Michelle Malkin: Blowing the Lid Off Probate Predators
By Michelle Malkin | June 23, 2021 | 11:43am EDT
There is a silent epidemic in this country claiming the lives and property of untold numbers of innocent elderly and disabled Americans. It has nothing to do with exotic viruses. In fact, it's a homegrown phenomenon involving corrupt elected officials, judges, and lawyers.
The deadly disease running rampant in our court system is probate and guardianship abuse.
This week, the granddaughter of the late iconic singer and songwriter Nina Simone blew the whistle on Vice President Kamala Harris' alleged role in a scheme where the entertainer's estate "was taken away from us" after she died in France in 2003. The battle stretched out over 15 years and was reportedly helmed by Harris while she served as California's attorney general between 2011-2017. In a two-part series of shocking tweets, ReAnna Simone Kelly laid out her family's claims about how Harris "threatened my mother Lisa Simone with jail time before the case was underway if my mom didn't resign as the Administrator and Trustee of the estate."
Simone Kelly alleged that Harris, who had no legal jurisdiction over Simone's estate overseas, "put out stories about funds being misappropriated which of course, turned out to be totally false as the money she was talking about was used to pay attorneys, accountants, and to protect and run the estate." Eventually, the granddaughter recounted, "the law firm that we initially sued for wrongfully filing the estate in the U.S. probate system, in the end, wound up settling with us for a few million dollars."
Simone Kelly wants answers and is urging people in power (that includes you, fellow journalists!) to "ask Kamala Harris why she came for my family...ask her why she separated my family...ask her why we as her family no longer own the rights to anything. Ask her why she bullied my mother in court and my mom almost killed herself from the depression."
If this all sounds bewildering and unimaginable, you haven't been paying attention. Across the country, judges, prosecutors, and other legal cronies have been entangled in nightmare cases involving elderly and disabled citizens who've been stripped of their homes, physically and mentally abused, defrauded, and often left to die, according to their families.
"All across America," California nurse and activist Patricia Lacy told me, "vulnerable elders are being placed under fraudulent guardian and conservatorships in an effort to obtain a senior's life savings, property, and removal of all their civil rights. They are not even allowed to hire their own attorney but are given a court-appointed attorney, who works in partnership with the opposing party. The guardians, who are supposed to be serving the best interest of the senior, instead use the elder's money to fight against their advanced directives or wishes. The result is usually the elders losing their homes and being placed in lockdown facilities. If a family member complains, the guardianship playbook calls for a court hearing to claim that the family member is 'interfering' and they are then isolated from their loved one."
Lacy is a member of the National Association to Stop Guardianship Abuse. Her beloved father, Stan Zurko, died at the age of 102 last year after a horrific struggle with a public guardian who separated him from family, hid legal documents from him, and withheld medication and living expenses. Lacy sought help from local and county officials in Ventura County, Calif., who turned a deaf ear and blind eye. Zurko died in May 2020, barred from moving in with his daughter, and gave up "out of despair that no one would hear him or help him," Lacy said. "He lost his will to live with so many people in court physically, emotionally, and financially harming him, until he just gave up and took his last breath."
The family's plight is still not over. Zurko's assets have been liquidated by the conservators, and Lacy is saddled with $250,000 in legal bills. The allegation that Harris threatened Nina Simone's family in the battle over her estate will be very familiar to other families who have faced similar intimidation by the Probate Predator Mafia.
"Many family members have been put in jail under false pretenses just to shut them up. My funds are depleted from paying all the expenses and attorneys' fees. I have all the documents and validation of the abuse to my father, but I can't hire an attorney with no funds," Lacy told me. "This is exactly what these predators do — deplete the family of all funds so they will not be sued."
The system is rigged. Vulnerable victims have little recourse against a cabal of ruthless thieves and grifters in black robes and three-piece suits. The good news is that families are fighting back and opening eyes. The bad news is that too many establishment journalists are more interested in serving as sycophants to elites than defending the helpless. I've asked Kamala Harris' office for comment on the Probate Predator epidemic. How many others will stand up?
