No one is supposed to be above the law. But during Donald Trump’s presidency, we were more likely to witness a White, wealthy, and well-connected felon pardoned than perp-walked. This was, perhaps, a piece of Trump’s kinship if not admiration for these elite grifters.
A Federal Judge Finds That Bill Barr Was a Fixer and Corrupter of Justice
What remains of Bill Barr’s sullied reputation was blown up when federal district Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the government must turn over the memorandum, which the public has yet to fully see and that the Justice Department relied upon in declining to prosecute the 45th president.
Not only was Barr being personally “disingenuous” by announcing his decision before the Mueller report was released and pretending he used the report to reach a conclusion instead of simply announcing the one he’d come to before the special counsel’s work had even finished his work, she wrote, “but DOJ has been disingenuous to this Court.”
“The fact that (Trump) would not be prosecuted was a given,” the judge wrote. In reality, it was a given from the moment Barr was appointed by Trump, as the past inevitably became prelude given his first stint as attorney general under George H.W. Bush. Back then, DOJ resisted efforts to get to the bottom of U.S. government-backed financing of Iraq in the run-up to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.
Mueller Report Has a Hidden Message for Barr
Pressed by House Democrats to appoint an independent counsel, Barr refused, while insisting it was “not a crime,” “simply not criminal in any way,” “nothing illegal.” What he meant was that oversight was for Democratic presidents only.
In 2019, Barr stonewalled then Sen. Kamala Harris when she asked him whether Donald Trump or anyone at the White House had inquired or urged that he open an investigation into anyone.
Think of Barr as an updated version of Roy Cohn, an earlier Trump lawyer. Both men attended Horace Mann, the swank private school in the Riverdale section of New York City, and Columbia University. As with Cohn, things are not ending well for Barr.
For the record, Judge Jackson’s recent opinion was not written on a blank slate. Judge Reggie Walton, a George W. Bush appointee, had already blasted Barr’s allergy to the truth. In a March 2020 decision in a related case, the judge “seriously” questioned Barr’s integrity and credibility, and deployed words like “distorted” and “misleading” to make his point.
He also observed that it appeared that Barr had “made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.”
DOJ is not a public relations shop. Likewise, the department’s client is the U.S., not the occupant of the Oval Office. The imperial presidency is supposed to have limits.
Barr’s reputation also stands to be tarnished by his efforts to put his thumb on the scale in connection with the sentencing of a since-pardoned Roger Stone and the Mike Flynn debacle. Like Stone, Flynn too received a Trump pardon. But along the way, Barr’s handling of Flynn’s case raised eyebrows from the bench.
Specifically, Judge Emmet Sullivan hammered Barr while dismissing, at the DOJ’s request, its own case against Flynn after he had pleaded guilty. Sullivan observed, “In view of the government’s previous argument in this case that Mr. Flynn’s false statements were ‘absolutely material’ because his false statements ‘went to the heart’ of the FBI’s investigation, the government’s about-face, without explanation, raises concerns about the regularity of its decision-making process.”
“Raises concerns”? Talk about understatement.
By the end of Trump’s term, Flynn would call for the imposition of martial law. Meanwhile, Flynn’s brother, Charles Flynn, another general, was on duty during the insurrection. To top it all off, Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, would emerge as a grim punchline in attempting to “release the Kraken” to try and push through Trump’s Big Lie.
As for the Flynn pardon, it happened on Barr’s watch, on November 25, 2020, more than two weeks before Barr quit. And here too, Barr’s past is relevant.
After Bush 41 lost to Bill Clinton, Barr successfully pushed for pardons for Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary, and others in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal. “I favored the broadest pardon authority,” Barr explained. There were some people just arguing just for Weinberger. I said, ‘No–in for a penny, in for a pound.’”
To his credit, Barr resisted Trump’s entreaties to find fraud with the election where none existed and, when he finally quit, the outgoing AG took a swipe at Trump and his efforts to undo the election results, and tried to suggest there was still some regularity to DOJ’s decision-making process by declaring that “it is incumbent on all levels of government, and all agencies acting within their purview, to do all we can to assure the integrity of elections and promote public confidence in their outcome.”
Much too little, too late. Meanwhile, AG Merrick Garland has until May 17 to appeal Judge Jackson’s ruling. If he does not, the full memo that Barr used when he was the attorney general to justify the fix that was already in will immediately become public—and the fixer’s reputation will take one more hard hit as his successor begins the hard work of restoring integrity and public confidence in a battered Justice Department
Starting with Trump, It’s Time for a White Collar Crime Crackdown
This week, a federal judge slammed Bill Barr over the Mueller investigation. Hopefully, Merrick Garland’s Justice Department will stay on Barr and give financial crimes the attention they deserve.
This week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson delivered a significant victory to anticorruption advocates. The federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to hand over the March 24, 2019 memo that former Attorney General William Barr claimed to have relied on when he decided not to criminally charge then-President Donald Trump with obstructing the Mueller Investigation. In a fair, but brutal dressing down of Bill Barr, Judge Jackson confirmed our worst suspicions, that the fix had been in to clear Trump. “The fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” she wrote.
Now, Attorney General Merrick Garland is at an inflection point. He will either deliver this internal memo from the Barr Justice Department to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the watchdog group who brought the original Freedom of Information Act Request, or he can appeal Judge Jackson’s decision. The direction Garland takes here has huge implications, not just for this case, or for public corruption, but more broadly for addressing our current white collar crime epidemic. Here’s why.
No one is supposed to be above the law. But during Donald Trump’s presidency, we were more likely to witness a White, wealthy, and well-connected felon pardoned than perp-walked. This was, perhaps, a piece of Trump’s kinship if not admiration for these elite grifters.
By the end of just the first two years of the Trump administration, federal white collar criminal enforcement was at an all-time low. We saw at least a 26 percent decline in the number of these defendants prosecuted since the Obama era, according to the Department of Justice. Also, criminal investigations by the I.R.S. for tax evasion, money laundering, and identity theft fell by 36 percent. How big is our white collar crime problem? While the F.B.I. pegs street-level “property” crimes including burglary, larceny, and theft nationwide at around $16 billion annually, there is no equivalent F.B.I. figures published on white collar crime. Scholars have tallied the cost to be at least $800 billion.
There is no official count of the number of suspects, convicts, victims, or total dollars involved, and there is not even a uniform definition of what qualifies as “white collar crime.” Though, Edwin Sutherland, the sociologist who coined the expression in 1939 to mean “a crime committed by a person of high social status and respectability in the course of his occupation,” today we typically define it by the nature of the offense, not the status of the offender.
What makes determining the white collar crime numbers additionally challenging is that the numbers change depending on who is adding them up. When reporting data to the F.B.I., state and local law enforcement can include behavior that would not seem to fit the bill, such as the arrest of a low-income suspect for writing a bad check or committing welfare fraud as white collar crime. Tracking at the federal level is equally tough. The 93 U.S. Attorneys’ offices annually report prosecutions organized by category. What is included has changed, creating an apples-to-oranges problem for those making comparisons over time. As an illustration, back in 1992, the annual report listed within its section on white collar crime: money laundering, official corruption, procurement fraud, and environmental, health and safety offenses. Today, those are tallied under different headings.
Despite this numerical opacity, we are in the midst of a prosecution crisis or rather a nonprosecution one, according to many experts. So, what can be done? Quite a lot, actually.
First, the Justice Department must pursue the obstruction case against Donald Trump. Volume II of the Mueller Report provided detailed, persuasive arguments that Trump committed criminal obstruction on several occasions. To ignore this evidence simply due to his status as a former president would further the public’s suspicion that the most powerful are above the law. If the DOJ wins a conviction, they can deal with the problems of incarcerating a former president later. What they should not do, is simply fail to prosecute because the this is unprecedented territory.
A Trump prosecution should be thought of as under the white collar crime umbrella using both Sutherland’s 1939 status-based definition and the more modern offense-based understanding. As for status, Trump occupied the highest office in the nation, if not the world. And, as for the nature of the offense, the obstruction-of-justice statutes are often used by federal prosecutors against defendants in complex fraud investigations. It’s the lying not the underlying crime that often is prosecuted. As one example, Martha Stewart was never charged with securities fraud. Instead, she was indicted for and found guilty of obstructing an agency proceeding and making false statements to investigators looking into her suspicious stock trading.
Second, President Biden should provide clear direction that cracking down on white collar crime is a priority. Tone from the top matters. After the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s, President George H.W. Bush said, “We will not rest until the cheats, the chiselers and the charlatans spend a large chunk of their lives behind bars in prison.” He backed this rhetoric with resources. An interagency group was set up to target the biggest offenders. Plus, he sought new legislation from Congress to increase funding and laws to sharpen tools to investigate bank fraud, including the use of wiretaps. By his third year in office, federal prosecutors had charged more than 1,000 and secured convictions of more than 900 individuals involved in significant S&L fraud.
Similarly, during the George W. Bush administration, between mid-2002 and early 2006, the Justice Department, secured convictions of more than 1,000 individuals involved in corporate fraud cases, including eighty-two CEOs, eighty-five corporate presidents, thirty-six chief financial officers, and fourteen chief operating officers. The posterchild of these prosecutions was Enron, the once high-flying, energy innovator with a $70 billion market capitalization that came crashing down when accounting fraud surfaced. Big talk matched with big resources, delivered big results.
There are promising signs that President Biden is similarly setting the right tone. In his joint address to Congress on the eve of his 100th day in office, he promised, “The I.R.S will crack down on millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes. That’s estimated to be billions of dollars.” This month the I.R.S. commissioner testified that the annual tax gap (the difference between what the I.R.S. is owed and what it’s actually collecting) is now nearly $1 trillion a year, most of which he said is due to tax evasion by the high-earners and large corporations. Importantly, President Biden is asking Congress to put our money where his mouth is, seeking additional I.R.S. funding of $80 billion over ten years toward this priority.
Third, Attorney General Merrick Garland should make individual accountability a reality, not just words on paper. When a large business enterprise is caught up in federal criminal activity, the trend has been to allow the enterprise to enter what’s called a deferred prosecution agreement or nonprosecution agreement to avoid the expense, embarrassment, and uncertainty of indictment or trial. The company pays some amount in penalties and fines, sometimes submits to an independent monitor, and within a few years is cleared. The vast majority of the time, no real people inside the organization face any criminal consequences.
Duke University Law School professor Brandon Garrett has calculated, individuals were charged alongside just 27 percent of the 497 of these agreements with organizations between 2001 and 2018. And high-level executives even more rarely. This must change. Similar to my recommendation in Big Dirty Money for an elite crime division, Garrett recommends an independent corporate prosecution function with Main Justice and key regional offices. This new unit should also get a handle on data reporting problem.
Garland has the right team in place to make this happen. His number two in command is Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. While on the Enron Task Force, she helped convict several former executives on an assortment of wire fraud and conspiracy charges.
Of course, President Biden must stay independent of any investigation touching on the former president. However, that recusal should not make either pursuing Trump or cracking down on white collar crime any less of a priority. The ongoing criminal investigations of Trump in New York County for insurance and bank fraud, and in Fulton County, Georgia for election interference should not absolve the U.S. Department of Justice from following the facts where they lead, even if they lead them to the former occupant of the Oval Office.
Report: Hunter Biden’s Connected to ‘Chief Spy of China’ Through His Chinese-American Secretary
A business partner Hunter Biden called “the chief spy of China,” assigned the president’s son a Chinese-American secretary who was feeding him opposition research to help Joe Biden’s 2020 election bid after the business venture collapsed in 2018, the Daily Mail reported Friday.
The Daily Mail obtained the information from emails contained in Hunter Biden’s alleged “laptop from hell,” which has become the gift that will not stop giving to critics of President Joe Biden and his troubled son.
“Under the heading ‘Uncle Joe 2020,’ the former assistant encouraged the president’s son to tell his father to ‘lead by example,’ ‘bring back sensibility,’ and emphasize his experience and age as a strength,” the newspaper added.
On Friday, the Daily Mail revealed:
After launching his multi-million-dollar joint venture with CEFC, Hunter was assigned a 29-year-old Chinese-American assistant, JiaQi Bao, who quickly struck up a close and intriguing relationship with her Biden boss.
At first, emails show the New York-based Bao diligently scheduled flights, hotels, and even doctor’s appointments for the president’s son.
But mysteriously, the young assistant also sent him opposition research to help Joe Biden’s 2020 election bid, urged him to take cash from the joint venture’s accounts as the business collapsed and wrote flirty and personal messages and even ended up with Hunter’s military dog tags in her New York apartment – the same tags he can be seen wearing in home-made porn videos he recorded on his laptop.
…
After the joint venture had dissolved, Bao emailed Hunter with a conspiratorial message encouraging him to help his father run for president and listing talking points to combat criticism of Hunter’s dealings with the Chinese.
After only a year, the business venture between Hunter, his uncle, and the CEFC collapsed in 2018.
A joint report by the Senate Homeland Security and Finance ommittees issued in September 2020 examined Hunter’s business deal with CEFC, noting the company’s deep ties to the communist Chinese government. It determined that the millions of dollars transferred from the firm to Hunter and his uncle “raise criminal financial, counterintelligence and extortion concerns.”
Hunter’s secretary, Bao, appeared very invested in having Joe Biden beat Donald Trump.
In a March 2019 email to Hunter, Bao told Hunter, “You need to help Uncle Joe run for president. Your father should really run for 2020 for this country. He will be one of the best presidents in our country’s history.”
Echoing China’s foreign policy, Bao reportedly promoted negative stories about Trump for Hunter to use, “including allegations of selling citizenship to corrupt Chinese officials, his alleged links to a Chinese-owned Florida “prostitution parlor,” and letting human rights violations slide in negotiations with China.
Bao also took issue with Trump’s trade war with China, reportedly lambasting it as “a complete failure thus far, resulting in tremendous loss to Americans.”
Critics expected Joe Biden to be soft towards China, and Beijing appeared to favor him over Trump.
The Daily Mail reported that it is unclear whether Bao knew of Huner’s business partner’s alleged links to the Chinese intelligence services at the time because she has not returned requests for comment on this story.
Still, it acknowledged:
After partnering with Chinese oil giant CEFC in the multi-million-dollar deal, Bao was appointed as his secretary and assistant, acting as a go-between for his Chinese business partners, translating documents and performing clerical work for Hunter in the joint venture.
Hunter did not have any problem believing his new business partner at CEFC was linked to the Chinese intelligence agencies, describing Patrick Ho to a friend in an audio recording on his laptop as the “spy chief of China.”
In December 2020, Hunter admitted that he is currently the subject of an FBI investigation, allegedly for tax crimes. However, some news reports suggest the investigators may also be scrutinizing his dealings overseas.
