to us, break down our cohesion and sense of community as well as inhibiting our way of life, our openness and our willingness take in people who are in need.
"They see hatred and fear between cultures and they see hatred and fear between religions. 
“We stand decisively against that.”

She added that Germany would "stick to our principles" and "give shelter to those who deserve it".

Economists have warned that Germany's shrinking population could hit growth and many now believe Mrs Merkel's fondness for large-scale migration is aimed at ensuring the country maintains its working-age population. 
However, she also hinted that Germany would act in the future to limit the numbers that were arriving at its borders. 

Asked if reducing the flow of migrants was a priority, Mrs Merkel responded: “Yes of course this is one of my objectives, immigration from last year was marked by a illegal immigration, human trafficking, and this is not something that we can accept. 

“Thousands die in the Mediterranean and we have said two things: first that we have to legalise the flow and that is why the voluntary agreement with Turkey contains humanitarian quotas, and also…a country like Germany, as strong as Germany, can not continue to take in such a flow of migrants and we have to limit the numbers. 

“We say that the refugees can lead a good life close to their homes and that is why three billion euros are earmarked for refugees in Turkey. 

“This is our responsibility, i am convinced of that. 

But she continued: “I am not going to say that we are going to welcome any more refugees, but we have to work hard to combat the root causes.”

Speaking defiantly amid the escalating poltiical and security crisis in Germany, Mrs Merkel repeated several times the mantra "We can do this" after spelling out the "major litmus test" that the country was now facing.

She also spoke of speeding up the process of sending home failed asylum seekers, after it emerged the Syrian migrant who detonated explosives near a music festival in Ansbach was refused the right to stay in Germany. 

In an admission of the dangers the migrant crisis has posed to security in Europe, Mrs Merkel also said that attacks in Paris last November was proof that terrorist fighters were being smuggled in among the flow of people arriving from the Middle East and Africa.

She said the attacks had “mocked” Germany and damaged the reputation of the majority of refugees in the country, who are law-abiding.

The German government will now look to take “additional measures” to counter the jihadi threat, although Mrs Merkel refused to be rushed into outlining exactly what these might be. 

Germany must conduct a comprehensive review before taking any steps in response to the attacks, she said. 

Mrs Merkel added: “These events create major concern and fears, but fears cannot inform us in political action and I will do my utmost to prevent these attacks from happening again. 
“We are not the only ones [affected by terrorism]. Governments need to live up to their responsibilities to restore confidence.”

A spate of attacks since July 18 has left 15 people dead - including four attackers - and dozens injured.

Two assailants, a Syrian asylum seeker and a refugee from either Pakistan or Afghanistan, had links to Islamist militancy, officials say.
The attacks have burst any illusions in Germany that the country is immune to attacks like those claimed by ISIS in neighbouring France.

 

 
Critics of Mrs Merkel say her refugee policy is at fault, after more than a million migrants entered Germany in the past year.

Was the CIA behind the failed Turkish coup?

Turkey's failed coup was financed by the CIA and directed by a retired U.S. army general using a cell in Afghanistan, said one Turkish pro-government newspaper. CIA agents used an island hotel off Istanbul as a nerve center for the plot, said another.
 

 By:  Michael Georgy and Mert Ozkan

ISTANBUL/ANKARA |  (Reuters) - Turks are churning out conspiracy theories about who helped orchestrate the abortive military coup that nearly toppled President Tayyip Erdogan, with the United States - a close NATO ally but a traditional object of suspicion - top of the list.

"The coup was directed by this man," said a front-page headline in the pro-government Yeni Safak newspaper, alongside a photo of retired U.S. Army General John F. Campbell, the last commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan and before that the 34th vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army.

It said the failed coup had been financed by the CIA via Nigeria's United Bank for Africa (UBA.LG), and that two Afghan-based Turkish generals detained in Dubai on Tuesday were part of Campbell's cell of plotters.

UBA on Wednesday denied involvement and said the accusations were "clearly false". Campbell told the Wall Street Journal that the allegations were "absolutely ridiculous" and Washington has dismissed claims of U.S. involvement as absurd.

Erdogan has blamed U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen for masterminding the attempted coup, which killed more than 240 people as rogue soldiers commandeered fighter jets, helicopters and tanks, and has called on Washington to extradite him.

Erdogan accuses Gulen of building a "parallel structure" in the judiciary, education system, media and military in a bid to overthrow him, a charge the 75-year-old cleric denies. A poll on Tuesday showed two thirds of Turks believe Gulen was behind the coup plot, though only 3.8 percent blamed the United States.

Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has said any country that stands by the cleric would be considered at war with Turkey. Labour Minister Suleyman Soylu said a day after the coup bid that it was clear "America is behind it", though Erdogan's spokesman later said he had spoken "in the heat of the moment".

Washington has said it will only extradite Gulen if Turkey provides evidence of wrongdoing.

For Erdogan's fervent supporters, such apparent reluctance is further evidence of U.S. complicity.

"I know that the United States has a finger in this. I know that this is a play put on by the United States, Israel and the United Kingdom," said Ahmet Demirci, among the dozens of people to have gathered in solidarity outside Erdogan's palace night after night since the July 15 coup attempt.

"That dishonest man, Fethullah Gulen is their pawn."

Older Turks recall past coups. Many see evidence that the United States backed a 1980 coup, at the height of the Cold War, citing reports that the CIA station chief in Ankara cabled Washington to say "our boys did it".

Mystery still shrouds modern Turkey's first coup in 1960 which overthrew a pro-American prime minister but was led by a U.S.-trained officer.

One newspaper published a photograph of a hotel it identified as a nerve center for CIA agents it said helped hatch the coup plot this month.

"The CIA was at work in this hotel that night," the headline in the pro-government Sabah newspaper said, above a photo of the Splendid Hotel on Buyukada, the largest of a group of islands in the Marmara sea just off Istanbul.

The paper said a group of 17 people, mostly foreigners, checked in at the hotel on the day of the coup attempt. It said the hotel was used as a headquarters for the British army during its occupation of Istanbul in 1919.

CONSOLIDATING POWER

A successful overthrow of Erdogan, who has run the country of about 80 million people since 2003, could have sent Turkey spiraling into conflict. The intrigue in the aftermath is helping justify a wide crackdown, analysts say, with more than 60,000 soldiers, police, civil servants and other officials detained, suspended or under investigation.

