Tag: corruption

Epstein prison guard googled him minutes before body found — and made mysterious deposit before pedophile’s suicide: DOJ

One of Jeffrey Epstein’s prison guards googled the sex predator minutes before he was found dead — and also made a mysterious $5,000 cash deposit 10 days before the predator’s jail-cell suicide, new Department of Justice documents reveal.

Tova Noel was one of the two Metropolitan Correctional Center workers accused of falsifying records to say they checked on Epstein throughout the night before his Aug. 10, 2019, suicide.

The guards were fired but criminal charges against both were later dropped.

Noel googled “latest on Epstein in jail” at 5:42 a.m. and then again at 5:52 a.m. — less than 40 minutes before her colleague, correctional officer Michael Thomas, found the disgraced financier dead in his cell by hanging at 6:30 a.m., according to an FBI record of Noel’s internet search history that night.

Earlier that shift, Noel, 37, shopped for furniture online and snoozed on the job instead of making the mandated checks on Epstein every 30 minutes, while Thomas perused motorcycles, prosecutors said.

The FBI highlighted the eerie internet search in its 66-page forensic examination of the Bureau of Prisons desktop computers of Noel and Thomas. It was the only search highlighted.

When questioned during her sworn statement to the DOJ in 2021, Noel denied googling Epstein.

“I don’t remember doing that,” she claimed, according to a transcript. She said FBI records were not “accurate. I don’t recall looking him up.”

Noel, who has since been sued in Westchester County Supreme Court for alleged assault at her new job as a medical office assistant at Montefiore Einstein Advanced Care, also claimed to investigators that everyone at the Manhattan federal lockup failed to do rounds and falsified records about it.

Keep reading

White House blocks intelligence report warning of rising US homeland terror threat linked to Iran war

The FBI, Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center were preparing to put out a joint intelligence statement on Friday to state and local authorities alerting them of a heightened threat due to the ongoing war in Iran, a senior DHS official said.

The bulletin, which was reviewed by the Daily Mail, details ‘elevated threats by the government of Iran to US military and government personnel and facilities, Jewish and Israeli institutions and their perceived supporters, and Iranian dissidents and other anti-regime activists in the United States.’

‘Radicalized individuals with a variety of ideological backgrounds also may see this conflict or other geopolitical events as a justification for violence,’ the report continues.

The five-page bulletin blocked by the White House provides specific details on how Iranian proxies may carry out attacks across the country. One section explains how local law enforcement can respond to this type of violence.

The official title is ‘A Public Safety Awareness Report: Elevated threat in the United States during US-Iran conflict’. 

Homeland Security broke protocol and gave the White House a heads-up about the nationwide bulletin hours before it was set to be released. 

Top Trump officials ordered it placed on ‘hold’. The White House did not deny blocking the terror bulletin in a statement to the Daily Mail.

‘The White House is coordinating closely with all government agencies to ensure information being disseminated is accurate, up to date, and has been properly vetted — even if that means taking additional time to review to ensure nothing is done in a vacuum,’ said White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson.

Keep reading

Surreal NCAA Scandal: California Basketball Coach Was Moonlighting in Multiple States as a Pimp

Even in the large, expansive, and sordid history of college sports scandals, this one might be one of the strangest.

According to ESPN, California State University, Bakersfield, has been rocked by a surreal scandal that has overshadowed the fact that the team is dead last in the Big West Conference.

(Which is probably for the best for the Roadrunners, given that they’re 8-22.)

But it doesn’t appear that Cal State Bakersfield’s athletic department will be answering any questions about that putrid record any time soon.

Instead, the department will undoubtedly be peppered with questions about “temporary assistant coach” Kevin Mays.

In August, then-Cal State Bakersfield basketball head coach Rod Barnes received an anonymous email alleging that Mays had been operating as a pimp across four different states.

“FIX IT OR THE WHOLE STAFF WILL FALL,” the tipster, who had identified a woman allegedly being trafficked by Mays, said in the email.

The tipster added that it was a “first warning and a final warning.”

Barnes would forward that email to school officials, which prompted an investigation that would eventually lead to criminal charges being pressed against Mays.

Mays is currently being held without bail as he faces an extensive list of charges — 11 in total — spanning both felonies and misdemeanors.

Among the most serious allegations are felony counts of pimping, along with charges tied to illegal weapons and drug trafficking.

Prosecutors accused him of possessing automatic firearms and high-capacity magazines, as well as methamphetamine and marijuana that authorities say were intended for distribution. Those allegations alone carry significant penalties if proven in court.

In addition, investigators claimed Mays had more than 600 images of child sexual abuse material and distributed obscene content involving a minor.

Despite the damning list of accusations, Mays has entered a plea of not guilty to every charge.

The bizarre scandal unsurprisingly took the sports world by storm.

Keep reading

NYC update: Violent black parolee sets innocent man on fire. He has 131 prior arrests…

Some crime stories are disturbing. Others are infuriating. And then there are the ones that make you stop and ask “How on earth is this person still on the streets?” And then you realize, oh, it’s a Dem-run city; that’s why.