The business venture between Hunter and CEFC collapsed in 2018, just a year after the president’s son and brother, uncle Jim, joined the deal under the impression it would yield billions of dollars.
After Hunter called his business partner “the chief spy in China,” U.S. law enforcement reportedly surveilled the Chinese businessman later as a “foreign intelligence threat” before his conviction for bribery in 2018.
“Ho was suspected of working with the Chinese intelligence services and had been monitored by federal law enforcement under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” the Daily Mail noted, citing court documents.
The Daily Mail added:
As Hunter’s joint venture with the Chinese began to crumble that month amid the arrests of its two leaders, Bao wrote one of her most surprising emails encouraging him to raid the coffers of one of Hunter and CEFC’s joint corporate vehicles called Hudson West.
At one point, she even offered for Hunter not to pay her for her “secretary” work.
Whatever Happened to QAnon?
Back in February, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was stripped of her committee roles, despite her expression of "regret" for some of her more extreme views. One of the charges against Rep. Greene is that she has supported QAnon, whose central claim is that there exists an elite whose members exercise political power and who indulge in promiscuity and other corrupt forms of behavior.
In a Washington Post article co-written by Isaac Stanley-Becker and Rachel Bade, Greene was dismissed as having endorsed the "baseless theory" of QAnon. Stanley-Becker and Bade devoted most of their article to critiquing QAnon rather than addressing Greene's policies, including her unwavering support for the police. Yet without evidence to corroborate it, the Post authors rejected the central claim of QAnon: that a powerful cabal of elitists, some with a history of pedophilia and other corrupt practices, exists within the Democrat party and the media that support it.
Maybe liberal journalists don't know corruption when they see it. Perhaps they don't believe that promiscuity or prostitution is "corrupt." Or that using cocaine and other illegal drugs is "corrupt," or even that sex with underage persons is "corrupt." By that definition, the press can maintain that liberal politicians are not corrupt, so they can dismiss QAnon's thinking as a "baseless theory."
A Time magazine story of April 16 offered a similar critique of certain conservatives who purportedly view "former President Donald Trump as a messianic figure battling a cadre of deep-state operatives." This is a good example of rhetorical fudging: is it that Trump is viewed as a "messianic figure" or that he is "battling ... deep-state operatives"? I don't know any conservatives who view the former president as a "messianic figure," but there are plenty who see him as having battled the Deep State -- and for good reason.
Most of us know corruption when we see it, and we know there is an element of truth in QAnon's charges. It goes back a long way — to the Kennedys, the Clintons, and hundreds of lesser figures. We were disgusted when, in March 1962, Marilyn Monroe offered herself up as a "birthday present" for President Kennedy in front of an approving audience of Washington liberals. And we were disgusted by the repeated accusations of Bill Clinton's philandering and sexual assault, including those by Juanita Broaddrick, Leslie Millwee, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willey — this in addition to Clinton's admitted affairs with Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers. One must ask the same question one asks of JFK and of his brothers: how many other illicit affairs were there, and why do liberals like Kennedy and Clinton so often stoop to this level?
The national media don't view the Kennedys, Clintons, or Bidens as corrupt, and electronic media may be systematically covering it up its evidence. If one Googles "most corrupt Democrats," the result will be pages of results on "Trump corruption." It appears that Google and other high-tech players are suppressing information about the corruption of the liberal elite.
According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, this sort of search result is the result of computer algorithms, as if algorithms wrote themselves. Concealing corruption is corrupt, and abetting that concealment, as the national media have done for decades, is also corrupt. It's an endless web of corruption, lying, and deceit. It's liberals who are most often caught up in such practices because maximum personal freedom — the very opposite of human liberty — is the goal and promise of liberalism. Liberal politicians and the media are in on it together, but anyone who points this out is a "conspiracy theorist."
In fact, there is overwhelming evidence of D.C. corruption. Bill Clinton as much as admitted to sexual activity with a young intern in the Oval Office, and he reportedly traveled aboard Jeffrey Epstein's "Lolita Express" "at least 26 times." Rep. Anthony Weiner, husband of Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's closest aide, resigned from Congress after repeatedly "sexting" suggestive photos of himself to women.
Didn't Rep. David Wu resign his seat over charges of making inappropriate advances toward a young woman? Didn't Sen. Al Franken retire following charges of improper sexual behavior? Aren't there accusations that Joe Biden sexually violated Tara Reade and acted inappropriately with eight other women? Didn't Barack Obama admit to using cocaine on multiple occasions? Wasn't D.C. mayor Marion Barry videotaped by the FBI smoking crack cocaine? Didn't Rep. Barney Frank hire a male prostitute to live with and work for him, during which time the individual reportedly operated a prostitution ring out of Frank's apartment? Didn't New York A.G. Eliot Spitzer resign after being implicated in a prostitution scandal? Have there not been calls for New York's Gov. Cuomo to resign in response to charges of inappropriate sexual behavior?
It is impossible for any fair-minded person to deny that widespread corruption exists among our nation's leaders, particularly among those in the Democrat party? Since that is the central claim of QAnon, how can QAnon be dismissed in toto as a conspiracy theory, as it has been in the liberal press?
Followers of QAnon pose definite accusations that, with enough work, can be verified or dismissed. Forbes made an effort to verify Tara Reade's charges against candidate Biden and found a number of people who appeared to corroborate Reade's story. Yet the charges were quickly dismissed by the liberal press, who then raised questions about Reade's competency and motives. The charges were never followed up by the Justice Department. Despite corroborating evidence, Reade found few who would listen to her — indeed, she found herself under attack for attempting to expose the Democrat candidate.
Another of QAnon's key charges is that the political elite are globalists who wish to create a New World Order governed by the elite themselves. In order to do this, they must weaken the U.S. militarily and economically.
No informed person can deny that U.S. military power declined under Obama/Biden or that Biden intends to shift funding away from the U.S. military. It may be that the Biden family is willing to sell out their country for a few million dollars, but much greater principles are at stake. A fundamental tenet of the left's thinking is that America must not continue as the world's pre-eminent military and economic power. As Obama liked to say on his American-guilt tour, America is not the equal of any nation on Earth — it is worse because of its history of imperialism, genocide, and greed. That belief was the basis of the Obama/Biden foreign policy, and it seems to be the basis of Biden/Harris policy as well.
Is the QAnon charge of globalist bias accurate or not? Can QAnon's thinking in this instance be dismissed as a conspiracy theory?
Time's reporter worries that conservatives who share "elements" of QAnon thinking are getting elected to local office. Again, there's the rhetorical nuance of dismissing those with vaguely defined "elements" of a certain way of thinking. A more thoughtful analysis would consider the actual policies of these candidates.
Democrats have treated Marjorie Greene the same way they have Rep. Lauren Boebert, Tara Reade, and others whose ideas and testimony threaten their interests. It is up to the American people to support those who are truthful and courageous, and to see beyond the bogeyman of "guilt by QAnon association." Certainly, in one respect, QAnon is correct: many of the Washington elite are corrupt, and their corruption needs to be exposed.
Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture including Heartland of the Imagination (2011).
The Left-Wing Putsch
We are in a dire and extreme condition as a country, where one of our two major parties is moving toward a total power-grab and a re-directing of our entire system of government. The left is positioning itself and has made significant headway already to control all branches of government in perpetuity. The days of "thinking through" differences are over as far as the Dems are concerned.
In a recent article, the author, Jonathan Tobin, expressed alarm about the appointment by Pres. Joe Biden of Sarah Margon for the post of assistant sec'y of state for democracy, human rights, and labor. Tobin concludes, "On this nomination, there can be no compromise. Supporters of Israel — be they Republicans or Democrats — are obligated to vote against her." This conclusion is assuming that this is another issue, like issues throughout American history, where wise and probing minds on both sides of the aisle can put aside partisan interests for the good of our country or the good of some ally or the enactment of a wise policy. Not only is Tobin's assumption naïve, but that view actually advances the cause of the power-grabbing Democrats. There is no longer an underlying unity and a common commitment to and belief in our American heritage.
Our government is under siege. The Democrats do not have goodwill. The freedom of the people is at stake. Not only Israel, but the entire USA is threatened as never before by the Democrats, who have yielded to the far left. Truman did not yield to the left led by Henry Wallace in 1948, but in 2020, Pres. Joe Burdensome signed a formal pact with Sen. Bernie Sanders last summer before the election. In this writer's opinion, that 110-page document was the tipping point, where the Democrats became the Democratic Communist Party of America (DCPA).
Although "Boynie" (writing this in my best Brooklyn accent) insists that his "Democratic Socialism" is not authoritarian, people like me insist that his statement is either a lie or some intellectual equivocation. Just as Henry Wallace in 1948 loved the USSR but was repudiated by Pres. Harry Truman, Sanders also has been infatuated with Soviet-style communism all his life. The fact is that when the federal government gradually or with singular rapidity takes over the means of production, the net result is and will always be authoritarian.
When we see the government striving to add two free years of college for all, develop vaccine passports, dictate modes of transportation in the name of energy control vis-Ã -vis climate change, implement a national curriculum inculcating racist stereotyping of the majority of the population, pack the Supreme Court, manipulate social media, portray all legislation about election integrity as racist and illegitimate, and force the spending of trillions of dollars on the country without input from the opposition party, we know we no longer have a party that even pays lip service to the Declaration of Independence with its assumptions of natural rights. Nor does it love and respect all the people as is affirmed by the Gettysburg Address ("of the people, by the people, and for the people"). Taking a knee is pathetic and immature. What we see in the Democratic Party today is a vicious power play as that party attempts to reverse American history and bipartisanship.
What we now see is not just a 50-50 split between two parties (which have an underlying consensus about the socio-political unity and purpose of our country), but a 50-50 split between Americans and an anti-American, despotic mentality.
Oh, Jack, you must be exaggerating — the "Democratic Communist Party of America"? C'mon, this is the party of the New Deal, the party that brought us Social Security, and banking regulations, and the Tennessee Valley Authority. This is the party that was anti-Castro under Kennedy and fought the commies under the lib Lyndon Baynes Johnson. How can you say it is "communist"? Isn't that a hysterical charge?
When we see the labeling of all Trump voters as "racists," when we see not one Dem speaking out against the demented protesters against Kavanaugh (not one Dem called for order in the Senate chamber), and the continuous insistence that those burning and looting all over the USA last summer were primarily peaceful protesters, then it is apparent to all that they are leading a revolutionary downward spiral of society. These events, which the Dems are justifying, and the woke attacks on the founders and icons of the USA, and the basic ideas of liberty and property rights, and contempt for parents and the nuclear family all smell like and look like living excerpts from the Communist Manifesto of 1848.
Here are a few quotes from the Manifesto:
The family must disappear: "The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty." Don't you see sending kids for abortions without parental notification as an outcome of this communist sentence? Or insisting on children having rights to have hormone-blockers without adult permission (even physicians must accommodate them) is an uncamouflaged attack on the family?
Disruption of society is necessary: "Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production." Don't you see that the Democratic borrowing and maniacal expansion of the federal government under a variety of excuses represents complete acceptance of this principle from the Manifesto?
Bourgeois capitalism is exploitative: "Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product."
Today's updated Marxism substitutes for "the proletariat" those who believe in gender fluidity, intersectionality, re-distribution of the wealth, elimination or "re-imagining" of policing, children selecting hormone-blockers without parental approval, an unlimited haven in the USA for the dispossessed and hurting people of the world (open borders), and unlimited marijuana for those who just "need a little break" from the stresses of everyday life. To these revolutionary and disturbed persons, any other views are inherently exploitative and emanate from the false values of our country's founding and our Judeo-Christian heritage.
Yes, we are at a tipping point, and if the Republican senators see their entire fight in terms of their ability to manipulate the rules of order in the Senate, and keeping the filibuster intact, then they have misread the proverbial "handwriting on the wall." While they rehearse on how best to maneuver within the context of Robert's Rules of Order, the DCPA will have taken over forever.
Finally, Polybius’ link of tyrannic ambition to mediocre politicians who “hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits,” describes Biden to a T. Biden is a long-time senator with few legislative achievements he still will own, a vicious pit-bull on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he shamelessly demagogued Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, a plagiarizer and unseemly harasser of women, a two-time loser in his bid for the presidency, a fabulist and grifter who monetized the office of Vice President to enrich his family, and a lightweight so light that his own boss, Barack Obama, said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Only a pandemic, disruptive lock-downs, and the Democrat primary threat of socialist Bernie Sanders––along with a probably fraudulent election, and a groveling media running interference–– could get such a meritless mediocrity into the Oval Office.
A Blueprint for Tyranny
A new administration leverages street-violence for political gain.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The vulnerability of political freedom and popular sovereignty to tyranny has been a constant theme in political philosophy for 2500 years. It profoundly influenced the creators of the Constitution, an important purpose of which is to forestall the tyranny that destroys political freedom and citizen rule. In the writings of Classical philosophers and historians the Founders could see the blueprint for such a tyranny––one we have seen unfolding in the last few decades, and accelerating in the policies of the current administration.
The Greek historian Polybius in the second century B.C. laid out how a democracy degenerates into tyranny:
So when [the rich] begin to hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits, they begin to seduce and corrupt the people in every possible way, and thus ruin their estates. The result is that through their senseless craving for prominence they stimulate among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them, and then the rule of democracy is transformed into government by violence and strong-arm methods. By this time the people have become accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and their prospects of winning a livelihood depend upon the property of their neighbors, and as soon as they find a leader who is sufficiently ambitious and daring . . . they introduce a regime based on violence.
Many of these preconditions already exist in our country. Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, ambitious politicians of both parties have “stimulate[d] among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them.” We call them “entitlements” rather than “bribes,” funded not by violently seizing the property of the rich, but by annually redistributing $1.6 trillion of the wealth of the upper middle class and the rich through the federal income tax. Indeed, the top one percent of all earners pays 40% of income taxes. The modern update of ancient “bribes” also comprises massive borrowing and electronically printing money. These practices have created nearly $27 trillion in government debt, five trillion more than GDP. The tyrants of Polybius’ day redistributed the wealth of the rich; today we redistribute the future wealth of the young and unborn who will be stuck with the bill.
And this largess will increase dramatically if the current administration successfully passes into law several new mechanisms for redistributing wealth:
- $1.9 trillion America Rescue Plan
- $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan
- $1.8 trillion American Families Plan
- $1 trillion Green New Deal for Cities
- $180 billion Green New Deal for Public Housing
- $15 trillion over 15 years Thrive Act
Most of this money will be spent on various transfers to voters, and subsidies to favored businesses and feckless state governments that run their own redistribution engines.
