Tag: corruption

Hochul to DOJ: Stop Targeting N.Y. Democrats

New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul has urged the Department of Justice to “stop targeting Democrats here in New York” amid a flurry of investigations into high-ranking past and present government officials of the Empire State.

During a press conference in Albany on Wednesday, Hochul was asked by a reporter if she thought the slew of investigations into high profile Democrat lawmakers were politically motivated. “Hell, yeah,” Hochul answered.

“The question is when will [U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi] stop politicizing the Department of Justice and just do their jobs?” Hochul asked reporters.

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation into former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo over his responses to Republicans on his handling of the COVID-19 lockdowns.

In March, Cuomo announced his intention to run for mayor of New York City, taking on current Democrat Eric Adams who has fallen out of favor with the liberal establishment over his embrace of some of President Donald Trump’s illegal immigration policies. Adams has since seen his own federal investigation dropped by Bondi’s DOJ.

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ActBlue officials decline to testify, Congress threatens subpoenas in foreign donations probe

The chairmen of three powerful House committees on Thursday threatened to issue subpoenas after several current and former top officials of the Democrat online fund-raising platform ActBlue declined to testify in a probe into possible foreign and fraudulent political donations, according to correspondence obtained by Just the News.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil, R-Wis., revealed in the letters that several of the witnesses initially agreed to voluntary, transcribed interviews, then pulled back through their lawyer earlier this month after President Donald Trump signed an order instructing the Justice Department to probe the platform.

“As we have explained, the Committees are examining allegations that ActBlue, a leading political fundraising organization, allowed bad actors, including foreign actors, to exploit the company’s online platform to make fraudulent political donations,” the chairmen wrote in letters to the witnesses, which were sent to a lawyer representing them, Danny Onorato. 

“Fraudulent political donations corrupt American elections could amount to interstate criminal conduct,” the letters also state.

The letters laid out the testimony flip-flops for each of the witnesses, including ActBlue’s former chief revenue officer, Peter Slutsky.

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What The Biden Health Coverup Reveals About The Political Class

Over the weekend, the Biden family announced that former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer. The statement said that the cancer was characterized by a Gleason score of 9 out of 10, indicating it is highly aggressive, and that it has already spread to the bone.

Well-wishes poured in from both the former president’s allies and political opponents as the Bidens reportedly reviewed treatment options. But it didn’t take long for people to note a few questionable details about the nature and timing of this announcement.

First, it happened to come a little over thirty hours before the release of a highly-anticipated book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson that detailed Joe Biden’s mental decline while in office and the effort by people around him to cover it up and deny it was happening at all. While other books have already come out claiming to tell this story, none have come from journalists as highly respected by the political establishment as Tapper and Thompson.

Also, the day before the announcement, Axios released the full recording of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, where the president’s difficulty answering straightforward questions was on full display at the same time his allies in the media were trying to claim he was “as sharp as a tack.”

That convenient timing and speed at which some Biden allies, like David Axelrod, came out and said that talk of the former president’s decline should now be set aside because of this diagnosis led to some skepticism about the claim that the cancer was discovered only a few days ago.

That skepticism only grew as doctors began reacting with disbelief that cancer at this late a stage could have either just developed in the past few months or gone undetected for years while Biden was president. That’s especially true considering that prostate cancer is typically easier to discover early than most other cancers due to antigens it releases in the blood that can be detected with a simple blood test—a blood test we know both presidents Obama and Trump had taken while they were in office.

It is certainly possible that no physical health problems were covered up during Biden’s presidency, that his cancer was only detected for the first time a few weeks ago, as his office has said. But many of those most aggressively denying that anything shady is happening with the timing of this announcement will have a much harder time getting the public to believe them because of the blatant and unsuccessful attempt to censor, hide, and deny Biden’s deteriorating mental state in the lead up to the 2024 election.

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Ex-Los Angeles deputy mayor will plead guilty in fake bomb threat to city hall

A former Los Angeles deputy mayor will plead guilty to reporting a bomb had been placed in city hall last year to law enforcement, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Brian K. Williams, 31, who was employed as the deputy mayor of public safety in October 2024, was charged with one felony count of making an explosives threat. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison.

