Tag: corruption

The Truth About Non-Disclosure Agreements In Non-Profits

MORE NON-PROFITS START DEMANDING VOLUNTEER NDAS

We were recently asked a question about NDAs for non-profit organizations by someone who had been asked to sign one. In light of that discussion, THE EASTON GAZETTE did some research on NDAs.

Non-disclosure agreements seem to be more prevalent than ever. Most of the time, we hear about non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) as they apply to high powered CEO’s leaving their positions or individuals involved in settlements of lawsuits. But now we are hearing about them in the context of local, small non-profit groups. What is an NDA?

A non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is a binding contract that obligates one or both parties to keep specified information confidential and to refrain from disclosing or misusing it. An NDA protects trade secrets, client lists, financial data, product designs, and other proprietary information. Parties sign NDAs before sharing sensitive material during deals, employment, or negotiations. Are NDAs Legally Enforceable?

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The practice of getting people to sign non-disclosure agreements applies in many different situations. For example, an employee either is hired for or leaves their job, and they may get slapped with signing an NDA by their employer. Some employees may sign an NDA upon retirement. That NDA must specify a particular time period for which that NDA is in effect. It also cannot use retirement benefits as leverage for signing an NDA. In other words, an employee cannot be coerced to sign with a threat of losing or reducing retirement benefits or health care.

are non-disclosure agreements enforceable?

Mostly, yes. However, there are clear stipulations to when NDAs are enforceable and when they are not.

NDAs are enforceable when they identify clearly defined confidential information. In other words, the NDA must specify a reasonable scope of information that is protected. It cannot just be a general statement that makes everything protected.

The parties, disclosing and receiving, involved in the NDA must also be clearly defined and both parties must receive something for signing, employment, access to information, or a business relationship. Neither party may be coerced to sign the agreement.

NDA’s cannot cover illegal activity.

When NDA’s fail it is generally because of an unreasonable duration for the NDA, a vague designation of what is and isn’t covered, an application to an existing employee without giving them anything new for signing, or an attempt to hide fraud, safety violations or illegal activity.

So, for example, if a corporation attempts to get an employee to sign an NDA so that employee will not disclose fraud of any kind, the NDA is invalid.

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Tax-deductible ‘charities’ served as pipelines to Democrat voter registration: report

Leftist nonprofits are using pass-through organizations to boost voter registration for demographics most likely to vote for Democrats, a new report alleges.

The report, titled “The ‘Charities’ influencing elections: 2024 and beyond,” written by the Capital Research Center (CRC), found that multiple left-leaning 501(c)(3)s, which are prohibited from engaging in any political campaign for or against a candidate and whose donations are tax deductible, acted as conduits for 501(c)(4)s, which are permitted to engage in direct partisan politics. 

Those tax-exempt organizations spent $638 million during the 2024 election cycle, according to the report, to register voters most likely to vote for Democrats.

Three 501(c)(3)s – America Votes Education Fund (AVEF), Guarantee Our Votes Project (GOVP) and Democracy Matters Foundation – effectively routed their entire annual expenditure to affiliated 501(c)(4) organizations while conducting almost no independent program activity. 

America Votes Education Fund: AVEF reported on its most recent IRS Form 990s that it gave $20,748,002 in grants to its 501(c)(4) affiliate America Votes while spending just $532 in office expenses and $274 in fundraising expenses in 2024, and paid no employees. 

Further, three 501(c)(3) board members are also the president, chief operating officer, and treasurer of the 501(c)(4). America Votes, whose donations are not tax-deductible, says that its mission is to “create a fairer, more representative democracy by increasing voter participation across the country. Our coalition carries out non-partisan, education-focused programs to engage voters, particularly newly eligible and infrequent voters.”

Guarantee Our Votes Project: GOVP spent just 0.2% of its $13,919,873 expenditures in 2024 on legal and office expenses; the remainder went to grants, including $13.85 million to America Works USA and $30,0000 to the New Hampshire Youth Movement project. The amounts represent a massive increase in spending from the previous year, when GOVP gave out just $166,016 in grants.

America Works USA’s website is just one page, describing its mission as finding “unique and creative ways to promote progressive policy, strengthen our democracy, and build powerful infrastructure in states.”

Democracy Matters Foundation: DMF provided 96% of its 2024 expenditures to grants, according to its 990s, giving $31.38 million to its affiliated 501(c)(4), Democracy Matters, which says it exists to “connect and build a community of pro-democracy donors.”

None of the nonprofits listed above responded to a Just the News inquiry prior to press time.

Scott Walter, president of CRC, who was recently interviewed on “Just the News, No Noise,” detailed two other organizations that follow the same pattern.