As for “government by violence and strong-arm methods,” modern tyranny for decades has relied on de Tocqueville’s “soft despotism,” an insidious coercion through a regulatory regime that Tocqueville predicted, one which “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.” All the money to be redistributed will come with a plethora of such intrusive regulations from the agencies managing it. These rules and regulations limit citizen freedom in numerous ways, from what they can do with their own property to how they run their own businesses, all accompanied by fines and fees that extract even more revenue.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, however, we saw another form of “strong-arm methods.” The politicizing of the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ, along with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation–– agencies with coercive investigative powers backed by military-level lethal force–– produced the tyrannical bullying of several members of Trump’s administration, most egregiously General Michael Flynn. Meanwhile, old-fashioned physical violence and intimidation in the streets dogged Trump’s political rallies, and even followed Trump supporters to restaurants and other public venues.
Just as Biden’s redistributive ambitions have gone far beyond what passes for “normal,” the violence in the streets last year exploded to levels not seen since the Sixties. Led by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, these “peaceful protestors” looted, burned, and vandalized cities across the country, the mayhem mysteriously abating in time for the election. Billions of dollars in property damage and scores of killed and wounded were the toll. Just the threat of such violence undoubtedly intimidated the judge and jurors in the Derek Chauvin trial. Why else wouldn’t the judge approve a change in venue, or sequester the jurors?
Violence is now the trump card in daily politics and culture. Corporations have gone “woke,” sending millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter and promoting their “systemic racism” lie. City governments and public school districts must factor in the chance of violent protests in their policy decisions. Even worse, the principle of equality before the law, a bedrock of political freedom, has been abandoned for political favoritism, in part because authorities are wary of igniting violence. Derek Chauvin was convicted of two murder charges, decisions not even close to being beyond a reasonable doubt. But the unidentified DC cop who murdered a protestor at the Capitol on January 6––a woman veteran who was not threatening the officer’s, or anybody’s, life––has not even suffered professional sanction, let alone an indictment and trial.
Violence for me, but not for thee.
Worse yet, Antifa has openly said that their violence is a tool of intimidation in the pursuit of political goals. CrimetheInc., an Antifa ally, has bragged that the outcome of the Chauvin trial was due to the street violence. It goes on to make explicit this link between violence and political aims: “You put yourself in a weaker bargaining position by spelling out from the beginning the least it would take to appease you. It’s smarter to appear implacable: So you want to come to terms? Make us an offer. In the meantime, we’ll be here blocking the freeway and setting things on fire.” This tactic is exactly what Hitler instructed his Sudetenland Nazi stooge, Konrad Henlein, to do in negotiations with the Czech government in 1938: “We must always demand so much that we cannot be satisfied.” What “satisfied” the Nazis was the destruction of Czechoslovakia.
What is disturbingly different from the Sixties, moreover, about last year’s violence is that the Democrat establishment has not just tolerated the violence, but often encouraged and promoted it––just as Representative Maxine Waters did during the Chauvin trial when she incited protestors to get “confrontational” if the wrong verdict was given. Apprehended rioters were rarely charged or tried, and police forces were ordered to stand down, or forbidden to use crowd-control tools. Many mayors seemed to embrace the philosophy of Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings, who during the riots in 2015 told the press, “We gave them [rioters] space to destroy.”
As Daniel Henninger suggests, this tactical use of violence may be why the Biden administration has not even tried to make a deal by compromising with Republicans, despite the Democrats’ razor-thin margin in the House and Senate, or the lack of a popular mandate. Instead, the administration wants to bully Americans into accepting their policies:
Mr. Biden is no street anarchist, but the political “change” confronting Americans after more than a year living with Covid—constant antipolice protests, migrants streaming across the southern border, D.C. statehood, blowing up the legislative filibuster, packing the Supreme Court and some $6 trillion in new federal spending—is a lot of nonnegotiable bulldozer.
Finally, Polybius’ link of tyrannic ambition to mediocre politicians who “hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits,” describes Biden to a T. Biden is a long-time senator with few legislative achievements he still will own, a vicious pit-bull on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he shamelessly demagogued Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, a plagiarizer and unseemly harasser of women, a two-time loser in his bid for the presidency, a fabulist and grifter who monetized the office of Vice President to enrich his family, and a lightweight so light that his own boss, Barack Obama, said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Only a pandemic, disruptive lock-downs, and the Democrat primary threat of socialist Bernie Sanders––along with a probably fraudulent election, and a groveling media running interference–– could get such a meritless mediocrity into the Oval Office.
If the Biden administration is successful at leveraging street-violence for political gain, the century-old progressive dream of transforming our Constitutional Republic into a tyrannical technocracy will be much closer to fulfillment, our country’s fisc much closer to bankruptcy, and our government much closer to a “regime based on violence.”
On that dismal day, we won’t be able to say that we hadn’t been warned for 2500 years.
HOW MANY YEARS HAVE THE BANKSTER BOYS LAWYER BARACK OBAMA AND LAWYER ERIC HOLDER ATTEMPTED TO INSTALL THE OBOMB INTO A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE?
"Along with Obama, Pelosi and Schumer are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration." PATRICIA McCARTHY
Obama gave his own personal seal of ethical approval, telling deep-pocketed donors this week: "I appreciate his strong sense of advocacy for ordinary Americans. You
can trust him -- you can count on him." Uh-huh. And I've got a bridge to Hope and Change to sell you. MICHELE MALKIN
"We know that Obama and his inner circle have set up a war room in his D.C. home to plan and execute resistance to the Trump administration and his legislative agenda. None of these people care about the American people, or the fact that Trump won the election because millions of people voted for him."
Patricia McCarthy / AMERICAN THINKER.com
“Obama’s new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety of groups organizing direct action against Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing.”
THE BANKSTER REGIME OF LAWYER BARACK OBAMA, LAWYER JOE BIDEN AND LAWYER ERIC HOLDER SPENT 8 YEARS SABOTAGING AMERICA’S BORDERS AND VOTING TO EASE MORE ILLEGALS INTO THE VOTING BOOTHS.
THIS CONSPIRACY WAS PART OF A LONG PLAN TO SITUATE CLOSET MUSLIM BARACK OBAMA INTO A THIRD TERM FOR LIFE.
WHEN BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY ERIC HOLDER WAS NOT SERVICING OBAMA’S CRIMINAL BANKSTERS HE WAS OUT AT LA RAZA ‘THE RACE’ RALLIES PUSHING FOR MEXICANS TO VOTE. LA RAZA OPERATED OUT OF THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE UNDER FORMER LA RAZA V.P. CECILIA MUNOZ AND WAS FUNDED WITH AMERICAN TAX DOLLARS HANDED TO LA RAZA BY BARACK OBAMA AND THE OPEN BORDERS DEMOCRAT PARTY.
CECILIA MUNOZ WAS ON JOE BIDEN’S PRESIDENTIAL TRANSISTION TEAM DOCUMENTING THAT BIDEN’S ASSAULT ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND THE INVASION HE HAS ORCHESTRATED WAS AND IS PREMEDITATED.
THERE IS NO GREATER THREAT TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY THAN THE LAWYER CLASS AND THE GLOBALIST DEMOCRAT PARTY.
Obama Funds the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA “The Race”… now calling itself UNIDOSus.
THERE IS A REASON FOR THEIR HISPANDERING AND DESPERATE DRIVE TO GET ILLEGALS INTO THE VOTING BOOTHS HOOK OR CROOK! Mexicanos are becoming one people gain.” Truxillo, 47, has said the new country should be brought into being “by any means necessary,” but recently said it was unlikely to be formed by civil war. Instead, its creation will be accomplished by the electoral pressure of the future majority Hispanic population in the region, he said.
JAMES WALSH
THE OBAMA-BIDEN HISPANICAZATION of AMERICA… first ease millions of illegals over our borders and into our voting booths!
How the Democrat party surrendered America to Mexico:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/07/james-walsh-hispanicazation-of-america.html
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!
The “zero tolerance” program was dismantled by Attorney General Erc Holder once it had successfully cut the transit of migrants by roughly 95 percent. Initially, officials made 140,000 arrests per year in the mid-2000s, but the northward flow dropped so much that officials only had to make 6,000 arrests in 2013, according to a 2014 letter by two pro-migration Senators, Sen. Jeff Flake and John McCain.
“The cost of the Dream Act is far bigger than the Democrats or their media allies admit. Instead of covering 690,000 younger illegals now enrolled in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 “DACA” amnesty, the Dream Act would legalize at least 3.3 million illegals, according to a pro-immigration group, the Migration Policy Institute.”
THE OBAMA - BIDEN - HOLDER AGENDA:
Concrete Evidence of the Continuing
Plunge in Both Civil and Criminal
Immigration Enforcement
By Dan Cadman
CIS Immigration Blog, January 23, 2016
Two recent reports from Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reflect the continued erosion of immigration enforcement under the Obama administration.
On January 20, TRAC reported that criminal prosecution for immigration offenses fell 22.3 percent from November 2014 to November 2015, and more than 36 percent over the course of five years, excluding magistrate court (which deals exclusively with petty offenses).
The following day, TRAC announced that "ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] Detainer Use Stabilizes Under Priority Enforcement Program". The Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) is the replacement to the Secure Communities Program mandated by Homeland Security Security Jeh Johnson as a part of the president's "executive actions" on immigration. It significantly restricts the ability of immigration agents to file detainers against aliens arrested by police on criminal charges.
I have no idea what TRAC means by "stabilizes". A quick look at Figure 1a of their report shows a more accurate state of affairs, if one considers the number of detainers being filed over the course of five years, from a high in April 2011, when Secure Communities became fully effective nationwide and kicked into high gear, versus October 2015. I would use other phrases: "plummeted" or "Dropped like a stone". Or, as my colleague Jessica Vaughan has noted, particularly in relation to detainers filed at county jails, where the lion's share of criminals of any stripes are held after being booked for offenses small and large: "a stunning free fall".
Valerie Jarrett: ‘We Should Make It as Easy as Possible to Vote,’ Including Expanded Absentee Ballots
11,580
Appearing Wednesday on MSNBC, former President Barack Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett said the federal government should make it “as easy as possible” for people to vote as Democrats continue to push a vote-by-mail option ahead of the 2020 election.
A partial transcript is as follows:
SUSAN DEL PERCIO: When we last spoke, you were talking about increasing voter enrollment, getting people registered to vote, participation. Now we see that there’s a big drive for registering and voting by mail. How concerned are you that the president is looking to privatize the post office, limit the amount of service that is possible for the post office with all of this effort on mail-in voting?
VALERIE JARRETT: Very concerned, in a word. And I think as, you know, earlier this week, Michelle Obama announced “When We All Vote,” an organization she formed, non-partisan organization, I might add, a call on Congress to ensure that we have the ability to have absentee ballots. We shouldn’t have to choose between our health and exercising our most fundamental right to vote.
I think we should make it as easy as possible for people to vote, and unfortunately, we have seen in history now in our country where states have passed laws, practices have been put in place to suppress the vote. We should be doing just the opposite. Technology is our friend. The ability to do absentee balloting is something we could fund and have in place if we get ready right now.
THE OBAMA MARXIST-MUSLIM BANKSTER-FUNDED THIRD TERM for life:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/03/obamas-marxism-still-hankering-for.html
"Cold War historian Paul Kengor goes deeply into Obama's communist background in an article in American Spectator, "Our First Red Diaper Baby President," and in an excellent Mark Levin interview. Another Kengor article describes the Chicago communists whose younger generation include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power." Karin McQuillan
Democrats Allow Communists to Infiltrate Their Party Across the Nation
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2019/06/obamas-lackey-judge-blakey-hands-obomb.html
“Obama’s new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety of groups organizing direct action against Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing.”
“Professor Paul Kengor has extensively researched the Chicago communists whose progeny include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power.”
We are all victims of the Obama cabal’s collusion with Russia – President Trump’s voters and all Americans who believe in our free and fair election process.
BARACK OBAMA: Was he America’s first closet Communist president?
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2019/05/karin-mcquilan-barack-obama-and-his.html
Obama choose Communists and Marxists for the highest, most powerful positions in our land, including his closest political advisors, and his head of the CIA. These facts are not in dispute. Most are openly admitted by the people in question, as necessary damage control. Our press chooses not to report them.
Professor Paul Kengor has extensively researched the Chicago communists whose progeny include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power.
President Obama agrees: Abysmal failure should be rewarded with promotion. He's leaving no shady banking buddy behind.
MICHELLE MALKIN
Democrats Allow Communists to Infiltrate Their Party Across the Nation
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2019/06/obamas-lackey-judge-blakey-hands-obomb.html
OPERATION OBOMB:
DESTABILIZE AMERICA TO LAY GROUNDS FOR A MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/seth-barron-obama-and-building-of.html
Katie Pavlich's Latest Books, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up are available on Amazon
FOR EIGHT YEARS BARACK OBAMA AND ERIC HOLDER SABOTAGED HOMELAND SECURITY TO EASE MORE MEXICANS OVER OUR BORDERS AND INTO OUR JOBS AND VOTING BOOTHS.
OBAMA NEEDED THESE ILLEGALS TO FINISH OFF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS, WHAT WAS LEFT OF THEM AFTER OBAMA'S CRONY BANKSTERS' PLUNDER.
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE DICTATOR
Barack Obama’s Russia Connection
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2019/06/barack-obamas-russian-connection-who.html
If Obama was a fully recruited agent of Moscow, tasked with giving Russia a significant military advantage over the United States, and economically weakening and socially dividing the nation, how would he have conducted his presidency (or his post-presidency) any differently? TREVOR LOUDON
Eric Holder: Coronavirus ‘An Opportunity to Permanently Change America’s Voting System
Former President Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder admitted he saw coronavirus as “an opportunity” to permanently change the way Americans voted.
“Coronavirus gives us an opportunity to revamp our electoral system so that it permanently becomes more inclusive and becomes easier for the American people to access,” Holder said in an interview with TIME magazine.
He called for a “sea change” in voting systems, allowing Americans to vote from home, using prepaid mail-in ballots and unlimited absentee voting. Holder did not discuss concerns about voter fraud in his interview but posited that any special exceptions made to the voting process during the coronavirus should remain permanent.
“It would be foolhardy to take these pro-democracy measures off the table after we get on the other side of the virus,” he said. “These are changes that we should make permanent because it will enhance our democracy.”
Holder’s comments align with former President Barack Obama, who voiced support for mail-in voting and joined forces with former First Lady Michelle Obama and prominent celebrities to press the United States for more mail-in voting.
Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have also called for mail-in voting in the 2020 election.
“Judicial Watch’s records request is designed
to expose how California state legislators are
wasting tax dollars to take care of another
corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the
guise of resisting the rule of law on
immigration and other matters,” stated
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “His
record at the Clinton and Obama Justice
Departments demonstrates a willingness to
bend the law in order to protect his political
patrons.”
