Tag: conflict of interest

Liberal SCOTUS Justice Took $3M From Book Publisher, Didn’t Recuse From Its Cases

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declined to recuse herself from multiple copyright infringement cases involving book publisher Penguin Random House despite having been paid millions by the firm for her books, making it by far her largest source of income, records show.

In 2010, she got a $1.2 million book advance from Knopf Doubleday Group, a part of the conglomerate. In 2012, she reported receiving two advance payments from the publisher totaling $1.9 million.

In 2013, Sotomayor voted in a decision for whether the court should hear a case against the publisher called Aaron Greenspan v. Random House, despite then-fellow Justice Stephen Breyer recusing after also receiving money from the publisher. Greenspan was a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg’s who wrote a book about the founding of Facebook and contended that Random House rejected his book proposal and then awarded a deal to another author who copied his book and eventually turned it into the movie The Social Network.

In 2017, Sotomayor began receiving payments each year from Penguin Random House itself, which continued annually through at least 2021, the most recent disclosure available, and totaled more than $500,000. In all, she received $3.6 million from Penguin Random House or its subsidiaries, according to a Daily Wire tally of financial disclosures.

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The US Could Use Some Separation Of Media And State

The US State Department’s spokesperson Ned Price is being replaced by a man named Matthew Miller. Like Price, Miller has had extensive prior involvement in both the US government and the mass media; Price is a former CIA officer and Obama administration National Security Council staffer who for years worked as an NBC News analyst, while Miller has previously had roles in both the Obama and Biden administrations and spent years as an analyst for MSNBC.

Like every high-level government spokesperson, Miller’s job will be to spin the nefarious things the US empire does in a positive light and deflect inconvenient questions with weasel-worded non-answers. Which also happens to be essentially the same job as the propagandists in the mainstream media.

In journalism school you are taught that there’s supposed to be a sharp line between government and the press; journalists are meant to hold the government to account, and there’s an obvious conflict of interest there if they’re also friends with government officials or are looking to the government as a potential future employer. But at the highest levels of the world’s most powerful government and the world’s most influential media platforms the line between media and state is effectively nonexistent; people flow seamlessly between roles in the media and roles in the government depending on who’s in office.

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After serving in CIA, lawmaker now has role overseeing it

As former CIA Director David Petraeus recently told the House Intelligence Committee about the needs of the agency’s workforce, one of the committee’s youngest members flashed a knowing smile and began to nod.

Abigail Spanberger spent almost a decade as a CIA operations officer. Now, she’s a third-term Democratic congresswoman from Virginia who was just named to one of two committees that oversees the work of America’s spy agencies.

The relationship between Congress and the U.S. intelligence services can be uneasy and is often adversarial. That’s especially true now as lawmakers demand answers about classified documents found in the private possession of two presidents and the Biden administration’s response to a suspected Chinese spy balloon.

Years of high-profile fights over intelligence matters have taken a toll, with some Republicans accusing the agencies of being part of a “deep state” controlling U.S. politics.

Spanberger, 43, is part of a small group of former intelligence officers to have been elected to Congress. Like others with access to America’s top secrets, she will be called on to review intelligence matters in private and explain what she can to fellow lawmakers and the public.

“I know the lingo. I know the language. I know the culture,” Spanberger told The Associated Press in a recent interview in her office. “I hope that helps me do my job better. But I’m sure there will be points of frustration probably for me and for them, frankly speaking.”

She rejects talk of a “deep state” and called on other lawmakers not to promote conspiracy theories about intelligence or the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

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What Conflict of Interest? California AG’s Wife Appointed to Run House Committee that Oversees His Budget

California Democrats who run the state have decided laws no longer matter nor do ethics.  The AG is fine with his wife leading the committee in the state house that oversees his budget. 

KCRA in California reported on the material conflict of interest:

California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s wife, Assemblymember Mia Bonta, has been tapped to lead a budget committee that oversees and helps determine his agency’s spending, a decision that some political experts say is ethically questionable.

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood, recently appointed Mia Bonta, as the chairwoman of the Assembly Budget Subcommittee 5, which focuses on how taxpayer dollars are used on the state’s various public safety agencies, including the California Department of Justice. Both Bontas are Democrats.

“It should raise eyebrows,” said Bob Stern, former general counsel for the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission. “What’s going on with them? It seems to me they have a tin ear about ethics.”

“I believe Ms. Bonta will continue to be independent and unbiased in her legislative judgment, as she has been since starting her service in the Assembly,” Speaker Rendon said in a statement, defending his decision. “The Legislature has a robust and transparent budget process, designed with checks and balances to ensure the best possible budget is passed. Our final Assembly budget proposal must be identical to the Senate, and will be approved or vetoed by the governor. Additionally, we can’t set salaries or benefits for state constitutional officers, so no elected official can ever personally or financially benefit from our budget process,” he said.

Democrats and their Deep State don’t believe in conflicts of interest or the law when it comes to their own actions.  This happens over and over again. 

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Conflict Of Interest? Dr. Simone Gold Sentenced To Jail By Judge She Allegedly Turned Down For A Date In College

Dr. Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors and a common Infowars guest, has been sentenced to 60 days in prison by a judge who she says should have recused himself from the case.

