Tag: pandemic

Democrat Massachusetts Mayor Arrested on Fraud and Money Laundering Charges – Used $1.6 Million in Covid Loans as Personal Slush Fund to Pay Off Mortgages

A Democrat Massachusetts mayor was arrested and charged on Friday with fraudulently obtaining over $1.5 million in Covid business loans.

The Mayor of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Brian Depena, used the proceeds from Covid small-business loans to fund his campaign, pay his personal taxes and pay off nearly $900,000 in high-interest, hard-money mortgages on his properties, according to the Department of Justice.

According to the charging documents during the pandemic back in 2020 and 2021, Depena applied for a taxpayer-funded Covid-era Economic Injury Disaster Loans (“EIDL”) for his tire business.

The EIDL loans must be used as working capital to provide relief to businesses that suffered economic losses during Covid.

However, Depena used the Covid loans to fund his struggling campaign, pay off two high-interest mortgages, and pay back taxes.

Per the DOJ:

Depena allegedly caused Tenares Tire to apply for and obtain an EIDL in the amount of $150,000 in June 2020 and then used the majority of those funds as working capital for the business. However, according to the charging documents, Depena needed cash by early 2021. It is alleged that his mayoral campaign was struggling to pay bills, he owed the IRS for back taxes and he owed almost $900,000 to two private, hard money lenders who were charging Depena 12% and 8% interest – significantly more than the EIDL rate of 3.75% – on loans that encumbered various properties Depena owned in Lawrence.

In April 2021, Depena allegedly caused a request for an increase of the Tenares Tire EIDL. On July 14, 2021, the SBA approved an increase of the loan by $350,000, bringing the total Tenares Tire EIDL to $500,000. However, the SBA did not release the funds for another month. While waiting, Depena allegedly sent the following texts (originally in Spanish, here translated to English) to his accountant and financial advisor, who had been assisting Depena with the EIDL application and modification.

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Fauci was not a mad scientist, but a mere bureaucrat granted unlimited power

For decades, Fauci was a career government health bureaucrat of unexceptional ability whose primary skill involved accumulated more power than any unelected American of his generation. He then used those skills to smother risk calculations and create consensus that any intelligent and wise adult would have rejected wholeheartedly.

On Monday, Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the first text chain from what we hope are a series of communications recovered from Fauci’s government-issued iPhone, which HHS finally handed over on August 5 in response to Johnson’s request. His phone is said to hold more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails. Quite suspiciously, it only contains three saved contacts, which probably means that it was tampered with. I do hope that government officials can secure the data that was possibly deleted.

The senators released something of a bombshell that discusses January 2021 communications between Fauci, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and future Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. This was just days after former President Biden’s inauguration. The subject is pregnant women and the mRNA injections. In it, Fauci writes that the supposedly “safe and effective” shot “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

One week later, Fauci went in front of cameras and said the vaccines had “no red flags” regarding pregnant women. He later said that there was “no indication whatsoever” of increased adverse events in pregnant women. By September, Walensky and her comrades in the Biden Government Health bureaucracy were strongly recommending vaccination before or during pregnancy.

If Fauci and his goons were level-headed and honest with the public, they would have said something along the lines of “we do not yet know if it’s totally safe, but we think covid is bad, so decide for yourself.”

Instead, they demanded compliance.

In another text in the chain, we get insight into Fauci’s mindset. It becomes clear that he is justifying the risk of miscarriage by declaring “COVID-19 can be a serious disease especially in pregnancy.”

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“It Sounds Like a Wild Conspiracy Theory”: Jeffrey Tucker Reveals the Real Reason for the Lockdowns, School Closures, and Masking

Author and Brownstone Institute founder and president Jeffrey Tucker sat down with computational biologist Dr. Jessica Rose for an hour-long conversation about some of the most shocking revelations from the COVID response.

During that discussion, Tucker shared what he says top FDA and NIH officials told him about the real purpose of the lockdowns and other restrictions.

The purpose, according to Tucker, was “to delay the onset of natural immunity… until after the shots were online.”

