Tag: corruption

Pentagon quietly shut legally required program to prevent civilian deaths by military, watchdog finds

The Pentagon has quietly dismantled a program it is legally required to operate to prevent and respond to civilian deaths in US military operations, according to its internal watchdog.

A report released by the department’s inspector general concluded the US military no longer has the people, tools or infrastructure needed to comply with two federal statutes requiring it to maintain a functioning civilian casualty policy, and operate a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP CoE).

Donald Trump’s administration has been accused of making deep cuts to the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) program, designed to handle training and procedures critical in limiting civilian harm in theaters of war.

While the program has not been officially canceled, the inspector general’s report said that funding had ended for a data management platform; committee meetings had halted; and many dedicated personnel had been lost or reassigned.

“As a result, the DoW may not comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy,” the report read. “A policy required by federal law.”

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.

The program was created by Lloyd Austin, then defense secretary, in January 2022, under Joe Biden, following years of deadly US bombing campaigns in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Airwars, a civilian harm monitor, estimated that US drone and airstrikes killed at least 22,000 civilians – and perhaps as many as 48,000 – in the 20 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon chief, has recently come under fire over deadly attacks on Iran, including a US strike in Minab that killed at least 175 people, a majority of them children, at an all-girls school.

Limiting casualties has not been a top priority under Hegseth’s tenure at the Department of War, rebranded on his watch from Department of Defense last September. When pressed on civilian casualties in Iran, he has pivoted to blame the country’s regime for placing rocket launchers in civilian areas, and also claimed no nation in history had taken more precautions than the US to avoid civilian deaths.

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What If We Really Are Just Exposing the Tip of the Federal Fraud Iceberg?

Open the Books exposed yet another insight into the stinking, rotten catastrophe that is the massive, systematic, and continuing stealing from American taxpayers via an unknown number of federal social service programs that for decades have all but hung in their windows signs saying “Come Steal.”

Earlier this month, the headline on the Open the Books website proclaimed “Hidden Fees: Taxpayers on the Hook for Foreign-Linked Health Care Fraud Schemes.” Here’s what was found:

In January 2026, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz alleged that roughly $3.5 billion worth of fraud, so far unconfirmed, was happening through false hospice billings in a scheme he attributed in large part to what he called the ‘Russian Armenian mafia.’

So, Open the Books took a look at Oz’s claims, what fraud could be confirmed, and its cost to taxpayers. It turns out Russian and Armenian-linked fraud has cost taxpayers almost $1 billion in confirmed losses from Medicare and Medicaid, part of a Department of Justice operation dubbed ‘Operation Gold Rush.’

So now we must add the Russian-Armenian Mafia to the Somali robbing of Medicaid billions in Minnesota and Ohio, and whatever ethnicity may be the thieves behind the similarly systematic filching in California and Maine. And let’s not forget the Mexican Drug Cartels almost certainly have their greasy fingers in this long-running criminal enterprise, too.

Thus far, 11 individuals involved in the transnational criminal operation have been charged by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in Operation Gold Rush, which is the largest health care fraud case ever charged by federal officials. The criminals bought medical equipment firms, then submitted fraudulent Medicare claims using more than 1 million stolen Americans’ names.

Only 11 people charged? There were 324 individuals charged nationwide by the DOJ last year, and the total thus far in 2026 isn’t known. But let us assume DOJ doubles its 2025 level and takes 648 individuals to federal court for defrauding Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Veterans Affairs, SNAP/Food Stamp, and who knows how many more federal benefit programs? And we haven’t even mentioned fraud in Department of Defense procurement.

Given the international scope of the waste and fraud, one might reasonably expect that thousands of criminals are involved who should be identified, charged, convicted, and imprisoned. According to GAO in 2024, the government loses as much as $521 billion annually to fraud, but I expect that estimate to spiral as the DOJ’s current anti-fraud effort goes forward.

