Tag: corruption

DC bar restores status of convicted ex-FBI lawyer who deceived the FISA court during Russia probe

Kevin Clinesmith, the former senior FBI lawyer who was placed on probation as a convicted felon for falsifying a surveillance document during the Trump-Russia investigation, has been returned to “good standing” as a member of the D.C. Bar Association. 

In August of 2020, Clinesmith pleaded guilty to doctoring an email that was then used to justify a surveillance warrant that targeted former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. As a result, Clinesmith was sentenced in January to 12 months probation, though the D.C. bar did not seek his disbarment. 

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Of Course Pelosi Doesn’t Want Congress Banned From Trading Stocks — She Rakes In Millions From It

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want Congress banned from trading stocks because she profits big from her and her husband’s investments on a regular basis.

In a press conference on Monday, the Democrat said that representatives and senators should do their best to comply with the reporting standards required by the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, signed into law in 2012, but rejected the suggestion that legislators and their spouses should be barred from trading.

“We are a free market economy that should be able to participate in that,” Pelosi said.

Like many others in Congress, Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, a San Francisco real estate investment mogul, have poured tons of money into the stock market and profited millions off of shares largely staked in Big Tech stocks such as Alphabet, Google’s parent company. According to disclosure forms collected in the House, Pelosi has reported holding stocks in Microsoft, Roblox, Netflix, and recently sold Facebook and Apple shares.

Pelosi isn’t the only member of Congress who makes money off of trading on some of the same companies that are regularly called to testify in front of her chamber’s committees. A recent report from Insider found that 49 other legislators not only frequently involved themselves in stock trades but also failed to disclose their dealings in accordance with the STOCK Act in a timely manner or at all. The list is filled with Republicans and Democrats who, despite the law designed to curb any insider trading and conflicts of interest, “offer excuses including ignorance of the law, clerical errors, and mistakes by an accountant” to justify their lack of financial disclosures.

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Suburban New York cop among half-dozen charged in sex-trafficking of underage girls from Mexico

A suburban police officer and five Queens residents were charged Tuesday with luring underage Mexican girls to New York and forcing them into prostitution, with the corrupt cop accused of accepting sex from the victims as payment for his work as a law enforcement mole.

The long-running operation, dating back almost 20 years, involved a pair of Queens-based schemes: the Ced-Hernandez sex trafficking organization brought the young women to New York with false promises of a better life, authorities charged in a 14-count Brooklyn Federal Court indictment.

The Godinez prostitution operation then drove the victims to meet with clients including Wayne Peiffer, a Village of Brewster police officer in Putnam County who also provided the ring with “advance warning of law enforcement operations,” authorities said.

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Portland gives $12 MILLION contract to social justice energy company headed by fraudster ex-convict

Linda Woodley, an ex-convict that has racked up millions of dollars in liens for unpaid federal and states taxes, was recently awarded an $11.5 million energy contract by the City of Portland, Oregon.

According to the The Oregonian, Woodley served time in prison for defrauding energy companies and pocketing the proceeds.

Linda Woodley is the Chief of Diversifying Energy, a community-focused nonprofit organization based in Portland, Oregon. According to their website, their mission is to facilitate equitable access to clean, sustainable energy and improve air quality to vulnerable populations, including low-income communities and people of color.

Information about Woodley’s criminal history can be found through a simple background check, so either the city of Portland knew about her past and they decided to award Woodley with contract anyways or they didn’t properly vette her. A six-figure penalty was even filed against Woodley just earlier this year, information that can also be easily found.

The City of Portland reportedly diverted the contact to Woodley after finding out that the original company it was awarded to had an 85 percent white workforce, The Oregonian reports. The contract supplies low-income families with heaters and coolers.

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15 lawmakers profiting from defense industry investments while running US defense policy

Fifteen lawmakers serving on House and Senate committees that shape U.S. military policy are profiting from investments in prominent defense contractors benefited by the very policies they influence, according to federal financial records analyzed by Business Insider this week.  

Insider examined nearly 9,000 financial reports for every sitting member of Congress, as well as their top staffers, as part of a broader effort dubbed the Conflicted Congress project, which aims to identify possible conflicts of interest among lawmakers in Congress. Both Democrats and Republicans serving on the Armed Services committees have combined defense industry investments nearing $1 million as of 2020, and they’re continuing to invest and cash in.

Among the contractors that appeared in the committee members’ financial disclosures were Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co., Raytheon Technologies Corp., Honeywell, and General Electric. Each company is known for spending millions to lobby the federal government in an effort to win lucrative government contracts and shape public policy.

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Is Criticizing Joe Biden a Danger to Democracy?

This week, President Joe Biden hopped onto Zoom in an effort to shepherd the world along the path to stronger global democracy, during a two-day summit with other world leaders. He’ll be making his case, however, amid growing concerns about democracy here at home. On Monday, The Atlantic’s dedicated doomscroll provider, Barton Gellman, unleashed his latest flurry of frets, warning that “Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun.” His masthead-mate, George Packer, followed up with a piece that urged readers to imagine democracy’s unthinkable demise in order to stave it off.

Whether we like it or not, there is reason to be gravely concerned. But against this backdrop, an interesting debate has broken out about the press’s role in protecting our too-fragile institutions and raveled civic fabric from a Trumpian assault—and whether the media, in an effort to support democracy, must unflinchingly support Biden, as well.

Over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank made considerable waves with a column that rather lustily accused the media of offering President Biden worse coverage than President Trump. At first blush, this might seem impossible, if only because Trump’s actions—through corruption, incompetence, and the need to constantly battle the media—made it almost impossible to cover him favorably. Milbank, however, marshaled some statistics from data analytics experts, who combed through hundreds of thousands of articles to provide a detailed “sentiment analysis” supporting his thesis that “Biden’s press for the past four months has been as bad as—and for a time worse than—the coverage Trump received for the same four months of 2020.”

But Milbank’s most provocative idea posited that the media needed to be “partisan” in the service of democracy. “The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.”

Not everyone took this message well. Politico’s Ryan Lizza responded to Milbank on Twitter: “No respectable model of salvaging democratic norms would include badgering journalists to write only positive stories about the most powerful person in the world.”

Lizza is correct. Blind fealty to heads of state is the hallmark of dictatorships, not democracies. 

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