Tag: corruption

Unusual ‘fellowship’ paid high-profile, repeat Democratic candidates between runs

Several repeat Democratic candidates in high-profile races who lost their 2018 bids for Congress got direct financial help from a nonprofit organization in the form of an unusual “fellowship” during the interim period before they launched 2020 campaigns.

New Politics is a 527 advocacy group that seeks to “revitalize American democracy by recruiting, developing, and electing servant leaders” — mostly veterans, but also those who were part of national organizations or worked in national security and intelligence — ”who put community and country over self.” It has an affiliated 501(c)3 charitable nonprofit group called the New Politics Leadership Academy, which hosts a training program for prospective candidates and a fellowship program.

Six unsuccessful Democratic 2018 congressional candidates were named fellows in the inaugural fellowship class in January 2019, and four of them later launched campaigns in major races again this year: Amy McGrath, Gina Ortiz Jones, Dan Feehan, and Roger Dean Huffstetler.

A press release announcing the program gave vague descriptions of projects, such as, “examine the nature of today’s political engagement with rural voters” or to “conduct research on how to further close the rural-urban political gap.”

Gabriel Ramos, communications director for both New Politics and the New Politics Leadership Academy, told the Washington Examiner that the opportunity to become a fellow was extended to both Republican and Democratic former candidates.

“The expectation of these fellows was that they would work to advance and inform NPLA’s mission of ‘revitalizing our democracy’ through their advocacy, research, and engagement with our community,” Ramos said in a statement. “The fellows worked on several initiatives related to NPLA’s leadership development and educational mission — including projects that provided NPLA with quantitative research about the rural-urban divide and insight into how issues that are typically understood as domestic or state-level challenges, may ultimately affect national security.”

Previous comments from the group’s founder and director, Emily Cherniack, seemed to suggest that the fellowship endeavor is part of a creative way to give perpetual candidates a financial cushion in the brief period between runs for office in back-to-back election cycles.

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State sanctioned secrecy: NSA’s criminality shield

Enacted at the height of the Cold War, the NSA Act gives the agency radically sweeping powers to withhold any information from public disclosure. Specifically, Section 6 of the Act states “…nothing in this Act or any other law…shall be construed to require the disclosure of the organization or any function of the National Security Agency, or any information with respect to the activities thereof, or of the names, titles, salaries, or number of the persons employed by such agency.”

NSA has used that blanket authority to try to keep secret details about its lethal 9/11 intelligence failure. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit I brought on behalf of the Cato Institute against the Defense Department (NSA’s parent organization) in January 2017 has, after over three-and-a-half years in federal court, partially punctured NSA’s veil of secrecy over the cancelled TRAILBLAZER and THINTHREAD digital network exploitation (DNE) programs.

In brief, during the five-year period leading up to the 9/11 attacks, a bureaucratic war raged inside of NSA over the best way to handle the exploding volume of digital communications the agency was trying to keep up with. On one side was a group of veteran NSA cryptographers, mathematicians and computer scientists who developed a cheap, extremely effective, and Constitutionally compliant in-house DNE system codenamed THINTHREAD. On the other side was then-NSA Director Michael Hayden, who favored an unproven, external, contractor developed DNE system called TRAILBLAZER. When then-GOP House Intelligence Committee staffer Diane Roark got the THINTHREAD team development money and language in the FY 2002 Intelligence Authorization bill directing wider deployment of the cheaper, off-the-shelf THINTHREAD system, Hayden refused to deploy it as directed — even though THINTHREAD, still in prototype development, was already producing intelligence NSA couldn’t get from any of its other existing systems.

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House Democrats’ stimulus bill includes stimulus checks for illegal immigrants, protections from deportations

A stimulus package proposed by Democrats in the House of Representatives includes a number of items that will benefit illegal immigrants — including an expansion of stimulus checks and protections from deportations for illegal immigrants in certain “essential” jobs.

The $2.2 trillion bill includes language that allows some illegal immigrants — who are “engaged in essential critical infrastructure labor or services in the United States” —  to be placed into “a period of deferred action” and authorized to work if they meet certain conditions.