"This has helped him strengthen his position," said Andrew Finkel, a journalist and political analyst based in Turkey since 1989. "He is doing what he does best, consolidating power."

Conspiracy theories have spiced up Turkish crises for decades amid the struggle between Islamists and secularists to shape the country, with superpower America often accused of fuelling the fire. Erdogan blamed foreign powers for stirring up nationwide anti-government protests three years ago.

Sometimes the perceived enemy is less formidable.

During contentious local elections in 2014, seen as a referendum on Erdogan's rule, power cuts disrupted the count. Turkey's energy minister blamed a cat, saying it had walked into a transformer unit, drawing ridicule from social media users who portrayed a "cat lobby" threatening the government.

In 2013, authorities detained a bird on suspicion it was spying for Israel, but freed it after X-rays showed it was not embedded with surveillance equipment, local newspapers said.

Nevertheless, Turks take their conspiracies seriously and the latest tensions are providing fresh material.

Gulen lives in a secluded compound in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. But Erdogan has good reason to worry about the reclusive cleric's reach inside Turkey.

In 2013, his followers in the police and judiciary opened a corruption probe into business associates of Erdogan, then prime minister, who denounced the investigations as a foreign plot.

"Why don't they hand him over? Why do they keep making insinuations? He (Gulen) lives there. Don't you think this is an apparent indicator? This is the impression people have," said Erdogan supporter Ayhan Onkibar outside the presidential palace.

"Why does he live in the United States? These are details we notice."

A generation of poisoning with gender-bender chemicals has created a new class of youth who fail to

The success of the globalists in perverting the minds of Western youth is evident in a new study by the Innovation Group, which found that most people between the ages of 13 and 20 – what the mainstream media and social engineers have dubbed "Generation Z" – no longer believe in strictly-defined gender identities like "male" and "female."

 

By: Ethan A. Huff

 

WASHINGTON (NaturalNews) - These gender "binaries," which are really just the pronouns humanity has been using since the beginning of time to differentiate between individuals with external reproductive equipment versus internal reproductive equipment, are now "old-fashioned" to the youth of today, which the study found are more comfortable than previous generations using gender-neutral (and grammatically incorrect) pronouns like "they" and "them" to describe a single, genderless individual.

A majority of Gen-Z respondents, 52 percent, indicated that they aren't completely heterosexual, while 35 percent – an 11 percent increase compared to "Millennials" – admit that they fall somewhere along the spectrum of bisexuality. This spectrum identification for sexuality is further reflected in the more than 38 percent of Gen-Zers who claim they don't believe gender defines a person.

As far as the types of clothes and accessories they buy, 13–20 year-olds are much more fluid when it comes to sticking to a gender norm. Only 44 percent of Gen-Zers buy clothes exclusively designed for their own gender, while an astounding 70 percent say they support the idea that bathrooms become "genderless," welcoming anyone and everyone who wants to use them.

Gen-Z is likewise more accepting of others who don't identify by any specific gender pronoun, or who identify by "non-traditional" gender pronouns like "ze;" 74 percent of Gen-Zers fall into this category compared to just 62 percent of older Millennials between the ages of 21–34. But the one thing on which both Gen-Zers and Millennials agree? More people than ever are experimenting with their gender identity.

A 16-year-old pansexual (genderless) student from Nebraska by the name of "Madeleine" told VICE that "it" (for lack of a better pronoun) learned more about gender and identity from its peers than from older people, and that "agender," or no gender at all, is a young people's phenomenon.

"I also notice that people my age are more open to gender and sexuality being fluid and subject to change," Madeleine told VICE. "For a while, I identified as asexual, but as time went on and I changed, I realized that maybe I wasn't that way anymore."

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are eliminating sex, gender
This lack of clarity about biological identity is a product of two things: relentless media propaganda and chemical poisoning with gender-bending chemicals found in plastics, herbicides and pesticides sprayed on our food, and environmental pollution. Chemicals like bisphenol-A (BPA), glyphosate, soy and other hormone-disruptors are altering human genes and producing next-generation "robot" humans with no gender, and thus no identity.

It's sad, really, because it could have been prevented through reforms that protect the people rather than the chemical and drug industries that produce these toxins. Food, water, air: It's all tainted with endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) that, more often than not, mimic the effects of estrogen, meaning they deplete testosterone and create hormone imbalances that not only confuse children, but also affect their growth and development.

Young girls are becoming more "masculine," while young boys are becoming more "feminine" – an alchemy of the two sexes both physically and mentally that's changing the landscape of culture and civilization.

Administration’s Syrian Refugee Target Passes 2/3 Mark; 0.3 Percent Christians

Of the July arrivals, 1,501 (99.0 percent) were Sunnis, and three (0.19 percent) were Christians. The other 11 (0.72 percent) were other Muslims.

 

By: Patrick Goodenough

 

 

WASHINGTON (XX) - With ten weeks to go until the end of the fiscal year, the Obama administration continues to admit Syrian refugees at an accelerated pace, and has now exceeded two-thirds of President Obama’s target of 10,000 by September 30.

 

The proportion of Christians among those resettled continues to languish below half of one percent, while other non-Sunnis account for just over one percent.

As of Monday, 1,515 Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war in their homeland had been admitted since the beginning of July, and a total of 6,726 since FY 2016 began on October 1, according to State Department Refugee Processing Center data.

Of the July arrivals, 1,501 (99.0 percent) were Sunnis, and three (0.19 percent) were Christians. The other 11 (0.72 percent) were other Muslims.

Of the 6,726 total Syrian refugee arrivals since the beginning of FY 2016, 6,625 (98.4 percent) were Sunnis and 23 (0.3 percent) were Christians – including 15 described simply as “Christian,” five Catholics, two Orthodox and one Greek Orthodox adherent.

The remaining 78 (1.1 percent) comprised 49 refugees described in the data simply as “Moslem,” 17 Shi’a Muslims, 10 Yazidis, one of “no religion” and one “other religion.”

To reach its 10,000 target by September 30, the administration will need to admit average of 1,597 each month for July, August and September. With a week of this month to go, and 1,515 admitted as of early Monday, the July target looks to be easily within reach.

Of the 1,515 refugees from Syria admitted since the beginning of July, 363 (23.9 percent) are men between the ages of 14 and 50, another 322 (21.2 percent) are women aged 14-50, and 784 (51.7 percent) are children aged under 14 – 371 boys and 413 girls.

