Friday, May 19, 2023

What's Up With Sam Brinton?

It's taken more than a day for even the sketchiest details to emerge in the latest Sam Brinton episode. As of yesterday, all we knew was in this Fox report:

Sam Brinton, the embattled former senior Department of Energy (DOE) official, was arrested as a "fugitive from justice" by Maryland police late Wednesday.

According to county records reviewed by Fox News Digital, Brinton was taken into custody in Rockville. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) Police, which is the lead law enforcement agency for both Washington, D.C., area airports, said the arrest was related to the theft of airport luggage, the third such criminal case involving Brinton.

"Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Police executed a search warrant May 17 in Montgomery County, Maryland, in connection with allegations of stolen property in luggage from Reagan National Airport that was brought to the department’s attention in February 2023," James Johnson, a spokesperson for the MWAA, told Fox News Digital in an email.

However, the Daily Wire had different details yesterday:

The Daily Wire’s Luke Roziak learned exclusively that former Biden administration nuclear official, Sam Brinton, was arrested last night at his home in Rockville, Maryland. A neighbor told Roziak that four unmarked police cars went to his house at about 10:00 PM and pulled him out. On Thursday, a judge ordered Brinton extradited to Arlington, Virginia to face charges of grand larceny related to alleged luggage theft out of Dulles Airport, in connection with those fugitive from justice charges.

Although Reagan National and Dulles Airport are nominally "in" Washington, DC, they're both actually in Virginia, and they're two separate airports 23 miles apart. The Fox story implies that the airport police are interested in a luggage theft that took place at Reagan, while the Daily Wire Wire says the arrest was for a luggage theft at Dulles. Are these two separate incidents, or is one or the other outlet confused between Reagan and Dulles?

There's a somewhat later, more detailed report at the Daily Wire:

On Thursday afternoon, Brinton appeared before a judge via closed-circuit television from the Montgomery County Central Processing Unit, where Judge Victor Del Pino declined to release him and ordered him extradited to Virginia. Brinton did not have a lawyer or any supporters or press, other than The Daily Wire, at the hearing. A public defender spoke for him temporarily, despite his not being eligible for a public defender because of his income.

. . . “Mr. Brinton is a nuclear engineer, he is married,” the public defender said. “He works for GeoFission, a nuclear startup. He believes if he is released to turn himself in [to Virginia], he can keep his job… I believe the allegation is stolen luggage.”

Del Pino said “I will deny the request to turn himself in. Virginia will pick him up. Good luck in Virginia, Mr. Brinton.”

. . . In March, a Tanzanian fashion designer named Asia Odorous Khamsin appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to say that her luggage had been stolen from Reagan National Airport in 2018 on the way to a fashion show, causing catastrophe because she was unable to show her designs. Brinton was later pictured wearing one of her one-of-a-kind designs that had been in the suitcase, she said.

Although this seems to be an important story, it looks as if only the Daily Wire has shown any interest in it, but the Daily Wire seems to have mixed Reagan up with Dulles. In any case, although the accounts refer to a luggage theft that came to police attention in February 2023, which may be the one the fashion designer discussed on the Tucker Carlson show in March, at this point, we simply can't be sure. Robert Spencer, in discussing the case at PJ Media, says,

It looked as if America’s two-tier justice system was operating again, and Brinton, as a key element of the Left’s initiative to force us to accept transgender madness, would not suffer anything like the legal penalties he would have gotten if he had not been a Leftist.

Notwithstanding, no legacy media covered the court hearing yesterday, and the right-wing Daily Wire still seems confused. This suggests to me that this is a story most outlets would rather not touch. Spencer concludes.

And so the question must be asked again: is the Biden regime’s ongoing love affair with sexual deviance bringing people into government who are unfit to serve and are active risks?

Back when I worked in security, if you had to do anything related to nuclear at the US Department of Energy, you had to go through an even more stringent background check for a clearance than at the Defense Department. Even in the 1990s, when I was involved in that kind of thing, credible allegations that you were a guy who dressed in women's clothing would almost certainly have resulted in having your clearance denied.

Mr Spencer is raising a legitimate question. People might say that we've gone beyond denying security clearances just because someone's a cross-dresser, apparently due to the argument that we're no longer prejudiced against gays or whatever, and they no longer represent a threat that they might be compromised by blackmail. But they can still be a threat to the organization's credibility just because they're seriously off, and they can potentially do unpredictably sick things, as Mr Brinton keeps proving.

This is the problem with attempts by sexual deviants of all kinds to hitchhike on the natural law argument used by abolitionists and civil rights activists. On one hand, natural law says the rights of African slaves and their descendants are human rights. On the other, deviant rights are not human rights, because deviant conduct violates natural law, and as soon as you do that, you open the door to a great deal else. The Sam Brinton case is a good example of the conundrum.

As Saul Alinksy said, "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."