Tag: corruption

New Haven Mayor Elicker Launches New Guide That Specifically Highlights Resources Available To Illegal Immigrants

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker, Police Chief Karl Jacobson and more than a dozen town officials attended a press conference at the Atwater Senior Center in the Fair Haven section of the city yesterday, another in a series of meetings about “protecting” immigrants — legal and illegal — from the incoming Trump Administration.

Representatives from Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro’s office were in attendance, too.

It’s worth reminding that DeLauro just voted AGAINST the “Preventing Violence Against Women By Illegal Aliens Act” earlier this week.

As in other meetings, Elicker reminded folks that New Haven is a sanctuary city, or as he calls it a “welcoming city” for everyone, “no matter what your document status is.”

“New Haven has been a welcoming city for decades, and decades, and decades,” Elicker boasted, at times speaking in Spanish to the crowd. “We are a city of immigrants.”

“We are here today to make it abundantly clear that when we confront challenges, we do it together … and we all stand united today,” he said.

During the meeting, Elicker announced that the city had developed a guide to help new residents, including illegal immigrants, so they can better navigate their arrival in New Haven.

Print copies of the “Resource Guide for New Residents” are available in English and Spanish.

The digital versions can be found on the city website at newhavenct.gov/welcome.

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Joe Biden’s farewell letter is full of classic Biden whoppers

On Joe Biden’s way out of office, he and his puppet masters are doing everything they can to tie Trump’s hands so they can blame him for failing to lower inflation, eliminate unnecessary federal workers, lower energy prices, and deport as many illegals as he promised and should.

They are also rewriting history, pretending that Biden’s four years in office made the world and America safer and more prosperous.

And now, Biden has issued a farewell letter, which was full of class Biden whoppers. Biden has been a serial liar throughout his fifty years in office so it’s completely expected, but he’s really outdone himself this time, starting out with one of his biggest, continuous lies, i.e. that he inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and his policies turned it around. From a report at Fox News:

Biden began his letter by writing that four years ago when he took office, ‘We were in the grip of the worst pandemic in a century, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression….’

The media know, or should know, that Biden inherited a rapidly growing economy, yet we see very few who correct Biden’s lies—so most Americans probably believe he actually did inherit a disaster. What Biden was actually handed though was a rapidly growing economy, low energy prices, overall inflation of 1.4%, a fairly secure border, and a relatively peaceful world—his executive orders and policies instantly undid all of that, and made things much worse for the last four years.

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Ousted Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao indicted by federal grand jury following FBI corruption probe

The former Mayor of Oakland, Sheng Thao, has reportedly been indicted by a federal grand jury following a corruption investigation headed by the FBI, sources familiar with the matter told the San Francisco Chronicle. On Thursday, federal officials announced that they intended to disclose the outcome of a “significant law enforcement operation” on Friday morning. However, they did not provide any additional information.

The official charges against the former mayor have not yet been announced, but come after her home was raided by the FBI in June 2024 as part of a corruption probe. Thao was recently recalled in the November election.

The FBI conducted a raid at Thao’s home and three properties that were associated with members of the Duong family, who were awarded a curbside recycling contract by the city of Oakland. The raids occurred last June, and federal agents seized phones belonging to Thao and her boyfriend, Andre Jones.

Days after the raids, a federal grand jury subpoenaed all “documents and communications related to Andre Jones” and “calendar entries or records” of meetings involving Thao or Jones dating back to June 2022.

The subpoena sought documents concerning the Oakland Army Base and Evolutionary Homes, a project to construct container homes that involved the Duongs and Mario Juarez, a man who is accused of violating the law in an attempt to assist Thao in winning the 2022 election, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Additionally, Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission has been conducting an inquiry into the Duong family. They have been accused of using straw donors to provide financial support to Thao and other politicians.

The city of Oakland released hundreds of documents in November, revealing that Evolutionary Homes representatives lobbied for $90 million in city funding to construct 300 tiny homes using shipping containers. Thao directly supported the venture, as evidenced by emails. On September 7, 2022, Evolutionary Homes was established in California. Juarez was listed as the organizer and a member of the Duong family as its agent. However, the company fell through.

Records indicate that Juarez established and exclusively funded an independent expenditure campaign during Thao’s 2022 mayoral campaign. This campaign spent over $100,000 on leaflets that targeted Thao’s opponents. Earlier this year, he entered a not-guilty plea to a charge that he had disbursed over $50,000 in fraudulent checks that were intended to cover the postage costs of the leaflets, the outlet reported.

The ousted mayor has maintained her innocence since the FBI home raid.

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Keir Starmer’s Support for the Gaza Ceasefire Is Riddled With Lies

There are so many lies, deceptions and misdirections in Sir Keir Starmer’s statement on the ceasefire agreed between Israel and Hamas yesterday that they need to be picked apart line by line.

Starmer: After months of devastating bloodshed and countless lives lost, this is the long-overdue news that the Israeli and Palestinian people have desperately been waiting for. They have borne the brunt of this conflict – triggered by the brutal terrorists of Hamas, who committed the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust on October 7th, 2023.

