Tag: corruption

Democrats Campaigning to Keep Green Party off the Ballot in Key Swing States

The 2020 presidential election is already underway — or, at least, it should be. Because of an ongoing legal battle, none of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties will be sending out mail-in ballots today like they were originally scheduled to. Democrats are attempting to remove Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins from the ballot because of an alleged procedural mistake his running mate Angela Walker made when informing election authorities about a change in her South Carolina address. A similar battle is raging between the two parties in Wisconsin, another key battleground state.

That such a minor procedural error could, in effect, disbar an entire political party from running might be news to many Americans. It is also a charge the Green Party strenuously denies. “I filed my address change properly to the Wisconsin Elections Commission as they instructed me to when our campaign informed them of my address change,” Walker said in a press release this morning,

The Democrat chairing the hearing concerning Democratic objections to my filing prevented that documentation from being presented. They had that information in hand. The Democratic commissioners could have resolved the problem last month at the hearing. Instead, they are playing politics with Wisconsin voters. They could end this now by withdrawing their phony objections. The Democratic commissioners are as guilty as the Republican justices in this hold-up of absentee ballots.”

“The court should have made a decision by now. We want a decision today to put us on the ballot. We want the absentee ballot process to proceed without further delay,” Hawkins added.

Why the Democrats might benefit from the removal of the Greens is clear. With many predicting a close election, third party votes could prove crucial in preventing one of the two major parties from getting over the line. One Emerson poll found that 51 percent of Bernie Sanders primary voters were at least considering opting for a third party come November. Hawkins and Walker have been pitching hard to disenchanted leftists, reminding voters that they embrace a Green New Deal, while Biden has rejected it.

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Heiress to Predatory Mortgage Empire to Spend $200 Million for Dems

The heiress to the subprime mortgage empire that preyed on minorities on its way to earning billions of dollars is now spending $200 million to boost liberal groups in battleground states, according to the New York Times.

Susan Sandler, the daughter of billionaire banking giants Herb and Marion Sandler, announced Monday that she is investing $200 million in “racial justice groups” as part of an effort to build a liberal infrastructure in states “undergoing rapid demographic change” such as Texas, Florida, and Georgia. The move from Sandler, a longtime donor to Democratic candidates and groups, is the start of a transition away from the short-term world of supporting campaigns to a long-term effort at building power, according to the Times.

The source of Sandler’s cash injection is her parents’ subprime mortgage company, Golden West Financial Corp., which was sold to Wachovia Bank in 2006 for a reported $25 billion. The couple built its fortune by offering millions of adjustable-rate mortgage loans to individuals, many of whom couldn’t afford them and eventually defaulted on their homes.

While the Sandlers came away with billions of dollars, many blame the loans they offered for causing the burst of the U.S. housing bubble and resulting financial crisis of 2007. The defaulted loans cost Wachovia billions of dollars, forcing it to merge with Wells Fargo, which eventually agreed to pay a $50 million settlement to borrowers who were misled by the Sandlers.

The Times, which covered the Sandlers’ predatory loan practices both in 2008 after the housing bust and last year in Herb Sandler’s obituary, made no mention of the source of Susan Sandler’s wealth. The 2008 Times article referred to the loans created by the Sandlers as the “Typhoid Mary” of the financial crisis.

The Times did not respond to a request for comment.

Though Sandler’s money is characterized in the Times as an investment in “racial justice groups,” the money will largely flow to political groups working to elect Democrats across the country. The listed recipients of the $200 million include the Texas Organizing Project, New Virginia Majority, New Florida Majority, and New Georgia Project.

Sandler’s political spending continues the tradition set by her parents, who used the billions of dollars they earned through offering risky loans to vulnerable populations to fund liberal giants such as Human Rights Watch and the Center for American Progress.

Documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon in 2016 revealed that the Sandler Foundation directed at least $24.4 million to the Center for American Progress alone. Wikileaks emails released in 2016 showed that the liberal nonprofit worked to push back against criticism of the Sandlers’ loan business and its role in causing the financial collapse.

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Half of All False Convictions in the U.S. Involved Police or Prosecutor Misconduct, Finds New Report

When innocent people are falsely convicted of crimes and later freed, in more than half of the cases, misconduct by police and prosecutors played a contributing role.