Michelle Malkin is a conservative blogger at michellemalkin.com, syndicated columnist, author, and founder of hotair.com. Michelle Malkin's email address is MichelleMalkinInvestigates@protonmail.com.
Does Church Fund Kamala Harris? And Her Other Shady Shenanigans
August 14, 2020 1.1K
Now that Kamala Harris is going to be the Democrat Party’s vice-presidential candidate, I am plugging here excerpts from a book that I had tweeted about a few months back. Sadly, I don’t think a single Indian news site or portal has reviewed or covered it.
So here goes:
Kamala Devi Harris was born to Donald Harris, her Jamaican-born father and Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, her Tamil Brahmin mother from India. Her father is a Marxist economist who taught at Stanford University.
Who Is Willie Brown And What’s The Connection?
“In 1994, she met Willie Brown, who at the time was the second-most-powerful man in California politics. As Speaker of the State Assembly, Brown was a legend in Sacramento and around the state.
Brown was under investigation several times,by the State Bar of California, Fair Political Practices Commission,the FBI.
In 1986 …as California Assembly Speaker, he “received at least $124,000 in income & gifts…from special interests that had biz before the Legislature.”
Now this is neither here nor there for me, except for the political angle:
“Brown was sixty at the time he began dating Kamala, who was twenty-nine. Brown was actually two years older than her father. Their affair was the talk of San Francisco in 1994.
Kamala’s mother defends her daughter’s decision – and offered choice comments about Brown. “Why shouldn’t she have gone out with Willie Brown? He was a player. And what could Willie Brown expect from her in the future? He has not much life left.
He (Willie Brown) put Kamala on the State Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later the California Medical Assistance Commission. The MAC paid $99k a year in 2002.. UIAB ~$114k. Both posts were part-time. At the time, she was working as a county employee making ~$100k”
During his tenure, Brown came under FBI investigation twice for corruption involving lucrative contracts flowing from the city to his political friends.
I thought it was only in Third World countries that people were forced to pay bribes to get services they’re entitled to from their government,” said U.S. district judge Charles Legge about the rampant corruption under Brown. “But we find it right here in San Francisco.
In January 2003, shortly after announcing her campaign, (Kamala) Harris had signed a form saying that she would stick to the city’s $211,000 voluntary spending cap for the campaign (for the San Francisco district attorney election).
Harris signed the pledge-and then blew right past the spending limit. By the end of Nov, she had raised $621,000…
The San Francisco Ethics Commission vote to fine Harris was unanimous. Her campaign had to pay a $34,000 fine, a record in city elections.
Moving On To The Next, And By Far The Most Disturbing Aspect: Church Sex Abuse Scandal
Harris often recounts her background as a sex crimes prosecutor earlier in her career to attack others for their legal failings in this area.
During her decade-and-a-half tenure as a chief prosecutor, Harris would fail to prosecute a single case of priest abuse and her office would strangely hide vital records on abuses that had occurred despite the protests of victims groups.
Harris’s predecessor as San Francisco district attorney, Terence Hallinan, was aware of and had prosecuted numerous Catholic priests on sexual misconduct involving children. And he had been gathering case files for even more.
Hallinan’s office had launched an investigation and quickly discovered that the San Francisco Archdiocese had extensive internal records concerning complaints going back some seventy-five years.
In spring of 2002, Hallinan demanded the church turn them over to his office. A month later, the archdiocese reluctantly complied.
The secret documents were explosive and reportedly contained the names of about forty current and former priests in the San Francisco area who had been identified in sexual abuse complaints.