CALIFORNIA COMRADES CHOOSE COMRADE HOLDER
https://sacramentocitizen.wordpress.com/2017/01/11/california-comrades-choose-comrade-holder/
Any attorney general who is not an activist is not doing his or her job.
Eric Holder
In Part One of this series, we exposed the Chicano Marxist take over of the California legislature and their plans to defy federal immigration laws and expected actions of the incoming Trump administration. Gov. Jerry Brown’s nomination of Xavier Becerra to be California’s next Attorney General was the first of many steps to protect the pervasive lawlessness of the radical left. Becerra has already taken an aggressive and combative stance against President-elect Donald Trump, vowing to fight Trump’s efforts to enforce immigration laws, and even block attempts to deport criminal illegal aliens. Trump’s campaign centered on building a wall along the United States border with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants, violent gangs, and terrorists posing as immigrants.
Xavier Becerra, currently a 12-year member of Congress, is an admitted member of MEChA, or “Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan,” often likened to a Latino KKK.
Becerra has publicly defended MEChA, even though the Chicano supremacist group evangelizes discrimination against non-Hispanics and calls for the killing of Border Patrol “pigs.” MEChA’s rallying cry is: “For the race, everything; For those outside the race, nothing.”
Becerra’s Radical Plans
Recently, the State Assembly Committee on the Office of the Attorney General asked nominee Becerra to detail his plans on the issues of immigration, civil rights, the environment, policing and consumer protection – apparently the only issues the California Legislature is interested in Becerra defending.
In a letter released Saturday, Becerra praised California’s policies helping illegal aliens get driver’s licenses, free college tuition, and free lawyers to represent them in deportation cases, calling it “national leadership.”
“All of these policies and programs are representative of California’s values as a welcoming state,” Becerra wrote to the Assembly committee.
Becerra also took a shot at Trump for proposing to create a registry of Muslim immigrants during the campaign.”Disturbing statements uttered during the recent Presidential campaign have given rise to legitimate fears that the new federal administration might seek to adopt policies that would discriminate against people based on factors such as their religious belief,” Becerra wrote. “Any such policies would be antithetical to the deepest constitutional values and traditions of this nation — a nation founded in part by men and women fleeing religious persecution.”
“I have no intention of allowing this policy through the doors of California,” he wrote.
Like a good progressive foot soldier, Becerra also vowed to fight for abortion, calling it “reproductive freedom.”
Becerra said he will support California’s recent legislation expanding voter registration and participation in elections. He might want to look into the 650,000 newly registered California voters, registered online only weeks before the election. According to the Los Angeles Times, “98% of all the growth in California’s voter ranks in 2016 happened in just the last 45 days of the registration season.”
As Attorney General, Becerra has vowed to continue enforcing policies to combat climate change and work to “transition Californians to a low-carbon way of life.” Becerra added that a part of environmental protections is safe drinking water and vowed to “pursue the goal of providing safe drinking water to all Californians.” Perhaps Becerra can begin by supporting the safe drinking water bills that Assemblyman Devon Mathis has tried to get passed over the last two years? In Mathis’ district, wells began going dry in East Porterville more than three years ago, with more continuing to dry up every day.
Assemblyman Devon Mathis, R-Porterville, authored the bills to provide $10 million to homeowners (not farmers) to dig deeper wells and clean contaminated ones.
Both bills passed through the Assembly and a state Senate committee without opposition, only to have Senate Appropriations Chairman Ricardo Lara, D-Los Angeles and Mecha activist, put both bills on suspense– one after the other, killing them and depriving 10,000+ low-income individuals access to running water. Sen. Lara was playing politics with this Republican bill, despite the 10,000 poor people who need the clean water.
Sanctuary Cities
California, through its 35 Sanctuary Cities, is clearly violating U.S. Federal Immigration law. Recently, Democrat members of the State Legislature proposed two bills: SB 6 by Sen. Ben Hueso, to create a state program to fund legal representation for illegal aliens facing deportation, and AB 3 by Assemblyman Rob Bonta to create taxpayer-funded training for defense attorneys and public defenders on immigration law for illegal aliens.
And now California is going to try to prevent the new Presidential administration from enforcing federal immigration law despite the fact that the Constitution clearly imposes a duty on the president and the executive branch, to enforce the law.
Hiring Eric Holder… for what?
Democrats in the California State Legislature apparently decided Becerra isn’t enough legal muscle, and recently hired former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder to fight a “clear and present danger” from President-elect Trump… the same former Attorney General Eric Holder who was once blasted for helping to trigger a “war” on police and called America “a nation of cowards” on the issue of race. However, he now says he sees his “younger” self in Black Lives Matter activists… this is who California hired to assist California’s top law enforcement officer?
Since Trump — who is not referring to himself as “The Office of President-Elect,” as his predecessor did — has not yet taken office, nor any official actions, it is hard to see specifically for what purpose Holder has been hired.
There certainly is poetic justice in hiring the failed Attorney General of the failed Obama Administration to defend the failed and deteriorating policies of the Jerry Brown administration and radical Democrats running the state.
Described as a “devious, power-hungry, racial zealot,” Eric Holder is also a dubious choice since he is the only U.S. Attorney General in history to be held in contempt of Congress, when he refused to turn over Operation Fast and Furious documents to Congress. One of the most reckless law enforcement operations ever conducted by the Justice Department, it involved selling guns to Mexican drug cartels, and resulted in the death of a U.S. border patrol agent, Brian Terry, as well as hundreds of Mexican citizens.
Under Holder’s watch at the DOJ Civil Rights Division, more than half of all the lawyers hired were chosen from four radical, anti-American organizations: the ACLU, National Council of La Raza, NAACP, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky outlined in their 2014 book, “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”
Additionally, the Justice Department under Holder, and now Loretta Lynch, has one of the worst records before the U.S. Supreme Court, losing significantly more cases than either of the Bush or Clinton Departments of Justice. “In most administrations, the department wins about 70 percent of the cases before the Supreme Court; Mr. Holder’s department has a losing record and has lost at least nine cases 9-0–even with Obama appointees Elena Kagen and Sonia Sotomayor on the court,” wrote Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, in a review of “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”
Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a records request with the California Legislature Joint Rules Committee seeking to examine legislative records regarding the state’s employment of former Obama U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. The record request includes:
All contracts between the California Legislature and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. or Covington and Burling.
All communications between the California Legislature and former U. S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. or Covington and Burling about the Legislature’s retention of Holder and/or Covington and Burling.
“Judicial Watch’s records request is designed to expose how California state legislators are wasting tax dollars to take care of another corrupt politician – Eric Holder – under the guise of resisting the rule of law on immigration and other matters,” stated Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “His record at the Clinton and Obama Justice Departments demonstrates a willingness to bend the law in order to protect his political patrons.”
The hiring of Eric Holder by the California Legislature confirms a lack of confidence in Xavier Becerra by Gov. Brown and Democrats in the Legislature–which must be quite humiliating for Becerra, especially after his promise to uphold California’s “progressive” policies on immigration, Obamacare, energy, and criminal justice. “If you want to take on a forward-leaning state that is prepared to defend its rights and interests, then come at us,” Becerra said, directing his comment to Trump. Choosing Holder also reiterates the anti-American, anti-Constitution, anti-religion movement of Marxists in America, but particularly in California. The biggest obstacle standing between Marxism and Marxist domination of the world is America, and the U.S. Constitution. And standing between a Marxist takeover of America is California – only when California is destroyed can Marxists proceed.
Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies
by Michelle Malkin
Editorial Reviews
In her shocking new book, Malkin digs deep into the records of President Obama's staff, revealing corrupt dealings, questionable pasts, and abuses of power throughout his administration.
From the Inside Flap
The era of hope and change is dead....and it only took six months in office to kill it.
Never has an administration taken office with more inflated expectations of turning Washington around. Never have a media-anointed American Idol and his entourage fallen so fast and hard. In her latest investigative tour de force, New York Times bestselling author Michelle Malkin delivers a powerful, damning, and comprehensive indictment of the culture of corruption that surrounds Team Obama's brazen tax evaders, Wall Street cronies, petty crooks, slum lords, and business-as-usual influence peddlers. In Culture of Corruption, Malkin reveals:
* Why nepotism beneficiaries First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are Team Obama's biggest liberal hypocrites--bashing the corporate world and influence-peddling industries from which they and their relatives have benefited mightily
* What secrets the ethics-deficient members of Obama's cabinet--including Hillary Clinton--are trying to hide
* Why the Obama White House has more power-hungry, unaccountable "czars" than any other administration
* How Team Obama's first one hundred days of appointments became a litany of embarrassments as would-be appointee after would-be appointee was exposed as a tax cheat or had to withdraw for other reasons
* How Obama's old ACORN and union cronies have squandered millions of taxpayer dollars and dues money to enrich themselves and expand their power
* How Obama's Wall Street money men and corporate lobbyists are ruining the economy and helping their friends In Culture of Corruption, Michelle Malkin lays bare the Obama administration's seamy underside that the liberal media would rather keep hidden.
• ISBN-10: 1596981091
• ISBN-13: 978-1596981096
Michelle Malkin
No Shady Banking Buddy Left Behind
First Lady Michelle Obama's latest overseas jaunt is getting all the headlines. But President Obama's money-grubbing junket to Chicago may cost taxpayers far more in the long run. With his Gaultier-clad wife sashaying around the Spanish seaside, the lonely fundraiser-in-chief returned to Illinois to take care of some birthday-week business. Job One: Filling the Senate campaign coffers of his corruption-tainted political protege Alexi Giannoulias.
Mission accomplished. Obama's Thursday afternoon campaign event for Giannoulias, the beleaguered state treasurer of Illinois, reportedly raked in $1 million. Lagging behind his GOP opponent, liberal Republican Rep. Mark Kirk, Giannoulias has coveted one-on-one, grip-and-grin time with Obama for months. In addition to the cash, photo-ops and video of the Obama fundraising event that Giannoulias will milk from now until Election Day, the White House has dispatched Vice President Joe Biden, White House senior adviser David Axelrod and White House campaign management guru David Plouffe to boost Giannoulias' bid. Plouffe proclaimed Democrats "all in" for Giannoulias, whom he described as "a great progressive champion."
Obama gave his own personal seal of ethical approval, telling deep-pocketed donors this week: "I appreciate his strong sense of advocacy for ordinary Americans. You
can trust him -- you can count on him." Uh-huh. And I've got a bridge to Hope and Change to sell you.
What would Giannoulias know about "ordinary Americans"? Giannoulias, 34, befriended Obama during pickup basketball games with an elite group that also included Michelle Obama's brother, Craig; Chicago edu-crat Arne Duncan (now Education Secretary); and hedge fund manager John Rogers (the ex-husband of the Obamas' ex-White House social secretary, Desiree Rogers). He spread his wealth and influence around early and often to support Obama's fledgling political career. He pitched in $7,000 in 2003-2004 to Obama's Illinois State Senate bids. He hosted fundraisers for Obama's U.S. Senate campaign in 2004 and for his presidential campaign in 2007.
Where'd the cash come from? Giannoulias' Greek immigrant family founded Chicago-based Broadway Bank, a now-defunct financial institution that loaned tens of millions of dollars to convicted mafia felons and faced bankruptcy after decades of engaging in risky, high-flying behavior. It's the place where Obama parked his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign funds. And it's the same place where a mutual friend of Obama and Giannoulias -- convicted Obama fundraiser/slum lord Tony Rezko -- used to bounce nearly $500,000 in bad checks written to Las Vegas casinos. This week, the Chicago Sun-Times revealed an additional $22.75 million Broadway Bank loan to a Rezko-owned business in 2006. Giannoulias held an ownership stake in the bank at the time.
Giannoulias served as Broadway Bank vice president and senior loan officer for four years. According to the Chicago Tribune, during Giannoulias' tenure, some $27 million of Broadway Bank's funny money went to mob crooks Michael "Jaws" Giorango and Demitri Stavropoulos. Giorango is a hustler who fronted a nationwide prostitution ring and was sentenced to six months in prison; Stavropoulos is behind bars for operating a multistate bookmaking ring. Giorango ran the $400-an-hour call girl operation out of high-rise luxury apartments in Chicago with the infamous "Gold Coast Madam," Rose Laws. Giorango and Stavropoulos used their Broadway Bank loans to start their own risky lending business for nontraditional borrowers unable to secure traditional bank financing.
Despite Giorango's criminal record exposed by the Tribune in 2004, Broadway Bank approved massive mortgages for him. Giannoulias' brother, Demetris, explained that as a "relationship bank," Broadway wouldn't just throw someone under the bus because of a "bad article." Instead, the bank went ahead and rubber-stamped a September 2005 loan for $3.4 million to buy a 32-unit Los Angeles apartment complex. The application falsely stated that the borrower, Giorango, had "not been convicted of a felony." Giannoulias oversaw the servicing of such shady loans totaling $11 million. Remember: He was no low-level staffer. He was, as he reminded supporters when he needed to deflect attention away from his youth, top management at Broadway Bank.
In January 2010, the bank entered a consent decree with federal and Illinois state regulators. It required Broadway Bank "to raise tens of millions in capital, stop paying dividends to the family without regulatory approval, and hire an outside party to evaluate the bank's senior management." The city's former inspector general blasted Giannoulias and his family for tapping $70 million worth of dividends in 2007 and 2008 as the real estate crash loomed. Broadway Bank was sitting on an estimated $250 million in bad loans. In late April, federal regulators shut it down. Cost to taxpayers: an estimated $390 million. Giannoulias refused to drop out of the race -- and instead used the company failure to argue that it made him (SET ITAL) more (END ITAL) qualified to serve in office: "I have a renewed vigor and a new perspective on just how horrible it is out there for so many people."
President Obama agrees: Abysmal failure should be rewarded with promotion. He's leaving no shady banking buddy behind.
BARACK OBAMA: Was he America’s first closet Communist president?
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2019/05/karin-mcquilan-barack-obama-and-his.html
Obama choose Communists and Marxists for the highest, most powerful positions in our land, including his closest political advisors, and his head of the CIA. These facts are not in dispute. Most are openly admitted by the people in question, as necessary damage control. Our press chooses not to report them.
Professor Paul Kengor has extensively researched the Chicago communists whose progeny include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power.
THE OBAMA MARXIST-MUSLIM BANKSTER-FUNDED THIRD TERM for life:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/03/obamas-marxism-still-hankering-for.html
"Cold War historian Paul Kengor goes deeply into Obama's communist background in an article in American Spectator, "Our First Red Diaper Baby President," and in an excellent Mark Levin interview. Another Kengor article describes the Chicago communists whose younger generation include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power." Karin McQuillan
*
"We know that Obama and his inner circle have set up a war room in his D.C. home to plan and execute resistance to the Trump administration and his legislative agenda. None of these people care about the American people, or the fact that Trump won the election because millions of people voted for him."
