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Santa Monica cops who ignored warnings that staffer Eric Uller allegedly molested boys should be prosecuted: lawyer

A California attorney who represented more than 80 victims allegedly molested and raped by a Santa Monica, Calif., police employee said cops and other officials who ignored warnings also should face criminal charges.

Attorney Brian Claypool said decades of abuse could’ve been prevented if officers listened to his clients’ pleas to fire the late Eric Uller, who worked for the nonprofit after-school Police Activities League program since the late 1980s.

The City of Santa Monica this week agreed to a whopping $122.5 million settlement involving 124 victims but court records show Uller molested more than 200 victims, who were minors at the time.

“The fact that this was a nonprofit connected to police makes it even worse,” Claypool told The Post. “Police are hired to protect and serve, and the fact that they had this guy around children … it never should’ve happened.

“They knew this guy had a propensity for molesting kids but did nothing. They were protecting a dangerous sexual predator.”

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Lawmakers Argue that Weed Must Be Kept Illegal to Protect the Jobs of Police Dogs—Seriously

 In a stunning display of misplaced priorities, some Minnesota politicians appear to be more concerned about the jobs of drug-sniffing dogs than the lives of humans impacted by cannabis prohibition. As the push for cannabis legalization in Minnesota gains momentum, it seems the well-being of these K-9s has somehow become a primary argument against it.

Minnesota’s House of Representatives recently passed a bill to legalize non-medical marijuana for individuals 21 and older, with a vote of 71-59. However, Republican state Rep. Brian Johnson voiced his concern over the costs associated with retiring police dogs trained to sniff out cannabis. Apparently, the default state of unemployment for dogs is a problem that should hold priority over human freedom and well-being.

“I did not see anything reading through the bill dealing with our K-9 units,” Johnson said. “Can you tell me how much money is in this bill to help defer the cost to our counties and police departments for the cost of the retirement of the dogs?”

This K-9-centric mindset isn’t new. Minnesota State Sen. John Jasinski, also a Republican, previously raised the “police dog discussion” during a committee hearing, lamenting the “thousands and thousands of dollars” spent on training these furry narcs, who will now have to retire due to cannabis legalization.

It’s worth noting that the legal cannabis industry has already created hundreds of thousands of jobs for humans. Yet, it seems the careers of drug-sniffing dogs are held in higher regard by some politicians.

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Epstein’s private calendar reveals planned meetings with Obama admin official, CIA chief

Jeffrey Epstein’s newly-revealed private calendar showed scheduled meetings with the current CIA director, a college president and attorney who served in the Obama administration, according to a report published Sunday.

New documents, which belonged to the rich convicted pedophile and were obtained by The Wall Street Journal, showed planned meetings with a slew of prominent individuals, including now-CIA Director William Burns, Bard College president Leon Botstein, Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler and professor Noam Chomsky.

All the scheduled meetings were slated to take place after Epstein was jailed in 2008 on charges of solicitation, including soliciting a minor. WSJ could not prove each scheduled meeting actually took place, and the documents did not reveal the purpose for the meetings. 

A spokesperson for Burns, who has taken the CIA’s helm since 2021 under the Biden administration, said the nation’s spy chief met with Epstein a decade ago when he was trying to leave the government.

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Colorado House Dems Vote Against Making Indecent Exposure to Children a Felony, Argue It Targets Drag Shows

Colorado House Democrats are sending a message that any legislation that restricts ‘drag shows’ performed in front of children should not be passed. Even if it is legislation against “indecent exposure” and performing sexual acts with children.

“27 Democrats in the Colorado House of Reps just voted against making indecent exposure to minors a class 6 felony,” Greg Price reported, citing the Colorado House Republicans. “One Democrat said that the bill ‘targets’ drag shows and the transgender community.”

“These types of laws have been used to ban drag shows to target individuals who use the restroom of the sex that they identify with a public restroom to charge them with felony charges,” one Democrat lawmaker argued. “I am very concerned about the attacks against the transgender community that are happening across the country.”

“When I initially read this bill, it did not even come to mind for me either as an advocate, but as I’ve looked at the bills and as I’ve talked to my colleagues who are fighting these types of bills across the country, it’s very clear to me that the language is very much mirrored in some of the laws that have been used to target members of our community because of who they are,” she continued.

The Colorado General Assembly is attempting to pass HB23-1135, which is entitled, “Concerning the offense classification for indecent exposure in view of a minor, and, in connection therewith, making an appropriation.”

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How The FBI Helps Ukrainian Intelligence Hunt ‘Disinformation’ On Social Media

The Federal Bureau of Investigation pressures Facebook to take down alleged Russian “disinformation” at the behest of Ukrainian intelligence, according to a senior Ukrainian official who corresponds regularly with the FBI. The same official said that Ukrainian authorities define “disinformation” broadly, flagging many social media accounts and posts that he suggested may simply contradict the Ukrainian government’s narrative.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the U.S., we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” said llia Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine.

“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and sometimes we get good results with that,” noted Vitiuk. “We say, ‘Okay, this was the person who was probably Russia’s influence.'”

Vitiuk, in an interview, said that he is a proponent of free speech and understands concerns around social media censorship. But he also admitted that he and his colleagues take a deliberately expansive view of what counts as “Russian disinformation.”

“When people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’ Indeed it is very difficult in such an informational flow,” said Vitiuk. “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

In recent weeks, Vitiuk said, Russian forces have used various forms of disinformation to manufacture fake tension between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the four-star general who serves as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s military.