Hallinan used the information from the files to begin pursuing legal cases against them. In nearby San Mateo and Marin County, prosecutors obtained the same church records and those in Marin charged Father Gregory Ingels in 2003
But by June 2003, Hallinan and other prosecutors had hit a roadblock: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California’s law extending the statute of limitations for priest abuse cases was unconstitutional.
The records that Hallinan had in his possession touched on well-connected institutions at the heart of California’s power structure. St. Ignatius College Preparatory School, in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, counted California governor Jerry Brown … as alumni.”
Now Comes Church Sexual Abuse And The Kamala Connection
According to San Francisco election financial disclosures, high-dollar donations to Harris’s campaign began to roll in from those connected to the Catholic Church institutional hierarchy.”
For some reason, she did not want the documents released in any form.
Harris’s office claimed that the cover-up was about protecting the victims of abuse.
Victims’ groups wanted the documents released and Harris was stopping it.
They’re full of shit,” said Joey Piscitelli, the northwest regional director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), the largest and most active victims’ group. “You can quote me on that. They’re not protecting the victims.
With the outcry of victims groups, Harris’s office then attempted to shift blame, claiming that the idea of burying the evidence had been first suggested by her predecessor, Hallinan.
But he [Hallinan] responded angrily to her claims. “I told Jack Hammel [the archdiocese’s legal counsel] in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t go along with anything like that.
James Jenkins..the founding chairman of the archdiocese’s Independent Review Board… resigned from the board… Jenkins argued that Harris’s deal with the archdiocese not only denied the rights of known victims, it also prevented other possible cases from coming forward.
In April 2010, a journalist with the San Francisco Weekly asked for the records through California’s Public Records Act. Harris’s office denied the request, offering conflicting explanations as to why they could not provide them.
In 2019, I requested those records through a California attorney. The San Francisco district attorney’s office responded that they no longer had them in their possession. Were they destroyed? Were they moved somewhere else? It remains a disturbing mystery.
She somehow served as San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011, and then as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017, and never brought a single documented case forward against an abusive priest.
To put this lack of action in perspective, at least fifty other cities charged priests in sexual abuse cases during her tenure as San Francisco district attorney. San Francisco is conspicuous by its absence.
The Next One: Prostitution But No Prosecution
At San Francisco’s adult entertainment clubs, dancers were taking customers behind closed doors and having sex for money. … After repeated complaints … the San Francisco Police Department decided to take action.
The police action caught the attention of newly installed district attorney Kamala Harris, and her staff sent the message to hold off on the enforcement.
Meanwhile, in response to continued complaints, the police conducted a pair of sting operations. Three undercover officers went into each of the two clubs and were quickly solicited by female employees for paid sex.
At both the Market Street Theater & New Century Theater, it happened “within minutes.”
When the operations were done, 9 women were arrested, as was the GM of the New Century. The cops claimed that they were “slam-dunk cases. But Kamala Harris dropped the cases.
It just leaves me in amazement,” said San Francisco Police Department vice captain Tim Hettrich. It was “almost legalizing prostitution.
Harris’s strange objections to prosecuting prostitution cases connected to these raids have a possible explanation. The owner of both the Market Street and New Century theaters was a company called Déjà Vu.
An owner of Déjà Vu, Sam Conti, had a long history with Willie Brown. Conti had first hired Brown as his defense attorney back in 1977. They remained friends. At Conti’s 2009 funeral, Brown delivered a videotaped eulogy.
Next One: Construction And Conflicts Of Interest
Ricardo Ramirez ran a cement and concrete company called Pacific Cement. As of 2003, a full one-third of the public works projects in San Francisco used Pacific. … Those contributions often went to the Willie Brown machine and were not always legal.”
39/51″In 1997, state officials found that Ramirez had illegally contributed $2,000 to Brown’s 1995 mayoral campaign.
…
Ramirez never faced charges for delivering substandard concrete. Instead, Harris’s office settled for a plea deal involving a single environmental count, illegally storing waste oil at one of his production facilities.
