Ramaswamy: Public shouldn’t be paying ‘hush money for sexual indiscretions’ by members of Congress

In voicing his opposition to former President Trump’s indictment, tech entrepreneur and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy noted that taxpayers have been paying millions to settle sexual harassment claims in Congress.

“If you want to talk about hush money for sexual indiscretions by politicians,” he tweeted Friday, “consider this: in the past 25 years, the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights has paid a staggering $18.2 million of *taxpayer dollars* to settle 291 cases of sexual harassment & other misconduct committed by members of Congress.

“The public shouldn’t be paying for this nonsense. We’re fixing corruption. No one will be spared.” 

The indictment of Trump by a Manhattan grand jury stems from hush money payments he allegedly made to women before the 2016 presidential election. The 45th president’s arraignment is expected to take place in New York on Tuesday,

Ramaswamy said the indictment is “politically motivated” and “marks a dark moment in American history.”

“It will undermine public trust in our electoral system and justice system,” he said. “It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its political rivals. Principles go beyond partisanship. Let the American people decide who governs.”

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Attorney Who Represented Survivors of Sex Crimes Arrested for Child Pornography

An attorney in West Palm Beach, Florida, who represented survivors of sex crimes was recently arrested with possession of child pornography.

Michael T. Dolce, 53, appeared in West Palm Beach federal court for his first appearance in the case on March 30, the Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney’s Office announced in a release.

According to the release, citing the criminal complaint affidavit, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Dolce’s apartment and found that Dolce was “actively downloading child pornography using peer-2-peer software.”

“Nearly 2,000 images and videos of child pornography were recovered from his devices,” it stated.

At the March 30 hearing, Dolce agreed to submit to pretrial detention while reserving his right to later challenge it, reported the Miami New Times. His arraignment is scheduled for mid-April, according to the outlet. He faces a child pornography possession charge, which has a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The office of Leonard Scott Feuer, Dolce’s attorney, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.

Dolce’s LinkedIn profile describes him as a “highly regarded trial lawyer and political activist” whose practice “is dedicated to representing survivors of sexual crimes, including child and adult victims, and adult survivors of child sexual abuse.”

According to the LinkedIn profile, he was a partner at the Palm Beach Gardens office of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll since late 2015. But his name is no longer listed on law firm’s website as of the time of writing.

According to an archived entry on the firm’s website, Dolce was the leader of its Sexual Abuse, Sex Trafficking, and Domestic Violence team.

In a statement to multiple outlets, the firm said it was “stunned and saddened” by the allegations against Dolce. A spokesperson confirmed Dolce was “terminated and is no longer affiliated with the firm.”

“We are focused on attending to the needs of our clients and staff and continuing to cooperate fully with the investigation,” the spokesperson added.

Separately, Dolce’s LinkedIn profile states that he has been on the board of directors of the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence since 2011.

He also served on the advisory board of Florida’s Children First, according to a now-deleted entry on the legal-aid organization’s website. The non-profit group is dedicated to representing “at-risk children, especially those in foster care.”

According to the website’s entry, Dolce founded a political committee called “Protect Our Kids First, Inc.” Separately, he also served on the Florida Bar’s Legal Needs of Children Committee, and on the governing board of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in West Palm Beach.

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Emails from Nat’l Archives reveal efforts to squash negative Biden family news, years before laptop story

Records newly released by the National Archives show efforts to suppress negative stories about the Biden family’s business deals long predate the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, dating back to 2015 when an aide to then-Vice President Joe Biden boasted she got a reporter to “only use” negative information “if her editors hold a gun to her head.”

The emails come from the Obama administration archives and were forced into the public through litigation by the America First Legal nonprofit public interest law firm. They chronicle efforts by Biden’s then-aides in the vice president’s office to suppress stories about Huter Biden’s relationship with the Ukraine energy compamy Burisma Holdings during a Biden trip to Ukraine in December 2015.

Stephen Miller, the president of America First Legal, said the records suggest the news media has been complicit in burying negative news about the Biden family for at least a decade.

“Joe Biden and the Biden vice presidency were intimately involved in the Hunter Biden Burisma affair,” Miller said on the Thursday edition of the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “They were intimately aware of it. They were intimately aware of the ethical objections, and they were intimately involved in trying to spin and control the press about it.”

You can read the full set of released documents at this link: NARA-Release-2_Supplement.pdf

The records obtained by Miller’s group reveal that Joe Biden personally approved quotes in December 2015 to address his son’s overseas business dealings even though the president has claimed he had no knowledge about what his son did.

“VP signed off on this — will give this quote to both reporters in my name shortly,” then- vice presidential press official Kate Bedingfield wrote in one of the emails. 

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“Grandma of the Police Officers Association” in California Arrested for Importing Fentanyl From China and Other Countries

As the drug crisis in America rages on as opioids and fentanyl pour across our unsecured border from the Mexican drug cartels supplied by Chinese “pharmaceuticals,” an unsuspecting trafficker has emerged.

San Jose Police Officers Association police union executive Joanne Marian Segovia was arrested on Wednesday for attempting to import a synthetic opioid called Valeryl fentanyl.  If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in federal prison.