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Army aviators, ready to leave the military, are told they owe 3 more years instead

Hundreds of Army aviation officers who were set to leave the military are being held to another three years of service after they say the branch quietly reinterpreted part of their contract amid retention and recruitment issues.

The shift has sparked an uproar among the more than 600 affected active-duty commissioned officers, including some who say their plans to start families, launch businesses and begin their civilian lives have been suddenly derailed. 

“We are now completely in limbo,” said a captain who had scheduled his wedding around thinking he would be leaving the military this spring. 

That captain and three other active-duty aviation officers who spoke to NBC News spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

As part of a program known as BRADSO, cadets commissioning from the U.S. Military Academy or Army Cadet Command from 2008 and 2020 were able to request a branch of their choice, including aviation, by agreeing to serve an additional three years on active duty. 

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The Censorship-Industrial Complex

I knew things were bad in my world, but the truth turned out to be much worse than I could have imagined.

My name is Andrew Lowenthal. I am a progressive-minded Australian who for almost 18 years was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology. My résumé also includes fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms.

[Read the accompanying #TwitterFile – The Informational Cartel]

In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation.”

Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing.

When Malaysian and Singaporean governments introduced “fake news” laws, EngageMedia supported networks of activists campaigning against it. We ran digital-security workshops for journalists and human-rights advocates under threat from government attack, both virtual and physical. We developed an independent video platform to route around Big Tech censorship and supported campaigners in Thailand fighting government attempts to suppress free expression. In Asia, government interference in speech and expression was the norm. Progressive activists in search of more political freedom often looked to the West for moral and financial support. Now the West is turning against the core value of free expression, in the name of fighting disinformation.

Before being put in charge of tracking anti-disinformation groups and their funders for this Racket project, I thought I had a strong idea of just how big this industry was. I’d been swimming in the broader digital rights field for two decades and saw the rapid growth of anti-disinformation initiatives up close. I knew many of the key organizations and their leaders, and EngageMedia had itself been part of anti-disinformation projects.

After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.

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Leftist Minnesota Just Gave State Power To Take Kids Away If Parents Don’t Approve Gender Surgery

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz on Thursday signed into law a bill making the state a “sanctuary” for children, including those from out of state, seeking gender-altering surgery without the consent of their parents.

The new law gives state courts temporary emergency jurisdiction over any child in Minnesota who has been abandoned, is in need of protection from abuse, or has “been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care.” The law defines such care as “medically necessary health care or mental health care that respects the gender identity of the patient, as experienced and defined by the patient” and specifically cites puberty blockers and chemical and surgical procedures “to align the patient’s appearance or physical body with the patient’s gender identity.”

“We just signed the Conversion Therapy Ban, Reproductive Freedom Defense Act, and Trans Refuge Bill into law,” said Democrat Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan. “In Minnesota, we’re building a state where everyone is safe to be who they are, love who they love, and live without fear of violence and discrimination.”

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Billionaire T. Denny Sanford Was Investigated For Child Pornography—Newly Unsealed Documents Reveal Why

Nude photos of underage girls between the ages of 8 and 15 were discovered in the email account of billionaire T. Denny Sanford, who is the wealthiest person in South Dakota, newly unsealed documents show, shedding light on a child pornography investigation into the philanthropist which was closed without charges in 2022.

In the summer of 2019, images of nude underage girls were discovered in an AOL email linked to Sanford, prompting an investigation into the founder of First Premier Bank who is worth $2 billion and has donated large sums to children’s causes, according to documents released Thursday.

The images were revealed in unsealed court documents this week after a court battle by the news organizations ProPublica and South Dakota’s Argus Leader newspaper.

In 2019 the parent company of AOL sent information about the images to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which in turn made the referral to law enforcement, sparking an investigation that included five search warrants for Sanford’s email, phone, and internet data; one investigator wrote he believed there was evidence of criminality, according to the documents.

Sanford’s attorney Stacey Hegge said Thursday that after an “exhaustive” investigation, no prosecutable offense was discovered, partly because many individuals had access to Sanford’s devices, including, potentially, hackers.

The investigation was closed last year after the South Dakota attorney general, who was leading it, was impeached, but it isn’t fully clear why Sanford was not indicted.

Sanford fought to keep the documents sealed, but, after a years-long battle led by news organizations ProPublica and the Argus Leader to publicize the affidavit, South Dakota courts ruled to unseal them on April 6.

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San Francisco Repeals Boycott of Conservative States; California May Follow

San Francisco repealed its boycott of conservative states over legislation on social issues on Tuesday because the boycott did not work and raised costs for the city. California may also soon repeal a similar boycott law.

As Breitbart News reported in February, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors decided to reconsider an ordinance passed in 2016 that banned city-funded travel to states that had passed laws like transgender bathroom ordinances. The ordinance also banned contracting with companies headquartered in those states. The boycott eventually expanded to include states that passed voter integrity laws and abortion restrictions.

But over time, the boycott failed to deter such laws, and raised the city’s contracting costs by 10% to 20%.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported:

Supervisors rolled back the entire law in a 7-4 vote just one month after the board agreed to exempt construction contracts from the boycott. Mayor London Breed has already said she supports repealing or reforming the underlying law.

“It’s not achieving the goal we want to achieve,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who sponsored the legislation that repealed the whole boycott. “It is making our government less efficient.”

As Breitbart News noted last month, California is also reconsidering its ban on state-funded travel to conservative states — a ban that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has repeatedly flouted by vacationing in such states or by visiting them to campaign against their laws and policies.

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