The latest story of Dems being soft on crime comes out of New York City, where a black man accused of setting someone on fire in Penn Station wasn’t some unknown guy who suddenly snapped. According to police, he was really, really well known to the system.

In fact, he had 131 prior arrests.

Yes, you read that correctly. One hundred and thirty-one.

It’s hard to find the words to even discuss this absurdity. But here it goes… a system that allows someone to cycle through arrest after arrest – 131 times – without being permanently removed from society is a system that protects criminals, not innocent people.

Keep reading

DOJ files reveal FBI’s plan to probe if close friends David Copperfield and Jeffrey Epstein shared a ‘predilection for minors’ and swapped possible victims 

The FBI sought to investigate if close friends Jeffrey Epstein and David Copperfield referred underage women to each other, a document released as part of the Epstein files reveal.

But agents claimed ‘weak’ bureau brass were intimidated by Copperfield and his ‘financial resources’ were too much for them to handle and the probe was eventually called off for those and other reasons.

A Daily Mail deep dive into the DOJ’s files reveals how serious the investigation into Copperfield was – and how close he was to the pedophile. Their ties were so close, the FBI referred to the illusionist as his favorite ‘cohort.’

Now, Copperfield announced today he is quitting his long running residency at the MGM Grand. He did not give a reason although it comes as his name appears at least 438 times in the released  DOJ documents from the Epstein files.

His final performance at the MGM Grand will be on April 30. He remains slated to perform 120 shows over the next eight weeks, in some cases as many as three shows a night. 

The DOJ emails show that prosecutors identified ‘lots of acts’ and and needed to further investigate whether Copperfield and Epstein were ‘engaged in referring possible victims to each other’.

The documents indicate that Copperfield had a ‘very close relationship’ with Epstein and trained his staff to pull young women from the audience at his shows to bring them backstage, where he kept a notebook of those he had sex with.

But after concern from ‘higher ups’, as one law enforcement official put it, the investigation did not lead to charges.

Keep reading

Catholic bishop, 69, accused of visiting mega-brothel 12 times in one month is dramatically arrested as he prepared to board flight to ROME

A disgraced Catholic bishop who was accused of visiting a notorious Mexican mega-brothel 12 times in one month was abruptly arrested on his way out of the country.

Bishop Emanuel Shaleta, 69, was detained at San Diego International Airport on Thursday after church members accused him of pocketing up to a million dollars from the Chaldean Catholic Eparchy of St. Peter the Apostle.

According to the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, Shaleta was charged with eight counts of embezzlement, eight counts of money laundering and one enhancement of ‘aggravated white collar crime.’

The Pillar previously reported that the bishop was expected to travel to Rome this week.

A church member originally contacted police with accusations against Shaleta in August 2025. 

The Vatican ordered an investigation alongside the Sheriff’s department after allegations of financial fraud and personal misconduct came to light.

Investigators alleged that Shaleta took at least $427,345 from parish accounts, issuing so-called reimbursement checks that he signed himself.

Shaleta was also allegedly seen frequenting a Gentleman’s Club in Tijuana that has been described as a brothel where women and girls have allegedly been trafficked and forced to work.

Shaleta turned in his resignation to the Vatican in January, but has vehemently denied any allegations of fraud. 

‘I have never in my priestly life or episcopal life abused any of the Church money,’ he said at a church service held on February 22, per the San Diego Union-Tribune. 

‘On the contrary, I have done my best to preserve and manage the donations of the Church properly.’ 

According to the investigation, Shaleta’s parish leased its social hall to an outside management firm for roughly $34,000 per month. 

Rent is normally paid by check by an outside company. 

However, records from November 2024 reportedly showed the payment coming from a separate parish bank account used to assist the poor.

When Shaleta was asked about this, he allegedly said he had told the company to give him the full amount so he could distribute it directly to families in need.

Keep reading

Three Massive Funds Control a Chunk of Most Media: Maybe that’s why you might not have heard of them

Recently, FAIR (2/3/26) took a look at the owners of the biggest online media outlets. It focused on the controlling owners of those outlets, which are mostly publicly traded corporations. But a lot of the money—about $2 trillion dollars—invested in the top 50 online media outlets in the US is not the controlling owners’. Rather, it is possessed by minority institutional investors that manage assets for others.

Take BlackRock, Inc., for instance. Innovation & Tech Today (7/8/22) called it “the biggest company you’ve probably never heard of.” The multinational’s influence comes from the $13.5 trillion it manages on behalf of retirement funds, governments, other corporations and individual investors. That figure is enough to purchase every share of Amazon five times over.

BlackRock is just one of the Big Three US asset management firms. The other two, the Vanguard Group and State Street Corporation, are similarly big financial players. Vanguard manages $12 trillion and State Street manages about $5.5 trillion. Collectively, the Big Three “steward” almost 7% of all of the wealth in the entire world: stocks, bonds, cash, everything, everywhere. And while they are not a cartel, they hold the same interests, by dint of owning a small slice of almost everything.