Their ethnic breakdown is: 1,472 Arabs, 22 Kurds, 18 Turkmen and three Armenians.

Of the 6,726 admitted since in FY 2016, 1,661 (24.6 percent) are men 14-50, while 1,537 (22.8 percent) are women aged 14-50. Another 3,240 (48.1 percent) are children aged under 14, made up of 1,658 boys and 1,582 girls.

Of the 6,726, 6,159 are Arabs, 497 are Kurds, 49 are Turkmen, four are Turks, three are Armenian, two are Syriac, one is Assyrian and 11 are “other.”

The 6,726 Syrian refugees have been resettled across the nation, with the largest groups going to Michigan (782), California (603), Arizona (512), Texas (471), Pennsylvania (429), Illinois (421), New York (367), Florida (329), North Carolina (312) and Ohio (305).

Screening concerns

Obama has rejected Republican concerns about security vetting for Syrian refugees, saying that “they are subjected to the most rigorous process conceivable.”

“There is an entire apparatus of all of our law enforcement agencies and the center that we use for countering terrorism to check and ensure that a refugee is not admitted that might cause us harm,” he said shortly after the Paris terror attack last November prompted fresh concerns about terrorist groups using refugee programs to infiltrate operatives into the West.

The administration says the process takes an average of 18-24 months, although an accelerated effort launched last spring aimed to reduce that to around three months in order to meet the president’s 10,000 target.

Last October FBI Director James Comey raised questions about the difficulties involved in checking backgrounds of refugee status applicants from Syria, telling a House Homeland Security Committee hearing “we can only query against that which we have collected.”

“If someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interests reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home but we’re not going to – there’ll be nothing to show up, because we have no record of that person,” Comey said. “You can only query what you’ve collected.”

Americans are throwing away billions of dollars worth of food

Americans throw away almost as much food as they eat because of a “cult of perfection,” deepening hunger and poverty and inflicting a heavy toll on the environment.

By:  Suzanne Goldenberg

 



 

ACROSS THE U.S. (Reveal) - Vast quantities of fresh produce grown in the U.S. are left in the field to rot, fed to livestock or hauled directly from the field to landfills because of unrealistic and unyielding cosmetic standards, according to official data and interviews with dozens of farmers, packers, truckers, researchers, campaigners and government officials.

From the fields and orchards of California to the population centers of the East Coast, farmers and others on the food distribution chain say high-value and nutritious food is being sacrificed to retailers’ demand for unattainable perfection.

We follow up on what’s happened since we first told you about the complicated networks of labor, trade and regulation that carry meat, produce and other products to our tables.

“It’s all about blemish-free produce,” said Jay Johnson, who ships fresh fruit and vegetables from North Carolina and central Florida. “What happens in our business today is that it is either perfect or it gets rejected. It is perfect to them, or they turn it down. And then you are stuck.”

Food waste often is described as a “farm-to-fork” problem. Produce is lost in fields, warehouses, packaging, distribution, supermarkets, restaurants and fridges.

By one government tally, about 60 metric tons of produce worth about $160 billion is wasted by retailers and consumers every year – one-third of all foodstuffs.

But that is just a “downstream” measure. In more than two dozen interviews, farmers, packers, wholesalers, truckers, food academics and campaigners described the waste that occurs “upstream:” scarred vegetables regularly abandoned in the field to save the expense and labor involved in harvest. Or left to rot in a warehouse because of minor blemishes that do not necessarily affect freshness or quality.

When added to the retail waste, it takes the amount of food lost close to half of all produce grown, experts say.

“I would say at times there is 25 percent of the crop that is just thrown away or fed to cattle,” said Wayde Kirschenman, whose family has been growing potatoes and other vegetables near Bakersfield, California, since the 1930s. “Sometimes it can be worse.”

“Sunburned” or darker-hued cauliflower was plowed over in the field. Table grapes that did not conform to a wedge shape were dumped. Entire crates of precut orange wedges were directed to landfills. In June, Kirschenman wound up feeding a significant share of his watermelon crop to cows.

Researchers acknowledge there is as yet no clear accounting of food loss in the U.S., though think tanks such as the World Resources Institute are working toward a more accurate reckoning.

Imperfect Produce, a subscription delivery service for “ugly” food in the San Francisco Bay Area, estimates that about one-fifth of all fruit and vegetables are consigned to the dump because they do not conform to the industry standard of perfection.

But farmers, including Kirschenman, put the rejection rate far higher, depending on cosmetic slights to the produce because of growing conditions and weather.

That lost food increasingly is seen as a drag on household incomes – about $1,600 a year for a family of four – and a direct challenge to global efforts to fight hunger, poverty and climate change.

Globally, about one-third of food is wasted: 1.6 billion tons of produce a year, with a value of about $1 trillion. If this wasted food were stacked in 20-cubic-meter skips, it would fill 80 million of them, enough to reach all the way to the moon and encircle it once. Taking action to tackle this is not impossible, as countries such as Denmark have shown.

The Obama administration and the U.N. have pledged to halve avoidable food waste by 2030. Food producers, retail chains and campaign groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council also have vowed to reduce food loss in the ReFED initiative.

Food experts say there is growing awareness that governments cannot effectively fight hunger, or climate change, without reducing food waste. Food waste accounts for about 8 percent of global climate pollution, more than India or Russia.

“There are a lot of people who are hungry and malnourished, including in the U.S. My guess is probably 5 to 10 percent of the population are still hungry – they still do not have enough to eat,” said Shenggen Fan, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. “That is why food waste, food loss matters a great deal. People are still hungry.”

That is not counting the waste of water, land and other resources or the toll on the climate of producing food that ends up in landfills.

Within the U.S., discarded food is the biggest single component of landfills and incinerators, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Food dumps are a rising source of methane, a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But experts readily acknowledge that they are only beginning to come to grips with the scale of the problem.

The May harvest season in Florida found Johnson with more than 24,000 pounds of freshly harvested spaghetti squash in his cool box – perfect except for brown scoring on the rind from high winds during a spring storm.

“I’ve been offering it for 6 cents a pound for a week, and nobody has pulled the trigger,” he said. And he was “expecting an additional 250,000 pounds of squash,” similarly marked, in his warehouse a fortnight later.

“There is a lot of hunger and starvation in the United States, so how come I haven’t been able to find a home for this 6-cents-a-pound food yet?” Johnson said.