A statement Dr. Gold delivered to Julie Kelly on Monday night explains the judge presiding over her case once asked her on a date while they were attending Stanford University Law School, a request she declined.

Upon seeing the judge’s name on her court docket, the doctor said she assumed he’d recuse himself from the case due to their history.

“The government charged me as a criminal defendant due to being present at the Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Dr. Gold wrote.

She continued, “I found out that I was assigned to Judge Christopher Cooper. This did not mean anything to me. I believed he would have recused himself as we knew each other in law school.”

The doctor described interacting with Judge Cooper on “several” occasions during college.

“One was one time when we walked/talked for some time (perhaps two hours) and got some food,” she wrote. “I believe this was second half of first year. My recollection was we walked from the Law School to a common area (on campus). I don’t recall what we ate etc. I recall general conversation – that he was from the south, that he had gone to Yale, that he was ambitious.”

“The conversation was pleasant,” Dr. Gold admitted. “My impression was that he was cute and that he thought similarly of me. We had other brief ‘hello how are you’ pleasantries. The other interaction that stood out was a week, perhaps two weeks later. This was in the (outside) courtyard of the Law School and we were just talking. After about 10-15 minutes Casey asked me out again, this time a formal invitation to a dinner date, following our prior less formal interactions. This I declined. Just because I wasn’t interested.”

Again, the doctor said she assumed Judge Cooper would have recused himself.

During the sentencing, Dr. Gold claimed the judge repeatedly acted with animus toward her, such as stating she ‘showed no remorse for the five people that died’ on Jan. 6th.

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Pelosi’s Husband Buys $2 Million In Tesla Shares As Democrats Push Green Energy Handouts

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband purchased 2,500 shares of Tesla stock amid Democrats’ push for increased green energy spending.

Paul Pelosi, the Democratic House leader’s millionaire husband, purchased the tranche of Tesla stock on Thursday, when the company’s share price reached about $872 per share by the end of day, according to congressional filings published Monday. Pelosi bought the shares, worth roughly $2.18 million at the time, at a strike price of $500 per share.

Since Paul Pelosi’s purchase, Tesla’s share price increased nearly 19% to over $1,036 a share, making his tranche worth nearly $2.6 million.

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8 Joe Biden Scandals Inside Hunter Biden’s MacBook That Corporate Media Just Admitted Is Legit

Last week, The New York Times quietly acknowledged that the emails recovered from the MacBook Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer store were authentic. The admission came nearly a year-and-a-half late, after the corrupt media — legacy and social — buried the scandal the New York Post broke just weeks before the November election.

Merely admitting the laptop is legitimate is not enough. Rather, by concurring in the authenticity of the laptop and the emails, the supposed standard-bearers of journalism have also implicitly acknowledged the validity of the scandals spawn by the porn-filled MacBook. And notwithstanding the salacious source of the documentary evidence of the scandals, the scandals are not about Hunter Biden: They are about now-President Biden.

Here are the eight Joe Biden scandals deserving further coverage.

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University That Funds Biden’s Think Tank And Hosts FactCheck.Org Has Contract With BioNTech, Gets Paid For Vaccine Sales And FDA Approvals

Documents obtained by NATIONAL FILE show that the University of Pennsylvania, which hosts and funds Joe Biden’s think tank called the Penn Biden Center, directly profits from the sale of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Coronavirus vaccines. The University gets more money if more vaccines are sold. The University of Pennsylvania also gets “milestone payments” when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. BioNTech pays the University of Pennsylvania Board of Trustees directly, and the university is protected from civil liability if people try to sue for “bodily injury” or “death” caused by BioNTech vaccines.

BioNTech signed a licensing agreement in 2018 with the University of Pennsylvania, which directly funds the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Even though Coronavirus had not yet broken out when the deal was made, the 2018 agreement ensured massive payments for the University of Pennsylvania if its technology ended up getting used in new mRNA-based vaccines. Well, UPenn’s technology did end up getting used in the mRNA-based Coronavirus vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech, and the deal has led to massive revenue for the university. Joe Biden, who was working for the University of Pennsylvania when the deal was made, received more than $900,000 from the University of Pennsylvania in the two years before he ran for president in this past election.

The University of Pennsylvania also houses the pro-vaccine website FactCheck.org. University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann is now Biden’s nominee for Ambassador to Germany. The Biden administration’s FDA has speedily approved or authorized Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines including for children — all while the Penn Biden Center’s parent university enjoys massive profits from vaccine sales and FDA approval. And the Pfizer-connected FDA even knew about numerous adverse events for children related to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but allowed children to be injected with it anyway. Now, as the FDA considers emergency use authorization for a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children as young as six months old, the direct financial relationship between these vaccines and Joe Biden’s think tank must be exposed.

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Chinese elite have paid some $31 million to Hunter and the Bidens

For those wondering why Joe Biden is soft on China, consider this never-before-reported revelation: The Biden family has done five deals in China totaling some $31 million arranged by individuals with direct ties to Chinese intelligence — some reaching the very top of China’s spy agency.

Indeed, every known deal that the Biden family enjoyed with Beijing was reached courtesy of individuals with spy ties. And Joe Biden personally benefited from his family’s foreign deals.

What are these deals? And who are the individuals who made them happen for the Bidens?

Here, then, are a few key facts about the Biden family’s $5 million-plus deals with individuals in bed with Chinese intelligence.

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