Tag: corruption

Former Atlanta official gets 14 years in corruption case

A pastor, political operative and former high-ranking Atlanta city official was sentenced Thursday to 14 years in prison after a jury found her guilty of charges stemming from a long-running federal investigation into corruption at City Hall.

U.S. District Judge Steve Jones told Mitzi Bickers that the evidence showed that she was involved in “a deliberate, calculated plan to cheat” the taxpayers of Atlanta over a number of years. In addition to the prison time, he ordered Bickers to pay nearly $3 million in restitution to the city and to serve three years of supervised release once she’s out.

Bickers, 56, was the first person to go to trial in the investigation into corruption during the administration of former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. She helped Reed win election and then worked as his director of human services for several years. Prosecutors said she used her influence to funnel roughly $17 million in business to city contractors Elvin “E.R.” Mitchell Jr. and Charles P. Richards Jr. in exchange for more than $2.9 million in bribes for herself and others.

A jury in March found Bickers guilty on charges including money laundering, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit bribery.

Prosecutors had asked Jones to sentence Bickers to serve 17 and a half years in prison. Her lawyers asked for a much lower sentence, pointing to the five years that Mitchell got and the two years Richards got.

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State Lawmaker Advised Mormon Bishop Against Reporting Church Member Who Sexually Abused Daughters, Lawsuit Filings Say

A Utah state representative told a Mormon bishop not to report a church member’s sexual abuse, advice that led to seven years of rape and abuse committed by the church member against his own daughters, according to new lawsuit documents.

State Rep. Merrill Nelson (R-UT), a prominent lawyer for the Mormon church, allegedly answered the first call from a help line when Bishop John Herrod told him that Arizona church member Paul Adams had admitted to sexually abusing two of his daughters. For more than two years, Nelson communicated with Herrod and another bishop who knew about the abuse allegations, according to call records, the Associated Press reported.

Nelson told Herrod “that he could be sued if he reported, and the instruction by counsel not to report Paul [Adams] to the authorities was the law in Arizona and had nothing to do with Church doctrine,” according to the plaintiff’s filings. However, as the AP reported, Arizona law allows blanket immunity for those who report child sexual abuse or neglect.

The sex abuser’s two daughters and one of his sons are trying to gain access to records from the Mormon church, but the church has refused them based on confidentiality. After a county judge ruled in the victims’ favor to see the records, the Mormon church took the case to the Court of Appeals.

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‘Deeply dangerous’: Network host says media need to stop covering ‘both sides’ of issues

MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan called for media outlets to not cover both sides of what he called “major issues” during a Wednesday forum.

“There are two words we need to remove from our media vocabulary right now and that is ‘both sides,’” Hasan told Semafor’s Ben Smith, a former New York Times reporter, in a video posted on Twitter and YouTube. “This fundamental crutch, this reliance on ‘both sides’ as a kind of lazy way of covering our political moment is deeply dangerous.”

“There are a bunch of major issues on which there are not both sides,” Hasan continued. “There are not both sides on climate change. There are not both sides on white supremacy. There are not both sides to democracy. Ben, there are not both sides on the Holocaust.”

Hasan referenced comments by an administrator at the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas, in October 2021 that said students should learn opposing views about the Holocaust.

“That’s not what the bill says,” Republican State Sen. Bryan Hughes of Texas, who wrote the legislation that required providing contradictory views on controversial issues, told NBC at the time.

“On the big issues of our time, on whether people should be able to vote, on whether they should be able to get to a ballot box, on whether one party should be able to overturn elections, no there are not both sides,” Hasan said.

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The Eulogy of Queen Elizabeth II that You Won’t See On Your TV

Turn on a TV, open a web browser, or scroll social media and you will not be able to avoid headlines and hashtags about Queen Elizabeth II passing away. After news broke that she was under “medical supervision,” media crews have stationed themselves out front of Buckingham Palace and its a veritable red carpet event as royals from all over Europe arrive to pay their respects and offer support.

On Thursday, newly elected British PM Liz Truss said the “whole country” was “deeply concerned” over the news of The Queen’s deteriorating health.

“My thoughts – and the thoughts of people across our United Kingdom – are with Her Majesty The Queen and her family at this time,” Truss stated.

Hours later, and surrounded by her royal family, Queen Elizabeth II took her last breath. Now, all the constant reporting has turned to memorializing her.

But is the queen really someone to be hailed as this expounder of all that is good? Should her face be plastered on screens worldwide and a 24/7 memorial be rolled out in her honor? Maybe so, but not for the reasons corporate media will tell you.

On top of mothering a child predator and helping to cover up his crimes, Queen Elizabeth — during her time as a monarch — fleeced the taxpayers of England for hundreds of millions just to pay for her castle. 

During this time, she hid her finances offshore — despite the fact that the Royal Family is tax exempt — and made countless billions off the backs of her subjects.

She also oversaw the horrific colonization of multiple territories in Africa and Asia in which people were savagely tortured, their land stolen, and their people slaughtered.