William’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Williams sent a text message to LA Mayor Karen Bass and other high-ranking city officials on Oct. 3, 2024 that he just received a call from someone who threatened to bomb city hall, prosecutors said.

“The male caller stated that ‘he was tired of the city support of Israel, and he has decided to place a bomb in City Hall. It might be in the rotunda.’,” Williams wrote in the text, according to prosecutors. He said he contacted the Los Angeles Police Department, who sent officers to search the building.

Police did not locate any suspicious packages or devices, prosecutors said.

Williams showed officers a call he received from a blocked number on his city-issued cellphone that he said was from the person who made the bomb threat. The call was made by Williams himself through the Google Voice application on his personal phone, according to prosecutors.

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Harmeet Dhillon Exposes DOJ’s ‘Color Revolution’ Wing: Secret ‘Resistance’ Memos, ‘Unhappy Hours,’ & ‘Crying Sessions’

In a revealing interview with Tucker Carlson, Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, pulled back the curtain on the entrenched resistance within the Department of Justice, which she described as a stronghold of the deep state. Dhillon revealed a culture of anti-MAGA defiance, marked by resistance memos circulating among career lawyers, instructing them to obstruct directives through bureaucratic tactics. Dhillon also recounted a hilarious scene of open crying sessions in the DOJ halls and mass resignations as hundreds of attorneys recoiled at her push to align the division with the Trump administration’s agenda.

TUCKER CARLSON: Your assistant attorney general, one of the greatest appointments, from my perspective, in this administration, running the civil rights division. What was it like when you showed up? What did you find when you got there?

HARMEET DHILLON: The civil rights division is the color revolution wing of the Department of Justice. Okay, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat administration, there are career lawyers who are very focused on a particular agenda there. So, when I showed up, or when I was, when the president was elected, I should say, there were over 400 attorneys in the civil rights division and about 200 staff, so a total of about 600 people. Kristen Clark, my predecessor, anti-police, open racist, got in trouble during her term for not being candid with the Senate during her confirmation hearings on some issues. So, she had a particular agenda. She got in there and she pursued that agenda aggressively. And she had all the staff to do it.

Now, under the first Trump administration, my predecessor in that job pretty much left it untouched. He told me he kind of, like, there were the career people there, if he wanted to get something done, they went to the U.S. attorney’s offices. I came in with a different perspective. I think it’s part of the promise of this administration under President Trump to fundamentally reform the government in the way that the people voted for. That means, in the civil rights division, we should be standing up for the civil rights of all Americans, not just some Americans. We shouldn’t be weaponizing the law in a particular way. We should apply those federal civil rights statutes, many of which were passed by and signed by Republican presidents and Republican administrations, evenly, and the government shouldn’t be putting its heavy thumb on the scale in most cases. But in egregious instances, we should step forward and right these wrongs.

But what I found there was a number of lawyers, I mean hundreds of lawyers, who were actively in resistance mode. There were memos out there by former government lawyers telling current government lawyers in my department how to resist if you’re given a direct order. Ask for clarification, send 20 emails, question it, slow down your response time, say it can’t be done. So, I was actually looking out for that when I came. I did my week of training after getting confirmed by the Senate. And then the next week, I was like, “Okay, guys, it’s time to get to business. I want everyone to be very clear what the agenda is here.”

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DOJ Pardon Scandal Deepens as Whistleblower Alleges Biden Allies Profited from Autopen Access

A deepening scandal tied to former President Joe Biden’s final acts has sparked a Justice Department (DOJ) probe into a last-minute pardon spree, with critics pointing to signs of a mechanical signature on every order.

Ed Martin, the DOJ’s pardon attorney, revealed that a whistleblower from within the Democratic Party has alleged that several high-ranking Biden aides financially benefited from managing access to the president’s autopen.

The explosive claim comes as concerns mount over whether Biden was mentally fit when he authorized dozens of controversial pardons on his final day in office.

Martin recently appeared on the “2WAY Tonight” podcast with journalist Mark Halperin to shed light on the deepening controversy. 

“I had a whistleblower in my office 10 days ago, senior, senior Democrat saying, ‘Look, it was these three people that controlled access, and they were making money off of it,’” Martin said, according to The Gateway Pundit. 

“I don’t know if I believe it yet, but the point is I think we have to get to the bottom of it for the American people and to protect the process. And that’s what we’re doing.”

