Tag: corruption

Jeffrey Epstein moved more than $250,000 between accounts for Noam Chomsky, who said the money was for a ‘pure technicality’

Renowned academic and political activist Noam Chomsky sought sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s help with managing financial transactions totaling over a quarter million dollars, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

In late April, the Journal revealed that Chomsky and Epstein met multiple times, even after Epstein pled guilty in 2008 to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution.

New reporting from the outlet highlighted that beyond a group dinner with Woody Allen, Epstein helped Chomsky move large sums of money, which the academic said was for a “technicality” related to distributing funds from a previous marriage.

Chomsky confirmed to the outlet that in March 2018, he received $270,000 from a bank account associated with Epstein, but said it was only to reorganize his own funds, and “did not involve one penny from Epstein.”

The academic said that after his previous wife died 15 years ago, he needed financial guidance for a “pure technicality.”

“Epstein gave me advice on how to transfer funds from one account of mine to another,” Chomsky told Insider in an emailed statement. “The simplest way was to pass it through his office.”

He also denied that he ever took money from Epstein. “Pure technicality,” Chomsky added. “No payments took place.”

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Five more Republican lawmakers surrender FTX money to U.S. Marshals Service

Money keeps pouring into the U.S. Marshals Service from federal political campaigns and committees who received funds from FTX, the now-defunct cryptocurrency company, according to a Raw Story analysis of federal campaign records.

Another five political campaigns sent $15,500 in campaign cash to the government agency best known for hunting down suspected criminals, adding to at least $160,000 collected from 30 federal political candidates and party committees, as Raw Story first reported.

The five new campaigns that gave up the money are fundraising entities for Rep. Marc Molinaro (R-NY), Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR), Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA).

Stefanik is chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, the GOP’s fourth most powerful position in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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IRS Whistleblower Removed From Hunter Biden Criminal Investigation, at Request of DOJ, Attorneys Say

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) removed a whistleblower and his team from a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s taxes and business dealings, at the request of the Department of Justice, according to the whistleblower’s attorneys.

“Today the [IRS] Criminal Supervisory Special Agent we represent was informed that he and his entire investigative team are being removed from the ongoing and sensitive investigation of the high-profile, controversial subject about which our client sought to make whistleblower disclosures to Congress,” the whistleblower’s lawyers said in a May 15 letter (pdf) addressed to multiple congressional lawmakers, first obtained by Just the News.

“He was informed the change was at the request of the Department of Justice.”

Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, has been under federal investigation for alleged tax fraud, lobbying crimes, and money laundering.

He confirmed back in December 2020 that his business deals were being investigated. Few details have been revealed about the probe since then.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the Department of Justice for comment.

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BIDEN IS SELLING WEAPONS TO THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD’S AUTOCRACIES

SINCE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN came into office in 2021, he hasdescribed a “battle between democracies and autocracies” in which the U.S. and other democracies strive to create a peaceful world. The reality, however, is that the Biden administration has helped increase the military power of a large number of authoritarian countries. According to an Intercept review of recently released government data, the U.S. sold weapons to at least 57 percent of the world’s autocratic countries in 2022.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been the world’s biggest weapons dealer, accounting for about 40 percent of all arms exports in a given year. In general, these exports are funded through grants or sales. There are two pathways for the latter category: foreign military sales and direct commercial sales.

The U.S. government acts as an intermediary for FMS acquisitions: It buys the materiel from a company first and then delivers the goods to the foreign recipient. DCS acquisitions are more straightforward: They’re the result of an agreement between a U.S. company and a foreign government. Both categories of sales require the government’s approval.

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‘NYT’ slights Palestinian civilian deaths and Netanyahu’s political motivation for attacks

We are accustomed to The New York Times parroting the official Israeli view of Palestinian resistance, and once again this week the Times came through, all but leaving out the Palestinian civilians killed by Israel and dismissing an important factor in Israel’s missile strikes on apartment buildings in Gaza — the pressure on Netanyahu from the fascistic members of his own coalition.

