Tag: corruption

Top Dem Senator Under Federal Investigation Over Campaign Spending

Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) is under federal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice for suspected campaign finance violations, according to.

The probe originated from a whistleblower complaint filed from Southern California, the outlet reported.

The investigation centers on the use of funds from Gallego’s political action committee for family travel and related expenses. Specific examples cited in connection with the allegations include trips to Miami, Chicago, Disneyland, and Disney World.

These matters were previously examined as part of a separate congressional ethics process.

A review of federal campaign finance records from Politico detailed additional spending by Gallego’s campaign committee and his leadership PAC, Juntos PAC. The records show more than $18,000 in reimbursements for child care since 2019, including payments to an au pair company and a $400 payment to Gallego’s mother-in-law for babysitting during a campaign fundraiser.

The leadership PAC covered costs for family travel to locations including a Miami Beach hotel stay exceeding $9,000 for a birthday celebration that also involved political events, a Chicago trip with nearly $1,500 in lodging that included a fundraiser, and meals and hotels at Disneyland and Disney World totaling nearly $1,500 (excluding flights).

Family members, including Gallego’s wife Sydney, their children, and an au pair, joined multiple trips. A joint fundraising committee with former Rep. Eric Swalwell also covered expenses related to the 2023 Super Bowl in Arizona, including event tickets and a pre-game brunch.

Gallego has stated that the expenditures comply with Federal Election Commission rules. In response to the Politico reporting, he wrote that such travel with family members for campaign and fundraising purposes is permitted and occurs regularly among members of Congress from both parties, noting the rising costs of child care.

A spokesperson for Gallego described the Miami trip as part of a multi-stop political and fundraising swing and the Chicago trip as including a fundraiser and attendance at political events.

Juntos PAC, established in February 2024, has raised nearly $1.5 million, with more than half of the funds coming from corporate PACs. Leadership PACs are subject to different rules than principal campaign committees and allow greater flexibility for expenditures tied to fundraising activities.

Gallego’s office has noted that the senator proactively established a legal defense fund in the preceding month.

The investigation follows the closure of an inquiry by the Senate Select Committee on Ethics. In a letter dated June 26, 2026, the committee informed Gallego that it “did not find evidence that your actions violated Federal law, Senate Rules or related standards of conduct.” The ethics inquiry stemmed from a complaint filed in April by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), which alleged campaign finance violations and inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature.

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Empire At 250: Can The Principles Of 1776 Survive The American Police State?

“The people are the only legitimate fountain of power.”

– James Madison

This is a year of strange anniversaries.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a band of revolutionaries declared their independence from a king.

America’s founders rejected concentrated power. They denounced standing armies. They distrusted government secrecy. They risked their lives to escape a ruler who could tax without consent, wage war without accountability, and govern without meaningful restraint.

Twenty-five years ago, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, America embarked on a very different journey.

The federal government claimed extraordinary emergency powers. Surveillance expanded. Wars multiplied. Executive authority grew. Constitutional safeguards were weakened in the name of security.

One anniversary marked a revolt against empire. The other marked the normalization of it.

Now, as America prepares to celebrate 250 years of independence, we are confronted with a bitter irony: the republic born in rebellion against empire has become an empire in everything but name.

Worse, the U.S. government is violating the very principles that justified the American Revolution.

Graft, grift and corruption. Endless wars. Profiteering. Trillions squandered abroad while the nation sinks deeper into debt at home.

A government that governs increasingly by executive order and emergency decree. A government that wastes taxpayer money with impunity, rewards political loyalty over constitutional fidelity, installs loyalists in positions meant to serve the public, dismantles safeguards against corruption, shields insiders from scrutiny, and treats accountability as an inconvenience.

National states of emergency that never seem to end. Efforts to nullify constitutional guarantees such as birthright citizenship. Expanded death penalty powers. A growing willingness to bypass Congress, sidestep constitutional restraints and rule by fiat.

Surveillance programs that track where we go, what we buy, who we know, what we say and what we believe. Fusion centers, facial recognition, license plate readers, AI-assisted monitoring, financial tracking, intelligence-sharing agreements and a sprawling security apparatus that treats privacy as a loophole and dissent as a threat.

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Americans Want Peace, Israel Wants War

America wants peace. Israel wants war. The great majority of Americans want an end to the war against Iran. The great majority in Congress just want more contributions from the Israel Lobby and its supporters.

Now, most members of Congress are really squirming. They know that most of their constituents are fed up with foreign wars and want this stupid war in Iran over, the sooner the better.

But they are afraid to criticize Israel’s war for fear of the Israel Lobby steering big campaign contributions against them. Their silence is deafening.