Such frustrations occur regularly along the entirety of the U.S. food production chain – and producers and distributors maintain that the standards always are shifting. Bountiful harvests bring more exacting standards of perfection. Times of shortage may prove more forgiving.

Retail giants argue that they are operating in consumers’ best interests, according to food experts.

“A lot of the waste is happening further up the food chain and often on behalf of consumers, based on the perception of what those consumers want,” said Roni Neff, director of the food system environmental sustainability and public health program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in Baltimore.

“Fruit and vegetables are often culled out because they think nobody would buy them,” she said.

But Roger Gordon, who founded the Food Cowboy startup to rescue and reroute rejected produce, believes that the waste is built into the economics of food production. Fresh produce accounts for 15 percent of supermarket profits, he argued.

“If you and I reduced fresh produce waste by 50 percent like (U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom) Vilsack wants us to do, then supermarkets would go from (a) 1.5 percent profit margin to 0.7 percent,” he said. “And if we were to lose 50 percent of consumer waste, then we would lose about $250 billion in economic activity that would go away.”

Some supermarket chains and industry groups in the U.S. are pioneering ugly produce sections and actively campaigning to reduce such losses. But a number of producers and distributors claimed that some retailing giants still were using their power to reject produce on the basis of some ideal of perfection, and sometimes because of market conditions.

The farmers and truckers interviewed said they had seen their produce rejected on flimsy grounds, but decided against challenging the ruling with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dispute mechanism for fear of being boycotted by powerful supermarket giants. They also asked that their names not be used.

“I can tell you for a fact that I have delivered products to supermarkets that was absolutely gorgeous and because their sales were slow the last two days, they didn’t take my product and they sent it back to me,” said the owner of a midsize East Coast trucking company.

“They will dig through 50 cases to find one bad head of lettuce and say: ‘I am not taking your lettuce when that lettuce would pass a USDA inspection.’ But as the farmer told you, there is nothing you can do, because if you use the PACA (Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act of 1930) on them, they are never going to buy from you again. Are you going to jeopardize $5 million in sales over an $8,000 load?”

He said he experienced such rejections, known in the industry as kickbacks, “a couple of times a month,” which he considered on the low side for the industry. But he said he usually was able to sell the produce to another buyer.

The power of the retail chains creates fear along the supply chain, from the family farmer to the major producer.

“These big growers do not want to piss off retailers. They don’t enforce PACA on Safeway, Wal-Mart or Costco,” said Ron Clark, who spent more than 20 years working with farmers and food banks before co-founding Imperfect Produce.

“They are just not going to call because that will be the last order they will ever sell to them. That’s their fear. They are really in a pickle.”

The Secret Documents That Detail How Patients’ Privacy is Breached

A federal agency sends thousands of letters a year to health providers closing out complaints about HIPAA violations. Though the government could make those letters public, it doesn’t. ProPublica has started to do so.

By:  Charles Ornstein

 







 

This is part of an ongoing investigation Policing Patient Privacy

ProPublica is exploring how patient privacy violations are affecting patients and the medical care they receive.

WASHINGTON (Propublica) - When the federal government takes the rare step of fining medical providers for violating the privacy and security of patients’ medical information, it issues a press release and posts details on the web.

But thousands of times a year, the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services resolves complaints about possible violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act quietly, outside public view. It sends letters reminding providers of their legal obligations, advising them on how to fix purported problems, and, sometimes, prodding them to make voluntary changes.

Case closed.

As part of its examination into the impact of privacy violations on patients, ProPublica has posted about 300 of these “closure letters” in our HIPAA Helper tool. The app allows users to review details of these cases and track repeat offenders. We obtained the letters under the Freedom of Information Act and this is the largest repository of them ever made public.

Most of the letters we’ve received were sent to two large providers, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and CVS Health. They are the entities with the most privacy complaints that resulted in corrective-action plans or “technical assistance” provided by the Office for Civil Rights from 2011 to 2014. But there are also notices of privacy violations sent to Kaiser Permanente, Planned Parenthood and the military’s health care system.

Read the HIPAA Closure Letters For Yourself

Patients accused the providers of inadvertently, or in some cases deliberately, sharing their health information without their permission – a Texas facility, for instance, kept receiving faxes from CVS intended for a Hawaii doctor with the same name. The complaints sometimes alleged that employees snooped in patients’ files out of personal animus.

Currently, the government provides only vague summaries of the issues it investigates, without the specifics that could make the information useful, said Dennis Melamed, who publishes a newsletter and website on HIPAA compliance. The top five categories of complaints in 2014, according to the Office for Civil Rights website, were impermissible uses and disclosures, safeguards, administrative safeguards, access and technical safeguards.

“We’re not really sure what’s going on,” Melamed said. “The terminology is confusing, it’s overlapping and it’s not consistent.”

Dr. Bill Brathwaite, a health information policy consultant who helped write the federal regulations implementing HIPAA, said he personally had only seen a few closure letters. The government, he said, has abstracted the lessons from its investigations “at too high a level for people to connect and say, ‘Those people are like me, I should pay more attention.’”

“The more information, the better,” Brathwaite said.

Deven McGraw, deputy director for health information privacy at the Office for Civil Rights, said her agency wants to put closure letters online but is constrained by its limited budget. In 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, it received more than 17,000 complaints, as well as tens of thousands of self-reported breaches of medical information.

Before closure letters can be released publicly, she said, the names of individual patients and other identifying information would have to be redacted.

“I do think it’s something that we should do but we have to figure out the best way to make that happen,” McGraw said. “It is something we’re working on.”

CVS and the VA have told ProPublica that they are committed to protecting patient privacy.

“We are never complacent about privacy matters and we constantly strive to address and reduce disclosure incidents by enhancing our training and safeguards,” CVS said in a statement last fall. The VA said at the time, “VA takes veteran privacy and the privacy of medical or health records very seriously.”

David Holtzman, who used to work at the Office for Civil Rights and is now vice president of compliance strategies for CynergisTek, a consulting firm, said the government does not have the money to catalog and archive closure letters. The Office for Civil Rights, whose budget has been flat for several years, should focus its resources on improving internal systems to detect and respond to privacy and security breaches instead, he added.

“To do this would cost money and it’s money they don’t have,” Holtzman said. “Each matter rests on its own merits and it is difficult to draw parallels from one case to another. There is going to be variability that is perhaps not captured in the black and white space of a closure letter.”