Under no reasonable definition can the last 15 months be described as a “conflict”. The slaughter and maiming of hundreds of thousands of civilians, as well as Israel’s program to starve the rest of the population, should rightly be understood as a genocide, one the International Court of Justice began investigating a year ago, and one that has been attested to by every major international human rights group, as well as a growing number of Holocaust scholars.

Starmer does at least hint at the truth in conceding that the ceasefire is “long overdue”. The genocide in Gaza could have been brought to an end at any point by US pressure. Indeed, the outlines of the current ceasefire were advanced by the Biden administration back in May. It was Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu who blocked progress. Israel’s western patrons, including Starmer, rewarded him with weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover. If the ceasefire is “overdue”, Starmer is fully responsible for that delay.

Further, the “conflict” wasn’t “triggered” by Hamas’ attack of October 7, as Starmer claims. The “conflict” has been going on for more than three-quarters of a century, triggered by Israel’s continuous efforts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their homeland, with western backing, in an explicitly colonial project. Israel wants us to believe the “conflict” clock started ticking on October 7. Only the ignorant, and contemptible politicians like Starmer, repeat that lie.

The killings on October 7 2023 weren’t “the deadliest massacre of Jewish people” since the Holocaust. That’s another cynical Israeli talking point repeated by Starmer whose sole purpose is to rationalise Israel’s genocide. The “deadliest massacre” for Jews since the Holocaust was, in fact, committed by the Argentinian junta, which disappeared and murdered thousands of Jews in the late 1970s. And unlike Hamas, whose victims were killed not because they were Jews but because they were Israelis and viewed as members of an oppressor nation, Argentina’s generals killed Jews specifically for being Jewish. Nonetheless, that massacre – inconvenient to the West – has been carefully memory-holed, including by Starmer.

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Whistleblower Seeks IRS Investigation Into Gates Foundation’s For-profit Vaccine Activities

A Florida whistleblower is asking a federal court to force the IRS to investigate alleged vaccine-related for-profit activities conducted by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Attorney William S. Scott, executive director of the World Peace Through Education Foundation, made the allegations in a claim filed with the IRS in May 2024. In September 2024, the IRS denied Scott’s claim. On Jan. 8, he filed an appeal against the IRS in federal court.

“Under the pretense of improving World Health, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation/Trust has been engaged in the promotion, manufacture and sale of Covid-19 vaccines that were not sufficiently tested for safety or for effectiveness for their intended use,” Scott said in his appeal.

Scott is asking that the IRS tax the Gates Foundation’s COVID-19 vaccine-related activities retroactively and in the future “as ordinary income from for-profit transactions.”

“The claim that its efforts are charity are bogus and it has acted in bad faith,” Scott wrote, referring to the Gates Foundation.

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Court Filings Reveal More Government Lies About Censorship, Seek Deeper Investigation

Joy Pullman over at The Federalist has written an excellent piece on recent developments in our free speech case and another related case, describing what these reveal about government censorship. The article opens:

Government pressure on national communications monopolies to mute Americans’ critiques of government began in Barack Obama’s presidency and continues today, say court documents filed Dec. 23.

Federal documents uncovered by separate litigation on Dec. 19 also show censorship of public discussion about prudent Covid policies began at least by February 18, 2020, a month before unprecedented citizen lockdowns. That contradicts Department of Homeland Security claims its censorship efforts began months later.

These documents also highlight that government employees deliberately violated transparency laws such as the Freedom of Information Act to hide their use of public offices. The Dec. 23 filing from Missouri v. Biden plaintiffs cites a May New York Times article showing “some Defendants, particularly at NIH and NIAID, have intentionally misspelled words in order to avoid production pursuant to FOIA requests; deleted emails; and used private emails.” Given this, the plaintiffs asked the federal district court to expand discovery to include intentionally misspelled keywords.

The filing also says President Biden senior advisor Andy Slavitt, a former Obama official, “continued using his White House email address even after he left government employment, presumably in an attempt to wield the authority of an office that he no longer held.” Slavitt personally “bullied” Twitter into deplatforming journalist Alex Berenson over his skepticism of mRNA injections, the filing notes.

The Missouri plaintiffs are petitioning for greater discovery and depositions in a case the U.S. Supreme Court returned to the district level after declining a preliminary injunction against vast censorship efforts that use taxpayer-funded cutout organizations to mask federal demands. “[T]his case is exceptional,” the plaintiffs argue. “Never before in this country’s history has a government censorship regime coordinated at the highest levels been exposed through litigation.”

Missouri plaintiffs include the states of Missouri and Louisiana, Health Freedom Louisiana co-director Jill Hines and Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, and internationally recognized research scientists and medical doctors Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University medical professor who is now President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health.

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UK Doctors Group That Pushed COVID Shots for Teens Hid Payments From Pfizer

The U.K.’s Royal College of General Practitioners (GP) failed to declare payments it received from Pfizer while it was advocating that children be given the COVID-19 vaccine, The Telegraph reported last week.