Most members are trying to keep quiet. Almost no one other than Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, and the Israel First crowd are enthusiastic about this war.

The only ones speaking out strongly in favor of it are members who have received and/or who hope to receive millions in campaign contributions from the Lobby like Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Tom Cotton and others.

They didn’t even criticize Israel when it was starving and killing more than 20,000 children in Gaza. Congress would have rushed to pass a resolution of condemnation if it had been done in any other country than Israel.

But the killing goes on, even during so-called ceasefires. Thousands have been killed over this past year by Israeli forces in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.

We don’t hear and see as much about all this killing because Israel was losing the public relations battle, and pro-Israel billionaires bought up significant parts of the national media that they did not already own.  Lesser-known conservative “influencers” and podcasters were given money, and 1,000 ministers were given free trips to Israel. Even TikTok was bought because its coverage was supposedly causing too many teenagers to have anti-Israel opinions.

However, all the pro-Israel propaganda has not worked so far. Even President Trump has apparently gotten angry at times with Netanyahu, telling him at one point that he shouldn’t blow up an entire apartment building to get at one person.

And Vice President Vance told the world in a press conference that Israel’s cabinet should realize that President Trump was the only world leader still supporting  Netanyahu and that two-thirds of all the military equipment and ammunition used by the IDF in these latest wars had been paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

The very few members of Congress and commentators who are criticizing President Trump for giving into Iran in the Memorandum he signed need to be asked what their alternative is.

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New Study Strongly Links Merck’s Gardasil HPV Vaccine to POTS, but Authors Downplay Signal

A new analysis of adverse events reported to the federal vaccine safety surveillance database after the HPV vaccine detected a strong safety signal for POTS, an autonomic nervous system disorder, in some people who received the shots.

The authors of the study, published last week in PLOS One, analyzed 77,909 reports associated with human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) between 2006 and 2024.

They concluded that the signal for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) warranted further investigation. However, they downplayed the significance of their findings, according to experts who spoke with The Defender.

Their discussion section dedicated only two sentences to POTS, even though the condition was the strongest signal identified by the analysis.

The authors underscored that a signal for POTS does not prove that it was caused by the shot, and said that a strong signal “does not necessarily translate into a large clinical or public health impact.”

Warning that when people hear about serious adverse events, it affects their “perception” of safety, the authors framed their paper as part of a process of identifying and addressing potential risks that “is crucial to maintaining high vaccination coverage.”

Cynthia Nevison, Ph.D., said this approach led the authors to be dismissive of their own results. “I always object in principle to papers that start out with the motivation of reducing vaccine hesitancy,” Nevison told The Defender.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) Chief Scientific Officer Brian Hooker said the attempts to downplay POTS as a side effect of the HPV shot are “criminal and the paper is expertly crafted to hide this very obvious signal in order to repeat the default ‘safe and effective’ lie.”

He added that given VAERS underreporting, “we know that the pesky result they’re downplaying could represent 68,000 POTS cases nationwide and over 1 million serious adverse events total.”

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Study Claiming COVID Vaccines Benefit Heart Health ‘Hopelessly Flawed,’ Scientists Say

A new study linking COVID-19 vaccines to a significantly lower risk of heart attack and stroke joins “the latest in a growing body of research about the vaccine’s benefits for heart health,” according to The Washington Post, which reported on the study.

But Dr. Vinay Prasad, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, called the study “hopelessly flawed.”

Prasad, the former director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research before stepping down in April, and other scientists said the study’s methodological flaws skewed its findings.

“Not only should it not be in the news, the paper should not be in print,” Prasad wrote on Substack.

Canadian researcher Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., called the paper “outright bad science” that “should not be used whatsoever to ‘help inform clinical and public health discussions’ as they propose.”

The study, published last week in JAMA Internal Medicine, tied COVID-19 vaccination to a 37.7% lower risk of serious cardiovascular conditions, particularly among people 75 and older or people with comorbidities.

The authors also found that the vaccinated had a 6.2% lower risk of serious heart conditions overall and a 6.6% reduction in all-cause hospitalizations.

“Extrapolating these estimates to a population of 1 million people, vaccination could plausibly be associated with averting approximately 2370 [major cardiovascular] events and 1580 deaths over an 8-month period,” the study claims.

However, the researchers acknowledged that “the absolute benefit” of COVID-19 vaccination “was modest for the general cohort.”

Heart conditions such as myocarditis are widely associated with the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, with reports of deaths connected to the vaccines, particularly among teenage and young adult males.

