Tag: corruption

Biden Pentagon spokesman insisted Afghan withdrawal wasn’t chaotic but his emails say otherwise

The Pentagon’s chief spokesman has long insisted there was no “chaos” during the bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, but his own email correspondence shows senior officials were acutely aware that conditions in the country were chaotic and spiraling into deadly violence, according to newly obtained government documents.

These memos and emails chronicle political efforts by the Biden/Harris administration to soft-pedal the truth to the American people about its first major foreign crisis. The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from the nonprofit watchdog Functional Government Initiative.

The memos show, for instance, that while then-DOD Undersecretary of Communications John Kirby tried to jaw-bone reporters to portray the Afghan withdrawal as orderly like President Joe Biden had promised, he was receiving briefings from diplomats and military officials in theater who were frantic to stabilize a crisis, particularly at the Kabul airport were evacuations of Americans were taking place.

One State Department situation report emailed to Kirby on Aug. 16, 2021 — 10 days before a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. Marines — referred to “breaches” and “flightline insecurity” at the airport that resulted in the exchange of gunfire that killed five Afghans and may have wounded an American soldier. “The crowd was out of control, the firing was only done to defuse the chaos,” the email reported, citing an official U.S. statement released inside the country.

“Hundreds have flooded the flight line and in at least one case, have forced themselves onto at least one US mil (and other civilian) aircraft. Crowds continue to run alongside planes, including mil aircraft,” the report added. Several Afghans clinging to U.S. aircraft fell to their deaths.

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Report: Like Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy Likely Knew About the Steele Dossier Much Earlier than Previously Known — And Said Nothing

What did Kevin McCarthy know? And when did he know it? Rumblings in Washington, DC, put Kevin McCarthy on the hot seat.

In June 2024, former Trump official Kash Patel dropped a bombshell on Steve Bannon’s War Room, exposing the rotten core of the Republican establishment.

Patel’s blockbuster report on Paul Ryan, which first surfaced on The Gateway Pundit, revealed that Ryan—then Speaker of the House—was the first to receive the fraudulent Steele Dossier in 2016.

This dossier, now widely acknowledged as a fabrication used to justify unlawful surveillance against Donald Trump, was apparently hidden by Ryan from his colleagues, investigators, and even officials within the Trump administration.

This only came out this year – eight years after the Deep State used this document in their first attempt to impeach President Trump in the Russia collusion hoax.

The question now is glaringly clear: Where was Kevin McCarthy during all this? As a leading figure in the Republican Party and a close ally of Paul Ryan, McCarthy’s silence or potential complicity in this cover-up raises serious concerns about his leadership and integrity.

Did McCarthy know of Ryan’s possession and subsequent concealment of the Steele dossier? If so, why did he not act or inform his party members who were blindsided by these revelations?

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The NYPD Is Illegally Leaking Sealed Records About Children to Tabloids

Last spring, New York City police officers stopped a 19-year-old on the subway during her commute. She was eligible for a free transfer from the bus to the subway, but the transfer failed to register at the turnstile, so she and a friend entered through the platform emergency exit door.

Police stopped them, took their names, and let her friend go. Officers told the 19-year-old she had a prior arrest — from 2018, when she was in her early teens — and began to question her.

The cops should not have known about that past arrest. A New York state law protects juvenile records in cases without any finding of guilt from access by anyone, including law enforcement, without a court order.

The arrest had occurred after an incident involving the girl’s mother that resulted in child services filing a petition against her mother for abuse and neglect, and removal of the girl from her mother’s custody. At the time of the subway encounter, she was still in foster care.

The arrest was never prosecuted and was later dismissed and sealed. Yet officers had managed to access the sealed record from their phones and question her about it.

The young woman is one of three plaintiffs who filed a class-action suit in July against the city and NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban for what they said was a practice of illegally accessing, using, and leaking sealed youth records. The suit, which was unsealed Thursday, alleges that officials routinely share those sealed records with prosecutors and the media — specifically with pro-cop tabloids that regularly publish juvenile arrest information sourced from police.

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RFK Jr. Exposes Democrats’ SUBVERSION OF DEMOCRACY Under Guise of “Saving” It

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy took a flamethrower to the Democrat Party establishment Friday while announcing he’s suspending his campaign for president and throwing his support for Donald Trump.

Check out highlights from RFK’s historic speech below.

During his address to the nation Friday, RFK condemned Democrats for becoming a shadow of their former selves, saying they’d “become the party of war, censorship, corruption, big pharma, big tech, big ag, and big money.”

The nephew of former President John F. Kennedy went on to describe how Democrats subverted democracy by blocking his campaign from appearing in ballots in several states while claiming to save it.