Patricia McCarthy / AMERICAN THINKER.com
A liberal Swiss billionaire known for meddling in U.S. elections has funneled millions of dollars to former attorney general Eric Holder's effort to redraw electoral maps in favor of Democrats, newly obtained documents reveal.
Swiss Billionaire Gave Millions to Eric Holder’s Partisan Gerrymandering Group
Hansjörg Wyss (left) with Roz Zander and Michael Bloomberg / Getty ImagesHayden Ludwig • May 6, 2021 5:00 am
A liberal Swiss billionaire known for meddling in U.S. elections has funneled millions of dollars to former attorney general Eric Holder's effort to redraw electoral maps in favor of Democrats, newly obtained documents reveal.
The Berger Action Fund, the advocacy arm of Swiss megadonor Hansjörg Wyss's Wyss Foundation, passed $3 million to the National Redistricting Action Fund (NRAF) between 2018 and 2020. The NRAF is the 501(c)(4) lobbying arm of Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a self-described "centralized hub for executing a comprehensive redistricting strategy" to give Democrats an edge in congressional races.
Holder, who chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, launched the group in 2017 with the goal of electing Democratic majorities in state legislatures in order to control the 2021-2022 redistricting process. While Holder has claimed his group wants to create "fair maps," the committee's stated goal in its IRS forms is "to build a comprehensive plan to favorably position Democrats for the redistricting process through 2022."
Holder has repeatedly decried the influence of foreign money in U.S. politics, even comparing Russian interference in the 2016 election to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. In a 2017 Washington Post op-ed about starting the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, Holder wrote, "There is nothing more fundamental to the well-being of our nation than the right to cast a ballot in fair elections, free from foreign interference." And in October 2020 he told Bloomberg that "we need to be prepared" for foreign "attempts to interfere with our electoral system."
Wyss's contributions reveal that the foreign billionaire supplied as much as 40 percent of the NRAF's total funding in 2017-2018 and 24 percent in 2018-2019, making him one of the largest donors to the organization in those years. Wyss is a Swiss citizen who stated that he does not hold permanent U.S. residency in 2014 and recently declined to tell the New York Times if he is an American citizen.
In 2016, the Daily Caller reported that Wyss had made $41,000 in illegal contributions to Democratic political action committees in violation of the federal government's strict ban on foreign support for U.S. political campaigns. Wyss's substantial spending through his nonprofits, while legal, raises serious ethical concerns about the far-reaching impact of foreign "dark money" in American elections and redistricting processes.
But Wyss has donated over $650 million since 2002 to environmentalist and left-wing groups through the Wyss Foundation. The New Venture Fund, a dark money nonprofit managed by the consulting firm Arabella Advisors, has received roughly $56.5 million from the Wyss Foundation since 2007.
Wyss's Berger Action Fund has passed at least $12.4 million to Arabella’s Sixteen Thirty Fund since 2010. The donations help fund the group's Hub Project, a campaign run by veteran Democratic Party operatives to help liberal groups with messaging strategy. The Hub Project is credited with doing "remarkable damage" to former president Donald Trump's reputation among Wisconsin voters in the 2020 election and helping Democrats defeat Republicans on "health care, taxes and the economy" in the 2018 midterms.
Wyss's groups have also supported Democratic-aligned nonprofits such as Priorities USA, the League of Conservation Voters, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund. The Wyss Foundation boasted it gave $1 million to leftist groups for "civic participation" just prior to the 2016 election.
Wyss and the Wyss Foundation declined to comment to the Washington Free Beacon on his funding of partisan groups involved in U.S. elections, particularly as it concerns his opaque immigration status. The Berger Action Fund, which does not maintain a website, could not be reached for comment.
Poll: Nearly 6-in-10 Americans Worry Mail-In Voting Will Spike Voter Fraud
1,821JASON REDMOND
Nearly 6-in-10 American likely voters say they are worried that nationwide mail-in voting will increase voter fraud, a new poll reveals.
The latest Rasmussen Reports survey of 1,000 likely voters finds that about 58 percent of Americans, or almost 6-in-10, are concerned over a spike in voter fraud should there be nationwide mail-in voting for upcoming elections.
A plurality of 36 percent of Americans said they are “very concerned” about more voter fraud because of mail-in voting, and another 22 percent said they are “somewhat concerned.” A minority of 39 percent said they are not concerned that mail-in voting will lead to more voter fraud.
Close to 80 percent of Republican voters said they are concerned about more voter fraud spurred by mail-in voting, along with more than half of swing voters. A majority of Democrats, 53 percent, said they are not concerned with voter fraud.
Federal Data: 28.4M Mail-In Ballots Have Gone Missing Since 2012 Electionhttps://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/20/federal-data-28-4m-mail-in-ballots-have-gone-missing-since-2012-election/ …
Feds: 28.4M Mail-In Ballots Have Gone Missing Since 2012 Election
About 28.4 million mail-in ballots went missing in the last four election cycles dating back to 2012, federal data reveals.
breitbart.com
83
87 people are talking about this
Working and middle-class Americans are much more likely to be concerned with voter fraud from mail-in voting than wealthy Americans.
For example, more than 6-in-10 likely voters earning less than $30,000 a year said they are concerned about voter fraud, as well as 58 percent of voters earning $30,000 to $50,000 a year and 63 percent of voters earning $50,000 to $100,000 a year.
Among those earning more than $200,000 a year, though, only 35 percent said they are concerned about voter fraud, while 65 percent said they are not concerned.
The survey comes as elected Democrats are lobbying for nationwide mail-in voting for the November presidential election — a move that would potentially deliver ballots to an estimated 24 million ineligible voters. The plan is being bankrolled by organizations funded by billionaire George Soros.
Voters were surveyed from April 14 to 15 with a margin of error +/- 3 percentage points.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Obama: DACA Illegal Aliens Deserve Amnesty During Coronavirus Crisis
Former President Barack Obama says the time is now, during the Chinese coronavirus crisis, to provide amnesty to about 3.5 million illegal aliens who are enrolled and eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
While about ten million Americans have filed for unemployment in just three weeks, Obama took to Twitter to call for an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens in the midst of the coronavirus crisis.
“Dreamers have contributed so much to our country, and they are risking their lives fighting on the frontlines of this pandemic,” Obama said. “They deserve permanent immigration status and a pathway to citizenship—as they are Americans in every way but on paper.”
Center for Immigration Studies Research Director Steven Camarotta has noted that DACA illegal aliens make up about 0.2 percent of the nation’s nearly 15 million healthcare workers. In New York, where a staggering number of DACA illegal aliens reside, they still only account for about 0.2 percent of the state’s healthcare workers, according to Camarotta.
Obama’s lobbying for a DACA amnesty in the middle of the coronavirus crisis comes as House Democrats — including Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Joaquin Castro (D-TX), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — have sent a letter to the Trump administration demanding DACA illegal aliens have their work authorizations extended.
“Support of DACA recipients during the current pandemic is particularly critical as over 200,000 DACA recipients are in occupations and industry groups that render them ‘essential critical infrastructure workers,’ according to DHS guidance,” the House Democrats wrote in their letter.
A DACA amnesty would put more citizen children of illegal aliens — known as “anchor babies” — on federal welfare, as Breitbart News reported, while American taxpayers would be left potentially with a $26 billion bill.
Additionally, about one-in-five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one-in-seven would go on Medicaid.
Any plan to give amnesty to DACA illegal aliens that does not also include provisions to halve legal immigration levels — the U.S. admits about 1.2 million legal immigrants a year at the expense of America’s working and middle class — would give amnestied illegal aliens the opportunity to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country.
At the southern border, a DACA amnesty has the potential to trigger a border surge that could triple the number of illegal aliens pouring through the border. Since DACA’s inception, more than 2,100 recipients of the program have been kicked off because they were found to either be criminals or gang members.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Obama Quietly Erasing Borders (Article)
Article Link:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=240045
WIKILEAKS EXPOSES THE OBAMA CONSPIRACY TO FLOOD AMERICAN WITH DEM VOTING ILLEGALS
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/wikileaks-exposed-obamas-la-raza-open.html
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
Obama Funds the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA “The Race”… now calling itself UNIDOSus.
"This is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA $800,000.00 in March of 2009!
Previous generations of immigrants did not believe they were racially superior to Americans. That is the view of La Raza Cosmica, by Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico’s former education minister and a presidential candidate. According to this book, republished in 1979 by the Department of Chicano Studies at Cal State LA, students of Scandinavian, Dutch and English background are dullards, blacks are ugly and inferior, and those “Mongols” with the slanted eyes lack enterprise. The superior new “cosmic” race of Spaniards and Indians is replacing them, and all Yankee “Anglos.” LLOYD BILLINGSLEY
DO A SEARCH FOR ERIC HOLDER AND "Operation Fast and Furious,"
GLOBALIST BARACK OBAMA AND NANCY PELOSI’S CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY AND KEEP AMERICA FLOODED WITH DEM VOTING ILLEGALS
https://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2018/12/nancy-pelosi-and-obama-soros-globalist.html
“One of the most disgusting things to come out of the Obama administration was "Operation Fast and Furious," where members of the Department of Alcohol, To bacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed illegal gun sales to go through – commonly referred to as "gun walking" – in order to track buyers and sellers they believed were connected to the Mexican drug cartels. Nearly 2,000 firearms were sold and were eventually found throughout the United States and Mexico. Two of them were used to kill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.” BETH BAUMANN
The “zero tolerance” program was dismantled by Attorney General Erc Holder once it had successfully cut the transit of migrants by roughly 95 percent. Initially, officials made 140,000 arrests per year in the mid-2000s, but the northward flow dropped so much that officials only had to make 6,000 arrests in 2013, according to a 2014 letter by two pro-migration Senators, Sen. Jeff Flake and John McCain.
Jose Angel Gutierrez, professor, University of Texas, Arlington and founder of La Raza Unida political party screams at rallies: "We have an aging white America. They are d ying. They are s hitting in their pants with fear! I love it! We have got to eliminate the g ringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to k ill him!"
Previous generations of immigrants did not believe they were racially superior to Americans. That is the view of La Raza Cosmica, by Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico’s former education minister and a presidential candidate. According to this book, republished in 1979 by the Department of Chicano Studies at Cal State LA, students of Scandinavian, Dutch and English background are dullards, blacks are ugly and inferior, and those “Mongols” with the slanted eyes lack enterprise. The superior new “cosmic” race of Spaniards and Indians is replacing them, and all Yankee “Anglos.” LLOYD BILLINGSLEY/ FRONTPAGE ma
THE OBAMA - BIDEN - HOLDER AGENDA:
Concrete Evidence of the Continuing Plunge in Both Civil and Criminal Immigration Enforcement
By Dan Cadman
CIS Immigration Blog
Two recent reports from Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reflect the continued erosion of immigration enforcement under the Obama administration.
On January 20, TRAC reported that criminal prosecution for immigration offenses fell 22.3 percent from November 2014 to November 2015, and more than 36 percent over the course of five years, excluding magistrate court (which deals exclusively with petty offenses).
The following day, TRAC announced that "ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] Detainer Use Stabilizes Under Priority Enforcement Program". The Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) is the replacement to the Secure Communities Program mandated by Homeland Security Security Jeh Johnson as a part of the president's "executive actions" on immigration. It significantly restricts the ability of immigration agents to file detainers against aliens arrested by police on criminal charges.
I have no idea what TRAC means by "stabilizes". A quick look at Figure 1a of their report shows a more accurate state of affairs, if one considers the number of detainers being filed over the course of five years, from a high in April 2011, when Secure Communities became fully effective nationwide and kicked into high gear, versus October 2015. I would use other phrases: "plummeted" or "Dropped like a stone". Or, as my colleague Jessica Vaughan has noted, particularly in relation to detainers filed at county jails, where the lion's share of criminals of any stripes are held after being booked for offenses small and large: "a stunning free fall".
http://www.cis.org/cadman/concrete-evidence-continuing-plunge-both-civil-and-criminal-immigration-enforcement
With Biden in the White House, President Trump
predicted, China would “own the United States.”
There’s also something to Trump’s charge that the
Bidens are an “organized crime family.”
Biden Refuses to Discuss Family’s Legal Troubles: ‘I’m Proud of My Son’
JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
11 Dec 20205,244
2:05
C-SPAN
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Joe Biden is refusing to discuss the legal troubles of his son amid revelations that the Department of Justice is investigating the younger Biden’s “tax affairs.”
Biden, who has been declared president-elect by numerous media outlets, was asked after a press conference on Friday in Wilmington, Delaware, if his son, Hunter, “committed a crime.” The question was in regards to Hunter Biden’s recent admission that he had been informed by the United States Attorney of Delaware that there was an open investigation into his “tax affairs.”
Despite the topic dominating the news cycle in recent days, the former vice president refused to comment on the situation.
“I’m proud of my son,” Biden said, repeating a line he has employed since the story first broke.
While the exact nature of the U.S. Attorney investigation remains unclear, the revelations come more than a month after Fox News reported that Hunter Biden’s laptop had been seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of a money laundering probe.
The younger Biden has faced questions for some time over his business dealings. In September the Senate Finance and Homeland Security Committees released an extensive report detailing numerous instances in which Hunter Biden’s business dealings appeared to overlap with his father’s political influence.
Senate Republicans have pledged to continue investigating the matter once the new Congress opens session in January. Of particular interest for some congressional watchdogs are allegations, first reported by Breitbart News in October, that a top official from a Chinese energy firm offered to provide the Biden “family” a $5 million non-secured, forgivable loan.
The offer was discussed in an email sent to SinoHawk Holdings CEO Tony Bobulinski, a one-time business partner of Hunter Biden. Bobulinski has since begun cooperating with both congressional investigators and federal law enforcement on the topic.
JOE BIDEN: A DEDICATED SERVANT OF WALL STREET, THE RICH, AND BANKSTERS….
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/lawyer-joe-bidens-kleptocracy-joe-and.html
The Biden family is notorious for being the crookedest clan not only in Delaware, but in D.C. DANIEL GREENFILED, FELLOW, SHILLMAN JOURNALISM, FREEDOM CENTER
The Hunter Biden laptop unrolls two ragged threads. One is the descent of Joe Biden’s son into new depths of depravity and the other are the foreign investors who bought into Joe Biden Inc.
If they can buy an election for Biden, the theory is, they can buy it for anyone.
Oligarchies always have lots of money even when workers go hungry and lose their homes. And they get that money by seizing the centers of power and consuming the wealth of nations.
LAWYER JOE BIDEN’S LAWYER INFESTED SWAMP
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/12/joe-biden-nominated-lawyer-xavier.html
Like Hunter Biden, Becerra has zero experience, in his case with health and welfare issues, having focused on trade, immigration, and law enforcement while in his well-padded government jobs. He's very adept at corruption, though, with scandals everywhere he ever went.