“If you want to win elections, what do you need to do? You have to register voters, and then you have to get them to vote,” he said. 

“Well, that’s what this machinery is focused on. And you have groups like the Voter Participation Center and the Voter Registration Project that claim they just are help – you know they’re helping people do their civic duty.

“But they micro-target their efforts to where they will turn out the most Democratic votes, and they claim that this is still charitable. But you know, you look at Voter Participation Center in an election year. They may spend two-thirds of their money that year on for-profit Democratic Party micro-targeting firms. Now, do you think: ‘Does that sound like nonpartisan charity work to you?'”

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DOJ Weaponization Working Group Drops Explosive Report Exposing FBI’s Outrageous Spy Campaign Against Traditional Catholics Under Biden Regime

The Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group released a bombshell report detailing how the Biden-era FBI expanded an investigation of one dangerous criminal suspect into a disturbing intelligence operation targeting Catholic priests, traditional Catholic churches and constitutionally protected religious beliefs.

The 231-page Richmond Domain Perspective Report concludes that personnel responsible for the disgraceful intelligence product have now been removed.

“The FBI personnel involved in the creation of the Richmond Catholic Memo have been terminated from their positions,” the report states.

The Justice Department did not publicly identify the terminated personnel.

The DOJ announced Thursday that investigators reviewed more than 1,800 pages of internal emails, intelligence assessments and investigative records concerning the FBI Richmond Field Office’s infamous January 2023 memorandum.

The report reveals that FBI personnel:

  • Opened investigative “Guardian” assessments on two Catholic priests.
  • Examined the priests’ travel and communications.
  • Pulled airline and credit-card information.
  • Searched one priest’s phone at Boston Logan International Airport.
  • Followed that priest from the airport to a private residence.
  • Conducted surveillance outside another residence associated with him.
  • Proposed cultivating Catholic clergy and church leaders as “tripwires” and sources.
  • Considered elevating the Richmond memo into a national intelligence product for senior FBI leadership.
  • Continued revising the project even after FBI headquarters ordered the original memo removed from bureau systems.

The FBI eventually closed both assessments after finding no national-security threat or evidence linking the priests to violent extremism.

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The Guest List Economy: How Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Real Estate Lock You Out

Who, exactly, manages the U.S. economy? And what happens when the people who run it convert it into their own private club — one that has a guest list that somehow never includes you?

Big Tech giants like Apple decide which apps you’re allowed to see and use. Remember when it shut down Parler? 

One day Parler was up. The next day Parler was gone — just because Apple decided the wrong people were talking too much.  

That’s a very convenient arrangement, don’t you think? 

Big banks and payment processors often play the role of gatekeepers too — deciding which businesses get accounts, which transactions get processed, and, in some cases, who gets access to the financial system at all. Conservatives learned just how much power those institutions wield during the years-long fight over politically motivated “debanking.”

Then there are the pharmacy benefit managers — middlemen who stand between you and the medicine your doctor prescribed. They decide which drugs get covered by insurance, which pharmacies you get to use, and how much you pay.

Do we honestly believe these people have the patients’ best interests at heart?

Of course we don’t.  

Average people lose choices and smaller competitors must follow the rules as written by the powerful and well-connected.

Their latest racket is in housing. 

Giant real estate players are creating preferred networks, where the well-connected get the first look at available homes on the market while regular buyers are left to scour through a public market that no longer always presents everything that’s actually for sale.  

House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Chair Scott Fitzgerald is asking the right questions. He has demanded answers from Compass — the country’s biggest real estate brokerage — and Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) MLS system about the private listings partnership they have popularized together, which only MRED members can see. Because the MLS controls nearly all the listings that are visible in one particular region, this anti-competitive behavior has real consequences.  

But the American people have many allies in their corner. 

Just like Rep. Fitzgerald and the rest of his colleagues on the congressional antitrust subcommittee, the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have also never been afraid to enforce the competition laws on the books to protect

Populist conservatives should always do antitrust this way — enforcing the law, knocking down the barriers anti-free market actors put up, and giving regular people a fair shot at competing. But then getting the hell out of the way.

The goal should be to protect competition, not to remake the economy to fit a more egalitarian, socialistic model — like how the Biden administration prevented low-cost airlines Spirit Airlines and Jet Blue from merging, leading to Spirit’s bankruptcy earlier this year. That didn’t help consumers. That led to less choices and higher fare costs. 

What helps consumers is a government willing to take down the corporate actors who violate the consumer welfare standard and leave Americans with fewer choices, not more. Right now, the most urgent target for that kind of enforcement is the housing industry.

