Tag: corruption

Democrats Say They’re Fighting Inequality. But Many of Their Policies Favor the Rich.

In the grand ballroom of American politics, Democrats have long waltzed to the melody of progressivism while ridiculing Republicans’ preference for outdated tax cut tunes. Ironically, they don’t want to pay for their style of big government with higher taxes on ordinary Americans, which their expansionary ambitions would require. Instead, they loudly proclaim that they want to tax the rich. It remains to be seen how true this is.

Indeed, while Democrats profess their devotion to social justice and fight against income inequality, they often push for policies that favor the rich. Take their nonstop battle over the last five years to ease the tax burden of their high-income constituents.

The State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), placed a $10,000 limit on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted from federal taxable income. This move predominantly affected high earners in high-tax states like New York, California, and many others that are Democratic strongholds.

That’s a tax hike on the rich. This shouldn’t bother Democrats, who are usually happy to demonstrate their egalitarian chops by clamoring for that very thing. Yet this time, by demanding repeal of the SALT cap, they are on the front lines of a battle to restore tax breaks for the rich. As it turns out, when affluent Californians and Northeasterners felt the pinch, Democrats were ready to cha-cha for tax relief.

Contrast this with the refusal by moderate New York Republicans to vote for Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) for House speaker in exchange for doubling the deduction cap to $20,000 for individuals and $40,000 for married couples. Now, this might mean these guys really didn’t want Jordan as speaker, but they wouldn’t roll over even in exchange for tax cuts for their own constituencies.

Would New York Democrats be so principled? Back in 2021, 17 of 19 members of this delegation threatened to block a Democrat-sponsored infrastructure bill if the SALT deduction cap wasn’t entirely repealed. I would have been OK with that crony bill failing; I highlight this incident only to reveal some Democrats’ commitment to tax breaks for rich blue-state voters.

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NJ Gov. Murphy used thousands in taxpayer funds to party at Taylor Swift concert, stadium events: report

Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is asking the state Democratic Party to reimburse taxpayers after he used $12,000 in state funds at a Taylor Swift concert and other stadium events.

Murphy’s expenditures, first reported by Politico, were all for food and drinks at MetLife Stadium. When confronted with the spending, Murphy’s office reportedly said it was asking the state Democratic Party to pay back the state.

Murphy’s office says it had always expected the state party to cover the costs, but noticed it had failed to do so. The governor’s office then dipped into a $95,000 personal expense account set up for the office. That account is set up to pay for “Official Receptions, Official Residence, and Other Official Expenses,” and cannot be used for “personal purposes,” according to Politico.

“Once it was clear that there were outstanding bills that had not been paid, the state stepped up to meet this responsibility,” Murphy spokeswoman Jennifer Sciortino told the outlet in a statement. “We are pursuing reimbursement from the state party for costs incurred at MetLife Stadium.”

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Archives locates 82,000 pages of Joe Biden pseudonym emails, possibly dwarfing Clinton scandal

Under legal pressure, the National Archives has located 82,000 pages of emails that President Joe Biden sent or received during his vice presidential tenure on three private pseudonym accounts, a total that potentially dwarfs the amount that landed Hillary Clinton in hot water a decade ago, according to a federal court filing released Monday.

The total of Biden private email exchanges was disclosed Monday in a little-noticed status report filed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought against the National Archives and Records Administration by the nonprofit public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The foundation brought the lawsuit seeking access to the emails after Just the News revealed a year ago that Joe Biden had used three pseudonym email accounts — robinware456@gmail.com, JRBWare@gmail.com, and Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov – during the time he served as President Barack Obama’s vice president.

The status report filed Monday in a federal court in Atlanta was the first to provide an estimate of the size and scope of possible government business conducted through Joe Biden’s private email accounts.

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How Pfizer Hid Nearly 80% of COVID Vaccine Trial Deaths From Regulators

Pfizer-BioNTech delayed reporting vaccine-associated deaths among BNT162b2 clinical trial participants until after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the product.

The vaccine makers also failed to account for a large number of subjects who dropped out of the trial.

Together, these strategies kept regulators and the public ignorant of a 3.7-fold increase in cardiac deaths among subjects who received the vaccine, according to analysis in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research.

The authors of the paper described it as a “forensic analysis,” defined by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology as “the use of scientific methods or expertise to investigate crimes or examine evidence that might be presented in a court of law.”

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RFK Jr. Implores Biden for Secret Service Protection After Intruder Arrested at His Home Twice in One Day

The campaign of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is calling for Secret Service protection for Kennedy after an intruder was arrested — twice — at his home Wednesday.