Police union president Sean Pritchard told the New York Post that Segovia was like “the grandma of the POA…this is not the person we’ve known, the person who has worked with fallen officers’ families, organized fundraisers for officers’ kids…”

Segovia was allegedly importing packages of drugs from China, Canada, India and other countries and disguising them as common items such as makeup, chocolates, and food supplements.  She has received at least 61 packages at her home from 2015 through 2023.

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UN Security Council Won’t Probe Nord Stream Bombing

The UN Security Council voted Monday against a Russian effort to get an independent investigation into the bombings of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines that connect Russia to Germany.

The only members of the Council that voted in favor of the resolution were Russia, China, and Brazil. The remaining 12 members abstained from the vote, including the US, the likely culprit of the attacks.

The resolution had little chance of passing since it needed at least nine votes in favor and no veto from any of the five permanent members of the Security Council: the US, China, Russia, Britain, and France.

Russia has been pushing for an international inquiry into the Nord Stream sabotage since investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a bombshell report in February that alleged President Biden ordered the bombings.

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New Analysis Shows How The CDC Spread False Information That Exaggerated The Severity of COVID-19

Academics from the University of California, San Francisco have published a new paper titled “Statistical and Numerical Errors Made by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

The paper outlines 25 instances when the CDC reported statistical or numerical errors. Twenty (80%) of these instances, according to the researchers, “exaggerated the severity of the COVID-19 situation.”

They also explain how the CDC was notified about the errors in 16 (64%) instances and later corrected the errors, at least partially, in 13 (52%) instances.

As the paper points out, it’s quite ironic that “inaccurate and misleading information” labels were put on various scientific papers, posts made by experts in the field, and more throughout the pandemic yet the CDC themselves have been outed multiple times for spreading misinformation.

In fact, the Biden administration collaborated with Big Tech to actively censor and put labels on content they knew, admittedly, was “true content” with an army of federal censors.

The researchers explain,

“Many entities rely on the CDC for trusted information, as does the lay public. For instance, YouTube links to the CDC website on all videos discussing COVID-19, supporting CDC policy positions. Spotify links select podcast episodes to the CDC website as well. Many universities, healthcare facilities, daycares, churches, businesses, schools, sports programs, and camps defer to CDC guidance for COVID-19 precautions. For this reason, it is imperative the CDC avoids errors in their statements, or, if errors are made, that they are rapidly corrected. We set out to identify numerical errors or objectively false statements made by the CDC.”

As you can imagine, this was a daunting task. US federal agencies put out a plethora of information on their websites, social media accounts, scientific publications, press releases, emails, and more. The authors sought to compile errors they previously identified, or errors brought to their attention by other observers.

All errors were presented at a meeting with all authors present. The errors were discussed, reviewed and accepted only if three authors all felt the errors were clearly false. A fourth author, not involved in the collection, made the final determination whether the included errors were false.

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“Something Very Dramatic Has Changed”: Matt Taibbi Says Democrats Ditched Free Speech

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi – of recent “Twitter Files” fame – has exposed the fact that civil liberties are no longer popular among Democrats. Taibbi appeared on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo” to reiterate his perspective that the modern Democratic Party no longer represents the values of the everyday American. 

“About all of this — Matt, how do you feel about all of this? I know before you started discovering this bad behavior, you identified as a Democrat, and now you’ve got all of your friends, quote-unquote, in the media attacking you for exposing this,” Bartiromo asked.

“Yeah, it’s funny, I mean, I was raised in a traditional ACLU liberal, I believed in free speech all my life. That was one of the things, frankly, that attracted me to the Democratic Party when I was a kid, the idea that we were the party that believed in letting everybody have a say, and we’ll just make a better argument, and that’s how the system works,” Taibbi said.

He continued, “Apparently, something very dramatic has changed in politics in America, and there’s been a shift. There’s no question about it anymore, that now the parties have had a complete reversal on how they read these issues.”

Taibbi leads a team of journalists, including Michael Shellenberger, who have been given access to Twitter Files, revealing a startling network of government agencies, think tanks, and Twitter personnel coordinating efforts to attack the First Amendment. 

What we’ve learned from the Twitter Files is the ever-expanding coalition of groups working with the government and social media to target and censor Americans, including government-funded organizations.

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Biden’s IRS goons dropped by Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi’s house while he was testifying before Congress … I wonder why?

While one of the journalists behind the Twitter Files was testifying about his finding in front of Congress, he was also being harassed by government goons who showed up to his house unannounced.

Matt Taibbi was in DC in early March to testify about the evidence he found of the government’s abuse of its relationship with Twitter and big tech to censor speech and control what Americans saw on their social media feeds. Meanwhile, the IRS had sent their folks out to Taibbi’s home to make an unscheduled visit.

TOTALLY NOT AN INTIMIDATION TACTIC!

The Wall Street Journal reported that Taibbi was visited because his previous tax returns from 2018 and 2021 had been rejected.

But they decided that an in-person visit was warranted instead of an electronic communication like you would normally expect.

It’s “not clear” why.

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