Though Martin declined to name the whistleblower, he described the source as a “high level advisor” from Biden’s 2020 campaign. 

The claims focus on alleged misconduct by Biden’s former Chief of Staff Ron Klain, senior adviser Anita Dunn and Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer. 

Former White House counselor Steve Ricchetti and First Lady Jill Biden were also described by Martin as “lead characters” in the decision-making process.

The core of the investigation centers on Biden’s widespread use of an autopen to sign last-minute clemency orders on Jan. 19, just one day before President Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term. 

According to watchdog group the Oversight Project, every single pardon issued that day featured identical autopen signatures from Biden.

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A Top Antitrust Enforcer Is Open To Prosecuting People Who Disagree With Him

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Mark Meador recently insinuated that his agency may investigate nonprofits and academic institutions that object to antitrust enforcement actions without disclosing their donors for deceptive practices. While Meador may think it’s OK to probe parties for disagreeing with him, the FTC’s consumer protection remit does not sanction prosecuting those who reject the commissioner’s antitrust ideology.

Meador recently reposted a video of him discussing the “academic whitewashing” of antitrust during an event hosted by American Compass and the Conservative Partnership Institute on May 1. (While no full recording of the event exists at press time, an employee of American Compass tells Reason that the clip is from the aforementioned event.)

Meador complains about academics “renting out their Ph.D. [and] their reputation to advocate for the interests of giant corporations.” He rightly acknowledged that people are free to do whatever they want but then said that the FTC brings “enforcement actions against influencers and reviewers who advocate for products without disclosing that they’re being paid for it.”

Meador wondered aloud whether nonprofit employees and academics who advocate “for the interests of certain corporations or mergers in their white papers and their op-eds without ever disclosing that they’re being paid to do so” may also be guilty of deceptive practices. He did not state that the FTC would bring enforcement actions against academics but said it’s “worth investigating.”

While Meador may think “it’s an interesting question” whether he may prosecute his ideological opponents, the Supreme Court has already provided an answer. Eugene Volokh, professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, understands the ruling in NAACP v. Alabama (1958) as holding that, “when it comes to speech that is neither commercial advertising for a product…nor specifically election-related, broader First Amendment precedents would indeed preclude such disclosure requirements.”

Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union and senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tells Reason that “the Supreme Court has expressly distinguished between commercial and other communications.” Citing Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel of Supreme Court of Ohio (1985), Strossen says “compulsory disclosure regarding non-commercial expression is presumptively unconstitutional.”

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Joe Biden’s Cancer Diagnosis Shouldn’t End Scrutiny of the Cognitive Decline Cover-Up

Former President Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis has prompted entirely appropriate expressions of sympathy from notable Republicans, Democrats, world leaders, and the public at large. Extending well-wishes, thoughts, and prayers to political opponents is a humane and civilizing instinct that might, in some small way, improve the U.S.’s fraught political climate. Regardless, it’s just the right thing to do.

But the former president’s prognosis must not bring a premature end to the conversation about whether Biden was cognitively fit for office in 2024. On the contrary, the public should demand answers and accountability on this topic with renewed vigor—precisely because of the well-founded mistrust engendered by Biden’s family members and inner circle, Democratic elites, and to some extent, the mainstream media. The reason we cannot necessarily accept, at face value, that Biden himself just learned about his diagnosis last week, is due to Biden’s own actions and the actions of his senior advisors, campaign staff, and party leaders.

It might very well be the case that Biden only recently became aware of this very serious health problem. But the timing is suspicious, coming just after the release of special counsel Robert Hur’s taped interviews with Biden, in which the lie that Hur had mischaracterized Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” was definitively exposed. The Biden White House had attempted to discredit Hur; Biden himself raged at a press conference and blamed Hur for bringing up Beau Biden’s death. The tapes, obtained and released by Axios, explicitly contradict Biden’s version of events—it was the president who first referenced the death of his son, evincing confusion over the exact date.

If anything, Hur was too gentle with Biden. He patiently listened to the president’s rambling, incoherent anecdotes, and attempted to steer him back to the topic at hand: alleged improper storage of classified documents. Biden’s behavior during the five-hour interview raised serious questions about his fitness for office at that time, let alone whether he remained sharp enough to perform the most demanding job in the world for another four years.