Even liberal Zionists in the United States were alarmed by the political motivation for murdering innocent civilians. But the Times made excuses for Netanyahu.

Yesterday the Times put the death of an Israeli in the third paragraph of its story– the first Israeli casualty during a week of violence. But in a frank demonstration that Palestinian lives don’t matter to the newspaper of record, the Times left civilian deaths in Gaza till a few paragraphs from the end of the story. (“At least 29 Palestinians have been killed since the hostilities began on Tuesday, six of them children…”)

The Times justified the Israeli attacks, calling them “airstrikes against what the military described as 150 targets linked to the militant group [Islamic Jihad] in Gaza.”

One Times headline only mentioned the three Islamic Jihad leaders killed, not the 10 civilians. Palestinians are being dehumanized, Dahlia Hatuqa pointed out.

Here’s a good example of how you dehumanize Palestinians. Israel purposefully struck a residential area in one of the most densely populated places on earth. It is impoverished and besieged. 12 people are killed, including women and children. And the headline is about “militants”

The PBS News Hour was almost as deferential. Geoff Bennett left the large number of Palestinian dead to the last line of his report, and didn’t say that almost all have been civilians. Nope, it’s legitimate targets: “Israeli airstrikes hit Islamic Jihad targets. Palestinian officials said at least 21 people in Gaza have been killed.”

This politeness about state terrorism reflects the enormous pressure inside Israel not to talk about the civilian deaths. When an Israeli channel highlighted the killings of ten women and children, it was ravaged by critics, including government ministers.

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FBI Contractor Created Fake Online IDs to Join Chatrooms Run by Groups Organizing Against Vaccine Mandates

An FBI surveillance contractor infiltrated the chatrooms of two airline industry groups opposed to vaccine mandates to collect intelligence on the groups’ organizing activities, investigative journalist Lee Fang reported.

The contractor, Flashpoint, which in the past infiltrated Islamic terror groups, now focuses on “anti-vaccine” groups and other domestic political organizations, according to Fang.

In a webinar presentation for clients last year, which Fang analyzed on his Substack, Flashpoint analyst Vlad Cuiujuclu demonstrated his company’s methods for identifying and entering encrypted Telegram chat groups.

He explained how the company attempted to join chatrooms of transportation workers resisting the COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Fang described the presentation:

“‘In this case, we’re searching for a closed channel of U.S. Freedom Flyers,’ said Cuiujuclu. ‘It’s basically a group that opposed vaccination and masks.’

“As he clicked through a database, Cuiujuclu showed a chat group on Telegram sponsored by Airline Professionals For Justice, another group formed by airline industry workers opposed to the mandate. The forum, he added, provided useful insights, including Zoom links for meetings of the grassroots organization.

“‘Private chats,’ said Cuiujuclu, ‘require for you to have an invite link,’ which he noted can often either be found by scrolling through public forums or by ‘engag[ing] the admin of that channel.’”

Flashpoint also offers clients artificial intelligence and internet scraping tools.

According to Fang, the firm is a leader in the “threat intelligence industry,” a growing number of security and surveillance firms that create fake online identities to infiltrate Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums and dark web message boards to gather information for clients, including corporations and the FBI, to monitor potential threats.

Joshua Yoder, president of US Freedom Flyers, said he is aware that Flashpoint infiltrated private chat groups associated with his organization.

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DOJ Does Not Deny Existence of Record Alleging Criminal Scheme Involving Joe Biden

The Justice Department did not deny the existence of a record alleging a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden, the House Oversight Committee confirmed to Breitbart News Wednesday.

On May 3, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) subpoenaed the FBI for records alleging the criminal scheme. The document, an FBI-generated FD-1023 form, allegedly details an arrangement involving an exchange of money for policy decisions between now-President Biden and a foreign national. Comer issued the subpoena following legally protected disclosures by a whistleblower to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) office.

Wednesday was the deadline for the DOJ to submit the document allegedly in the agency’s possession. But instead of handing over the alleged information, Christopher Dunham, the DOJ’s acting assistant director in the office of congressional affairs, wrote to Comer that such information is “sensitive law enforcement” material and refused to readily provide it, a letter obtained by Breitbart News shows.

