By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

The Secret Service imposed a lockdown at the White House on Monday morning after a man threw a sign and notebook over the Pennsylvania Avenue fence.

The lockdown was ordered around 10:40 a.m. and lifted less than an hour earlier after two people were taken into custody.

None of the objects were deemed dangerous.

The lockdown prevented people from leaving or entering the White House.

President Trump, who was attending a 9/11 ceremony, returned to the White House during the lockdown, according to the Secret Service.

Former FBI agent writes true-crime book.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

A former FBI agent is writing his first true-crime book about corruption, extortion and staged burglaries in the unlikely Texas town of Tenaha.

Former Agent Stewart Fillmore began investigating the case in 2009 and has turned it into a book entitled, “Tenaha: Corruption and Cover-Up in Small Town Texas.”

“You know dirty public officials. I think that’s an intriguing topic to a lot of people,” Fillmore told KTRE.

The case involved a federal civil lawsuit that accused elected officials in the small town of stopping black motorists and seeing their money and property under the threat of arrest.

“There was nothing that we found to be illegal that would rise to the level of putting someone in jail,” Fillmore said.

Fillmore got a break int he case after receiving a letter by then-Constable Fred Walker.

“It was an extortion letter and it was from someone calling themselves Jack Frost,” Fillmore said. “Jack Frost claimed that Fred Walker and another individual named Rod McClure were stealing narcotics out of the Tenaha City Marshal’s evidence room and that Jack Frost, in this extortion letter, wanted $70,000 from both of them for his silence.”

Nicholas Deelstra

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

A state worker ended up in jail after reporting to the FBI that he was soliciting sex from a purported teen who never showed up at his house.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Nicholas Deelstra, 54, called the FBI in late August about an alleged Craigslist scam. 

An employee with the Office of Rehabilitation in the state Department of Workforce Services, Deelstra said someone claiming to be the teen’s father messaged him, “demanding he send money to cover car repairs because” the family’s vehicle was damaged while the boy was trying to meet with the man.

Logan City Police took up the case and arrested Deelstra last week for alleged sex crimes.

The Tribune wrote:

Deelstra told a Logan officer that he agreed to meet with the teen for sex, despite knowing he was underage, court records state. Police also found sexually explicit messages between Deelstra and the purported teen on the man’s phone.

Deelstra was charged Monday in 1st District Court with third-degree felony counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and dealing inmaterials harmful to a minor, as well as two counts of class Amisdemeanor soliciting a minor by internet or text.

Other Stories of Interest

• DACA Recipients Detained at Border Patrol Checkpoint
• Training Exercise in the District Will Involve Police, Secret Service, FBI
• Why Robert Mueller May Have to Give Donald Trump Immunity
• Man Who Ousted FBI Informants in Refugee Takeover Case Found in Contempt of Court
• Opinion: Shame on FBI for Dropping Hillary Clinton’s Email Scandal

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

As the leader of the DEA in El Paso prepares to leave his job for a promotion to lead the Houston Division, he warned that the Mexican cartels are continuing to expand their heroin and meth trafficking business. 

“Every day we try to answer the prayers of those parents who are praying that drugs, violence and crime will pass over their children,” Will R. Glaspy said in an interview last week with El Paso Times. 

Glaspy, who served more than three years as the special agent in charge of the DEA’s El Paso Division, is scheduled to start working in Houston on Sept. 18.

Glaspy said drug cartels are turning away from marijuana in favor of meth and heroin.

The El Paso Times wrote:

During his time in El Paso, Glaspy said that his agents handled cases such as the arrests of Sinaloa-cartel affiliated drug traffickers in El Paso, Albuquerque meth traffickers and “Operation Crystal Mountain,” which targeted meth dealers on the Mescalero Apache Reservation.

The No. 1 priority in the El Paso region is fighting Mexican drug cartels, with the No. 2 priority being “community impact cases” that target local drug-dealing groups, Glaspy said.

DEA agents deal more with border drug-trafficking issues in El Paso, Las Cruces and Alpine, which covers the vast Big Bend area.

“Basically, what we are trying to do is target command-and-control of the Mexican organizations sending the drugs up here,” Glaspy said.

Steve Bannon on 60 Minutes.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

Former White House strategist Stephen Bannon said President Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey was the biggest mistake “maybe in modern political history.”

Bannon made the extraordinary claim during an interview with “60 Minutes” on Sunday.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that if James Comey had not been fired, we would not have a special counsel,” Bannon told interviewer Charlie Rose.

Bannon said the firing opened the door for the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether President Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia to win the White House.

“We would not have the Mueller investigation in the breadth that clearly Mr. Mueller is going,” Bannon said.

Bannon described Washington as “a city of institutions, not individuals. And I think you have to look at it as institutions. The FBI is the institution. The speaker of the house is an institution. The majority leader is an institution. Okay? The Justice Department is an institution. They have an institutional logic of how they proceed and what they’re going to do. And you can’t get caught up in individuals.”

Bannon added that he didn’t learn of Comey’s firing until after it had happened.

Justin Liverman, via LinkedIn.

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

A hacker who exposed private online accounts of the directors of the CIA and FBI, among others, in 2015 has been sentenced to five years in prison.

The Washington Post reports that 23-year-old Justin Liverman harassed leaders at the CIA and FBI and was a member of the “Crackas With Attitude” collective. 

The accounts were breached by a British teenager impersonating officials. Liverman and a co-defendant harassed the victims with the exposed information.

The harassment included threatening and explicit phone messages.

Co-defendant Andrew Otto Boggs was sentenced to two years in prison, and the British teenager is being prosecuted in his country.

U.S. Supreme Court

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

The Justice Department is appealing an injunction on President Trump’s travel ban, even though a significant portion of the ban is set to expire by the Oct. 10 court date.

Even more, the entire ban is likely to expire by the time the justices rule on the case, the Washington Post’s Editorial Board wrote. 

The Justice Department is appealing a federal court’s ruling against the Trump administration’s temporary travel ban of refugees and residents of six majority-Muslim countries.

The Post wrote:

Mr. Trump’s order halts entry into the United States by citizens of the six banned countries for 90 days and suspends refugee admissions for 120 days. After courts blocked the ban, Mr. Trump clarified that these clocks would begin ticking as soon as the policy was allowed to go into effect. Because the Supreme Court lifted in part the lower-court injunctions against the order on June 26, the refugee ban will expire in late October, and the entry ban at the end of September.

As a matter of law, the Supreme Court can’t rule on a case that no longer presents an ongoing issue. Yet the Justice Department hasn’t given any indication of awareness that the court might well dismiss the case without deciding whether the ban is legal. Not only is the department now battling over an injunction on a policy that likely expires in two weeks, but its opening brief before the Supreme Court didn’t even address the issue.

If the White House wants to keep the case alive, Mr. Trump could declare that the clock has yet to start with respect to those immigrants and refugees with “bona fide” connections to the United States, for whom the ban has remained on pause. Or he might extend the order on the grounds that the government has been unable to conduct reviews of vetting procedures — ostensibly what the halt in travel was meant to allow — without the ban fully in place. He could even issue a new ban or make the existing order permanent.