It also grants protections to those employers who hire those undocumented immigrants, ordering that “the hiring, employment or continued employment” of the defined group is not in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act. That lasts until 90 days after the public health emergency is ended.

A Democratic description of that part of the bill says that “such workers are deemed to be in a period of deferred action and to be authorized for employment, and employers are shielded from certain immigration-related violations for employing such workers.”

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Moderator For 2nd Trump-Biden Debate Worked As Intern For Biden, Staff Assistant For Ted Kennedy

The second presidential debate, scheduled for October 15, will be moderated by Steve Scully, the political editor at C-SPAN and host of Washington Journal, who once worked as an intern for Senator Joe Biden in college, later working as a staff assistant in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s communication office.

“While attending college, he served as an intern in the office of Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden, and later a staff assistant in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s media affairs office,” Utah Valley University noted.

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Biden’s Texas Political Director, Other Democrats Accused In Illegal Ballot Harvesting Scheme

According to a lawsuit filed with the Texas Supreme Court Monday, Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden’s political director in Texas has been accused of ballot harvesting in Harris County. Harris County is Texas’ most populous county; Houston is its and the state’s largest city.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed by conservative activist Dr. Steven Hotze and several others, two investigators accuse Dallas Jones and several prominent Democrat officeholders of organizing a ballot harvesting scheme. Jones was named Joe Biden’s political director in Texas in late August with stories appearing in media in September.

The investigators have filed sworn affidavits attesting to evidence, including video, of the ballot harvesting scheme. The affidavits were filed in conjunction with the lawsuit which Dr. Hotze and several Republican officeholders filed contesting Gov. Greg Abbott’s extension of early voting in the state.

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It Sure Looks Like Daniel Cameron Lied About Breonna Taylor’s Killing

It’s getting harder to deny the likelihood that Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron lied, and lied multiple times, when he explained why a grand jury decided not to charge any police officer with a crime for killing Breonna Taylor. Cameron’s office presented evidence to the jury, but the only criminal charges he announced last week were against Brett Hankison, the Louisville officer who fired blindly into Taylor’s apartment on March 13 and accidentally sprayed ammo into a neighboring unit. The “wanton endangerment” charge he’s facing means that the only officer who will suffer legal consequences for the events surrounding Taylor’s death, at least for now, is the only one who didn’t have a direct hand in killing her. The other officers involved, Jonathan Mattingly and Myles Cosgrove, shot Taylor six times out of more than 30 rounds fired between them.

When Cameron announced this decision to the public, he characterized it as a just resolution to a universally accepted set of facts. “The warrant [that the police used to enter the apartment] was not served as a ‘no-knock’ warrant,” he claimed, rebuking witness accounts that officers had failed to announce their presence before bursting into Taylor’s home, causing her boyfriend Kenneth Walker to think they were being burglarized and shoot one of them in the leg. Walker’s bullet was the police’s justification for opening fire, which killed Taylor, who was unarmed. But failing to announce themselves as police would undermine that defense: Under Kentucky’s “castle doctrine,” law-enforcement officers are the only home invaders that residents aren’t allowed to use deadly force against, but only if they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement.

This wasn’t the only dubious claim that Cameron expected the public to take at face value. He also said that the grand jury agreed that Taylor’s death was justified. “While there are six possible homicide charges under Kentucky law,” he explained, “these charges are not applicable to the facts before us because our investigation showed — and the grand jury agreed — that Mattingly and Cosgrove were justified in the return of deadly fire after having been fired upon.” But the grand jury may not have actually agreed.

On Monday, one of the jurors took the extraordinary step of filing a court motion to make transcripts of the grand jury deliberations public and allow its members to speak publicly about how they unfolded, according to the New York Times. Grand jury deliberations are subject to strict secrecy, and the evidence they consider usually only becomes public in court if there’s prosecution. The unnamed juror claimed that Cameron had misrepresented the jury’s case to the public, and that the jurors were never given the option to indict officers Mattingly and Cosgrove. If true, this would appear to undermine Cameron’s claim that the jury was unanimous that Taylor’s death was legally justified.

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