Tag: corruption

‘Disturbing’: FBI’s Alleged Altering of Evidence in Jan. 6 Proud Boys Case, Trial Paused: Defense Lawyer

The trial of Dominic Pezzola, one of the defendants of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach, was paused on Thursday due to classified FBI messages revealed in court, which the defense attorneys say show FBI agents discussing the altering of evidence.

Pezzola is one of the Proud Boys members on trial for obstruction and conspiracy charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol breach. He was arrested on Jan. 15, 2021, and indicted the same month. Pezzola’s trial began in January of this year.

“There are a couple of emails between FBI agents casually discussing altering a document and destroying hundreds of pieces of evidence. It’s very disturbing and right now we have more questions than answers,” Roger Roots, an attorney at John Pierce Law, wrote. Roots confirmed that Washington District Court Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, paused the trial on Thursday due to the leaked messages.

The exchange Roots referred to came into light on Wednesday during the testimony of FBI special agent Nicole Miller, who was involved in the agency’s investigations of the Jan. 6 defendants.

When cross-examining Miller, Nick Smith, an attorney representing Proud Boys member Ethan Nordean (listed as co-defendant on Pezzola’s case), revealed classified FBI emails that were hidden in a tab in an Excel spreadsheet. Roots, in Pezzola’s case, used this evidence to support a motion to dismiss (pdf) the charges against Pezzola, which Roots’s team filed on Wednesday.

In the motion, Pezzola’s team said the emails showed that the FBI was monitoring communications between Nordean and his lawyer, violating the Sixth Amendment, which prohibits invasions of the right to counsel (Matter of Fusco v. Moses).

“In the Nordean case, confidential attorneys-client trial/defense strategy and position was wrongfully obtained by the government, about which was overheard, shared, utilized, where potentially ‘338 items of evidence’ were ordered to be ‘destroyed,’ said Pezzola’s legal team in the motion to dismiss.

According to a separate filing by Nordean’s lawyers, Miller said in one correspondence that “[her] boss assigned [her] 338 items of evidence [she has] to destroy”; Nordean’s lawyers allege that another email show an agent requesting Miller to “go into [a] CHS [informant] report” that Miller “just put [together] and edit out that [the agent] was present.”

The emails show Miller “admitted fabricating evidence and following orders to destroy hundreds of items of evidence,” Pezzola’s lawyers wrote in its motion to dismiss, and that the government obtained information that benefitted itself in the trial, causing substantial prejudice to each of the defendants, including Pezzola.

“If justice means anything, it requires this case to be dismissed,” Pezzola’s lawyer said.

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Rail boss tells train crew to skip inspections, limit reports in leaked audio

A leaked recording of a manager at one of the nation’s largest rail companies, reveals them telling workers to skip inspections and not report cars with the same type of problem blamed for last month’s massive train derailment in Ohio.

The Norfolk Southern derailment and subsequent investigation into its cause have invited increased scrutiny into the rail industry’s safety practices. 

The audio, obtained by the Guardian, hears the manager telling a former employee of Union Pacific to stop tagging railcars for broken bearings. The manager says doing so delays other cargo.

A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board into the Norfolk Southern derailment found that a wheel-bearing failure was responsible for the catastrophe.

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New Mexico Soros-Backed Secretary of State, Maggie Toulouse-Oliver, Used Illegal Software to Combine Election Results and Tried to Cover It Up, Breaking Several State and Local Laws in the Process

As the Democrat-controlled New Mexico legislature barrels ahead with legislation that would put the nail in the coffin of honesty and transparency in New Mexico’s elections, the corruption of the Secretary of State (SOS), Maggie Toulouse Oliver, continues to be exposed.

After hearing public testimony during a November Torrance County public meeting, the Estancia News has done a deep dive on how election results in New Mexico are finalized, or “canvassed.”  It turns out the SOS has illegally centralized this process, cutting out the clerks, and breaking multiple state and federal laws in the process.

This series of articles will outline the framework put in place by Toulouse-Oliver and corrupt Senator Daniel Ivey-Soto that could be the mechanism used to illegally undermine elections in New Mexico.

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Fauci ‘Prompted’ Scientists To Fabricate ‘Proximal Origins’ Paper Ruling Out Lab-Leak

Dr. Anthony Fauci – who offshored banned gain-of-function research to make bat coronaviruses more transmissible to humans – has been accused by Congressional investigators of having ‘prompted’ the fabrication of a paper by a cadre of scientists aimed at disproving the Covid-19 lab-leak theory.