There's undoubtedly a whole raft of scandals linked to his name because he's a big reason why California is what it's become. These scandals are just a sampling and a deep dive will undoubtedly reveal that he's more corruption than actual pol. It's like Joe Biden is surrounding himself with men like himself.
Report: Joe Biden’s Brother Under Federal Investigation for Role in Bankrupt Healthcare Firm
Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP Photo
10 Dec 20205,004
4:31
Joe Biden’s younger brother, James, is purportedly under federal investigation by the United States Attorney in the Western District of Pennsylvania for his role in a now-bankrupt healthcare firm.
On Wednesday, Politico reported that federal prosecutors “have been asking about James Biden’s dealings” with Americore Health, a company that operates rural hospitals .
James Biden, who worked for Americore between 2017 and 2019, supposedly received a personal loan from the $650,000 company before decreasing his day-to-day activities. The personal loan was given to James Biden for helping Americore secure an even bigger bridge loan from a hedge fund run by one of his associates, Michael Lewitt. Court documents, as well as former Americore executives, claim that James Biden convinced the firm’s leadership to sign off on both by promising he would be able to secure larger investments from Middle Eastern contacts thanks to his family’s name.
Americore, which filed for bankruptcy in late-2019, was raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) earlier this year as part of an ongoing probe into its finances and business practices. At the time, FBI agents also raided the home of Americore’s CEO, Grant White.
Even before raids, the company’s conduct had come under scrutiny after it was accused of fraud. In July 2019, Michael Frey and his business partner, Dr. Mohannad Azzam, filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming James Biden and Americore’s leadership had promised and failed to line up investors for their rural healthcare enterprise. The suit alleges, James Biden urged the two men to borrow $10 million from a hedge fund run by Lewitt, who was involved in the deal.
“The lawsuit takes direct aim at Biden, painting him as a con artist who uses his ties to his brother … to lure his victims,” the Knoxville News Sentinel reported in August 2019.
According to documents filed with the U.S. District Court, Frey and his wife developed a business model to take over rural hospitals and retrofit them to not only offer traditional hospital care, but also drug addiction and mental health treatment. After incorporating the enterprise as Diverse Medical Management, they brought on Azzam, “who contracted with nursing homes to provide medical care for seniors.”
The business model was lucrative enough that by 2017, Frey and Azzam were actively pitching it to investors and hospitals across the country. One investor particularly taken with the idea was Americore.
At the behest of Americore’s CEO, White, Frey and Azzam were urged to pitch their business plan to rural hospitals in Kentucky. It was at one such meeting the two men met James Biden, who identified himself as a “principal” at Americore.
Not long after their initial encounter, James Biden introduced the men to Lewitt, a hedge fund manager and well-known “credit strategist.” Around this time, Americore made plans to buy Diverse Medical for the sum of $7 million.
Despite the deal, Americore quickly fell behind on its scheduled payments to Frey and Azzam. It was then that James Biden and Lewitt, as detailed in the lawsuit, hatched a plan to oust White and sell Americore along with Diverse Medical to a third company called the Platinum Group. Frey and Azzam appear to have been uncomfortable with the turn the deal took, especially the notion of removing White. The men, though, went along with the plan after being told a payout was “imminent.”
“They repeatedly assured (Frey) that investment capital originating from and flowing through foreign entities was not only certain, but was imminent,” documents filed by Frey and Azzam’s attorney state.
James Biden, himself, is alleged to have tried to pacify the two men’s fears by leaning heavily on his family name and promising that their business model would “play an integral role in health care policy at the highest levels of the United States government.”
It is unclear if the purported investigation that the U.S. Attorney has into James Biden is directly connected to Frey and Azzam’s lawsuit.
Reports of a federal probe, however, come after Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s youngest son, released a statement on Wednesday admitting that his lawyers had been informed the U.S. Attorney in Delaware had opened an investigation into his “tax affairs.”
Hostile Takeover: Wall Street Assumes Command of Joe Biden Transition Team
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2020/11/joe-biden-i-need-secretary-of-treasury.html
Wall Street and the biggest U.S. banks,
after spending a fortune to unseat President
Trump, are getting key spots in Democrat Joe
Biden’s transition team that he has devised
before the presidential election is certified.
Many of the big banks with links to Biden
transition team members were major donors to the
former vice president.
James Biden, a Torture Ticket, Preventable Hospital Deaths, and an Investigation
Fri Dec 11, 2020
Front Page Magazine was about the only conservative site to have released this story before the election about the damage that Biden's brother did to rural hospitals.
After Americore took over the Ellwood City Medical Center, it racked up over 40 citations from the Department of Health. Cardiovascular services were cut, the wound unit was closed, and access to its MRI machines was sidelined.
In 2018, James Biden was renovating his Americore office and demanding expensive furniture as part of an office that was described as a “little shrine to him and his brother and Obama.”
Utilities threatened to turn off the gas and the water at Ellwood. Instruments weren’t being sterilized because there was no equipment, and the hospital couldn’t even afford to order tests.
Things got so bad at the hospital that hazardous waste was just piling up in garbage bags.
Hospital patients might have been able to get basic care and supplies, but the money wasn’t there. Meanwhile, James Biden had allegedly made off with $650,000.
Now, there's mention that the investigation is reaching James Biden.
In addition to the probe into Hunter Biden, federal authorities in the Western District of Pennsylvania are conducting a criminal investigation of a hospital business in which Joe Biden’s brother James was involved. Federal officials have asked questions about James Biden's role in the business, according to a second person with direct knowledge of that investigation, who said it remains ongoing.
Now we'll see if James Biden is an untouchable as he claimed to be.
Last year, two medical firms sued, among others, James Biden, claiming that, "millions of dollars in funds may have been taken by these defendants outside of the ordinary course of business."
When there were concerns about the government, the message was, “Jim told me. Don’t worry every time someone threatens to sue you you’re with us now nobody is gonna touch You,”
After they sued Biden and his partners, they received an envelope filled with "blood-stained currency from a Middle Eastern country" linked to terrorists and a "torture ticket" resulting in an FBI investigation.
Rep. Jim Banks Accuses Biden of Tax Avoidance ‘Hypocrisy’
In a March 25 letter to the president, Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Banks called out Joe Biden’s tax avoidance “hypocrisy.”
Republican Study Committee Chairman Representative Jim Banks asked President Joe Biden whether he would put his proverbial money where his mouth is in regard to the tax avoidance Biden himself publicly criticized.
During remarks on Biden’s infrastructure plan, the president complained “millions of Americans lost their jobs last year while the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their net worth increase by $4 trillion,” saying “it just goes to show you how distorted and unfair our economy has become.”
In the March 25 letter, Banks asked Biden whether he would address the “legally dubious tax strategy” he said the president and his wife used to skirt roughly $500,000 in payroll taxes. Banks pointed out “S-corporations” used on Biden’s 2017, 2018, and 2019 tax returns, in which “[Biden] and the First Lady sheltered over $13 million” from taxes designed to support Medicare and the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Banks wrote:
Press reports indicate that you both directed revenue from book royalties and speaking appearance fees into these two corporations avoiding self-employment payroll tax liabilities that would have flowed to America’s Medicare program that provides care to over 60 million seniors.
He then referenced a July 2019 article in the Wall Street Journal in which a Tax Policy Center analyst observed claimed: “there’s no reason for these [earnings] to be in an S-Corp — none, other than to save on self-employment tax.”
Breitbart News previously reported “on much of the income Joe and Jill Biden generated through the corporations they established to pay themselves—CelticCapri and Giacoppa are the names of the two so-called S-Corporations—they did not have to pay payroll taxes collected to fund Social Security and Medicare.”
Speaking to Fox News, Banks said “House Democrats used their oversight power to subpoena Trump for his tax returns, but they’ve completely ignored Joe Biden’s abuse of our tax code,” promising changes next year.
“When we take back the House in 2022,” Banks said, “Oversight [Committee] Republicans won’t forget about Biden’s legally dubious tax avoidance schemes.”
Banks said the issue shows that “Democrat hypocrisy is limitless” and their widely-publicized rhetoric on closing tax loopholes might not apply to everyone. “The ACA imposed higher taxes on millions of Americans, but not Joe Biden. He paid $121,000 less in ObamaCare taxes thanks to an obscure tax loophole. Talk about inside baseball,” Banks told the outlet.
“Joe Biden advocated for expanding Medicare, and is pushing to close tax loopholes and for a $3 trillion tax hike,” Banks continued. “At the same time, ‘Amtrak Joe’ made $13 million through speaking fees in just three years, then skimped over $500,000 from Medicare recipients through tax loopholes.”
In his letter, Banks closed with a pointed question for the president: “Do you intend to undo your hypocrisy and pay these taxes back to the American people?”
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now. TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
With Biden in the White House, President Trump predicted, China would “own the United States.” There’s also something to Trump’s charge that the Bidens are an “organized crime family.”
LLOYD BILLIONGSLEY
IMAGES OF JOE BIDEN’S MANSIONS:
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a33809100/joe-biden-real-estate-homes/
RIDING THE DRAGON: The Bidens' Chinese Secrets (Full Documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRmlcEBAiIs
CHINA’S OLD WHORE SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN, AMERICA’S BIGGEST WAR PROFITEER, WAS FIRST TO ENDORSE BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT. WONDER WHY???
As Glenn Bunting of the Los Angeles Times reported in 1997, Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum “has expanded his private business interests in China – to the point that his firm is now a prominent investor inside the communist nation.” In 1995, Dianne Feinstein became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “giving her a prominent platform for her efforts to support China’s trade privileges.”
As Ben Weingarten noted in the Federalist in 2018, Feinstein’s husband has “profited handsomely from the greatly expanded China trade she supported.” The senator also “served as a key intermediary between China and the U.S. government, while serving on committees whose work would be of keen interest to the PRC.”
For 20 years, through three election cycles, Feinstein maintained on her staff a Chinese spy who would even attend consular functions for the California Democrat. One wonders what the FBI knew, when they knew it, and what they did about it, if anything.
Other politicians with China business connections include Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, whose husband has conducted a series of deals in the Communist nation. Recall that Speaker Pelosi kept Eric Swalwell on the House Intelligence Committee even after his “PoonFang” liaisons with a Chinese spy (FEINSTEIN LONG EMPLOYED A CHINESE SPY).
Tucker Carlson Delivers a Monologue So Damning That President Trump Shares It, Includes Explosive Hunter Biden News
By Bonchie
The segment ends with an assertion that Joe Biden has been compromised, and that’s exactly correct. There hasn’t been a more China-friendly politician in the last 30 years than Biden. With his probable swearing-in on the horizon, the communists are rejoicing. That should tell you just how big a mistake it was to let him anywhere near the presidency.
Schweizer: ‘It’s Going to Be Business as Usual’ for Hunter’s Dealings
Video:
On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer said he reads President Biden’s statements about his son Hunter’s deals as a declaration that “it’s going to be business as usual in the Biden administration as far as these deals are concerned.”
Schweizer said, “Joe Biden has said there are going to be no sketchy overseas deals during his second term. Here’s the problem: He does not believe that the early deals that Hunter was involved in, the China deal, Burisma, he’s never described those as sketchy. So, I read that as saying, it’s going to be business as usual in the Biden administration as far as these deals are concerned.”
THE BANKSTER OLIGARCHY THAT DESTROYED AMERICA
COVERS THE FRADULENT 'POPULIST' HOAX STAGED BY OBAMA, CLINTON AND BIDEN EVEN AS THEY SERVED WALL STREET BANKSTERS AND THE SUPER RICH... AND FILLED THEIR POCKETS DOING SO.
Chris Hedges: How Republicans, Democrats, and the Media Have Weakened US Democracy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2jyzp09_g8
Fitton: America Needs to Know the Truth About Biden Family’s Corruption
PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images
3 Feb 2021262
4:51
The Biden scandals didn’t disappear when Joe Biden entered the Oval Office, as I wrote in this op-ed for The Washington Times:
A president takes office amidst charges of family corruption and shady business dealings with a country connected to interfering in the very election that put him in the White House. Sound familiar?
The false narrative that Democrats concocted to hobble the Trump administration four years ago is now the real deal with Joe Biden and his family. And unlike President Trump, who faced unprecedented institutional resistance and Deep State resistance, President Biden can likely count on the Justice Department and the media to allow him to escape meaningful scrutiny.
Judicial Watch recently started a petition at Change.org asking the Department of Justice immediately to appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden family dealings in China, Ukraine and other countries. There is substantial evidence, from documents and witness statements, that the Biden family, including President Joe Biden, may have been involved in criminal activity with foreign entities tied to Ukraine and China. In just a few days the petition has garnered nearly 200,000 signatures.
Judicial Watch uncovered documents that show even as far back as the Obama administration Russia-linked media in Ukraine were “trolling” Joe Biden over “his son’s business.” Mr. Biden’s son Hunter has acknowledged that he is the target of an FBI criminal investigation. Any investigation should involve alleged money laundering, influence peddling and tax violations among other shady activities.
A special counsel is required because the Justice Department and its FBI are conflicted in investigating any matters that could implicate the president and/or his immediate family in criminal activity. As Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said recently, “if there were ever circumstances that create a conflict of interest and call for a special counsel, that’s here.” Justice Department regulations that were abused to appoint a special counsel to harass then-President Trump actually do fairly apply to the Biden situation. A special counsel is required by Justice regulations when:
(a) That investigation or prosecution of that person or matter by a United States Attorney’s Office or litigating Division of the Department of Justice would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances; and
(b) That under the circumstances, it would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter.
The matter is urgent. Americans just learned that communist China was actively involved in the 2020 presidential election. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, in a letter transmitted to Congress, concluded that “based on all available sources of intelligence, with definitions consistently applied, and reached independent of political considerations or undue pressure — that the People’s Republic of China sought to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections.”
Chinese efforts to interfere in the 2020 election might have been better known before election days but for Deep State resistance. Intelligence Community Ombudsman Barry Zulauf found that CIA analysts were reluctant to reveal China’s malign actions because they were opposed to the Trump administration, and were “saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies.” In fact, “strong efforts” were made last summer to suppress analysts who wanted to expose the full range of Chinese efforts to swing the election to Mr. Biden.
We are already seeing China indirectly benefitting from Biden policies. Cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline will divert Canadian oil west to the petroleum-hungry People’s Republic. Re-entering the Paris Climate Agreement gives political cover to China’s excessively polluting dirty coal industry, in which Hunter Biden is heavily invested. Mr. Biden’s State Department on Day One removed a page on its web site that contained a comprehensive assessment of the threats China poses to the U.S. and its allies, and an emboldened Beijing slapped outrageous sanctions on outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and 27 other former Trump officials. Does China have corrupt leverage over President Biden?