BUSTED

Tens of thousands of people every year are sent to jail based on the results of a $2 roadside drug test. Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinely produce false positives. Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them?

 

By:  Ryan Gabrielson and Topher Sanders





 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AUSTIN (Propublica) - Amy Albritton can’t remember if her boyfriend signaled when he changed lanes late that August afternoon in 2010. But suddenly the lights on the Houston Police patrol car were flashing behind them, and Anthony Wilson was navigating Albritton’s white Chrysler Concorde to a stop in a strip-mall parking lot. It was an especially unwelcome hassle. Wilson was in Houston to see about an oil-rig job; Albritton, volunteering her car, had come along for what she imagined would be a vacation of sorts. She managed an apartment complex back in Monroe, La., and the younger of her two sons — Landon, 16, who had been disabled from birth by cerebral palsy — was with his father for the week. After five hours of driving through the monotony of flat woodland, the couple had checked into a motel, carted their luggage to the room and returned to the car, too hungry to rest but too drained to seek out anything more than fast food. Now two officers stepped out of their patrol car and approached.

Albritton, 43, had dressed up for the trip — black blouse, turquoise necklace, small silver hoop earrings glinting through her shoulder-length blond hair. Wilson, 28, was more casually dressed, in a white T-shirt and jeans, and wore a strained expression that worried Albritton. One officer asked him for his license and registration. Wilson said he didn’t have a license. The car’s registration showed that it belonged to Albritton.
The officer asked Wilson to step out of the car. Wilson complied. The officer leaned in over the driver’s seat, looked around, then called to his partner; in the report Officer Duc Nguyen later filed, he wrote that he saw a needle in the car’s ceiling lining. Albritton didn’t know what he was talking about. Before she could protest, Officer David Helms had come around to her window and was asking for consent to search the car. If Albritton refused, Helms said, he would call for a drug-sniffing dog. Albritton agreed to the full search and waited nervously outside the car.

Helms spotted a white crumb on the floor. In the report, Nguyen wrote that the officers believed the crumb was crack cocaine. They handcuffed Wilson and Albritton and stood them in front of the patrol car, its lights still flashing. They were on display for rush-hour traffic, criminal suspects sweating through their clothes in the 93-degree heat.

As Nguyen and Helms continued the search, tensions grew. Albritton, shouting over the sound of traffic, tried to explain that they had the wrong idea — at least about her. She had been dating Wilson for only a month; she implored him to admit that if there were drugs, they were his alone. Wilson just shook his head, Albritton now recalls. Fear surging, she shouted that there weren’t any drugs in her car even as she insisted that she didn’t know that Wilson had brought drugs. The search turned up only one other item of interest — a box of BC Powder, an over-the-counter pain reliever. Albritton never saw the needle. The crumb from the floor was all that mattered now.
At the police academy four years earlier, Helms was taught that to make a drug arrest on the street, an officer needed to conduct an elementary chemical test, right then and there. It’s what cops routinely do across the country every day while making thousands upon thousands of drug arrests. Helms popped the trunk of his patrol car, pulled out a small plastic pouch that contained a vial of pink liquid and returned to Albritton. He opened the lid on the vial and dropped a tiny piece of the crumb into the liquid. If the liquid remained pink, that would rule out the presence of cocaine. If it turned blue, then Albritton, as the owner of the car, could become a felony defendant.

Helms waved the vial in front of her face and said, “You’re busted.”

Albritton was booked into the Harris County jail at 3:37 a.m., nine hours after she was arrested. Wilson had been detained for driving without a license but would soon be released. Albritton was charged with felony drug possession and faced a much longer ordeal. Already, she was terrified as she thought about her family. Albritton was raised in a speck of a town called Marion at the northern edge of Louisiana. Her father still drove lumber trucks there; her mother had worked as a pharmacy technician until she died of colon cancer. Albritton was 15 then. She went through two unexpected pregnancies, the first at age 16, and two ill-fated marriages. But she had also pieced together a steady livelihood managing apartment complexes, and when her younger son was born disabled, she worked relentlessly to care for him. Now their future was almost certainly shattered.

The officers allowed her to make a collect call on the coinless cellblock pay phone. She had a strained relationship with her father and with her son’s father as well; instead she dialed Doug Franklin, an old friend who once dated her sister. No one answered. Near dawn the next morning, guards walked Albritton through a tunnel to the Harris County criminal-justice tower’s basement, where they deposited her in a closet-size holding room with another woman, who told Albritton that she had murdered someone. Albritton prayed someone would explain what would happen next, tell her son she was alive and help her sort out the mess. She had barely slept and still hadn’t eaten anything. She heard her name called and stepped forward to the reinforced window. A tall man with thinning hair and wire-rim glasses approached and introduced himself as Dan Richardson, her court-appointed defense attorney.
Richardson told Albritton that she was going to be charged with possession of a controlled substance, crack cocaine, at an arraignment that morning. Albritton recalls him explaining that this was a felony, and the maximum penalty was two years in state prison. She doesn’t remember him asking her what actually happened, or if she believed she was innocent. Instead, she recalls, he said that the prosecutor had already offered a deal for much less than two years. If she pleaded guilty, she would receive a 45-day sentence in the county jail, and most likely serve only half that.

Albritton told Richardson that the police were mistaken; she was innocent. But Richardson, she says, was unswayed. The police had found crack in her car. The test proved it. She could spend a few weeks in jail or two years in prison. In despair, Albritton agreed to the deal.

Albritton was escorted to a dark wood-paneled courtroom. A guilty plea requires the defendant to make a series of statements that serve as a confession and to waive multiple constitutional rights. The judge, Vanessa Velasquez, walked her through the recitation, Albritton recalls, but never asked why she couldn’t stop crying long enough to speak in sentences. She had managed to say the one word that mattered: “guilty.”

Police officers arrest more than 1.2 million people a year in the United States on charges of illegal drug possession. Field tests like the one Officer Helms used in front of Amy Albritton help them move quickly from suspicion to conviction. But the kits — which cost about $2 each and have changed little since 1973 — are far from reliable.