On February 1, 2020, Fauci and his boss, NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, and at least eleven other scientists participated in a conference call during which several of them warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China – may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.

Three days after the call, four participants from the call (Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen, University of Sydney virologist Edward Holmes, Tulane School of Medicine virologist Robert Garry, University of Edinburgh virologist Andrew Rambaut and Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin) seemingly discarded their concerns over a lab-leak, and drafted “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” which they sent to Fauci and Collins.

Also heavily involved (yet not credited) was Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the current Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization.

As a related aside – the Washington Examiner revealed last week that two authors of “Proximal Origin” who initially expressed concerns over a lab-leak and then changed their tune (Anderson and Garry), received millions in NIH grants under Fauci.

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Here’s The Lawmaker Who Accepts More BlackRock Money Than Any Other Member Of Congress

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) accepted more donations in the last election cycle from BlackRock and individuals affiliated with the firm than any other member of Congress.

The connection between the lawmaker and the asset management company was noted by the American Accountability Foundation, a non-profit government oversight and research organization, after Schumer rebuked efforts to scrap a Labor Department rule that would allow retirement fiduciaries to allocate funds in accordance with the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement, also known as ESG. Both the House and Senate passed a resolution opposed to the rule, which President Joe Biden is expected to veto.

BlackRock is a leading proponent of the ESG movement, which critics say mingles political and social causes such as decreasing carbon emissions and achieving racial diversity in a manner that compromises or distracts from profitability. Schumer nevertheless accepted $103,950 from individuals associated with BlackRock and $10,000 from a political action committee controlled by the company, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.

“ESG opponents are trying to turn it into a dirty acronym, deploying attacks they’ve used for elements of a so-called woke agenda,” Schumer said on social media this week as the resolution moved through Congress. “They call ESG wokeness. They call it a cult. They call it an incursion into free markets. I say ESG is just common sense.”

Candidates from both parties benefit from BlackRock money, with Republicans getting $639,000 and Democrats getting $453,000 in the most recent midterm election cycle. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) were the second and third-largest individual recipients of funds from BlackRock and individuals associated with BlackRock.

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How Social Networks Became a “Subsidiary” of the FBI and CIA

The US Congress last tried to grapple with what the country’s ballooning security services were up to nearly half a century ago.

In 1975, the Church Committee managed to take a fleeting, if far from complete, snapshot of the netherworld in which agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and National Security Agency (NSA) operate.

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the congressional committee and other related investigations found that the country’s intelligence services had sweeping surveillance powers and were involved in a raft of illegal or unconstitutional acts.

They were covertly subverting and assassinating foreign leaders. They had co-opted hundreds of journalists and many media outlets around the world to promote false narratives. They spied on and infiltrated political and civil rights groups. And they manipulated the public discourse to protect and expand their powers.

Senator Frank Church himself warned that the might of the intelligence community could at any moment “be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything… There would be no place to hide.”

Since then, the technological possibilities to invade privacy have dramatically increased, and the reach of the intelligence agencies, especially after 9/11, has moved on in ways Church could never have foreseen.

This is why establishing a new Church Committee is long overdue. And finally, in the most controversial of circumstances and for the most partisan of reasons, some sort of revival may finally be about to happen.

A protracted battle last month within the Republican Party to elect Kevin McCarthy as the new speaker of the House of Representatives forced him to cave to the demands of his party’s right wing. Not least, he agreed to set up a committee on what is being called the “weaponization” of the federal government.

It held its first meeting last week. The panel said its task would be to look at “the politicization of the FBI and DOJ and attacks on American civil liberties”.

Earlier, in a speech to the House on the new committee, Republican Representative Dan Bishop said it was time to cut out the “rot” in the federal government: “We’re putting the deep state on notice. We’re coming for you.”

Democrats are already decrying the committee as a tool that will be wielded in the interests of Donald Trump and his supporters, saying the Republican right wants to discredit the security services and suggest malfeasance in the treatment of the former president.

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NewsGuard Misinfo Watchdog: Contracts with DOD, WHO, Pfizer, Microsoft and AFT

NewsGuard is a self-appointed misinformation watchdog. It seems to be just one more way Americans are not allowed to think for themselves. Co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz claim it is the “librarian for the internet.” Set up specifically to rate online journalistic integrity, Brill states NewsGuard provides services that “explain to people something about the reliability and trustworthiness and background of those who are feeding them the news.” Eric Effron is the organization’s Editorial Director.