Tucker admits it “sounds like a wild conspiracy theory.” But he says multiple sources who were actually there, working inside the agencies and companies, have confirmed it “without a shadow of a doubt.”

The lockdowns that wiped out small businesses. The school closures that sent children’s reading scores back to 1971. The plexiglass, the masking, the stay-at-home orders. None of it was about keeping us safe. “It was exactly the opposite,” as Tucker put it.

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Over 1,000 Canadians seek to testify over alleged COVID vaccine injuries

More than 1,000 Canadians have applied online to testify about serious health problems they say they experienced following COVID-19 vaccination, according to organizers of an upcoming inquiry led by Conservative MP Dean Allison.

The Allison Inquiry is a non-partisan preliminary inquiry intended to give Canadians who report being injured by COVID-19 vaccines an opportunity to share their experiences.

The hearings are scheduled to take place on Parliament Hill from September 8 to 11, with approximately 50 Canadians expected to testify.

Allison, the MP for Niagara West, provided an update on the inquiry during a press conference in Ottawa on Thursday, saying the response from Canadians has been far greater than organizers anticipated.

“More than 1,000 people have now applied online asking for the opportunity to have their voices heard,” Allison said.

Allison said many applicants have spent years struggling with their health, looking for answers and attempting to navigate a medical system they believe has failed to address their concerns.

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Senator Ron Johnson Reveals Fauci Deleted His Contact List from His iPhone Likely to Cover Up Text Messages

Senator Ron Johnson on Wednesday said he believes Dr. Fauci deleted his contact list from his iPhone to cover up his text messages.

On Monday, Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the first batch of text messages from Dr. Fauci’s Covid-era iPhone.

The text messages revealed that Fauci privately knew that the Covid vaccine caused miscarriages in pregnant women.

Fauci covered up the data that revealed an 82% miscarriage rate in women vaccinated during the first trimester.

The Gateway Pundit reported in 2022 that VAERS showed a 4070% increase in miscarriages and stillbirths since the mRNA rollout.

Last month, the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations obtained a copy of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s COVID-era iPhone as it continues its investigation into the federal government’s handling of the pandemic and Fauci’s past lies to Congress.

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Fauci Privately Flagged Miscarriage Risk Before Telling Pregnant Women There Were ‘No Red Flags’

Newly disclosed text messages show Dr. Anthony Fauci privately entertained the possibility that the COVID-19 vaccine could trigger first-trimester miscarriages, months before he told the public there was no risk.

The messages come from a trove that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) released, containing more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails the Senate Homeland Security Committee pulled from Fauci’s government-issued phone. Among the trove is a January 2021 text chain between Fauci, Dr. Vivek Murthy and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who went on to serve as the Biden administration’s surgeon general and CDC director, in which the three officials worked through how the vaccine’s risks might interact with pregnancy.

On Jan. 25, Murthy opened the thread with a question. “For pregnant women considering getting the vaccine, are you aware of any data or theoretical reason why vaccinating early vs late in pregnancy would be preferred? And any sense of when there will be more robust data on vaccine risk in pregnant women?”

Walensky noted that more than 15,000 pregnant women had already enrolled in the CDC’s V-safe vaccine safety monitoring system. Fauci wrote there “are no data or theoretical reason to believe that vaccinating early versus later in pregnancy would be preferred.” He also flagged a caveat that would later look prescient. “Yet, some people (even female health care professionals) feel concerned about injecting a ‘genetic’ vaccine very early in pregnancy,” he wrote.

Nearly two hours passed before Fauci circled back with something he had not mentioned the first time. “I asked around a bit more and another issue came up that you need to be aware of,” he wrote. “Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

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RFK Jr Humiliates CNN’s Dana Bash

When a massive treasure trove of Anthony Fauci’s diary entries and emails were released recently, thanks to Sen. Rand Paul, it caused a tremendous amount of embarrassment for the 85-year-old former public health official.

Fauci came across as a remarkable narcissist, someone obsessed with his own instant and surprising fame. He chronicled each and every media appearance, celebrating each instance a legacy outlet published yet another glowing, reverential profile. He spoke excitedly about his friendships with celebrities like Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand, even stating that he and Baez were made for each other.