The field tests seem simple, but a lot can go wrong. Some tests, including the one the Houston police officers used to analyze the crumb on the floor of Albritton’s car, use a single tube of a chemical called cobalt thiocyanate, which turns blue when it is exposed to cocaine. But cobalt thiocyanate also turns blue when it is exposed to more than 80 other compounds, including methadone, certain acne medications and several common household cleaners. Other tests use three tubes, which the officer can break in a specific order to rule out everything but the drug in question — but if the officer breaks the tubes in the wrong order, that, too, can invalidate the results. The environment can also present problems. Cold weather slows the color development; heat speeds it up, or sometimes prevents a color reaction from taking place at all. Poor lighting on the street — flashing police lights, sun glare, street lamps — often prevents officers from making the fine distinctions that could make the difference between an arrest and a release.
There are no established error rates for the field tests, in part because their accuracy varies so widely depending on who is using them and how. In Las Vegas, authorities re-examined a sampling of cocaine field tests conducted between 2010 and 2013 and found that 33 percent of them were false positives. Data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab system show that 21 percent of evidence that the police listed as methamphetamine after identifying it was not methamphetamine, and half of those false positives were not any kind of illegal drug at all. In one notable Florida episode, Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies produced 15 false positives for methamphetamine in the first seven months of 2014. When we examined the department’s records, they showed that officers, faced with somewhat ambiguous directions on the pouches, had simply misunderstood which colors indicated a positive result.

No central agency regulates the manufacture or sale of the tests, and no comprehensive records are kept about their use. In the late 1960s, crime labs outfitted investigators with mobile chemistry sets, including small plastic test tubes and bottles of chemical reagents that reacted with certain drugs by changing colors, more or less on the same principle as a home pregnancy test. But the reagents contained strong acids that leaked and burned the investigators. In 1973, the same year that Richard Nixon formally established the Drug Enforcement Administration, declaring “an all-out global war on the drug menace,” a pair of California inventors patented a “disposable comparison detector kit.” It was far simpler, just a glass vial or vials inside a plastic pouch. Open the pouch, add the compound to be tested, seal the pouch, break open the vials and watch the colors change. The field tests, convenient and imbued with an aura of scientific infallibility, were ordered by police departments across the country. In a 1974 study, however, the National Bureau of Standards warned that the kits “should not be used as sole evidence for the identification of a narcotic or drug of abuse.” Police officers were not chemists, and chemists themselves had long ago stopped relying on color tests, preferring more reliable mass spectrographs. By 1978, the Department of Justice had determined that field tests “should not be used for evidential purposes,” and the field tests in use today remain inadmissible at trial in nearly every jurisdiction; instead, prosecutors must present a secondary lab test using more reliable methods.

But this has proved to be a meaningless prohibition. Most drug cases in the United States are decided well before they reach trial, by the far more informal process of plea bargaining. In 2011, RTI International, a nonprofit research group based in North Carolina, found that prosecutors in nine of 10 jurisdictions it surveyed nationwide accepted guilty pleas based solely on the results of field tests, and in our own reporting, we confirmed that prosecutors or judges accept plea deals on that same basis in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Jacksonville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Newark, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Diego, Seattle and Tampa.

This puts field tests at the center of any discussion about the justice of plea bargains in general. The federal government does not keep a comprehensive database of prosecutions in county and state criminal courts, but the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data at the University of Michigan maintains an extensive sampling of court records from the 40 largest jurisdictions. Based on this data, we found that more than 10 percent of all county and state felony convictions are for drug charges, and at least 90 percent of those convictions come by way of plea deals. In Tennessee, guilty pleas produce 94 percent of all convictions. In Kansas, they make up more than 97 percent. In Harris County, Tex., where the judiciary makes detailed criminal caseload information public, 99.5 percent of drug-possession convictions are the result of a guilty plea. A majority of those are felony convictions, which restrict employment, housing and — in many states — the right to vote.

Demand for the field tests is strong enough to sustain the business of at least nine different companies that sell tests to identify cocaine, heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine, LSD, MDMA and more than two dozen other drugs. The Justice Department issued guidelines in 2000 calling for test-kit packaging to carry warning labels, including “a statement that users of the kit should receive appropriate training in its use and should be taught that the reagents can give false-positive as well as false-negative results,” but when we checked, three of the largest manufacturers — Lynn Peavey Company, the Safariland Group and Sirchie — had not printed such a warning on their tests. (Lynn Peavey Company did not respond to our request for comment. A spokesman for the Safariland Group said the company provides law-enforcement agencies with extensive training materials that are separate from the tests and their packaging. We asked John Roby, Sirchie’s chief executive, about the missing warnings and requested an interview in May. He responded in writing a month later saying that the boxes carrying Sirchie’s cocaine tests had been updated and now display a warning that reactions may occur with both “legal and illegal substances.” After our inquiry, Sirchie added another warning to its packaging, listing at the bottom of its printed instructions: “ALL TEST RESULTS MUST BE CONFIRMED BY AN APPROVED ANALYTICAL LABORATORY!”)

Even trained lab scientists struggle with confirmation bias — the tendency to take any new evidence as confirmation of expectations — and police officers can see the tests as affirming their decisions to stop and search a person. Labs rarely notify officers when a false positive is found, so they have little experience to prompt skepticism. As far as they know, the system works. By our estimate, though, every year at least 100,000 people nationwide plead guilty to drug-possession charges that rely on field-test results as evidence. At that volume, even the most modest of error rates could produce thousands of wrongful convictions.

After he arrested Amy Albritton, Officer Helms sent what remained of the crumb he found on the floor of her car to the Houston Police Department crime laboratory. He listed it as “.02 grms crack cocaine” and noted on the submission form that he was also sending a “syringe w/ unknown substance .01 gr” — presumably the needle Officer Nguyen reported pulling from the ceiling lining and that Albritton had not seen and still could not explain. (Helms’s submission form, which was separate from the arrest report, said it came not from the ceiling but from the “suspect visor.”) The last item Helms turned in was a ziploc bag of the “unknown wht powder” that had been removed from the BC Powder package.

“HOLD + ANALYZE FOR COURT,” Helms wrote by hand. And then, with no court case pending, the evidence sat on hold, one of several thousand samples in the laboratory’s backlog of untested pills, plants, powders and assorted crumbs and pebbles.