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Ohio Sen. Moreno Rips GOP Gov. DeWine for Putting Haitian Migrants over Americans

Ohio’s Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno blasted his state’s governor, Republican Mike DeWine, for the governor’s support of the thousands of Haitian migrants Joe Biden imported into the state as the Trump administration moves to revoke their temporary protected immigration status.

DeWine went on left-wing CNN and attacked the Trump administration for working to revoke the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of some 300,000 economic migrants from Haiti, thousands of whom flooded into the Buckeye State during the Biden years. On CNN, DeWine insisted that the Haitians have been an integral part of Ohio communities.

“It is not in the United States’s interest, certainly not in Ohio’s interest,” DeWine told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “to have people who are working every single day, who are supporting a family, who are buying houses, fixing up old houses, starting businesses, and then put deep roots in this country and really are contributing, and yank them out!”

DeWine painted a picture of Haitians who are important and contributing greatly to America and Ohio both.

But Sen. Moreno begged to disagree. In fact, Moreno said that these thousands of Haitians are a net drag on Ohio, and not a boon to the state’s economy at all.

Moreno said that housing has become more expensive because of all these migrants, that car accidents have soared, and that these Haitians are sucking up billions in welfare that should be going to Ohioans, not economic migrants.

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The Chancellor, the Asset Manager, and the Missiles

There is a particular kind of arrangement that no law forbids and no scandal quite captures, because nothing in it is hidden. It sits in plain view, in regulatory filings and procurement requests, and it works precisely because everyone involved can say, truthfully, that they broke no rule. Friedrich Merz’s Germany is building one of these in real time.

Start with the weapons. In July 2025, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told Washington that Germany wanted to buy the American Typhon launch system and Tomahawk cruise missiles — the system’s first foreign sale, the decision left entirely to the United States. Trade outlets, citing Politico, put the order at three launchers and some 400 Tomahawk Block Vb missiles, north of €1 billion. Nearly a year later, Washington has not answered. The request stalled after Merz criticized the American war on Iran and Trump pulled 5,000 troops out of Germany and canceled a planned long-range-fires deployment. Europe’s would-be military leader, it turns out, cannot get deep-strike capability without American factories and a president’s goodwill. So much for sovereignty.

Now follow the money, because that is where the story actually lives. The Tomahawk is built by RTX, formerly Raytheon, where BlackRock sits among the largest institutional holders. The Typhon launcher is Lockheed Martin’s, where BlackRock has disclosed beneficial ownership above 5 percent in a Schedule 13G filed with the SEC. And BlackRock is where Merz spent four years before climbing back into politics: from 2016 to 2020 he chaired the supervisory board of its German arm. The man asking Washington to sell Germany missiles was, until lately, the public face of a firm that profits when the missiles are sold.

His time there was not quiet. In November 2018, while Merz chaired its supervisory board, prosecutors raided the Munich offices of BlackRock Asset Management Deutschland over cum-ex trades — the dividend-stripping fraud that drained the German treasury of tens of billions of euros. The conduct under investigation predated his arrival, prosecutors named him no suspect, and he called the practice “completely immoral” and ordered the firm to cooperate. Note the pattern all the same: this is a man who has spent his career adjacent to the machinery, never holding the smoking gun, always in the room.

Then came the policy. The fiscal lock came off before Merz was even sworn in. As leader of the election-winning CDU and chancellor-in-waiting, he drove through the outgoing Bundestag — on March 18, 2025, weeks before he took office, and deliberately before the newly elected parliament could convene — the amendment exempting defense spending above 1 percent of GDP from the constitutional “debt brake.” The borrowing limit Germans had treated as sacred since 2009 was gone, replaced by an open tap. German military spending rose 24 percent in 2025 to $114 billion, the largest in NATO Europe. Merz has pledged more than €750 billion for the armed forces.

And BlackRock holds the contractors cashing in. It disclosed a 6.91 percent stake in Rheinmetall, the tank-maker whose shares have soared since 2022, with the ownership chain running through the very German subsidiary Merz once chaired. It crossed the 5 percent threshold in the sensor firm Hensoldt. These are not idle positions. They are the firm collecting on a rearmament its former chairman set loose.

Merz, naturally, denies the whole framing. “I never accepted a lobbying mandate,” he told Die Zeit. The transparency group LobbyControl notes that BlackRock’s own description of his job included cultivating contacts with governments and regulators — which is what lobbying is, whatever euphemism rides on the business card.

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Self-Exiled Chinese Billionaire Guo Wengui Sentenced To 30 Years In U.S. Prison For Massive Fraud – “Let’s Take Down The CCP!”