More importantly he also said completely different things privately than he was stating publicly:

He acknowledged in his diary that the lab leak was not only possible, but likely.

He admitted that he wanted masks mandated because people were wearing them anyway and the CDC had pushed it.

He knew closures weren’t working, saying that cases were rising and falling irrespective of policy.

He even fretted about potentially contracting Covid-19 at an event that required proof of vaccination.

He then went on to demand more vaccine mandates and passports afterward anyway.

Fauci ultimately appeared to be pretty appalling, to put it mildly.

The only entity that came out looking worse? That same legacy media.

CNN Ignores Its Own Failures, Demands More Ineffective Mandates

CNN’s Jake Tapper is mentioned several times, including having shared multiple dinners with the doctor.

One was in October 2020, just before Fauci demanded that Americans shut down Thanksgiving.

I reached out to Tapper’s PR rep to see if that “friendship” impacted his coverage, and despite his public demonstrations of concern over “transparency,” they declined to comment.

Another person mentioned? CNN’s Dana Bash.

Bash, according to Fauci, had texted him to say that he was “a better man” than Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) after their heated exchange, adding that CNN compatriot Wolf Blitzer believed nobody would have blamed Fauci if he’d said “go f— yourself” in response to Jordan’s questions.

Bash has essentially ignored this, because as a highly concerned source of journalistic integrity or something, it’s important that she maintains never actually taking accountability for anything.

She also had current Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on her show Sunday. She then took that opportunity to misrepresent how poorly she, CNN, and legacy media performed their jobs during the pandemic.

When asking Kennedy if President Trump deserves the blame for the policies that Fauci recommended, Kennedy brought up that Trump almost immediately wanted lockdowns to end.

“President Trump, as you recall, wanted to end lockdowns,” Kennedy said. “I think the thing that did the most damage to our country was the lockdowns, the lockdown that shut down 3.5 million businesses in our country with no due process, no just compensation. All of our churches closed, our schools, and our children are still paying the price for that. And yet we had the worst outcome of any country in the world. We have the highest death rate from Covid of any nation on earth.”

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National Security Experts: Accountability Cannot End with Fauci, China Must Answer for COVID

National security experts are calling for the Chinese Communist Party to face accountability over the coronavirus pandemic following a Senate committee’s vote to hold former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress, arguing scrutiny of Fauci should not end the effort to determine responsibility for COVID-19.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-5 Thursday to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress after he invoked the Fifth Amendment 111 times during testimony before the committee, whose inquiry included COVID-19’s origins, risky life sciences research, and his federal service. Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) argued Fauci’s Fifth Amendment claims were improper because former President Joe Biden had granted him a sweeping pardon covering his government service from 2014 through January 2025. 

Paul said Fauci therefore had little risk of prosecution for truthful answers about conduct covered by the pardon, while Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) pointed to Fauci’s refusal to answer even basic questions, including whether a folder was sitting in front of him, as evidence that his invocation of the Fifth Amendment was not tailored to any specific threat of prosecution. Fauci’s attorney David Schertler called the vote a “crude political stunt” intended to punish Fauci for exercising his constitutional rights. The vote came as the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations obtained a copy of Fauci’s cellphone from the Department of Health and Human Services and Florida subpoenaed Fauci, focusing on his alleged self-dealing during the pandemic.

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What Else Are They Hiding?

This past couples of weeks was a wild ride. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) released many thousands of pages of documentation concerning the strange world of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) while Dr. Anthony Fauci was at the height of his power as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci’s wife headed the ethics department for the entire agency.

His tenure there came to an end in December 2022, following three years in which he was celebrated by mass media as the nation’s leading voice for science and the man with all the answers for dealing with a respiratory pandemic. He was on television daily, sitting for as many as 12 interviews a day.

All this while, he kept careful logs of each day, while working with a large staff to prepare the document as the first draft of an autobiography. He believed that he would go down in history with exactly the reputation the media had cultivated for him. He lobbied for and amassed dozens of awards, some of which paid in the high six figures. He was sought after and doted on by all the elites.

All at once, it has fallen apart.