Albritton served 21 days of her 45-day sentence. When she was released, she took a taxi to the motel where she had planned to stay with Wilson, whom she never saw again after the arrest. (Helms and Nguyen would not comment for this article; Wilson did not respond to requests.) The manager had kept her clothes, so she took a room again and waited for her friend Doug Franklin to fly in from Louisiana. The plan was that he would lend her the money to get her impounded car and keep her company on the drive home. When they retrieved the car, it had been sitting in the summer heat for more than three weeks. Albritton was overwhelmed by the smell of rotting hamburgers.

When Albritton pleaded guilty, she asked Franklin to explain the situation to her bosses at the rental-property firm, but Franklin decided it was safer to say nothing. She was going to be fired in any case, he reasoned, and alerting an employer about the drug felony would only hurt her future prospects. Albritton had managed the Frances Place Apartments, a well-maintained brick complex, for two years, and a free apartment was part of her compensation. But as far as the company knew, Albritton had abandoned her job and her home. She was fired, and her furniture and other belongings were put out on the side of the road. “So I lost all that,” she says.

Albritton’s older son, Adam, then 24, had been living on his own for years and learned of his mother’s arrest only after she had begun her sentence. While Albritton was incarcerated, her younger son, Landon, remained with his father, who had threatened in the past to seek custody but never followed through. Albritton’s father, Tommy Franklin (no relation to Doug), was openly skeptical about her claim of innocence. “If the law said you had crack, you had crack,” she recalls him telling her.

Albritton gave up trying to convince people otherwise. She focused instead on Landon. Using a wheelchair, he needed regular sessions of physical and occupational therapy, and Albritton’s career managing the rental complex had been an ideal fit, providing a free home that kept her close to her son while she was at work, and allowing her the flexibility to ferry him to his appointments. But now, because of her new felony criminal record, which showed up immediately in background checks, she couldn’t even land an interview at another apartment complex. With a felony conviction, she couldn’t be approved as a renter either. Doug Franklin allowed Albritton and Landon to move in with him temporarily, and Albritton took a minimum-wage job at a convenience store.

Through all of this, the crumb of evidence remained in storage in the Houston crime lab. It was a closed case, and the prosecutor, as was standard practice, had filed a motion to destroy the evidence. Only some final paperwork — a request from the lab and a judge’s signature — was needed. But this was an extremely low priority in a complex bureaucracy.

By 2010, the lab had been discredited by a decade of botched science and scandal. Thousands of untested rape kits were shelved from unsolved assaults. Errors in fingerprint matches were discovered in more than 200 cases. The lab had lost key blood samples; employees had tampered with or falsified other evidence. And it was continuing to struggle with a significant backlog of drug-test evidence — one that stemmed from what amounted to an epic experiment in field testing.

When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in August 2005, more than 250,000 mostly black refugees streamed into Houston, and local authorities openly anticipated a crime surge in which the refugees were portrayed as would-be perpetrators. Charles McClelland, who retired in February as Houston’s police chief and was then an assistant chief, says the department decided that pursuing drug-possession charges would also help suppress the number of predicted robberies and burglaries. “Anecdotally, it makes sense: Where does a person who has a substance-abuse problem get the money to buy drugs?” McClelland argues. “One could easily make the connection that they’re committing crimes.” The city distributed thousands more of the color field tests than usual to patrol officers, and drug evidence swamped the controlled-substances section of the lab. Even as the Katrina refugees gradually left Houston, the emphasis on low-level drug enforcement remained. By 2007, annual submissions to the lab had climbed to 22,000, even as budget cuts had reduced the staff, leaving the scientists with far more samples than they could competently analyze.

In 1972, the Department of Justice published a training guide for forensic chemists in the nation’s crime labs, emphasizing that they were “the last line of defense against a false accusation,” but 40 years later, that line had largely vanished. A federal survey in 2013 found that about 62 percent of crime labs do not test drug evidence when the defendant pleads guilty. But the Houston crime lab, for all its problems, would not be among them.

James Miller, the lab’s controlled-substances manager, had long practiced a kind of evidentiary triage. Evidence tied to pending drug manufacturing, sale or possession cases — 50 a year on average — would receive immediate attention, because only laboratory analysis would be admissible in court. But evidence from cases in which the defendants pleaded guilty before going to trial — the overwhelming majority of the remaining thousands of submitted drugs samples — would also be tested. The city had no legal requirement to confirm that the substances were the illegal drugs the police claimed they were. But in Miller’s lab, everything would be checked, even if it took years. “All along, we’ve said we’re about the science,” he says — not securing convictions. So the evidence sat, waiting.

The forensic scientists in Miller’s lab keep untested samples in Manila envelopes locked in cabinets below their work benches. Some sat there for as long as four years, lab records show. Albritton’s evidence stayed locked up for six months. On Feb. 23, 2011 — five months after Albritton completed her sentence and returned home as a felon — one of Houston’s forensic scientists, Ahtavea Barker, pulled the envelope up to her bench. It contained the crumb, the powder and the still-unexplained syringe. First she weighed everything. The syringe had too little residue on it even to test. It was just a syringe. The remainder of the “white chunk substance” that Officer Helms had tested positive with his field kit as crack cocaine totaled 0.0134 grams, Barker wrote on the examination sheet, about the same as a tiny pinch of salt. Barker turned to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis, or GC-MS, the gold standard in chemical identification, to figure out what was in Albritton’s car that evening. She began with the powder. First the gas chromatograph vaporized a speck of the powder inside a tube. Then the gas was heated, causing its core chemical compounds to separate. When the individual compounds reached the end of the tube, the mass spectrometer blasted them with electrons, causing them to fragment. The resulting display, called a fragmentation pattern, is essentially a chemical fingerprint. The powder was a combination of aspirin and caffeine — the ingredients in BC Powder, the over-the-counter painkiller, as Albritton had insisted.

Then Barker ran the same tests on the supposed crack cocaine. The crumb’s fragmentation pattern did not match that of cocaine, or any other compound in the lab’s extensive database. It was not a drug. It did not contain anything mixed with drugs. It was a crumb — food debris, perhaps. Barker wrote “N.A.M.” on the spectrum printout, “no acceptable match,” and then added another set of letters: “N.C.S.” No controlled substance identified. Albritton was innocent.

Inger Chandler oversees the small conviction-integrity unit of the Harris County district attorney’s office, where she has been a prosecutor for 12 years. Conviction-integrity units are a fairly new concept in law enforcement: Prosecutors re-examine convictions in light of new evidence, often in the form of previously unavailable DNA tests. Conviction-integrity units originally focused on murder and rape cases, but they also increasingly investigate drug convictions.