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“The Regime of Censorship Being Imposed on the Internet is Dangerously Intensifying in Ways I Believe Are Not Adequately Understood”

U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald has condemned the Government, media and Big Tech for coordinating to censor dissent. Writing on Twitter on Tuesday, the Intercept cofounder blasted those who have taken advantage of a series of ‘crises’ as a pretext to conspire to suppress their ideological opponents. The searing Twitter thread is reproduced in full below.

The regime of censorship being imposed on the internet – by a consortium of Washington D.C. Democrats, billionaire-funded ‘disinformation experts’, the U.S. Security State, and liberal employees of media corporations – is dangerously intensifying in ways I believe are not adequately understood.

A series of “crises” have been cynically and aggressively exploited to inexorably restrict the range of permitted views and expand pretexts for online silencing and deplatforming. Trump’s election, Russiagate, January 6th, Covid and war in Ukraine all fostered new methods of repression.

During the failed attempt in January to force Spotify to remove Joe Rogan, the country’s most popular podcaster – remember that? – I wrote that the current religion of Western liberals in politics and media is censorship: their prime weapon of activism.

But that Rogan failure only strengthened their repressive campaigns. Dems routinely abuse their majoritarian power in D.C. to explicitly coerce Big Tech silencing of their opponents and dissent. This is Government censorship disguised as corporate autonomy.

There’s now an entire new industry, aligned with Dems, to pressure Big Tech to censor. Think tanks and self-proclaimed ‘disinformation experts’ funded by Omidyar, Soros and the U.S./U.K. Security State use benign-sounding names to glorify ideological censorship as neutral expertise.

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Obama Foundation executives earn lavish salaries as fundraising plummets, and it defaults on agreement with city

The cenotaph-like monument to Barack Obama being built on prime lakefront property that used to be a park in Chicago is running into financial problems.  But the top executives there are feeling no pain, earning salaries far higher than those at other presidential foundations.  Fundraising is down so much that the foundation appears to have defaulted on an agreement with the City of Chicago made as a condition of receiving acres of land in Jackson Park, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, and repurposed as the site of the monument (which is not a presidential library under the control of the National Archives).

A substantial analysis of the salaries and finances of the Obama Foundation done by A.D. Quig of the Chicago Tribune reveals that the ten top executives there earn far more than their counterparts at other presidential foundations, and they top the pay levels at all but one of Chicago’s major cultural institutions.

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Man Behind US Navy’s Largest Corruption Case Hires a U-Haul, Cuts Ankle Tag, and Flees

His unassailable charm was said to have penetrated the U.S. Navy better than the Soviets ever could, as he gained unprecedented access to classified military information through a massive bribery network. Now, Leonard Glenn Francis has pulled off yet another daring feat, successfully escaping house arrest just weeks before he’s set to be sentenced for masterminding the Navy’s largest-ever corruption scandal. 

Widely known as “Fat Leonard” for his 350-pound, 6-foot-three stature, Malaysian businessman Francis cut his GPS monitoring ankle bracelet off on Sunday and fled his San Diego home, where he’s been under house arrest since 2018. 

Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Omar Castillo told reporters on Monday that police arrived at Francis’ home concerned about his health after being notified of a problem with his bracelet, only to find nobody home.

“As of now, multiple leads are being investigated,” Castillo said, adding that Francis’ neighbors had seen U-Haul moving trucks at his house in the days before his escape. None notified police of his brazen and slow-paced escape, though it’s not clear whether they knew who resided at the property.

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The Historic Collapse of Journalism

I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s chief adviser for “strategic communications.” It was written by a reporter named David Samuels.

These two made a striking pair — fitting, I would say. Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer living in Brooklyn when, by the unlikeliest of turns, he found his way into the inner circle of the Obama White House. Samuels, a freelancer who usually covered popular culture celebrities, had long earlier succumbed to that unfortunately clever style commonly affected by those writing about rock stars and others of greater or lesser frivolity.

Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.” A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English. A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings. “Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification of our public discourse.

Rhodes and Ned Price, his deputy, were social-media acrobats. Price, a former C.I.A. analyst and now the State Department’s spokesman, recounted without inhibition how they fed White House correspondents, columnists, and others in positions to influence public opinion as a fois gras farmer feeds his geese.

Here is Price on the day-to-day of the exercise:

“There are sort of these force multipliers. We have our compadres. I will reach out to a couple of people, and, you know, I wouldn’t want to name them…. And I’ll give them some color, and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space and have huge followings, and they’ll be putting out this message on their own.”

Rhodes gave Samuels a more structured analysis of this arrangement:

“All the newspapers used to have foreign bureaus. Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what is happening in Moscow or Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

I wrote at length about the Times piece in Salon, where I was foreign affairs columnist at the time. There was so much to unpack in Samuels’s report I hardly knew where to begin. In Price we had a complete failure to understand the role of properly functioning media and the nature of public space altogether.

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