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Ukrainian Anti-Corruption Prosecutors Say Zelensky’s Right-Hand Man Yermak Turned to Fortune Teller To Cast Spells and ‘Eliminate Enemies’

Yermak sought the counsel of ‘Veronika Feng Shui’, who urged him to ‘eliminate his enemies’ while still in power.

It turns out that Volodymyr Zelensky’s right-hand man, Andriy Yermak, turned to a fortune teller amid the political turmoil that ended with him in pretrial arrest.

We first reported this story back in February, when Russian RT brought ‘a story that would have had all the markings of pure Moscow propaganda, if it were not brought by a Ukrainian source with knowledge of the inner workings of the Kiev regime’.

Former press secretary to Volodymyr Zelensky, Yulia Mendel, had claimed that Yermak sought help from witches of various stripes – shady occultists gathering ‘water from corpses’, burning herbs, and performing dark rituals – as you can read in: Former Ukrainian Official Denounces Regime Reliance on Witchcraft – Disgraced Gray Eminence Andriy Yermak Said To Mess With Corpses, Burned Herbs, and Perform Dark Rituals.

Many people may have dismissed this story as a fantasy by one disgruntled employee amplified by the Russian propaganda machine – but now, the reports have resurfaced, with iron-clad Ukrainian sources and copious amounts of evidence.

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Ilhan Omar Knew About $250 Million Somali Fraud Scheme, Convicted Mastermind Claims in Explosive Jailhouse Interview

Aimee Bock, the convicted mastermind behind the massive $250 million Feeding Our Future COVID meal fraud scandal, has dropped a bombshell from jail, saying she believes Rep. Ilhan Omar knew exactly what was going on and actively helped keep the fraudulent program alive.

Bock, the founder of Feeding Our Future, spoke to the New York Post this week from Sherburne County Jail, where she is awaiting sentencing after her March 2025 conviction on conspiracy, bribery, and wire fraud charges.

Dozens of individuals, mostly from Minnesota’s Somali community, have been convicted in the scheme that fraudulently billed the federal government for tens of millions of meals that were never served to low-income children during the pandemic.

“I struggle to believe that she wouldn’t have known,” Bock said of Omar.

Bock alleged that Omar’s office repeatedly stepped in to help secure and extend USDA waivers that dramatically loosened oversight of the child nutrition programs.

Those waivers eliminated the requirement for site inspections and allowed restaurants and other non-school entities to participate, opening the floodgates to massive fraud.

Omar personally introduced the Maintaining Essential Access to Lunch for Students (MEALS) Act in March 2020, which gave the USDA authority to issue those waivers during the pandemic.

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Colorado county Republican chair arrested in sting on allegations he tried to pay for sex with a child

Hunter Rivera, the 24-year-old chairman of the Weld County Republican Party, was one of two men arrested Thursday on suspicion of trying to buy sex from Larimer County Sheriff’s Office investigators who posed as minors as part of an operation targeting child predators.

After news of Rivera’s arrest broke late Friday, multiple prominent Republicans denounced Rivera and called for his immediate resignation from the party position.

The sheriff’s office said in a news release that “several dozen people” responded to investigators who posed as minors offering sexual acts for sale on local websites and online forums. Two men — one of whom was Rivera — showed up at an agreed-upon location to pay for sex but were arrested and later booked into the county jail, the office said.

Rivera, who lives in Windsor, faces four felony charges, the sheriff’s office said: soliciting a child prostitute, internet luring of a child, soliciting to arrange a minor prostitute in a cybercrime, and attempted sexual assault on a child.

Rivera was being held at the Larimer County jail on a $6,500 cash-only bond but was in the process of being released, according to county records. His next scheduled court appearance is May 21.

“Children are not property to be bought or sold,” Sheriff John Feyen said in a statement. “Human trafficking is modern day slavery, and we won’t tolerate it in Larimer County. I hope this operation sends a strong message. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you try to hurt kids in our community, you will be held accountable.”