Given the years of investigations costing millions of dollars to delve into fake Russia collusion accusations against Trump world, the American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
Exclusive — Sen. Bill Hagerty: ‘China Is Singing All the Way to the Bank’ Thanks to Joe Biden’s Policies
Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) told Breitbart News exclusively that the Chinese Communist Party is “singing all the way to the bank” thanks to President Joe Biden’s various policies in his first two weeks in office.
Hagerty, in an exclusive interview on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel, said that Biden’s orders closing down the Keystone XL pipeline and shutting down leases for drilling on federal lands embolden China and undermine the United States.
“Broadly look at what the Biden Administration is doing on energy,” Hagerty said. “By canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, Biden is giving a huge gift to China. Look at what it did to Canada. If Canada can’t move their oil through the XL pipeline, they’re going to sell it to China. Well, guess what? China now has a huge store of oil headed its way courtesy of the Biden administration. And this Paris Climate Accord that they want to get back into? That’s going to put an immediate burden on the U.S. economy. China is not going to have to comply anywhere in the near term. Theirs was the only economy that grew last year. Ours didn’t. They’re going to put more burden on us while China is singing all the way to the bank thanks to the Biden administration. So we have some real reasons to be concerned.”
The Chinese have another friend in Biden’s selection for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas Greenfield, Hagerty said. A speech that Greenfield gave to a Confucius Institute event in 2019 that surfaced last week saw her praising the Chinese Communist Party’s Belt and Road Initiative in Africa. Hagerty argued that CCP Belt and Road efforts compromised the man who would become the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, by trapping his native Ethiopia in debt.
“Look at this U.N. representative that they put forward, Linda Thomas Greenfield, she clearly doesn’t get it,” Hagerty said. “She’s praising China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Africa. Look no further than Ethiopia and what happened there with this Belt and Road Initiative. When Dr. Tedros was the health minister and the foreign minister, the Ethiopian government took billions of dollars in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. Then, when it was necessary, China had Dr. Tedros running the WHO and he stepped right up and parroted their line and helped cover up the pandemic when they wanted him to do it. This is textbook debt trap diplomacy, they’re using their influence for nefarious means, and I cannot imagine a U.N. representative who does not understand that.”
Asked about the speech and whether it could jeopardize Greenfield’s confirmation prospects in the U.S. Senate, where Democrats have a narrow majority in the 50-50 split chamber when Vice President Kamala Harris v0otes to break the tie, Hagerty said he thinks she could.
“I think this speech and that it’s come to light—given at a Confucius Institute no less, she was paid by the Chinese to give this speech—the naïveté that her position underscores is extremely disturbing and I think it’s going to make it very difficult for her to get confirmed,” Hagerty said. “If you think about 2019 as you mentioned, the whole world knew about China was doing with the Belt and Road. You and I talked about what they did in Sri Lanka with that deep water port. They put a tremendous amount of debt on a small country, Sri Lanka, built a second deep water port that the country didn’t need, they foreclosed on it before it was even finished and they never even moved the Chinese workers, they speak Chinese at that port right now, they operate under Chinese law, and it’s along one of the busiest most strategic shipping lanes in the world. They know what they’re doing. They’re going into these small countries and like I mentioned with Ethiopia and they’re pushing their influence. They’re putting a tremendous amount of debt, which gives them leverage. For her not to understand or see that is deeply concerning.”
While there are definitely policies, comments, and actions from Biden himself on down through several of his top administration officials signaling a softening towards Beijing, Hagerty did say there are some in the Biden administration, like Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who seem to understand the threat.
“It’s a mixed bag. I think Secretary Blinken does have a much more clear-eyed view about what’s happening than most members of the Biden administration,” Hagerty said. “He and I talked about this at length. He’s acknowledged Secretary Pompeo’s designation of the Chinese as committing genocide with the Uyghurs there. That’s correct. Secretary Blinken was right to acknowledge that. He was also right to acknowledge the Trump administration largely got it right on China. I was pleased at the inauguration, the Biden Administration invited the Taiwanese rep to come to the inauguration—that sent a strong message, even stronger frankly is sending the USS Teddy Roosevelt into the waters off of Taiwan to push back against Chinese military aggression there with the Taiwanese and that incredibly important ally there. But if you look at it more broadly, I don’t think Biden gets it. You look back to the campaign, he said ‘oh China is not our competition come on man!’”
Hagerty on Wednesday introduced a series of amendments to the budget resolution in the Senate, including some specifically targeting the CCP. He and his office are hoping for bipartisan support behind these measures, including ones that would “end the inappropriate classification of China by international organizations that gives China an advantage over America and enhance accountability at those organizations” and “ensure that the United States leads other nations in holding China accountable for engaging in genocide and crimes against humanity with respect to Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Province of China.” These are the first amendments Hagerty, a freshman senator just elected in November, has offered as a U.S. Senator. Others include protections for American workers from open borders and amnesty immigration policies, efforts to preserve former President Donald Trump’s wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, and support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
In his interview on Breitbart News Saturday, Hagerty again ripped the Biden administration for its energy orders, saying that they will empower the Chinese Communist Party
“The first and the most immediate concern is the fact that Biden is killing jobs. He’s killing American jobs at a time when we’re trying to recover from a pandemic-driven recession,” he said. “Who would do this? He’s doing exactly that. Energy independence was one of the biggest strategic victories of the Trump administration. I worked very hard to get the Japanese to invest in infrastructure to become an importer of U.S. energy. We would certainly want our allies to be utilizing U.S. energy rather than Russian energy or energy from other nations that don’t have our best interests at heart. That was a very powerful strategic tool for us, a very powerful strategic step. Biden wants to make us now dependent on nations again that don’t have our best interests at heart. He wants to make us energy dependent on foreign countries and wants to get us the oil we would otherwise be doing business here lowering our costs of doing business, lowering our output costs, lowering the cost of gas at the pump for American citizens—he wants to raise that price and send the benefit to China because the Chinese are going to get the oil that the Canadians will no longer be selling to us. This is ludicrous. It’s killing American jobs. It’s damaging our economy. It’s strengthening our strategic competitors and weakening us in the process.”
Overall, Hagerty said, the Biden Administration policies amount to an effort by the Democrats to again silence the so-called “forgotten man” that led to former President Donald Trump’s rise in 2016.
“It is just amazing. That’s why the Trump administration and our policies toward places like China, toward security, toward things like immigration, resonated so much within America and certainly within my home state of Tennessee,” Hagerty said. “The forgotten man, forgotten woman, the forgotten citizen has been extremely concerned about this. This amnesty program, not only is it unfair to our workers, it’s only going to invite more and more illegal immigration because they’re moving the wrong direction on border security as well. They’re just going to invite more of this cheating and more downward pressure on the American worker. This is absolutely a wrongheaded policy and as you say we’ve got this COVID pandemic to put behind us yet they’re focused on all of these policies. By encouraging and even creating an incentive for more people to flood in across that border rather than securing it, we will have an even harder time combatting the pandemic and getting out of it.”
LISTEN TO SEN. BILL HAGERTY ON BREITBART NEWS SATURDAY:
Tucker Carlson Delivers a Monologue So Damning That President Trump Shares It, Includes Explosive Hunter Biden News
By Bonchie | Dec 08, 2020 9:00 AM ET
AP Photo/Richard Drew
Tucker Carlson has always been known for his hard-hitting monologues, sometimes stretching 20 minutes into his show. And while some hit closer to home than others, last night’s was so impactful that Presides an explosive video that was eventually deleted from social media by China, and it exposes perhaps thent Trump himself shared it.
It involve most dangerous threat America faces.
(also see Amazing Video of Chinese Government Official Speaking to Group About Joe Biden Winning the Election)
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2020
If you watch the above clip, what you’ll see is a Beijing-based professor bragging about China’s ability to settle affairs with the United States in their favor. But it’s his admission that that’s only possible because the CCP has people placed he calls “old friends” in upper positions of power across the influence sectors in the country. He’s obviously talking about government inroads, but he also specifically mentions someone being the vice president at a major Wall Street firm. At another point, he notes an American woman who now has dual Chinese citizenship and lives part of the year in Beijing. Why that’s important is that the communist nation does not allow dual citizenship. You do the math on that.
Things got more damning, though. The professor goes on to talk specifically about President Trump and how he’s blown up China’s ability to control American interests and bend them in their favor. The trade war is specifically mentioned here, with it being noted that Wall Street “tried to help” but couldn’t do much because Trump held an adversarial position against the financial institutions in question. Unsurprisingly, we hear about how easy Barack Obama’s administration was to manipulate in comparison. The professor even brags about having so many people near the levers of power during that time, but they couldn’t “fix Trump” in his words.
That’s when things get really explosive, though. Carlson plays one final clip in which the professor, obviously relieved, says that now Joe Biden has been elected. That leads him to say that Trump has claimed Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, ran some kind of “global foundation.” He then makes a stunning admission that yes, the Chinese are the ones who funded that and that there are many “deals” in all of it.
As Carlson quips, now you know exactly why we the mainstream media and social media immediately sought to quash the Hunter Biden story with such force. The Chinese have compromised so many people at the top, including in our media structure, that the story simply couldn’t be allowed to live despite it being true. And keep in mind, if there was ever a video like this targeting Eric Trump or another Trump family member, for example, it would be the lead story on every network for months as proof of foreign interference.
The segment ends with an assertion that Joe Biden has been compromised, and that’s exactly correct. There hasn’t been a more China-friendly politician in the last 30 years than Biden. With his probable swearing-in on the horizon, the communists are rejoicing. That should tell you just how big a mistake it was to let him anywhere near the presidency.
Senate Committees Drop New Report on Hunter Biden, Alarming Connections to China
The Republican led Senate Finance and Homeland Security Committees published a new and lengthy report Tuesday evening further detailing national security concerns related to Hunter Biden's shady foreign dealings in China and Ukraine.
"The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (HSGAC) and the Senate Committee on Finance undertook this investigation into potential conflicts of interest, and the involvement of the Biden family in foreign business ventures while Joe Biden was vice president, following allegations that the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy could have been affected by Hunter Biden’s position on the board of Burisma, and that family members may have improperly sought to benefit from their relationship with the vice president," the report states.
The Committees found the relationship between the Biden family, through Hunter and former Vice President Joe Biden's brother James, is deeply connected to the Chinese Communist Party.
"Hunter Biden and Devon Archer engaged in numerous financial transactions with Chinese nationals who had deep connections to the Communist Chinese government. These Chinese nationals included Ye Jianming, founder of CEFC China Energy Co. Ltd (CEFC) and chairman of the board for its subsidiary, the China Energy Fund Committee (CE Fund). They also included Gongwen Dong, who was Ye Jianming’s associate and reportedly executed transactions for his companies. Ye’s connections to the Communist government are extensive and, as explained below, he has been previous affiliations with the People’s Liberation Army. Based on the information received by the Committees, Ye was also financially connected to Vice President Biden’s brother, James Biden. Thus, there exists a vast web of corporate connections and financial transactions between and among the Biden family and Chinese nationals," the report states. "Hunter Biden has extensive connections to Chinese businesses and Chinese foreign nationals that are linked to the Communist government. Those contacts bore financial fruit when his father was vice president and after he left office."
"The records acquired by the Committees show consistent, significant and extensive financial connections among and between Hunter Biden, James Biden, Sara Biden, Devon Archer, and Chinese nationals connected to the Communist regime and PLA as well as other foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds. These connections and the vast amount of money transferred among and between them don’t just raise conflicts of interest concerns, they raise criminal financial, counterintelligence and extortion concerns. The Committees will continue to evaluate the evidence in their possession," the report concludes.
Meanwhile, a Chinese professor in Beijing boasted this week that the Chinese Communist Party now has connections at the highest levels and within the most elite circles of American government.
As Trump Predicted, Under Biden China Owns the United States
What that means for America’s patriotic movement.
Fri Feb 19, 2021
On February 11, Joe Biden announced sanctions on Burma for a recent coup in that nation, also known as Myanmar. “The military must relinquish power they’ve seized and demonstrate respect for the will of the people of Burma as expressed in their November 8 election,” Biden said. For the current occupant of the White House, first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, that was something of a departure.
During a political career of nearly 50 years, it’s hard to find the Delaware Democrat urging China’s ruling Communist Party to respect the will of the people and hold free elections. As they made clear at Tiananmen square in 1989, the people of China want freedom, democracy, and human rights. The Communist regime deployed massive military force against the people, but for Joe Biden that proved no object to China’s admission to the World Trade Organization.
As the Black Book of Communism and other studies confirm, China’s Communist regime has murdered scores of millions, but American politicians demanded no accounting, or punishment of those responsible, as a condition of WTO admission and trade privileges. Neither did they require free multi-party elections, or self-determination for Tibet, as a condition of joining the WTO.
Access to the American market was supposed to make China more peaceful, but the regime became more repressive and expansionist. On the other hand, American politicians made plenty of money. Prominent among them is Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a regular guest of the PRC since the 1970s and a staunch advocate for China’s most favored nation status.
As Glenn Bunting of the Los Angeles Times reported in 1997, Feinstein’s husband Richard Blum “has expanded his private business interests in China – to the point that his firm is now a prominent investor inside the communist nation.” In 1995, Dianne Feinstein became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “giving her a prominent platform for her efforts to support China’s trade privileges.”
As Ben Weingarten noted in the Federalist in 2018, Feinstein’s husband has “profited handsomely from the greatly expanded China trade she supported.” The senator also “served as a key intermediary between China and the U.S. government, while serving on committees whose work would be of keen interest to the PRC.”
For 20 years, through three election cycles, Feinstein maintained on her staff a Chinese spy who would even attend consular functions for the California Democrat. One wonders what the FBI knew, when they knew it, and what they did about it, if anything.
Other politicians with China business connections include Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, whose husband has conducted a series of deals in the Communist nation. Recall that Speaker Pelosi kept Eric Swalwell on the House Intelligence Committee even after his “PoonFang” liaisons with a Chinese spy.
The PRC’s biggest American asset is surely Joe Biden. He acquired the China beat in 2012 on the recommendation of National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, a failed Fannie Mae lobbyist and behind-the-scenes operator for the “composite character” David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
Biden routed the China trade through son Hunter, a frequent flyer on Air Force Two. Hunter’s laptop was the equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s private server, enabling the vice president to avoid scrutiny. The FBI had Hunter’s laptop but by all indications FBI bosses believed that, as Comey said of Hillary Clinton, no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges against Joe Biden’s son, especially with the “Big Guy” running for president. The New York Post broke the story, but the Democrat-media-tech axis promptly banned the October surprise.