In early 2014, Chandler took a call while sitting at her desk, encircled by stacks of case files and pictures of her toddler twins. Eric Dexheimer, a reporter at The Austin American-Statesman, told her he had noticed a series of unusual exonerations coming out of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. He’d tracked 21 drug convictions across Texas that had been reversed because labs had found that the drugs in question weren’t really drugs. The laboratory results came after defendants had already pleaded guilty. Did Harris County have any other bad drug convictions beyond what the courts had overturned? Chandler didn’t know, but she said she would try to find out.

Chandler called Miller, the controlled-substances manager at the lab, and asked him if there was something wrong with any of their drug convictions. Miller was not surprised to hear from Chandler. He explained that the lab had indeed found problems with their drug convictions; when his forensic scientists found discrepancies in the evidence — officially labeled “variants” — they sent the details by email to the district attorney’s office, and they had been doing so for years. Chandler hadn’t known any of this. She found the email inbox for lab notices, and it did indeed contain hundreds of messages that were sent from the lab. One after another, the lab notices said, “No Controlled Substance.” In cases involving drug possession, that meant the defendants were not guilty. (Drug manufacturing and selling charges can hold even if the underlying substance is not illegal.)

It was unclear if anyone had ever followed up on the notices. When Chandler entered several of the court case numbers into the district attorney’s records-search system, however, she found that a majority of the convictions remained in place. She started a list. Over the course of the following year, she found that the district attorney’s office had failed to correct 416 “variants” between January 2004 and June 2015, all of them in cases that ended in guilty pleas. Some variants were legally ambiguous — the field test was positive, but for the wrong drug; the drug weights were incorrect; or there was too little of the evidence to analyze — but in 251 cases, the results were simple: “No Controlled Substance.”

74 percent of the convicted didn’t possess any drugs at the time of their arrest

Most of the unjustly jailed have spent seven years or more saddled with criminal convictions that damage their reputations and constrain their lives. To this day, scores of them have yet to learn they’ve been proven innocent.

Under the 1963 Supreme Court opinion in Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors must provide defendants with exculpatory evidence, even after a conviction. Chandler could have met that mandate simply by alerting the convicting court and the defense attorneys to the lab reports — “Every other Brady situation, as long as I give notice, I’m done,” she says — but in these cases, Chandler says, she knew very few of the wrongful drug convictions would be reversed if she let the system handle each of them individually. The exoneration effort needed to be centralized, so that someone would become responsible for finding the defendants themselves. Chandler took the list to Devon Anderson, Harris County’s district attorney.

Anderson, a former district-court judge, had been the top prosecutor for only seven months. Her husband, Mike Anderson, who took office as district attorney in January 2013, died of cancer eight months into his term, and Gov. Rick Perry appointed her to replace him. Now, as Chandler described the problem, Anderson felt sickened. The litany of wrongful convictions was not just enormous — it was still growing. Her office, she says, was to blame for “a breakdown at every point in the system.” She hired a former prosecutor to research the cases and find the defendants. “It may sound corny, but it’s true: Our duty under Texas law is to seek justice,” she says. “A lot of people think it’s convictions, but it’s justice.”

In April 2014, The American-Statesman published Dexheimer’s story, which focused on 21 wrongful drug convictions across Texas caused by lab delays. But prosecutors in Harris County were still uncovering the scale of their own problem.

Based in part on the information gathered by Marie Munier, the former prosecutor Anderson hired to examine the drug convictions, we determined that 301 of the 416 variants began as arrests by the Houston Police Department, with the rest coming from surrounding municipalities, and that 212 of those 301 arrests were based on evidence that lab analysis determined was not a controlled substance, or N.C.S.

In our own examination of those 212 cases — thousands of pages of arrest reports, court filings and laboratory-testing records, along with interviews of prosecutors, police executives, officers, defense attorneys and innocent defendants who pleaded guilty — we saw a clear story about both who is being arrested and what is happening to them. The racial disparity is stark. Blacks made up 59 percent of those wrongfully convicted in a city where they are 24 percent of the population, reflecting a similar racial disparity in drug enforcement nationally. Patrol units, not trained narcotics detectives, appeared to be the most prolific field-test users.

The kits, or the officers interpreting them, got it wrong most often when dealing with small amounts of suspected drugs. Sixty-three percent of the N.C.S. cases involved less than a gram of evidence. The smallest possession cases are the ones in which a field test can be of greatest consequence; if officers find larger quantities of white powder in dozens of baggies or packaged in bricks, they have sufficient probable cause to make an arrest regardless of what a color test shows. (Though in those cases, too, they are generally required to test the drugs.) It’s widely assumed in legal circles that these wrongfully convicted people are in fact drug users who intended to possess drugs. Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that seeks to overturn wrongful convictions, says some who work toward exoneration have complained to him that those exonerated of drug charges often are just accidentally not guilty, and shouldn’t be added to the National Registry of Exonerations. The assumption is not entirely without basis — 162 of the 212 N.C.S. defendants had criminal histories involving illegal drugs. However, 50 had no criminal history involving drugs at all.

All of the 212 N.C.S. defendants struck plea bargains, and nearly all of them, 93 percent, received a jail or prison sentence. Defendants with no previous convictions have a legal right in Texas to probation on drug-possession charges, even if they’re convicted at trial. But remarkably, 78 percent of defendants entitled to probation agreed to deals that included incarceration. Perhaps most striking: A majority of those defendants, 58 percent, pleaded guilty at the first opportunity, during their arraignment; the median time between arrest and plea was four days. In contrast, the median for defendants in which the field test indicated the wrong drug or that the weight was inaccurate — that is, the defendants who actually did possess drugs — was 22 days. Not only do the innocent tend to plead guilty in these cases, but they often do so more quickly.

On July 29, 2014, Munier sent a letter to Amy Albritton. It was a form letter, one of hundreds Munier was sending to exonerated defendants, opening with the salutation “Dear Sir or Madam,” but the contents were highly personal. It stated that the Harris County district attorney’s office had learned that the drug evidence in Albritton’s case was not a controlled substance: “Accordingly, you were prosecuted for a criminal drug offense and convicted in error.” Munier mailed the letter to the address on Albritton’s driver’s license, but Albritton did not receive it. She had long since moved on.

She had struggled to rebuild her life as a felon. The hours at the convenience store were