Top Democrats, however, echoed Biden’s talking points that behind closed doors, the president was at the top of his game. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) said Biden’s mental acuity was “as good as it’s been over the years,” and that the pair would talk several times a week. The message from virtually every Democratic leader who interacted with Biden was the same: Hur is a partisan actor and shouldn’t be trusted, Biden is absolutely fine. Everyone knows that’s false.

And it’s not just the Hur tapes. Original Sin, the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, is slated for release later this week; excerpts from the book have already publicized the elaborate steps taken by Biden’s campaign staff to shield him from press scrutiny. The inescapable conclusion is that party leaders were well aware of Biden’s diminished capacity and were more than willing to mislead the voters—their own voters—about that fact.

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Ed Martin Identifies ‘Gatekeepers’ Involved in Biden Autopen Scandal, Says Whistleblower Has Come Forward with Shocking Allegations

DOJ Pardon Attorney Ed Martin discussed Biden’s growing autopen scandal this week with journalist Mark Halperin on the “2WAY Tonight” podcast.

Last Tuesday Ed Martin said that the Justice Department is reviewing Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons since it has become increasingly clear he was incapacitated during his presidency.

Ed Martin this Tuesday revealed he wrote to the Biden family and others and a senior Democrat whistleblower came forward with shocking allegations.

A couple of people “lawyered up” Ed Martin said.

“The Biden pardons are unprecedented,” he added.

“I had a whistleblower in my office 10 day ago, senior, senior Democrat saying, ‘Look, it was these three people that controlled access, and they were making money off of it,’” Ed Martin told Mark Halperin. “I don’t know if I believe it yet, but the point is I think we have to get to the bottom of it for the American people and to protect the process. And that’s what we’re doing.”

Although Ed Martin couldn’t name names, he said the senior Democrat whistleblower worked as a high level advisor in Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.

The three gatekeepers who were allegedly selling access to the autopen were Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain, Mao lover and senior White House Advisor Anita Dunn and Biden attorney Bob Bauer.

Ed Martin said former Biden counsel Steve Ricchetti and Jill Biden were also lead ‘characters’ in the Biden White House.

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A Judge Of Her Peers? Judge Dugan Assigned A Judge Previously Rebuked For Political Comments

Five years ago, I wrote about a federal judge who, in my view, had discarded any resemblance of judicial restraint and judgment in a public screed against Republicans, Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court. The Wisconsin judge represented the final death of irony: a jurist who failed to see the conflict in lashing out at what he called judicial bias in a political diatribe that would have made MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell blush.

His name is Lynn Adelman.

I was wrong in 2020. Irony is very much alive.

This week, a judge was randomly selected to preside at the trial of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan. A critic of Trump’s immigration policies, Dugan is accused of obstructing federal law enforcement and facilitating the escape of an unlawful immigrant.

The judge assigned to the Dugan case? You guessed it. Lynn Adelman, 85.

A judge is expected to come to a case like this one without the burden of his own baggage.

Judge Adelman is carrying more baggage than Amtrak in Wisconsin.

The selection of Adelman shows how political commentary by judges undermines the legitimacy of the court system. Now, in a case that has divided the nation, the public will have to rely on a judge who discarded his own obligations as a judge to lash out at conservatives, Trump, and conservative jurists.

Adelman was a long-standing Democratic politician who tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to run for Congress during his 20-year tenure in the Wisconsin Senate. For critics, Adelman never set aside his political agenda after President Bill Clinton nominated him for the federal bench.

Adelman was sharply rebuked for ignoring controlling Supreme Court precedent to rule in favor of a Democratic challenge over voting identification rules just before a critical election.  Adelman blocked the law before the election despite a Supreme Court case issued years earlier in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008), rejecting a similar challenge.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit issued a stinging reversal, explaining to Adelman that in “our hierarchical judicial system, a district court cannot declare a statute unconstitutional just because he thinks (with or without the support of a political scientist) that the dissent was right and the majority wrong.”

Adelman, however, was apparently undeterred. In 2020, he wrote a law review article for Harvard Law & Policy Review, titled “The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy.”

Adelman attacked what he described as a “hard-right majority” that is “actively participating in undermining American democracy.” He also struck out at Trump as “an autocrat… disinclined to buck the wealthy individuals and corporations who control his party.”

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