The hallmarks of a free marketplace are competition, choice, and the promise that an outsider can still knock the people on top off their perch by building a better mousetrap. 

America’s economy is supposed to be a marketplace open to everyone, not a managed economy that has its rules set by the members of a members-only club. The more Congress, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson can do to keep it that way, the better off we’ll all be.

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REPORT: Fauci Told Aide to Permanently Delete Emails About Gain-of-Function Research

Newly obtained documents reportedly show that Dr. Anthony Fauci instructed an aide to permanently delete an email concerning controversial gain-of-function research years before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The emails, obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, date back to 2012, when Fauci was defending experiments that made a highly dangerous strain of bird flu transmissible through the air.

Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier conducted the experiments with funding from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Fouchier described the resulting virus as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.”

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Dog-eaten meat, rats and urine: Stomach-churning details of 10K LA street food complaints revealed

A dog eating meat out of a street vendor’s bag before it was served to customers. Cockroaches crawling out of a food truck. Mice scurrying beside open salsa. Raw meat baking unrefrigerated in the heat. People urinating around cooking equipment.

These are just a handful of the stomach-churning allegations listed in a staggering 662-page dossier of 9,746 public health complaints about street food vendors filed across Los Angeles County from 2023 until early 2026.

The disgusting details, obtained by the California Post through a public records request, emerge as LA Mayor Karen Bass ordered the LAPD this week to stop issuing criminal citations to street vendors who flout the rules.

The move will give un-permitted food carts free reign across the city, potentially letting the conditions get even worse.

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Becerra’s Mexican Consulate Network: Is The California Governor Frontrunner Running A Foreign Influence Operation?

Xavier Becerra, California’s AG turned HHS Sec turned likely Gubernatorial candidate, got his start in politics thanks to a foreign coordinated influence network that funnels through Mexico’s consulates, says a recent Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report. The gigantic network was built by Becerra, in part, through his alignment with nonprofit organizations that have coordinated for decades with Mexico’s 50+ US consulates. Mexico’s former Foreign Minister said it best: “We are already giving instructions to our consulates that they begin propagating militant actions — if you will — in their communities.” That is not a metaphor. Mexico’s consulates have run voter registration drives and distributed how-to guides on crossing into the US and evading Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

As “my family,” Becerra aids the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), an organization running multiple operations both north and south of the border. The DOGE project called CHIRLA a “civic pipeline” of immigration services to Democratic voter mobilization. The group has sent activists to obstruct live ICE enforcement operations and has called for dismantling the Department of Homeland Security entirely.

UnidosUS — formerly the National Council of La Raza — is next. Becerra has given keynote speeches at their annual conferences, with travel expenses covered by the group. Unidos was founded under a written agreement with Mexican President Carlos Salinas, which Mexico’s Foreign Ministry described as “an instrument of Mexican foreign policy.” Unidos directors have held meetings with Mexican officials specifically to strategize resistance to Trump administration enforcement.

The Logan Act — the very law now trending nationwide — outlaws U.S. citizens’ engagement with foreign governments to change their positions on disputes with the United States. GAI President Peter Schweizer argues this coordination goes beyond politics. In 2024, Mexican leaders explicitly endorsed MALDEF and Unidos as vehicles for “collective action” toward reclaiming the American Southwest.

On September 11, 2017, Becerra attended a private luncheon with Mexican diplomats during their mission to organize resistance to Trump’s DACA termination. That same day, he filed a lawsuit that ultimately preserved DACA in federal court. Coincidence or coordination? The State Department has begun a national security review of all 53 Mexican consulates. The question now is whether DOJ will follow.

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US Deports Ex-Ecuadorian Minister Tied to Cartel Murder of Presidential Candidate

ICE overrode judge’s decision blocking José Serrano’s removal.

Ex-Ecuadorian minister José Serrano, accused of aiding a cartel murder presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in 2023, has been deported by ICE.

Ecuadorian conservative Presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio was assassinated at a campaign rally in August 2023.

Fernando Villavicencio was reportedly shot in the head three times.

Supporters of the popular conservative, Fernando Villavicencio, managed to capture a suspect after the assassination.

A grenade was also found at the scene.

The criminal gang “Los Lobos,” based in Ecuador, later claimed responsibility for the assassination.

José Serrano’s removal took place even after a US judge blocked Serrano’s removal arguing he may be tortured if returned to the South American nation.

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New Documents Confirm Fauci’s NIAID Provided Cover for CIA Bioterrorism Research — CIA Helped Obtain the Viruses and Controlled What Data Could Be Shared

As The Gateway Pundit has reported for years, Fauci was never merely a public-health doctor.