Joe Biden is also on record that the Chinese Communists are “not bad folks,” and “not competition for us.” So no surprise that Biden turns a blind eye to China’s repressions and beats up on Burma, a nation that poses no threat to the United States. In effect, Joe Biden serves as governor general of Americachukuo, China’s North American economic zone.
With Biden in the White House, President Trump
predicted, China would “own the United States.”
There’s also something to Trump’s charge that the
Bidens are an “organized crime family.”
In December, Joe Biden claimed nobody in his family would be involved in any business that even appears in conflict with the presidency and the government. As Miranda Devine of the New York Post reports, it turns out that Hunter Biden still holds a 10 percent share of the Chinese firm BHR partners and is thus “still in business with the Chinese Communist Party.”
The performance of Joe “America Last” Biden and China-compliant Democrats brings clarity to the patriotic movement now in place and growing. At least 74 million patriots are part of an independence movement that seeks to preserve rights under the U.S. Constitution.
Those rights are now at risk, as the Democrat demolition squad seeks to erase the nation’s history. To adapt Milan Kundera, the struggle of the patriotic movement against the America-Last regime is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Finally, Polybius’ link of tyrannic ambition to mediocre politicians who “hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits,” describes Biden to a T. Biden is a long-time senator with few legislative achievements he still will own, a vicious pit-bull on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he shamelessly demagogued Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, a plagiarizer and unseemly harasser of women, a two-time loser in his bid for the presidency, a fabulist and grifter who monetized the office of Vice President to enrich his family, and a lightweight so light that his own boss, Barack Obama, said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Only a pandemic, disruptive lock-downs, and the Democrat primary threat of socialist Bernie Sanders––along with a probably fraudulent election, and a groveling media running interference–– could get such a meritless mediocrity into the Oval Office.
A Blueprint for Tyranny
A new administration leverages street-violence for political gain.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The vulnerability of political freedom and popular sovereignty to tyranny has been a constant theme in political philosophy for 2500 years. It profoundly influenced the creators of the Constitution, an important purpose of which is to forestall the tyranny that destroys political freedom and citizen rule. In the writings of Classical philosophers and historians the Founders could see the blueprint for such a tyranny––one we have seen unfolding in the last few decades, and accelerating in the policies of the current administration.
The Greek historian Polybius in the second century B.C. laid out how a democracy degenerates into tyranny:
So when [the rich] begin to hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits, they begin to seduce and corrupt the people in every possible way, and thus ruin their estates. The result is that through their senseless craving for prominence they stimulate among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them, and then the rule of democracy is transformed into government by violence and strong-arm methods. By this time the people have become accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and their prospects of winning a livelihood depend upon the property of their neighbors, and as soon as they find a leader who is sufficiently ambitious and daring . . . they introduce a regime based on violence.
Many of these preconditions already exist in our country. Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, ambitious politicians of both parties have “stimulate[d] among the masses both an appetite for bribes and the habit of receiving them.” We call them “entitlements” rather than “bribes,” funded not by violently seizing the property of the rich, but by annually redistributing $1.6 trillion of the wealth of the upper middle class and the rich through the federal income tax. Indeed, the top one percent of all earners pays 40% of income taxes. The modern update of ancient “bribes” also comprises massive borrowing and electronically printing money. These practices have created nearly $27 trillion in government debt, five trillion more than GDP. The tyrants of Polybius’ day redistributed the wealth of the rich; today we redistribute the future wealth of the young and unborn who will be stuck with the bill.
And this largess will increase dramatically if the current administration successfully passes into law several new mechanisms for redistributing wealth:
- $1.9 trillion America Rescue Plan
- $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan
- $1.8 trillion American Families Plan
- $1 trillion Green New Deal for Cities
- $180 billion Green New Deal for Public Housing
- $15 trillion over 15 years Thrive Act
Most of this money will be spent on various transfers to voters, and subsidies to favored businesses and feckless state governments that run their own redistribution engines.
As for “government by violence and strong-arm methods,” modern tyranny for decades has relied on de Tocqueville’s “soft despotism,” an insidious coercion through a regulatory regime that Tocqueville predicted, one which “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.” All the money to be redistributed will come with a plethora of such intrusive regulations from the agencies managing it. These rules and regulations limit citizen freedom in numerous ways, from what they can do with their own property to how they run their own businesses, all accompanied by fines and fees that extract even more revenue.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, however, we saw another form of “strong-arm methods.” The politicizing of the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ, along with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation–– agencies with coercive investigative powers backed by military-level lethal force–– produced the tyrannical bullying of several members of Trump’s administration, most egregiously General Michael Flynn. Meanwhile, old-fashioned physical violence and intimidation in the streets dogged Trump’s political rallies, and even followed Trump supporters to restaurants and other public venues.
Just as Biden’s redistributive ambitions have gone far beyond what passes for “normal,” the violence in the streets last year exploded to levels not seen since the Sixties. Led by Antifa and Black Lives Matter, these “peaceful protestors” looted, burned, and vandalized cities across the country, the mayhem mysteriously abating in time for the election. Billions of dollars in property damage and scores of killed and wounded were the toll. Just the threat of such violence undoubtedly intimidated the judge and jurors in the Derek Chauvin trial. Why else wouldn’t the judge approve a change in venue, or sequester the jurors?
Violence is now the trump card in daily politics and culture. Corporations have gone “woke,” sending millions of dollars to Black Lives Matter and promoting their “systemic racism” lie. City governments and public school districts must factor in the chance of violent protests in their policy decisions. Even worse, the principle of equality before the law, a bedrock of political freedom, has been abandoned for political favoritism, in part because authorities are wary of igniting violence. Derek Chauvin was convicted of two murder charges, decisions not even close to being beyond a reasonable doubt. But the unidentified DC cop who murdered a protestor at the Capitol on January 6––a woman veteran who was not threatening the officer’s, or anybody’s, life––has not even suffered professional sanction, let alone an indictment and trial.
Violence for me, but not for thee.
Worse yet, Antifa has openly said that their violence is a tool of intimidation in the pursuit of political goals. CrimetheInc., an Antifa ally, has bragged that the outcome of the Chauvin trial was due to the street violence. It goes on to make explicit this link between violence and political aims: “You put yourself in a weaker bargaining position by spelling out from the beginning the least it would take to appease you. It’s smarter to appear implacable: So you want to come to terms? Make us an offer. In the meantime, we’ll be here blocking the freeway and setting things on fire.” This tactic is exactly what Hitler instructed his Sudetenland Nazi stooge, Konrad Henlein, to do in negotiations with the Czech government in 1938: “We must always demand so much that we cannot be satisfied.” What “satisfied” the Nazis was the destruction of Czechoslovakia.
What is disturbingly different from the Sixties, moreover, about last year’s violence is that the Democrat establishment has not just tolerated the violence, but often encouraged and promoted it––just as Representative Maxine Waters did during the Chauvin trial when she incited protestors to get “confrontational” if the wrong verdict was given. Apprehended rioters were rarely charged or tried, and police forces were ordered to stand down, or forbidden to use crowd-control tools. Many mayors seemed to embrace the philosophy of Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings, who during the riots in 2015 told the press, “We gave them [rioters] space to destroy.”
As Daniel Henninger suggests, this tactical use of violence may be why the Biden administration has not even tried to make a deal by compromising with Republicans, despite the Democrats’ razor-thin margin in the House and Senate, or the lack of a popular mandate. Instead, the administration wants to bully Americans into accepting their policies:
Mr. Biden is no street anarchist, but the political “change” confronting Americans after more than a year living with Covid—constant antipolice protests, migrants streaming across the southern border, D.C. statehood, blowing up the legislative filibuster, packing the Supreme Court and some $6 trillion in new federal spending—is a lot of nonnegotiable bulldozer.
Finally, Polybius’ link of tyrannic ambition to mediocre politicians who “hanker after office, and find that they cannot achieve it through their own efforts or on their merits,” describes Biden to a T. Biden is a long-time senator with few legislative achievements he still will own, a vicious pit-bull on the Senate Judiciary Committee where he shamelessly demagogued Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, a plagiarizer and unseemly harasser of women, a two-time loser in his bid for the presidency, a fabulist and grifter who monetized the office of Vice President to enrich his family, and a lightweight so light that his own boss, Barack Obama, said, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.” Only a pandemic, disruptive lock-downs, and the Democrat primary threat of socialist Bernie Sanders––along with a probably fraudulent election, and a groveling media running interference–– could get such a meritless mediocrity into the Oval Office.
If the Biden administration is successful at leveraging street-violence for political gain, the century-old progressive dream of transforming our Constitutional Republic into a tyrannical technocracy will be much closer to fulfillment, our country’s fisc much closer to bankruptcy, and our government much closer to a “regime based on violence.”
On that dismal day, we won’t be able to say that we hadn’t been warned for 2500 years.
Kushner Companies Violated Multiple Laws in Massive Tenant Dispute, Judge Rules
Judge finds Kushner-owned management company charged "deceptive" fees to thousands of tenants, in lawsuit filed after ProPublica found widespread problems in their apartments.
It’s been six years since Dionne Mont first saw her apartment at Fontana Village, a rental housing complex just east of Baltimore. She was aghast that day to find the front door coming off its hinges, the kitchen cabinet doors stuck to their frames, mouse droppings under the kitchen sink, mold in the refrigerator, the toilet barely functioning and water stains on every upstairs ceiling, among other problems. But she had already signed the lease and paid the deposit.
Mont insisted that management make repairs, but that took several months, during which time she paid her $865 monthly rent and lived elsewhere. She was hit with constant late fees and so-called “court” fees, because the management company required tenants to pay rent at a Walmart or a check-cashing outlet, and she often couldn’t get there from her job as a bus driver before the 4:30 p.m. cutoff. She moved out in 2017.
Four years later, Mont has received belated vindication: On April 29, a Maryland judge ruled that the management company, which is owned by Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm, violated state consumer laws in several areas, including by not showing tenants the actual units they were going to be assigned to prior to signing a lease, and by assessing them all manner of dubious fees. The ruling came after a 31-day hearing in which about 100 of the company’s current and former tenants, including Mont, testified.
“I feel elated,” said Mont. “People were living in inhumane conditions — deplorable conditions.”
Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh brought the consumer-protection case against Westminster Management, the property-management arm of Kushner Companies, in 2019 following a 2017 article by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine on the company’s treatment of its tenants at the 15 housing complexes it owned in the Baltimore area, which have served as profitable ballast for a company better known for its gleaming properties in New York. The article revealed the company’s aggressive pursuit of current and former tenants in court over unpaid rent and broken leases, even in cases where tenants were in the right, as well as the shoddy conditions of many units.
To build its case, the attorney general’s office subpoenaed records from the company and solicited testimony from current and former tenants, who provided it via remote video link to Administrative Law Judge Emily Daneker late last year.
In her 252-page ruling last week, which was first reported by the Baltimore Sun, Daneker determined that the company had issued a relentless barrage of questionable fees on tenants over the course of many years, including both the fees identified in the 2017 article and others as well. In more than 15,000 instances, Westminster charged in excess of the state-maximum $25 fee to process a rental application. In more than 28,000 instances, the company also assessed a $12 “agent fee” on court filings against tenants even though it had incurred no such cost with the courts — a tactic that Daneker called “spurious” and which brought the company more than $332,000 in fees. And in more than 2,600 instances, the Kushner operation assessed $80 court fees to tenants at its two complexes within the city of Baltimore, even though the charge from the courts was only $50. “The practice of passing court costs on to tenants, in the absence of a court order,” Daneker wrote, “was deceptive.”
The manifold fees suggested a deliberate strategy to run up tenants’ tabs, Daneker wrote, repeatedly calling the practices “widespread and numerous.” She concluded that “these circumstances do not support a finding that this was the result of isolated or inadvertent mistakes.”
Daneker also found that the company violated consumer law by failing to have the proper debt-collection licenses for some of its properties and by misrepresenting the condition of units being leased to tenants. However, she found that the attorney general’s office did not establish that the company violated the law in several other areas, such as by misrepresenting its ability to provide maintenance on units or in some of its calculations of late fees.
Kushner Companies, which has since sold some of the complexes and put others of them on the market, declined to be interviewed for this article. A statement from Kushner general counsel Christopher Smith suggested that the ruling amounted to a victory for the company, despite the judge’s many findings against it. “Kushner respects the thoughtful depth of the Judge’s decision, which vindicates Westminster with respect to many of the Attorney General’s overreaching allegations,” Smith said.
In previous statements, the company had alleged that Frosh, a Democrat, had brought the suit for political reasons, and was singling out the company owned by the then-president’s son-in-law for a host of practices that the company said were common in the multi-housing rental industry. In her ruling, Daneker stated that she found no evidence of an “improper selective prosecution” in the suit.
The attorney general’s office declined to comment, noting that the case is not yet final. Each side will next have the chance to file exceptions, as objections are known, that will be considered by the final arbiter in the consumer protection division of the attorney general’s office. The state’s lawyers will also propose restitution sums for tenants and a civil penalty. Once the consumer protection arbiter issues a ruling, both sides will have the right to challenge it in the state’s appeals courts.
Also awaiting resolution is a separate class-action lawsuit brought by tenants that alleges, among other things, that the company’s late fees exceeded state limits. A Court of Special Appeals judge has yet to issue a ruling following a January oral argument on the plaintiffs’ appeal of previous rulings against both their attempt to certify themselves as a class and against the substance of their claim regarding late fees.
Despite the drawn-out process, including a three-month delay because of the pandemic, former tenants took satisfaction in the first judicial affirmation of their accounts of improper treatment. Kelly Ziegler, an orthodontic assistant, lived for two years in Highland Village, just south of Baltimore. She also didn’t get to see her unit before she moved in, in 2015, and was confronted with a litany of problems: a leak from the tub into the kitchen, a loose bedroom window that she worried her young child might fall out of, and a roach infestation so bad that she couldn’t use her stove. After some neighbor kids rolled a tire into her yard to use as a swing, she was fined $250 with no warning. “They did a lot of petty stuff,” she said.
But when she asked to break her lease over the problems with the house, management warned her that they would take her to court. She finally got out of the lease in 2017.
When the attorney general’s office approached Ziegler over her case, she was eager to share her experience. But when she found out that the complex was owned by President Trump’s son-in-law, she started to worry she would face repercussions for speaking out. “It made me scared that I was doing something wrong. This is a person with power,” she said. She said that her grandmother tried to reassure her: “You don’t have anything to worry about. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I hope I don’t run into him,” she said.Kushner has of course since left the White House and moved to Florida. Ziegler now lives with her family on a dead-end street in southwest Baltimore. It’s near a high-crime strip where, not long ago, a 17-year-old friend of her daughter was fatally shot. But Ziegler is still glad to be out of Highland Village, out of Kushner’s reach.
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