Kennedy also bashed the military industrial complex for its complicity in Ukraine’s war against Russia.

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DOJ IG Finds FBI Systematically Mishandled Classified Info

Talk about irony: The FBI, which was willing to use deadly force over Donald Trump allegedly mishandling classified documents, has been systematically mishandling similar information for years, according to bombshell findings released Thursday by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

The DOJ-IG said it discovered the FBI’s mishandling of classified information while auditing a contract related to how the bureau destroys electronics containing “sensitive-but-unclassified” information, as well as classified national security information.

According to Horowitz’s audit, the FBI labels computers that handle such information when it sends them to a facility to be destroyed. However, it does not label internal hard drives extracted from those computers. The FBI also doesn’t properly track thumb drives and disk drives containing information of varying classification levels, according to Horowitz.

Compounding the security risk is the fact that those unmarked internal hard drives, thumb drives and disk drives often end up in a physically unsecured warehouse.

Horowitz said that when his staff visited an FBI “Media Destruction Team” facility last October, they found “non-accountable” hard drives and other electronic storage devices sitting in an open pallet-sized box. Horowitz said he’s not disclosing details about the facility since it’s not secured.

“A [property-turn-in] staff member told us that the pallet for the loose media was unsecured for extended periods, sometimes spanning days or even weeks because PTI would wrap the pallets and move them to the Facility shelves only when the box reached full capacity,” the Inspector General said.

During the same visit last October, Horowitz said his staff also found a container from January 2022 that identified its contents as “non-accountable.”

“Notably, the container’s shrink wrapping was torn, and boxes inside were visibly open and contained hard drives marked Secret,” he said.

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Albuquerque’s Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right To Leave Their Body Cameras Off

Albuquerque, New Mexico, Police Chief Harold Medina operated his department-issued pickup truck “in an unsafe manner” on February 17, when he ran a red light and broadsided a car, severely injuring the driver. So concludes a recent report from internal investigators who looked into that shocking incident.

Duh, you might say if you have seen surveillance camera footage of the crash, which shows Medina crossing Central Avenue, a busy, four-lane street, against the light. He crosses the westbound lanes through a gap between two cars, forcing one of the drivers to brake abruptly, before barreling across the eastbound lanes, where he rams into the side of a gold 1966 Mustang driven by 55-year-old Todd Perchert.

Although Medina’s recklessness seems obvious, the Albuquerque Police Department’s Fleet Crash Review Board (CRB) earlier this year concluded that the crash was “non-preventable.” How so? Medina, who was on his way to a Saturday press conference with his wife when he took a detour to have a look at a homeless encampment, said he ran the light to escape an altercation between two homeless men that had escalated into gunfire at the intersection of Central and Alvarado Drive.

While “the initial decision to enter the intersection is not in question,” Lt. James Ortiz says in the Internal Affairs report, “the facts and circumstances do not relieve department personnel of driving safely to ensure no additional harm is done to personnel or to citizens.” Medina, Ortiz says, clearly failed to do that: “By definition, driving into a crosswalk, darting between two vehicles driving on a busy street, and crossing through an intersection with vehicles traveling eastbound were unsafe driving practices.” In this case, he notes, those unsafe practices “resulted in a vehicle collision with serious physical injuries to the victim, including a broken collarbone and shoulder blade, 8 broken ribs (reconstructed with titanium plates after surgery), collapsed lung, lacerations to left ear and head, multiple gashes to his face, a seven-hour surgery, and hospitalization requiring epidural painkiller and a chest tube for nearly a week.”

Ortiz not only disagrees with the CRB’s conclusion about Medina’s crash; he says the board never should have reviewed the incident to begin with, since its mission is limited to accidents “not resulting in a fatality or serious injury.” Ortiz says Commander Benito Martinez, who chairs the CRB, violated department policy when he decided the board should pass judgment on Medina’s accident.

Martinez acknowledged that department policy “prohibited the CRB from hearing serious injury crashes” and that “allowing such a case to be heard would be a policy violation.” Why did he allow it anyway? “He explained that his reasoning for permitting the Chief’s crash to be reviewed by the CRB was based on his belief that someone wanted the crash to be heard,” Ortiz writes. “Cmdr. Martinez clarified that he believed someone from Internal Affairs wanted the case to be heard by the CRB to ensure full transparency. However, he did not consult with anyone in Internal Affairs to verify the accuracy of this assumption.”

Both the CRB’s decision to review the crash and its implicit exoneration of Medina are hard to fathom. But Medina’s explanations for the third policy violation identified by Ortiz—the chief’s failure to activate his body camera after the crash—are even weirder.

