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.

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading

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.”

Keep reading

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.

Keep reading