The Royal College of GPs, which represents 54,000 GPs, is the U.K.’s professional body for general medical practitioners, similar to the American Medical Association in the U.S.

In 2021, Pfizer gave the organization 102,820 British pounds ($125,558 USD at current exchange rates) through “donations and grants” and “benefits in kind.” That was more than double the 49,324 pounds ($60,232) Pfizer gave the organization in 2020, up from only 4,309 pounds ($5,262) in 2019.

In September 2021, the U.K.’s chief medical officers, the highest-ranking government public health advisers, asked parents to vaccinate their children to keep schools open, according to The Telegraph.

They issued that advice even though the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which advises the government on vaccination, opted not to recommend universal vaccination for 12- to 15-year-olds. The JCVI said the benefits of vaccination for that age group were only “marginally greater than the potential known harms.”

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Nonprofit Founded By Ex-Georgia State Rep. Stacey Abrams Slapped With Largest Fine In State History Over Election Violations

Failed gubernatorial candidate and former Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams, a prominent Democrat, is back in the news after a nonprofit she founded was hit with the largest fine in Georgia’s history this week.

Abrams’ “New Georgia Project” spent $3.2 million trying to get her elected as Georgia governor in 2018, but failed to disclose the spending in violation of state law.

Georgia’s ethics commission found the group and its affiliate the “New Georgia Project Action Fund” engaged in 16 instances of illegal election work on behalf of Abrams and others.

The shady group, once headed by current Democrat Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock, was ordered to pay a $300,000 fine.

Both groups failed to register as independent campaign committees before taking electioneering contributions and did not file campaign finance reports of the donations or spending.

If Abrams won her 2018 gubernatorial election against Brian Kemp, it’s likely the illegal activity would have been swept under the rug.

Popular 𝕏 account @amuse questioned why Democrats like Abrams and Hillary Clinton only received fines for finance law violations when President-elect Donald Trump received over 30 felonies for “mischaracterizing” $140k in campaign funds.

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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Went MIA Twice Last Year And Didn’t Tell Congress

Lloyd Austin transferred his responsibilities as defense secretary to a subordinate on two separate occasions last year and didn’t inform Congress as required by federal law, according to an explosive inspector general report released Wednesday. The revelation marks another instance in which Austin has been caught going MIA while leading the Pentagon.

Released by the office of the Department of Defense (DOD) inspector general, the report primarily focuses on a controversy involving Austin that arose in January 2024. The defense secretary was admitted to Walter Reed’s ICU on Jan. 1 after reportedly “experiencing severe pain,” which seemingly stemmed from an “initial medical procedure” he underwent on Dec. 22, 2023, according to The Guardian.

The report confirms Austin’s procedure was related to a prostate cancer diagnosis.

As I previously wrote in these pages, the American people, Congress, and high-ranking Biden administration officials — including President Biden — were unaware of Austin’s absence for several days. Even Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks — whom Austin transferred his responsibilities to and was vacationing in Puerto Rico at the time — was also unaware of the situation until she was briefed on the matter days after Austin was admitted to the ICU.

But it appears that wasn’t the only instance in which Austin failed to properly notify relevant authorities about transferring his duties to Hicks.

According to Wednesday’s IG report, the Pentagon “did not report two [Assumption of Functions and Duties] AFDs, occurring on June 17, 2024, and June 21, 2024, to the Comptroller General and Congress” as required by federal law and DOD policy.

The DOD IG noted how both transfer of power notifications “stated that the reason for the AFD was travel” and that Hicks “was serving as the Acting Secretary of Defense.” While the directives “did not indicate the expected duration of the transfer” of authority, “the June 17 AFD lasted 1 hour and the June 21 AFD lasted 35 minutes,” according to the report.

“However, although these AFDs were reported to the [White House Situation Room], they were not reported to the Comptroller General and Congress,” the analysis reads.

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HHS Secretary Becerra Defends Biden Admin’s Big Tech Censorship, Blames Disinformation for Public Distrust

US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra is about to step down, along with the rest of the Biden administration. Not only that, but it also seems likely that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will take over that post.

Ouch.

That aside – the exit of Becerra might be the end, and the conclusion of a “synopsis” of this particular political drama – but the start goes way back to 2020, the pandemic, its (mis)handling, and all the wrongs that impacted both people’s physical and mental health, and facilitated rampant online censorship, for many years.

It makes for an interesting read that the Washington Post decided to give Becerra a lot of space to state his case – but less so because of anything the soon-to-be former official actually had to say, or any ideologically heavy narrative the media outlet in question itself, felt the need to peddle in this context, one more time.

(There’s a point in the article where the Covid pandemic is described – now in January 2025 – as merely “receding”?)

These seemingly last-ditch delusional efforts are being made all over the place and this one has Becerra at one point addressing the elephant in the supposedly purely scientific room – what about the rampage of online censorship around Covid?

Believe it or not, it’s the victim card that Becerra chose to play here. “I can’t go toe to toe with social media,” he is quoted as lamenting by the Washington Post, bringing up things like “instantaneous misinformation” as the culprit for citizens now expressing low trust in the outgoing government.

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