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Watchdog pushes for investigation of FDA official’s conflict of interest

A disturbing article in the New York Times reveals that while a senior Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official, Jeff Shuren, M.D., J.D., was in charge of regulating medical devices, his wife’s powerful Washington law firm was representing their manufacturers.

Despite ethics rules barring Shuren, the director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, from working on matters involving clients of his wife’s law firm, he did not always fully recuse himself, according to the report. In July, Shuren announced that he was transferring to the FDA’s Office of the Commissioner, and will leave the agency later this year.

Dr. Robert Steinbrook, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, calls on the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to launch an investigation amid news of these allegations. He released the following statement:

“The revelations about Dr. Shuren, the former director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, are very troubling. There are long-standing concerns that the FDA’s regulation of medical devices has been too friendly to industry under Shuren’s leadership and has not prioritized patient safety and the effectiveness of novel medical devices. The Office of Inspector General at DHHS should formally investigate the allegations in the New York Times article. And the FDA must appoint a new director of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health who has no conflicts of interest and prioritizes patients’ interests.”

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House Oversight Committee: Biden Committed Impeachable Offenses

The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability released a report Monday asserting that President Joe Biden engaged conduct worthy of impeachment. The committee, chaired by Representative James Comer (R- KY), states that the president has “participated in a conspiracy to monetize his office of public trust to enrich his family,” mishandled classified information, and engaged in the obstruction of justice in order to conceal the extent of his involvement in unsavory practices.

The 291-page reports lays out a series of questionable business dealings done by various members of the Biden family, including his brother James and his son Hunter, the object of which was securing the influence of Joe Biden’s name and position as vice president of the United States.

The transactions detailed by the report include interactions with a Kazakhstani oligarch, Russian and Romanian businessmen, the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisima, and various corporations tied to the Communist Party of China. It also alleges that former donors to Joe Biden’s campaign provided large loans on questionable terms to the Biden family.

The report further argues that during his presidency, Biden has “repeatedly evinced a hostility towards and unwillingness to cooperate with the House’s impeachment inquiry and Congress’s legislative oversight,” arguing that the administration has impeded the investigation of his activities and obstructed the carriage of justice.

The report concludes that there is sufficient evidence to impeach the president: “As both president and vice president, Joe Biden has abused his office of public trust, putting his family’s financial interests above the interests of the American people. Although the Committees’ fact-finding is ongoing amid President Biden’s obstruction, the evidence uncovered in the impeachment inquiry to date already amounts to impeachable conduct.”

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Biden family and associates made $27M from foreign business after boosts from Joe Biden: Impeachment report

The Republican-led House unveiled findings from its yearlong impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden on Monday, concluding that the president’s family and business associates raked in more than $27 million through foreign business deals in recent years.

In a 291-page report, a trio of House committees found that Biden committed impeachable offenses, including abuse of power, by mingling with his son Hunter’s and brother James’s foreign business partners while he was vice president.

The House Oversight, Ways and Means, and Judiciary committees, which have led the inquiry, said that after more than two dozen interviews, six hearings, and a review of millions of pages of documents, they found that the Biden family participated in a “global influence peddling racket” with Biden’s “full knowledge and cooperation.”

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Every Leading Large Language Model Leans Left Politically

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrating into everyday life – as chatbots, digital assistants, and internet search guides, for example. These artificial intelligence (AI) systems – which consume large amounts of text data to learn associations – can create all sorts of written material when prompted and can ably converse with users. LLMs’ growing power and omnipresence mean that they exert increasing influence on society and culture.

So it’s of great import that these artificial intelligence systems remain neutral when it comes to complicated political issues. Unfortunately, according to a new analysis recently published to PLoS ONE, this doesn’t seem to be the case.

AI researcher David Rozado of Otago Polytechnic and Heterodox Academy administered 11 different political orientation tests to 24 of the leading LLMs, including OpenAI’s GPT 3.5, GPT-4, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Twitter’s Grok. He found that they invariably lean slightly left politically.

“The homogeneity of test results across LLMs developed by a wide variety of organizations is noteworthy,” Rozado commented.

This raises a key question: why are LLMs so universally biased in favor of leftward political viewpoints? Could the models’ creators be fine-tuning their AIs in that direction, or are the massive datasets upon which they are trained inherently biased? Rozado could not conclusively answer this query.

“The results of this study should not be interpreted as evidence that organizations that create LLMs deliberately use the fine-tuning or reinforcement learning phases of conversational LLM training to inject political preferences into LLMs. If political biases are being introduced in LLMs post-pretraining, the consistent political leanings observed in our analysis for conversational LLMs may be an unintentional byproduct of annotators’ instructions or dominant cultural norms and behaviors.”

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