The sheriff’s office release stressed that defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Rivera has been a fixture in Republican circles in recent years, both at the state Capitol, where he worked for several years as a legislative aide until last year, and in broader party activity.

After serving on multiple local local boards and chairing the Northern Colorado Young Republicans, Rivera ran unsuccessfully for Windsor Town Board in 2022, the Fort Collins Coloradan reported.

He served as an appointed member of the state GOP’s executive committee until last month, when the state party’s interim chair, Eric Grossman, removed him from the panel following delegates to the Republicans’ state assembly censuring members who had voted against filing a motion to close Colorado’s primary election to unaffiliated voters.

“Mr. Rivera should immediately resign,” Grossman told Colorado Politics in a text message. “I dismissed him from the excomm weeks ago after being censured by over 2,000 delegates and how fortuitous that decision looks now.”

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Windsor Republican who supported Rivera’s bid for county chair last year, issued a blistering statement condemning the allegations and calling on Rivera to be “replaced immediately” as party chair.

“These allegations are vile and indefensible. I pray to God there are not real victims out there. I am angry and disgusted,” Boebert said in a text message.

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Australian Federal Court rules ‘trans women’ are REAL women

Australia’s Federal Court has delivered its long-awaited judgment in the Giggle v Tickle appeal, finding in favour of Roxanne Tickle.

The full court, made up of Justices Melissa Perry, Geoffrey Kennett and Wendy Abraham, handed down the decision today after a two-day hearing last August.

The case involved Sall Grover, founder of the women-only social networking app Giggle, who had removed Roxanne Tickle, a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman, from the platform. Grover appealed an earlier 2024 ruling that found the exclusion amounted to indirect discrimination. Tickle cross-appealed, seeking a finding of direct discrimination and higher damages.

The court ruled that Giggle and Grover directly discriminated against Tickle on the ground of gender identity by excluding them based on their gender-related appearance, as shown in a selfie, and then refusing to readmit them. 

The judges agreed with the original decision on the interpretation of special measures under the Sex Discrimination Act, concluding that the app’s women-only policy did not provide a defence in this instance. They increased the damages award to $20,000, taking into account what they described as aggravating conduct by Grover.

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For-Profit Immigrant Detention Centers Exploiting Prison Labor With $1 Per Day Wages

As President Donald Trump continues his mass detention and deportation agenda and expands the use of privately owned immigrant prisons, with more than 60,000 people detained across the country, the profits of private contractors like the GEO Group and CoreCivic are skyrocketing—and a new report by a government watchdog reveals one method the multibillion-dollar firms have of extracting profits from detainees.

Public Citizen researcher Douglas Pasternak wrote in a report released Wednesday that approximately 50% of immigrants who are detained for more than a few days end up in the government’s so-called Voluntary Work Program (VWP), earning just $1 per day—12.5 cents per hour—while they keep the detention centers running.

At facilities like Adelanto Detention Center in Adelanto, California, run by the GEO Group, and CoreCivic’s Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, detainees work as many as 14 hours in a day for just $1—cooking, cleaning, performing maintenance work, and completing other labor essential to the facilities’ operations—and in many cases are forced to use their meager wages only at commissaries also run by the corporations.

“This entire $1-a-day pay scheme is economically unjustifiable, fundamentally unfair, and morally reprehensible,” said Pasternak in a statement.

The companies are notorious for price gouging, forcing the so-called “voluntary worker” to work full-time for 11 days to afford a tube of Sensodyne toothpaste—priced at $11.02 at Stewart Detention Center, compared to just $5.20 on Amazon.

“At these rates, it may take a detainee more than three days of work to purchase a can of tuna fish or more than two days of work to purchase a bar of soap,” said Public Citizen.

The business model has saved the contractors millions of dollars and allowed them to reap massive profits.

Former CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger made $7.2 million in compensation last year before retiring, and the company’s profits grew from $68.9 million in 2024 to $116.5 million last year. Both CoreCivic and the GEO Group reported well over $2 billion in revenue in 2025.