After the anthrax attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Bush administration remade NIAID into the civilian hub of U.S. biodefense.

Billions poured in. High-containment labs proliferated. Dual-use research on the most dangerous pathogens exploded, work that Fauci later funneled, through EcoHealth Alliance, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The new documents fill in how early that partnership with the intelligence community really was.

According to Sen. Rand Paul:

“JUST RELEASED: The official hearing record of Anthony Fauci’s “testimony” before my Committee—which ultimately led the Committee to hold him in contempt. Beginning on page 96: previously unreleased documents I entered into the permanent congressional record, like this one showing CIA funds were transferred to Fauci’s NIAID.”

An undated interagency agreement obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation confirms that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases worked directly with the CIA on sensitive research involving viruses and biological threats.

The eight-page agreement shows that the CIA’s Biological Technology Center initiated a collaboration with NIAID involving “forensic microbiology” research for the intelligence community.

Fauci served as director of NIAID from 1984 until 2022.

According to the documents, the CIA planned to leverage existing civilian research programs at NIH to support intelligence-related biological research.

Unclassified NIH virus research would be used to “augment and complement” the CIA’s own research and development.

The CIA would even help Fauci’s agency obtain the pathogens needed for the research.

The arrangement also gave the spy agency control over what could be released publicly.

Although the resulting research was reportedly considered sensitive rather than classified, NIAID could not share the data without first receiving permission from the CIA.

In other words, Fauci’s supposedly civilian public-health institute was working alongside America’s premier spy agency on research involving dangerous biological agents, with the CIA controlling access to the findings.

The project reportedly sought to expand the government’s ability to conduct comparative forensic analyses of complete viruses rather than examining only individual genes.

This is not ancient history. It is the origin story of the same apparatus that later funded bat-coronavirus experiments in Wuhan, steered the intelligence community away from the lab-leak hypothesis, and produced the “Proximal Origin” paper that media and public-health officials treated as gospel.

Documents released this year by Sen. Rand Paul and then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard showed Fauci briefing CIA officials, feeding the IC a hand-picked list of NIAID-funded scientists, and denying under oath that he had discussed viral research with intelligence agencies.

The new CIA–NIAID agreement shows the relationship was baked in from the start.

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Brazil’s Lula da Silva Denies Knowing Woman Tied to Son’s Corruption Probe Despite Many Photos with Her

Socialist President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Thursday publicly denied knowing a businesswoman embroiled in his son’s ongoing corruption probes despite extensive photographic evidence suggesting otherwise.

Several of the candidates running against Lula in the October presidential election published old photos showing Lula alongside the businesswoman, debunking the president’s claims.

President Lula’s oldest son, Fábio Luís Lula da Silva, is currently being targeted by three different probes on allegations of corruption and influence peddling at Brazilian federal government institutions, including Brazil’s National Social Security Institute (INSS). The younger Lula is commonly referred to by the nickname Lulinha (“Lil’ Lula”).

Some of the broader INSS corruption allegations against the president’s son involve businesswoman and lobbyist Roberta Luchsinger. An investigation conducted by Brazil’s Federal Police (PF) reportedly found chat messages in Luchsinger’s phone suggesting that she and Lulinha maintained a “permanent acting and coordinated action nucleus” to secure deals with public institutions.

Additionally, some of the messages obtained by the PF in the investigation reportedly state that Luchsinger told another Brazilian businessman that President Lula had “offered” her a government position. According to the alleged contents of the messages, she declined the offer to focus on her “partnership” with Lulinha. Per O Globo, some of the messages also suggest that Luchsinger received large sums of cash to cover flight ticket expenses for Lula’s son. Both Lulinha and Luchsinger have reportedly denied any wrongdoing.

According to CNN Brasil, the messages also suggest a link between Luchsinger and Marco Aurélio “Marcola” Santana Ribeiro, President Lula’s former chief of staff. Santana Ribeiro, who is also a target of the broader corruption probes, has been described as one of Lula’s closest advisers.

On Thursday, President Lula held an interview with TV Globo as part of the ongoing 2026 presidential campaign in which he is seeking reelection for a fourth term. Asked for comment on the allegations that he “offered” a government position to Luchsinger and asked if he ever met her in the Brazilian presidential palace, the incumbent president said that he “does not know” the businesswoman nor had he ever seen her in the past.

“The only thing missing was for her to say that I offered her the Ministry of Defense; the idea that the navy and air force operating here are under her command is utter nonsense,” Lula prefaced.

“I don’t know this woman. I’ve never seen her in my life. I’ve never spoken to her. She’s never been anywhere near me,” he asserted.

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