Tag: corruption

Supreme Court overturns ex-mayor’s bribery conviction, narrowing the scope of public corruption law

The Supreme Court overturned the bribery conviction of a former Indiana mayor on Wednesday, the latest in a series of decisions narrowing the scope of federal public corruption law.

The high court’s 6-3 opinion along ideological lines found the law criminalizes bribes given before an official act, not rewards handed out after.

“Some gratuities can be problematic. Others are commonplace and might be innocuous,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote. The lines aren’t always clear, especially since many state and local officials have other jobs, he said.

The high court sided with James Snyder, a Republican who was convicted of taking $13,000 from a trucking company after prosecutors said he steered about $1 million worth of city contracts to the company.

In a sharply worded dissent joined by her liberal colleagues, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the distinction between bribes and gratuities ignores the wording of the law aimed at rooting out public corruption.

“Snyder’s absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one that only today’s court could love,” she wrote.

The decision continues a pattern in recent years of the court restricting the government’s ability to use broad federal laws to prosecute public corruption cases. The justices also overturned the bribery conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in 2016 and sharply curbed prosecutors’ use of an anti-fraud law in the case of ex-Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling in 2010.

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White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Accused of Violating Hatch Act — Openly Campaigns for Biden and Slams Trump During Live Interview 

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been accused of flagrantly violating the Hatch Act during a recent live interview on MSNBC.

The Hatch Act, established in 1939, restricts certain political activities of federal employees, along with some state and local employees who work in connection with federally funded programs. The act’s primary aim is to ensure a federal workforce free from partisan political influence or coercion.

Violating this law may lead to removal from federal service or prohibition from federal employment.

During the MSNBC interview, Jean-Pierre campaigned for Biden ahead of the upcoming debate, unabashedly praising his leadership and policies while simultaneously disparaging Trump’s administration.

In the interview, Jean-Pierre responded to host Willie Geist’s question about potential criticism from Trump regarding inflation and rising costs in the upcoming presidential debate on Thursday.

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“Overkill”: Dems Bristle After AIPAC Spends ‘Unprecedented’ Amount To Defeat Bowman

While Rep. Jamal Bowman, a moron, may have sealed his fate after pulling a fire alarm to delay a House vote on a congressional stopgap bill, the ‘squad’ member’s Democratic primary loss to ‘moderate’ challenger George Latimer has raised eyebrows for other reasons.

Chief among them is what Axios described as an ‘unprecedented financial investment’ by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which spent over $14.5 million to defeat Bowman, mostly via TV ads attacking the incumbent.

While Bowman also faced opposition from a ‘Crypto Super PAC‘ – and Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss posting on X that “this is what happens when you pick a fight with the crypto army,” Democrats tell Axios that AIPAC’s enormous ad spend may have also been meant to intimidate Democrats who are critical of the Jewish state.

“It might change how they talk about [Israel],” one moderate House Democrat told the outlet, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“The number is gross … I don’t like it,” another House Democrat told Axios, calling the figure “Overkill,” and adding “If anything that much money could backfire, because then you get people that are like, ‘This is just wrong.”

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FBI Wants 20 Years To Produce Records On Its Involvement W/ OKC Bombing

It’s been about nine years since Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records about a CIA asset and FBI informant who helped fund the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as for records about a neo-Nazi bank-robbery gang also involved in the attack.

Tired of waiting, Trentaudue sued the FBI over the matter in February, demanding the bureau to produce the 69,375 pages of documents that it’s holding. But now, the FBI wants to take another nearly 12 years to fork over those documents to him, which means that it would take at least 20 years for the bureau to comply with his initial FOIA request.

Such a slow production rate is unacceptable, Trentadue said in a Tuesday court filing.

“The FBI proposes to process these records/documents for release to Plaintiff in monthly increments of 500 pages over a period of 11.5 years!” he said.

“If the Court accepts the FBI’s proposed snail-pace processing of these materials, Plaintiff will be close to 90-years of age when he finally receives all of them,” he said.

“He has already waited almost a decade for these documents/records, with the FBI having made no effort during the interim to produce them, and should not have to wait another 11.5 years to receive them.”

Trentadue has been suing the U.S. government for OKC bomb-related records for nearly 30 years, ever since his brother was murdered in a federal penitentiary. The complex story of how the death of Trentadue’s brother relates to the OKC bombing can be read in this Mother Jones article.

Trentadue’s latest lawsuit seeks records on FBI informant and CIA asset Roger Moore (not the James Bond actor), and the bank-robbery gang, the Aryan Republican Army, which he says was an FBI front group.

According to Trentadue’s lawsuit, Moore was an FBI informant as part of the bureau’s 1980s- and early 90s-era Operation Punchout, which was designed to identify and apprehend surplus dealers that bought and sold government property stolen from Department of Defense facilities in Utah.

Furthermore, Moore build patrol boats for use by the US Navy in the Vietnam War, as well as speedboats for the CIA, according to Aberration in the Heartland of the Real—historian Wendy Painting’s PhD thesis-turned-book about OKC bomber Tim McVeigh.

As for the Aryan Republican Army, Trentadue believes that was an FBI front group that also helped fund the bombing.

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Powerful Dem Who’s Home Was Raided by FBI Last Week Breaks Silence With Bizarre Claim

Late last week the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided the home of Democratic Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao who’s currently facing an active recall campaign.

The details surrounding the ordeal have been unclear, however, on Monday Thao broke her silence on the matter for the first time.

She still withheld many details about the incident and what may have precipitated it, but suggested it was part of a plot by “radical right-wing forces” aiming to oust her from leadership.