Brill is a Yale graduate and lawyer who has authored multiple best-selling books and was, among other things, CEO of Verified Identity Pass, Inc., the first U.S. biometric Voluntary Credentialing Program that went bankrupt in 2009. It was the parent company of CLEAR which went back online in 2010 and then went public in 2021.

According to MintPressNews, “Crovitz held a number of positions at Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, eventually becoming executive vice president of the former and the publisher of the latter before both were sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in 2007. He is also a board member of Business Insider, which has received over $30 million from Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in recent years.”

Crovitz’s alliances might account for the organization’s favorable 100 ratings for WSJ and the Washington Post. He is also a contributor “to books published by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation,” which are also favorably rated by NewsGuard.

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Katie Hobbs accused of receiving Sinaloa cartel bribes

A California-based law firm has accused Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, Runbeck Election Services, and a slew of other election officials, mayors, judges, city councilman, and county supervisors in the state of receiving bribes from the Sinaloa cartel.

During a Thursday hearing before the Senate Elections and Municipal Oversight & Elections Joint Committee, the principal investigator for Harris/Thaler Law Corporation, Jacqueline Breger, presented their shocking findings, detailing how a money-laundering investigation in the midwest revealed alleged corruption in Arizona.

“In 2006, the U.S. Attorney’s Offices in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa investigated the laundering of drug cartel monies through a complex series of single-family home purchases in those states,” Breger told the committee. “By 2009, numerous real estate agents, escrow companies and title insurers had been indicted, charged and convicted of racketeering. In 2014, our office was asked to review the case files and to determine whether monies from the sales of the properties had filtered to property purchases in Arizona, specifically in Maricopa and Pima County.”

The Sinaloa cartel is notorious for being led by the infamous “El Chapo,” the Mexican drug lord whose real name is Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, who was widely considered to have been one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world before his capture in 2016.

According to the investigator, it was concluded that several real estate agents in Iowa “had set up a laundering system in Arizona and thereafter had transferred the proceeds of sales to Panamanian Corporations.”

“In 2018, Mr. Thaler discovered, incidental to another matter, a series of trust deeds evidencing that cash laundering through single family residences in Arizona was pervasive and ongoing,” Breger continued. “With that, a new investigation began with the focus being on money laundering and related racketeering activities in Maricopa County and several other Arizona counties. The Harris/Thaler office currently represents several parties directly damaged by the racketeering activities.”

In the nearly 100-page report, Breger dug into the entire investigation, naming Dawna Rae Chavez, a resident of Mesa, Arizona, and her daughter, Brittany Rae Chavez, as “principal preparers of the documents necessary to effect the racketeering enterprises.”

“To date, more than 10,000 falsified documents have been recorded with the Maricopa County Recorder. We estimate that more than 35,000 warranty deeds/trust deeds evidencing fraudulent transactions exist in the database. 11. The number of falsified notarizations exceeds 15,000.  12. Dawna and Brittany’s participation in racketeering activities also includes facilitation of bribes to public officials, tax evasion, payroll theft, bankruptcy fraud, insurance fraud, and extortion,” Breger said. 

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Bayer Admits It Paid “Millions” in HIV Infection Cases — Just Not in English

To read the English-speaking media, you’d never know that Bayer (BAYRY) just paid “tens of millions” of dollars to end a three-decade long scandal in which the company sold HIV-contaminated blood products to haemophiliacs, thousands of whom later died of AIDS.

Ironically, Bayer’s new haemophilia iPhone app got some coverage, as did Bayer’s haemophilia research grant to the University of Florida. But you have to pick through the French and Italian news media to find out that Bayer is finally writing checks to people who got AIDS because, in the 1980s, the Cutter Biological unit of Bayer ignored federal law to recruit prisoners, intravenous drug users, and high-risk gay men as donors of the blood Cutter then used to make Factor VIII and IX, the clotting product that haemophiliacs need in order to not bleed to death. Agence France Press reported (via a Google translation):

The German group Bayer and three other labs will pay tens of millions of euros to hemophiliacs who accused them of having sold in the 1980s blood products contaminated with HIV, a source close to the deal told AFP.

The figure of tens of millions of euros in compensation “is not totally wrong,” she added. Bayer and the U.S. company Baxter are the two main parties to the agreement, she said.

A company spokesperson said:

However, “the company accepts no responsibility” in this case, and “continues to insist it has always acted responsibly and ethically.”

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