That’s the primary theme of a new report, “Government Misconduct and Convicting the Innocent,” released today by the National Registry of Exonerations, which has been tracking all known exonerations in the United States for the past 30 years. Every year they release a report documenting trends in exonerations, how often DNA evidence plays a role in determining an innocent person is behind bars, problems with eyewitness testimony, and of course, misconduct by officials.

This new report drills into all of the exonerations they’ve archived up until February 2019. That’s 2,400 cases. These are people who have been convicted of crimes, sentenced, then later cleared based on new evidence showing their innocence.

In 54 percent of these cases, misconduct by officials contributed to a false conviction. The more severe the crime, the more likely misconduct played a role when an innocent person was convicted.

Police and prosecutors, in general, engaged in misconduct at about equal rates, 35 percent for cops, 30 percent for prosecutors at the state level. In drug cases, though, cops were four times more likely to have engaged in misconduct than prosecutors. When it came to federal cases, prosecutors engaged in misconduct at rates more than twice as often as police. In white-collar cases, federal prosecutors engaged in misconduct seven times as much as police.

The most common type of misconduct involved concealing exculpatory evidence, which is evidence that suggests the defendant is not guilty. The National Registry of Exonerations found that evidence was deliberately concealed in 44 percent of the cases that ultimately resulted in exonerations. The 218-page report documents the many ways that police and prosecutors break the rules in order to get convictions, from fabricating evidence and manipulative conduct during interrogations to fraudulent forensics and flat-out lying in court.

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Chief of Police Arrested on Shocking Charges of ‘Continuous Sexual Abuse of a Child’

Weekly or more, TFTP reports on police officers who get arrested by fellow cops on charges of everything from trafficking in child pornography to child rape to running child sex trafficking rings. Some of these officers are low-level cops like Avo Marzwanian, 34, of LaPlace, Louisiana who was charged earlier this month with 10 counts of distribution and 20 counts of possession of child pornography involving juveniles under the age of 13 along with 15 counts of sex abuse against animals.

Other child predators fill the top position in their department like Anthony “Tony” Yocham, who is the police chief in Hamilton, Texas, a town about 100 miles southwest of Fort Worth.

“Detectives with the Somervell County Sheriff’s Office asked the Texas Rangers to investigate the allegations,” said Texas DPS Lt. Lonny Haschel to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Yocham was arrested over the weekend on charges of continuous sexual abuse of a child. According to the Texas Rangers, they took Yocham into custody Saturday after their investigation found enough probable cause to charge him with a crime.

Yocham, who lost the Republican nomination for Somervell County Sheriff in April, was taken to the Johnson County Jail in Cleburne, Texas where he quickly posted the massive $500,000 bond and walked out.

The department has yet to release a statement regarding their police chief’s arrest. Nor have they said whether or not Yocham has been placed on leave. Our efforts to contact the chief or anyone else in the department have fallen on deaf ears.

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A bug in Joe Biden’s campaign app gave anyone access to millions of voter files

A privacy bug in Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s  official campaign app allowed anyone to look up sensitive voter information on millions of Americans, a security researcher has found.

The campaign app, Vote Joe, allows Biden supporters to encourage friends and family members to vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election by uploading their phone’s contact lists to see if their friends and family members are registered to vote. The app uploads and matches the user’s contacts with voter data supplied from TargetSmart, a political marketing firm that claims to have files on more than 191 million Americans.

When a match is found, the app displays the voter’s name, age and birthday, and which recent election they voted in. This, the app says, helps users “find people you know and encourage them to get involved.”

While much of this data can be already public, the bug made it easy for anyone to access any voter’s information.

The App Analyst, a mobile expert who detailed his findings on his eponymous blog, found that he could trick the app into pulling in anyone’s information by creating a contact on his phone with the voter’s name.

Worse, he told TechCrunch, the app pulls in a lot more data than it actually displays. By intercepting the data that flows in and out of the device, he saw far more detailed and private information, including the voter’s home address, date of birth, gender, ethnicity and political party affiliation, such as Republican or Democrat.

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