The sheer amount of capital the Big Three can throw around gives them weight. When President Donald Trump went off on an extended tirade about Chinese control of the Panama Canal, BlackRock was there with a solution: “An investor group led by BlackRock will acquire two ports near the Panama Canal,” the New York Times (3/4/25) reported. And when the US economy went into a financial tailspin in 2007–08, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink was the person that central bankers and presidents had on speed dial. They’re invested in private prisons and residential real estate and Kellogg’s cereals, to name just a few.

Keep reading

They Track Every Dollar You Move. They Ignored $378 Million of Epstein’s.

Try to wire $15,000 to a foreign bank account sometime.

You’ll be asked to fill out compliance forms explaining the purpose of the transfer. Your bank’s compliance department will review the transaction. A Currency Transaction Report will be filed with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. And depending on the bank, you may receive a follow-up phone call asking you to further justify why you’re moving your own money.

Try to open a bank account overseas and it gets even more fun. Under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA, every foreign bank on Earth is required to report American account holders to the Internal Revenue Service. The paperwork burden is so heavy that thousands of foreign banks have simply stopped accepting American clients altogether.

Deposit $10,000 in cash and the government automatically files a report. Split it into two deposits of $5,000 to avoid that report and you’ve committed a federal crime called “structuring” — punishable by up to five years in prison.

This is the financial surveillance infrastructure that every American lives under. It was built over decades, starting with the Bank Secrecy Act in 1970 and expanded massively by the Patriot Act after 9/11. We are told it exists to catch money laundering, drug trafficking, terrorism financing, and financial crimes.

Yet over twelve years, Jeffrey Epstein moved $378 million across 270 wire transfers without a single flag.

Bank of New York Mellon — one of the oldest and largest financial institutions in America — processed every one of them. At least 18 were round-dollar $1 million wires in 2007 alone — textbook structuring.

The bank’s own compliance review could not identify a legitimate business purpose for any of the 270 transactions. And no Suspicious Activity Report was filed until 2019 — only after Epstein had been arrested on federal sex trafficking charges.

More than a decade passed between when the transactions occurred and when regulators were notified.

This wasn’t an isolated case, either. Both JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank settled lawsuits related to their Epstein banking relationships. The pattern was identical: process the money, ignore the red flags, settle quietly later.

But while the banks were asleep, another arm of the government was not.

Keep reading

Biden Autopen Investigation is Ongoing and NOT Closed

Fox News reported on Thursday that the Justice Department’s investigation into Biden’s autopen is ongoing – NOT closed – as previously reported by The New York Times, CBS News, and NBC News.

Fox News cautioned that Joe Biden is not the target of the investigation.

On Wednesday, The New York Times and other outlets, citing sources, reported that prosecutors in Jeanine Pirro’s office dropped the criminal case into whether Joe Biden’s aides unlawfully used the autopen to issue pardons.

According to Fox News, the Biden autopen investigation is ongoing.

Per Fox News: It is also clear that the target of any potential prosecution would NOT be former president Biden himself, “It’s hard to imagine how [Biden] could be criminally liable for pardon power,” said the senior DOJ official, describing that power as basically limitless.

The Oversight Project broke the story about the Biden autopen scandal wide open after they discovered thousands of acts of clemency and executive actions were signed with an autopen rather than a wet signature.

Keep reading

Trump pardons Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday he is issuing a “full and unconditional” pardon to Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar and his wife, Imelda, using a lengthy social media post to accuse the Biden administration of targeting political opponents, even within its own party.

“One of the clearest examples of this was when Crooked Joe used the FBI and DOJ to ‘take out’ a member of his own Party after Highly Respected Congressman Henry Cuellar bravely spoke out against Open Borders, and the Biden Border ‘Catastrophe,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“Henry, I don’t know you, but you can sleep well tonight — Your nightmare is finally over!” Trump continued, referring to bribery charges brought against the congressman in 2024.

Responding to the pardon on X, Cuellar thanked Trump “for his tremendous leadership and for taking the time to look at the facts.”

“This pardon gives us a clean slate. The noise is gone. The work remains. And I intend to meet it head on,” he wrote.

The 11-term congressman, who filed for reelection Wednesday as a Democrat, has been likely to face a competitive reelection in a Trump-won district that Republicans are targeting — making the president’s pardon a puzzling move as his party tries to defend its majority in 2026.

Asked Wednesday if he’ll change parties, Cuellar told reporters on Capitol Hill, “No, like I said, nothing has changed.”

And Cuellar said he did not cut a deal with the White House to earn the pardon. “No, no,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju when pressed on the topic later Wednesday. The congressman said he “didn’t know that this was coming,” adding he would go to a White House Christmas party next week and would thank the president personally.

Keep reading