The simple reason: The agency he once occupied is now run by a man and people he had ferociously denounced in public and private.

The release was an act not of revenge but of simple transparency.

The American people deserve to know the truth about a time in which accurate information was denied to them through censorship and media propaganda.

It’s a rare treat.

We find out, for example, that the billionaire Bill Gates has special security clearances at NIH, where at every visit he was treated like royalty. Gates cleared his book on pandemics with Fauci, who recommended an editor at NIH, none other than Dr. David Morens, who has been charged with document destruction.

The revelations go on and on seemingly without limit. I started reading as soon as the diary was released. I saw that it was 1,100 pages, but that’s full pages in small type. In book form, it would be 2,400 pages. I could not stop reading. Having lived and breathed every day of this, I was fascinated to see Fauci’s own thinking in light of the world outside.

Not only was my weekend gone completely, but also, without notice, the project took up the next day and evening and then again. And again. It was late Thursday afternoon before I finished. My notes on the salient parts, the truly astounding material, alone took up 30 pages along with screenshots. I had lost so much sleep over these days and canceled every appointment. It was all too delicious to resist.

And you know why, correct?

For years we had been stuffed to the gills with the greatness myth. Then it suddenly all unraveled, slowly but furiously and all at once. The author was put in front of a Senate subcommittee and questioned in great detail about the origin of the virus, the contracts, the cover-ups, the angling for fame and fortune, and so much more.

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The Four Way Squeeze

The days might still be long, but this is a dark season in our country’s politics. Everybody’s nervous and many are furious, and yet all that emotion goes nowhere, just eats you up while you watch and wait for signs that help is on the way. What would that help even look like? Maybe a concerted effort to bum-rush a whole lot of bad ideas out of American life and replace them with better ideas that are worth building a life around.

Of the two political parties that used to vie between the interests of property and of labor, there is almost nothing left — nothing coherent, anyway. Mr. Trump & Co. still stand outside a feckless Republican establishment that can only say “no.” That is bad enough, when it comes to vital matters like election reform and sound fiscal policy. But the President is methodically wearing them down with tactical work-arounds such as this week’s use of State Department visa control to prevent foreign visitors coming here just to drop birthright citizens.

Things will get super-serious when the president has to manage the government’s functional bankruptcy, the bond market crack-up under our impossible debt-burden, and all its knock-ons. It’s coming for sure, and will require a stringent reorganization of American finance, probably even of our money itself. That will be a moment when the nation understands what leadership really means, not just endless deception and fakery.

Speaking of which, you have the other party, the Democrats. The Dems, unmoored from the interests of labor (whatever is left of it), are now strictly just the party of bad ideas and crime. The party is also, at this juncture of history, caught in a gruesome four-way squeeze that could easily drag it into extinction. Let’s count them.

First, is the basic basket of ideas that comprise the party’s platform, readily identifiable for some years now as the “Woke” catalog. Virtually all of them are ideas that a majority of the public rejects as insane. A wide-open border. We tried that for four years under the fake president “Joe Biden.” Didn’t work out so well. Added many millions to the free everything dole that actual citizens resentfully have to pay for. Took jobs away from said citizens. Got a lot of (mostly) women murdered and raped. Let in Gawd knows how many foreign terrorists.

“Woke” also includes the DEI products of manufactured race animus and gender confusion, especially as applied in school from K all the way to PhD. Apart from the sheer hatred and idiocy these things generated, they also led to the scrapping of merit and excellence as organizing principles for civilization. Americans increasingly reject all of that.

The second squeeze point is the Democratic Party’s criminal portfolio. The Covid-19 operation was basically theirs. It killed and injured millions, wrecked the integrity of medicine, and brought on the deliberate perversion of our election procedure. It gave us fake President “Biden” and the autopen gang that ran him. Along the way, the party weaponized the law and produced one hoax after another: RussiaGate, Impeachment, J-6, the 2024 Trump trials — treason, sedition, deprivation of rights under color of law, obstruction of justice and much more. These crimes are a huge burden for the party and they are in the process of being adjudicated, and a lot of the party’s heroes will end up in prison.

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