Security personnel from Gavin de Becker & Associates, which was hired by the campaign, found and held the intruder until police arrived, according to a news release from Kennedy’s campaign.

Kennedy initially entered the campaign as a Democrat challenging President Joe Biden, but has since announced he is running for the White House as an independent.

Police arrested the man, who had asked to see Kennedy, the release said.

The man returned to Kennedy’s house after being released, the news release said, noting that Kennedy was home during both incidents. The intruder was again arrested after his second visit.

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Senator Reveals How FBI “Improperly” Halted Investigation Into Biden Family Corruption

Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley announced Wednesday that there is evidence that the FBI and the DOJ attempted to shut down investigative activity into the Biden family and initiated a coverup of “criminal information” by labeling it “foreign disinformation.”

Grassley presented the findings in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, noting that “This letter is based on years of investigation, including the provision of information, records, and allegations from multiple Justice Department whistleblowers.”

The Senator further noted that the findings “indicate there is — and has been — an effort among certain Justice Department and FBI officials to improperly delay and stop full and complete investigative activity into the Biden family, including but not limited to FD-1023s referencing the Biden family.”

“As just one initial example, I’ve been made aware that at one point in time the FBI maintained over 40 Confidential Human Sources that provided criminal information relating to Joe Biden, James Biden, and Hunter Biden,” he continued.

“It’s been alleged that the basis for shutting the investigative activity down was an August 2020 assessment created by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten,” Grassley added, further noting “That assessment was used by an FBI HQ team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.”

The Senator goes on to detail how the FBI used Auten’s assessment and other briefings to discredit bribery and corruption allegations as “foreign disinformation.” 

Grassley alleges that the “partisan media” and Congressional Democrats then cited the FBI’s assertions as a way of stymying his investigation into the Bidens.

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NYC family convicted of running sex trafficking ring using ‘threats of force, fraud and coercion,’ bribing cop with sexual favors

The Queens family that allegedly operated a years-long sex trafficking ring involving young women and girls from Mexico — and bribed an upstate cop to cover up their horrific offenses in exchange for sexual favors — was found guilty this week, federal officials said. 

Luz Elvira Cardona, 35, her partner Jose Facundo Zarate Morales, 34, as well as her mother Blanca Hernandez Morales, 53, and the older woman’s partner, Roberto Cesar Cid Dominguez, 60, were all found guilty Thursday after a four-week jury trial in Brooklyn Federal Court.

During the sick scheme, Cardona even paid for her 15-year-old niece — who lived in Mexico — to come to New York back in 2007 under the pretense that she could start working as a cleaner, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. 

But once the teen arrived in Queens, her aunt, along with Morales, brokered a deal with a client to sell her virginity.

She was then forced to engage in “commercial sex” with 20 or more men daily, officials said. 

The family’s nefarious plot began in 2002 when they pressured young women and girls – including one other minor besides Cardona’s niece – to come to the US with false promises of a better life, and work lined up for them, the jury heard.

Instead, they “used force, threats of force, fraud and coercion” to pressure their victims to engage in prostitution, prosecutors said. 

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Whistleblower: The World Bank Helped Cover Up Child Sex Abuse at a Chain of For-Profit Schools It Funded

FOR SHANNON MAY and her husband Jay Kimmelman, the conference call scheduled with the World Bank on September 12, 2020, was make or break. It had been just over 10 years since the Harvard graduates had launched Bridge International Academies, a chain of for-profit schools that had exploded in Africa and South Asia. With the backing of Silicon Valley’s elite and the support of international financial institutions like the World Bank, the founders were now in negotiations to raise fresh capital that would allow them to move into several new countries. 

Rapid expansion was essential to the company’s business model. Bridge had figured out a way to slash the biggest cost drivers of a school budget — teachers’ salaries and traditional school houses — but the business was a low-margin enterprise that couldn’t slow down. The company was aiming for 10 million pupils, and it wasn’t as unreachable as it sounded: Bridge had already taught more than 1 million kids, backed by the for-profit investment arms of some of the world’s most famous philanthropists, including Bill Gates and eBay and Intercept founder Pierre Omidyar. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative provided Bridge with $10 million in seed funding; its previous round of financing, the so-called Series E, which closed in 2017.

Bridge was now raising its next round, Series F.  May and Kimmelman had a lot to lose: The couple had relocated from Cambridge to Kenya, and had done well enough to helicopter to their vacation home on the coast.

