Tag: corruption

Prosecutors in Smollett Case Lied to the Public, Special Prosecutor Finds

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and prosecutors in her office lied and misled the public about the case against Jussie Smollett, according to a special prosecutor’s case released Monday.

Foxx, a Democrat whose campaign was backed by billionaire George Soros, initially said there was a “strong case” against Smollett for faking a hate crime against himself that would have led to a conviction. But Foxx claimed days later that certain aspects of the case “would have made securing a conviction against Smollett uncertain.”

Dan Webb, a special prosecutor appointed to probe the actions of Foxx and her underlings, said the pivot was “false and misleading.”

The office also offered a series of other false and misleading statements, Webb’s report said.

Foxx recused herself from the case in 2019 because she was rumored to be related to or have a relationship with Smollett or his family. But, according to legal rules, Foxx had to recuse her entire office and ask the court to appoint a special prosecutor. Foxx instead chose to keep in place a prosecutor she appointed from within her office to oversee the case.

The office and Foxx “made the decision to ignore this major legal defect seemingly because they did not want to admit they had made such a major mistake of judgment,” Webb wrote, adding that they “then compounded the problem by making a false statement to the media” about the matter.

Foxx and/or prosecutors in her office also falsely said Smollett had no criminal background when they dismissed the initial case against him, falsely represented that $10,000 was the most Smollett could have been ordered to pay in restitution, and were misleading when they claimed the dismissal was not unusual because they could not identify any similar cases, according to the report.

Foxx’s office engaged in substantial abuses of discretion and breached obligations of honesty and transparency, Webb concluded.

Keep reading

Amazon deleted reviews of Chinese president’s book on government’s orders

Didn’t like Chinese President Xi Jinping’s book? Keep your mouth shut.

That’s what China told Amazon, according to a new report, when the country pushed the bookseller to delete all comments and reviews related to “The Governance of China,” a compendium of Xi’s speeches and writings.

Amazon complied. It’s another example of a US company bending to Chinese pressure in order to keep doing business in the huge and growing economy.

The government edict was delivered two years ago, according to the Reuters report citing two people familiar with the matter, but had never before been disclosed.

Now, on Amazon sites accessed within China, there are no reviews or star ratings for the book.

The censorship demand was made after some reviewers gave the leader’s tome less-than-stellar marks, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

It was a negative review that prompted the wholesale ban on reviews and ratings on the book, according to a source. The ban was for the book’s Amazon listing in China.

Keep reading

CDC Massively Inflated Number of ‘Vaccinated’ Americans

CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has been wildly inflating the number of “vaccinated” Americans by counting potentially tens of millions of “boosters” and second doses as first time shots, according to a report from Bloomberg News.

To give you an idea of the scale of the CDC’s overreporting, in just one state, Pennsylvania, the CDC overreported the number of first doses for the elderly “by about 850,000” when compared to the state’s own revised estimates.

There’s only around 2.27 million elderly people (aged 65 and over) in all of Pennsylvania.

“Alison Beam, the state’s acting health secretary, said their review showed that some first doses were actually second doses — meaning that fully inoculated people were counted twice as half-vaccinated,” Bloomberg reported.

Keep reading

Why Don’t People “Trust The Science?” Because Scientists Are Often Caught Lying

There has been an unfortunate shift in Western educational practices in the past few decades away from what we used to call “critical thinking.” In fact, critical thinking was once a fundamental staple of US colleges and now it seems as though the concept doesn’t exist anymore; at least not in the way it used to. Instead, another brand of learning has arisen which promotes “right thinking”; a form of indoctrination which encourages and rewards a particular response from students that falls in line with ideology and not necessarily in line with reality.

It’s not that schools directly enforce a collectivist or corporatist ideology (sometimes they do), it’s more that they filter out alternative viewpoints as well as facts and evidence they do not like until all that is left is a single path and a single conclusion to any given problem. They teach students how to NOT think by presenting thought experiments and then controlling the acceptable outcomes.