She particularly targeted conservative outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, accusing them of trying to “fan the flames” through their reporting.

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‘Amazon Files’: Emails Show Amazon Caved to Pressure From White House to Suppress Books Critical of Vaccines

In addition to pressuring social media platforms to censor content during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration also worked with Amazon to suppress books questioning the safety or efficacy of vaccines, according to internal emails obtained through a series of subpoenas, Fox Business reported.

The emails — dubbed “The Amazon Files” — were included in a report by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

In a June 21 post on X (formerly Twitter), Committee Chair Jim Jordan shared a list of 43 books that Amazon initially added to a newly created “Do Not Promote” class of allegedly anti-vaccine books.

The No. 2 book on the list — “Vaccine Epidemic” — was co-authored and edited by Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland, CHD General Counsel Kim Mack Rosenberg and Louise Kuo Habakus.

The first book on the list is, “Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History” by Dr. Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk.

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‘Colossal public interest’: Mainstream media, conservative groups fire back at DOJ rationale for withholding audiotapes of President Biden’s special counsel interview

As a fight to obtain audiotapes of Joe Biden’s five-hour interview with special counsel Robert Hur carries on in court, both a coalition of mainstream media organizations and conservative groups agree that the 46th president should not be able to hide behind executive privilege and worries of “deepfakes” to avoid disclosure in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case.

The Heritage Foundation, Judicial Watch, and the media coalition, composed of CNN, ABC, The Associated Press, CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, NBC, Reuters, and more, separately filed documents Friday opposing the motion for summary judgment that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s DOJ filed in late May.

The Heritage Foundation, calling this a “simple case despite the efforts of the Government to complicate it,” offered counterpoints to DOJ assertions that the public’s access to the transcripts of Hur’s Biden interview is more than sufficient in light of foreseeable “privacy harms.”

“While the transcript discloses spoken words (the ‘lexical’ portion of the interview), the audio recording is the only source of the ‘non-lexical’ portion that depicts the tone, tenor, cadence, pauses, hesitations, and other demeanor evidence of the interview,” wrote attorney Samuel E. Dewey. “As any junior trial lawyer can attest, a witness’s live recording speaks volumes more than a cold transcript of the same testimony.”

“Special Counsel Hur testified to Congress that he relied upon this ‘demeanor’ evidence to reach his controversial decision to recommend against criminal charges,” the filing continued.

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Biden Campaign Launches Taskforce to Combat Alleged “Cheap Fakes,” Urges Media Support

The Biden campaign is putting together a specialized task force that has been formed to counter what it considers manipulated portrayals of President Biden in online videos.

According to a staffer, who spoke with Politico, this initiative aims to “mitigate the risks” associated with these videos, which depict the president in various awkward or confusing situations.

Despite pushback on the Biden administration that the videos are actually accurate and have not been manipulated with AI, this move underscores a deepening concern within the Biden administration regarding the circulation of these clips on social media platforms, often highlighted as signs of the president’s deteriorating mental agility.

The issue gained traction following a press conference where White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized the media for distributing footage showing Biden in an unflattering light. Jean-Pierre labeled one such video, which showed former President Barack Obama assisting a seemingly bewildered Biden off a stage, as a “deepfake” and a “cheap fake video done in bad faith.”

Further incidents adding to the controversy include Biden’s peculiar behavior during a G7 summit and a Juneteenth event. In one instance, he was seen wandering away from a group of world leaders and in another, appearing disoriented among dancing attendees.

The campaign’s approach has sparked criticism from various quarters, accusing it of attempting to censor and control the narrative surrounding the president’s public appearances. Social media reactions have been sharply divided, with some users mocking the campaign’s efforts to label these videos as “cheap fakes” and questioning the integrity of the mainstream media’s coverage of these events.

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Georgia Judge Accused of Assaulting Cop at Club Claims She Was ‘Set Up’

A Georgia judge is claiming that her arrest at an Atlanta-area nightclub was a “setup” after she was caught on police body camera striking an officer in an altercation where she says she was only trying to help a woman who was being attacked.

Douglas County Probate Judge Christina Peterson was arrested at the Red Martini Restaurant and Lounge in Buckhead shortly after 3:00 a.m. Thursday when police responded to a fight “between two separate parties,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. 

While Peterson was “not involved in the initial altercation,” according to the arresting officer, he said he was “approached and struck with a closed fist by the accused, Christina Peterson.”

“Ms. Peterson then forcibly pushed the officer in the chest and kept swiping his hands away as he attempted to assist the female being escorted out,” the Atlanta Police Department said in a press release.  

“Ms. Peterson pushed the officer in the chest again and that is when she was subsequently placed into custody.”

The 38-year-old judge has since been charged with battery and felony obstruction, with body cam footage released by Atlanta Police Department (APD) showing her striking the cop and screaming “let her fucking go” as he attempts to break up the dispute.

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What Can You Do While Waiting for a FOIA Response?

The government is slow, especially at answering questions about itself. In theory, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lets Americans ask any federal agency for any public record and get a response back within 20 days. All 50 states have similar records laws. After all, government documents are the property of the taxpayer.

In practice, almost no government agency meets its own deadlines. FOIA requests can take weeks, months, or even years longer than the legal deadline. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are notorious for sitting on requests for ages before handing back pages that are almost entirely censored with a black highlighter.

Using data from the public records site MuckRock, Reason calculated the average response times for several agencies. It turns out that you can do a lot of fun (and not so fun) things while waiting for bureaucrats to give you the documents that your taxes paid for.

The averages only include cases where the agency actually managed to turn up documents. It doesn’t count requests that are still pending or cases where an agency straight-up ghosted the requester.

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