Just days before the call, in early September, May and Kimmelman had gotten bad news. In 2016, there had been a dozen or more cases of serial sexual assault at a Bridge school in Kenya. Several years later, at another Bridge location, a child on school grounds had been fatally electrocuted by a dangling live wire, while another had been badly injured. May and Kimmelman were already aware of the tragedies. Indeed, the company had internally documented many more cases of sexual abuse, but they had not been reported to the World Bank and stayed out of the local press. Now, a World Bank investigation threatened to bring them to light. 

In February 2020, an internal World Bank entity that independently reviews bank projects, called the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, had sent an investigative team, led by veteran investigator Daniel Adler, to Nairobi to look into complaints filed by a local human rights organization about workers’ rights and health and safety issues at Bridge schools. The CAO team, while in Nairobi, learned of additional allegations from parents and community members, namely the serial assaults and the electrocution. Adler quickly filed a report recommending a deeper look and asked Bridge for more information.

Bridge spent several months gumming up the process, successfully negotiating a nondisclosure agreement with the World Bank that would make it difficult to publish in full any report that might be completed. The company also pressured the head of the CAO, Osvaldo Gratacós, to ease off. Gratacós was pushed out by the World Bank, but the effort ultimately backfired; before his tenure expired, he formally launched an investigation — known internally as a CAO compliance process — into the sex abuse allegations at Bridge in September 2020. May and Kimmelman were now meeting with the World Bank to discuss how to respond.

With the company actively soliciting Series F financing and close to securing a deal to expand in Rwanda, the timing couldn’t have been worse. So the group — which included William Sonneborn, the World Bank official who oversaw the investment in Bridge, and another World Bank staff member, Shannon Atkeson — hatched a plan to keep the allegations hidden. 

With Gratacós already on his way out, the next step was to “neutralize Adler,” the CAO’s lead investigator. Bridge would file a complaint with a World Bank ethics office accusing Adler of violating CAO procedures and of impersonating a Bridge employee. It was right out of the Bridge playbook: The company had previously done the same to a Canadian graduate student writing a report on its schools in Uganda, going so far as to craft a bogus “Wanted” poster and place it in local newspapers. (A subsequent complaint Bridge filed with his university was dismissed.)

Next, Bridge would publish a consultant report favorably comparing its own record on student safety to that of Kenyan public schools — something to point to if the news leaked. The main objective, though, was to keep it quiet for as long as possible. The revelations would “spook investors” and undermine Bridge’s expansion plans in Rwanda. “Time matters,” as one person on the call put it. “Need to delay until Series F.”

There was only one problem: Someone on the call was taking notes.

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Top government official bought prostitutes, schmoozed with foreign national: Investigation

A federal investigation has confirmed that a top-level FBI official associated with a foreign national and massage parlor owner paid for prostitutes “multiple” times before resigning and apparently ducking criminal charges.

The Department of Justice inspector general said that the former “senior level” official received “sexual favors” at a number of massage parlors while employed by the agency.

What’s more, the official did not tell the FBI of their relationship with the “foreign national” as required.

The investigation did not identify the former official or even the city the affair took place in.

Despite facing a long list of potential crimes, the inspector general said that since the suspect retired before the audit confirmed the charges, “federal and state criminal prosecution was declined.”

Senior-level federal officials earn as much as $203,000 a year. It is unclear why no charges were ever filed.

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U.S. Attorney declines to name those involved in decision not to prosecute Hunter Biden

Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C. who was a key figure in Jan. 6 prosecutions and refused to bring tax charges against Hunter Biden, backed out of naming those involved in declining to prosecute the first son, according to his transcribed interview with lawmakers.

“I’m already dealing with enough threats and harassment of my assistant United States attorneys,” Graves said in the official transcript obtained by Just the News as he explained why their names were not revealed. 

He told lawmakers during the interview how his agency decided to not partner with David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney for Delaware who was later named special counsel, and prosecuting a Hunter Biden in tax charges.

Graves told lawmakers he met with five or six people from his office in March 2022 to determine whether they should get involved in the Hunter Biden case.

Three weeks later the office decided to not get involved in the case, and Graves refused to disclose his office’s thoughts because the investigation is still ongoing.

Graves also said it was “normal” for federal prosecutors to bring tax cases without partnering with the Justice Department Tax Division, but in this case, Weiss needed the division’s approval to open a grand jury probe into Hunter Biden.

While Graves said he never told the Delaware prosecutor to not bring charges, he also never followed up with Weiss to make it clear that he was still welcome to bring charges even if his own office would not be involved.

Furthermore, Graves said he never felt a need to recuse himself from being involved in the case involving President Joe Biden’s son even though he worked on the president’s campaign, as well as candidate John Kerry’s 2004 Democratic presidential campaign and President Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign. 

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