Guo Wengui, a self-exiled Chinese billionaire and vocal critic of the Chinese Communist Party, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison Monday for orchestrating a sprawling financial fraud that prosecutors say defrauded more than 1,000 victims worldwide of hundreds of millions of dollars.

U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres handed down the sentence in a Manhattan courtroom filled with Guo’s supporters. She described how Guo preyed on investors who hoped to support democracy in China, using their money to fund a lavish lifestyle while showing no remorse, wrote Politico.

“You took advantage of people’s dreams,” Torres said, adding that Guo “takes no responsibility for his actions and instead insists his conduct caused no loss and harmed no one.”

Before sentencing, Guo, also known as Miles Guo or Ho Wan Kwok, complained about his treatment in custody. He told the court through an interpreter that he had been ill and needed medical attention earlier that day. He briefly defended himself, saying his only goal in coming to the United States was “to destroy the CCP.”

The judge ordered Guo to forfeit $889 million in restitution. Victims who wrote to the court described losing life savings, suffering severe anxiety, and facing family shame over the failed investments.

One victim who testified at trial, Wei Chen, told the judge that Guo’s fraud “destroyed my life” and that of her family.

From tycoon to fugitive

Guo fled China about a decade ago and rebranded himself in the U.S. as a prominent critic of the Chinese government. He cultivated ties with American conservatives, most notably forming a close alliance with political strategist Steve Bannon. In 2020, the two announced plans to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.

Before his arrest in 2023, Guo lived extravagantly in a luxury apartment overlooking Central Park, owned yachts, race cars, and designer goods, and was a member of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

Prosecutors said Guo raised more than $1 billion from investors between 2018 and 2023 through fraudulent schemes involving his media company GTV Media Group, the Himalaya Farm Alliance, and the Himalaya Exchange. Much of the money allegedly went to support his opulent lifestyle rather than the promised projects.

A federal jury convicted him on nine of 12 counts after a seven-week trial, added Politico.

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Sadiq Khan Said There Were No Grooming Gangs In London; Police Investigating 4,000 Cases

The London mayor who once insisted there was “no indication” of grooming gangs now faces explosive new scrutiny after a police review uncovered thousands of previously sidelined child sexual exploitation files.

The Metropolitan Police has identified more than 4,000 potential child sexual exploitation cases across London that may require reopening.

These stem from roughly 12,000 reports dating back to 2010, with about one in three previously closed after police or prosecutors took no further action.

The cases have now been referred to the National Crime Agency under Operation Beaconport for urgent assessment.

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They Classified It So No One Could See It: The Obama Team’s War on a Duly Elected President

Consider what it takes to lie to a free people at scale. A private liar can deceive a neighbor. A campaign can deceive a district. But to deceive an entire nation, and to do it durably, you need something rarer. You need an institution the public has been trained to trust, and you need to borrow its authority. The intelligence community is that institution. When career officers say a thing is so, citizens reasonably assume the judgment rests on secret evidence too sensitive to share. That trust is precisely what makes the apparatus so dangerous when it is turned, because a borrowed badge of credibility can launder a falsehood into a fact. This is the heart of the matter, and it is why the events of 2016 through 2020 deserve a stark description. The coordinated politicization of US intelligence by the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, and an interlocking network of operatives was the single greatest disinformation campaign in American history.

I want to be careful with that claim, because careless conservatives have squandered credibility by overreaching, and the fact-checkers are waiting. So let me say plainly what I am not arguing. This was not treason in the strict constitutional sense, which requires levying war against the US or adhering to its enemies, proven by two witnesses to an overt act. That high bar is not met here, and pretending otherwise only hands critics an easy rebuttal. What I am arguing is more precise and, in some ways, more damning. The conduct fits the ordinary legal definition of conspiracy, a secret agreement to achieve unlawful ends through unlawful means, and it carries the unmistakable character of sedition, the deliberate poisoning of public perception against a lawful government. The aim was to subvert an election and, having failed at that, to cripple the presidency the voters chose.

Begin with the money, because money leaves a paper trail, and the trail here is not seriously contested. The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee routed roughly $1.02 million to the law firm Perkins Coie for what they would later report to regulators as legal services. Perkins Coie retained the research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, paying his firm roughly $168,000. The product of this arrangement was the now-infamous Steele dossier, a collection of unverified and largely uncorroborated allegations. The political origin of that document is not a matter of conjecture. In 2022 the Federal Election Commission fined the Clinton campaign $8,000 and the DNC $105,000 for misreporting these payments as legal expenses rather than the opposition research they were. A campaign paid for a smear, mislabeled it, and then the smear migrated into the machinery of federal law enforcement.

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