When it was sued over its use of the VWP in Washington State, the GEO Group testified that it would have had to pay 85 full-time employees at the state’s minimum wage—$17.13 per hour—if it hadn’t used the labor of detainees. Hiring workers would have cost the company over $3 million per year, but instead the GEO Group spent just over $22,000 paying imprisoned immigrants $1 per hour.

“The private contractors running immigrant detention centers are pocketing millions of dollars in profits as tens of thousands of detainees struggle to afford to purchase a bar of soap or a tube of toothpaste,” said Pasternak. “The dichotomy between the contractors’ profits and the detainees’ pay is outrageous.”

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Georgia Acid Attack Victim Lashes Out at Savannah Mayor and Police For Withholding Video Evidence, Suggesting She Personally Knew Suspect

Last December, a Georgia woman sustained severe burns to her face, neck, and scalp after a stranger emerged from the bushes at a Forsyth park and doused her in acid.

According to law enforcement, a black male approached the victim, Ashley Wasielewski, while she was walking around Forsyth Park and hurled acid at her.

The suspect, who is still at large, approached the victim from behind and poured the liquid chemical on her.

Wasielewski suffered third-degree burns and received treatment at Memorial Hospital in Augusta.

According to police, the attacker was not known to the victim.

“I walk around this park a lot, even at night,” Wasielewski told WJCL. “You just don’t expect something like this to happen here.”

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Bombshell: Left-Wing Tech Billionaires Are Paying the Full Salaries of Dozens of ‘Journalists’ at Top Media Companies

If you want to talk about media corruption, how about the discovery that a left-wing political organization has embedded 80 “journalists” in the corporate media by paying their full salaries?

Breitbart News has previously reported on LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s dark money election meddling, as well as Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz’s deep penetration of President Joe Biden’s administration with AI activists.

Behind this corruption is a far-left, globalist organization called Effective Altruism (EA), which the New York Post describes as a “billionaire-backed movement [that] aims to solve the world’s problems” which wants to send the message that “unchecked AI will destroy us all,” and that we must “prioritize causes like climate change, global health, poverty, [and] pandemics.”

EA wants to end factory farming. Okay, and replace it with what — insects? We have to feed 8.3 billion people every single day.

No one should blame EA. These fascist tech bros are merely doing whatever it takes to further their fascist cause. If you believe in something, you take every advantage to promote it.

What is obscene here…

What is indefensible here…

What is inexcusable here is this:

To spread their message the group has the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism — funded in part by EA foundations — which pays full salaries of journalists placed inside such newsrooms as Time, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and The Guardian, NBC News, and The Verge.

Then there’s Ezra Klein at the New York Times:

New York Times superstar columnist Ezra Klein has maintained deep, longstanding ties to EA and its billionaires, and even uses his widely read NYT column to solicit donations to them.

How can you call yourself a progressive if you solicit donations to an organization run by… billionaires?

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CIA Whistleblower: Fauci Led Multi-Agency Cover-Up of COVID Lab Leak Evidence

A CIA whistleblower today told the U.S. Senate that Dr. Anthony Fauci intentionally helped cover up evidence showing that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese laboratory that worked with U.S.-funded scientists — some of whom were involved with gain-of-function research and coronaviruses months before the pandemic.

“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional,” said James E. Erdman III, a senior operations officer for the CIA. Erdman testified during a hearing organized by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

Erdman, who worked for the federal Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) between March 2025 and April 2026, leading its investigation into COVID-19’s origins, said this position exposed him to evidence that Fauci, the CIA and other elements of the U.S. intelligence community actively covered up evidence of a COVID-19 lab leak.

He said a “small circle” of scientists was involved in the cover-up and helped promote the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had a zoonotic — or natural — origin. Fauci then referred investigators from various U.S. intelligence agencies leading an interagency probe into the virus’s origins to the same scientists, Erdman said.

Erdman said the scientists were linked to gain-of-function research, which increases the virulence or transmissibility of viruses and is used in vaccine development.

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