For example, a common and manipulative thought experiment used in schools is to ask students to write an “analysis” on why people do not trust science or scientists these days. The trick is that the question is always presented with a built-in conclusion – That scientists should be trusted, and some people are refusing to listen, so let’s figure out why these people are so stupid.

I have seen this experiment numerous times, always presented in the same way. Not once have I ever seen a college professor or public school teacher ask students: “Should scientists today be trusted?”

Not once.

Keep reading

Emails Reveal Fauci’s Effort to ‘Smear’ Anti-Lockdown Scientists

Newly released emails show Anthony Fauci and his boss at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to conduct a “quick and devastating” take-down of health experts who proposed a lockdown-free Covid-19 control strategy.

The emails, released on Friday by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, show retiring NIH Director Francis Collins telling Fauci in October 2020 to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) – a statement that proposes working towards achieving herd immunity through “focused protection” of the most vulnerable.

Days after the GBD was released, Collins notified Fauci and other health officials about how the proposal from “three fringe epidemiologists” was getting a “lot of attention” and called for a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

Keep reading

Ghislaine Maxwell Trial: Evidence from Jeffrey Epstein’s Safe Went Missing Following FBI Raid

In July 2019 the FBI raided Jeffrey Epstein’s home in New York City. The FBI agents found damning information and evidence throughout his 7-story residence. The evidence included “numerous black binders” with white labels that had “clear pages containing thumbnail photos with CDs attached.”

FBI agents also found several items in a safe including “binders with CDs, various items of jewelry, external hard drives, lose diamonds, large amounts of U.S. currency and passports.”

The FBI later said the evidence in the safe went missing. Chris Wray’s FBI said they went back a few days later and the evidence had disappeared.

Keep reading

Nike execs gave $60,000 to Democrat who blocked anti-slave labor bill

Several top Nike executives funneled more than $60,000 to the re-election campaign of Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden over the course of just 16 days in September.

On Wednesday evening, Wyden blocked the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act which the House passed unanimously Tuesday and the Senate was expected to overwhelmingly approve. President Joe Biden vowed to sign the bill once passed by both chambers and work with Congress to “ensure global supply chains are free of forced labor,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement.

Nike, a major benefactor of Wyden, was one of several corporations to lobby against the bill, The New York Times previously reported. A March 2020 report from the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) concluded that the Oregon-based athletic apparel giant was one of several corporations suspected to either directly employ forced labor or source materials from suppliers using forced labor in Xinjiang.

Keep reading

Members Of Congress And Their Families Traded Over $630 Million In Stocks This Year

Members of Congress and their immediate families exchanged more than $630 million in stocks this year.

A report from The New York Times’ DealBook — based upon research conducted by Capitol Trades — revealed that asset purchases amounted to $267 million, while sales amounted to $364 million:

About 60 percent of these trades were in company stocks, with the rest split among funds, bonds and other assets. Republicans bought $100 million worth of stocks this year, versus $75 million for Democrats, according to the average of ranges that lawmakers provide in filings.

Politicians from the two major parties displayed distinct portfolio preferences:

Democrats are really into tech stocks, which accounted for some $35 million, or nearly half of all purchases by the group (versus only 14 percent for Republicans). Microsoft was the most popular big-ticket buy: The husband of Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington is a former Microsoft executive who sold between $5 million and $25 million in the company’s stock in October, which she reported past the 45-day deadline, prompting criticism. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband is a real estate and venture capital investor who is active on the stock market, making a pair of million-dollar purchases of Microsoft stock during the year, among other trades.

Republicans are more about energy, buying $32 million worth of stock in companies in the sector during the year, about a third of all purchases (versus a mere 1 percent for Democrats). Representative Mark Green of Tennessee was associated with many of the biggest energy trades, spreading six-figure purchases across a range of firms.

According to The New York Times, members of Congress also traded $26 million in stock options and $300,000 in cryptocurrencies.

Keep reading