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CIA ‘May Have Assisted in Obtaining Signatories’ for Letter Discrediting Hunter Biden Laptop: House GOP Report

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency may have helped get intelligence community members to sign the notorious letter falsely labeling the Hunter Biden laptop story Russian disinformation.

House Republicans investigating possible weaponization of federal law enforcement against political opponents of Democrats or their policies reportedly found a link between the agency and the letter.

Politico published the letter where 51 IC members painted reports of wrongdoing by the president’s son as Russian disinformation a few weeks before the 2020 general election.

Fox News further reported:

The Central Intelligence Agency “may have assisted in obtaining signatories” for the letter signed by 51 former national security officials to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the House Judiciary and House Intelligence committees found.

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Surgeon General Vivek Murthy Refuses To Acknowledge the Government’s Misrepresentation of Mask Research

In a recent interview with The New York Times, former White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci conceded that face masks had, at best, a modest overall impact on coronavirus transmission during the pandemic. “From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins—maybe 10 percent,” he said. “But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it’s not at the margin. It really does work.”

This week CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Surgeon General Vivek Murthy about Fauci’s gloss, which she said might be perceived as “an extremely significant statement,” because “we were told it didn’t matter what kind of mask [we wore].” She also noted that children were required to wear masks in schools and day care centers, adding that “none of them wore them the right way.” The contrast between that frequently mandatory advice and what Fauci is saying now, Burnett suggested, is “upsetting to a lot of people.”

Murthy’s response illustrates the persistent difficulty that public health officials have in speaking honestly about this subject. He conceded that shifting government health advice “can be disconcerting” but said “sometimes guidance does evolve over time as you learn more.” He also allowed that the pandemic “has been incredibly hard for a lot of people, especially kids and parents.” And he mentioned “greater loneliness and isolation” as one consequence of the pandemic, saying the Biden administration is working on “a national strategy to address loneliness.”

The one thing Murthy did not address was the substance of Burnett’s question. Fauci’s current summary of the evidence, she noted, contradicts what public health officials told us during the pandemic. “Do you understand,” Burnett asked, why people might view that contradiction as “extremely significant” and “upsetting”? Murthy evidently does not understand that, even though it goes to the heart of the government’s credibility when it purports to tell us what science says about the effectiveness of disease control measures.

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Excessive force, cover-ups: LAPD whistleblower expands ‘SWAT Mafia’ allegations

Anthony Soderberg was wounded, no longer armed and positioned precariously on a steep embankment when Los Angeles Police Lt. Ruben Lopez radioed to the surrounding SWAT team that the mentally ill man they’d just flushed from a nearby home remained a threat and must not be allowed to leave.

SWAT Sgt. Tim Colomey, a crisis negotiator standing next to Lopez in the command center, was stunned — interpreting the remark, as he knew other officers would, as a kill order.

“What the f— did you just say?” Colomey asked Lopez, just before the barrage of gunfire erupted.

“It was like pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop,” Colomey recalled. Officers outside “just started blasting away.”

In a frank and far-ranging legal deposition in March, the former SWAT sergeant offered extensive new details in support of allegations he first made in 2020 that the LAPD’s most elite tactical unit — a model for similar units across the country — is deeply corrupt and controlled by a violent inner circle known as the “SWAT Mafia.”

The 27-year LAPD veteran, who speaks quickly in a thick Boston accent, provided the deposition under oath as part of a lawsuit against the department and the city, in which he alleges he was transferred out of SWAT as retaliation for whistleblowing about the violence. He is seeking unspecified damages.

The city has denied Colomey’s claims in court; Lopez declined to comment on the allegations.

It is the SWAT team’s job to confront the most dangerous situations, and its members are specifically trained to end threats to the community. They are equipped and armed accordingly — and, department officials have said, rarely use force.

The Los Angeles Police Department as a whole has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, including over its multibillion-dollar budget and its use of force. Colomey’s allegations and other recent scandals involving SWAT members have intensified the spotlight on the team.

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