Harris & her office refused to offer an explanation as to why they were going so light on Willie Brown’s friend & donor. “Harris’ office had no explanation for why it dropped the concrete case,” – the Chronicle.””Kamala Harris’s signature program as San Francisco district attorney was called Back on Track-a program designed to give first-time drug offenders an opportunity to avoid a criminal record.
Those (in the program) included were not just nonviolent, first-time offenders who had committed a single drug offense. Some were illegal immigrants and violent criminals such as Alexander Izaguirre.
Amanda Kiefer was walking down the street when Izaguirre snatched her purse and jumped into a waiting SUV. Rather than drive off, the SUV sped toward Kiefer to run her down. Kiefer jumped on the hood and saw Izaguirre and the driver laughing.
The driver slammed on the brakes throwing Kiefer to the ground. The impact fractured her skull.
…
Harris did not offer an explanation. Instead, she simply explained that enforcing federal immigration law was not her job.
Next One: Nutrition Companies And Kamala’s Husband
In 2015 the attorneys general from fourteen other states, including New York, launched an effort to investigate nutrition companies on the grounds of false advertising and mislabeling.
The Obama administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) was also going after dietary supplement producers, charging them with exaggerated claims
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) opened an investigation into Herbalife in March 2014. In July 2016, the FTC won a $200 million settlement against Herbalife. But Harris never even investigated the company.
It is worth noting that those corporations in question all happened to be clients of her husband’s law firm, Venable LLP. GNC, Herbalife, AdvoCare International, Vitamin Shoppe, and others were represented by Venable.
In 2015, prosecutors from Harris’s own attorney general’s office based out of San Diego sent her a long memorandum arguing that Herbalife needed to be investigated. … Harris declined to investigate or provide the resources-and never offered a reason.
These excerpts are from @peterschweizer‘s 2020 #1 bestseller, “Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite. A pity this book’s not received the coverage it deserves in India.
amzn.to/3iCKPt9 Feature Image Credit – Breitbart
Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, by Peter Schweizer
Disclaimer: views expressed are personal.
Kamala Harris Refused to Prosecute Priests’ Sexual Abuse After Church’s Lawyers Funded Her Campaign
In this June 27, 2019, file photo, then-Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., listens to questions after the Democratic primary debate hosted by NBC News at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Art in Miami. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson, File)
ROBERT KRAYCHIK (BREITBART)
Peter Schweizer, author of Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite and president of the Government Accountability Institute, discussed with host Alex Marlow of Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily on Thursday that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), while San Francisco’s district attorney (DA), refused to prosecute cases of priests’ sexual abuse.
Harris was the only DA among those from the top 50 metropolitan cities not to lay charges against clergy for sexual abuse, said Schweizer, reflecting on Harris’s tenure as the San Francisco DA between 2004 and 2011.
Schweizer stated, “The numbers are pretty stunning. From 2004 to 2011, Kamala Harris was the San Francisco [district attorney] responsible for all prosecutions and the prosecution team in the San Francisco area. Between 2004 and 2011, she did not prosecute a single case of priests’ sexual abuse–period.”
Schweizer continued, “To put that in the context of how stunning that is, if you look at the top 50 metropolitan areas in the United States at that time, all 50 prosecuted at least one case, the sole exception being Kamala Harris in San Francisco.”
Breitbart · Breitbart News Daily – Peter Schweizer – August 13, 2020
After being elected as San Francisco’s DA, Harris terminated her predecessor’s plans to publicly release “clergy abuse files” naming names of priests accused of sexual abuse. Terence Hallinan, the former DA of San Francisco, had slated the files for public release against the wishes of the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
Schweizer described Harris’s suppression of the above-mentioned documents as “stunning.”
“[The Archdiocese of San Franciso wasn’t] real happy to share hundreds of pages of complaints that had been made about priests in the area,” Schweizer said, “and according to [Hallinan’s] account, there were at least the names of 40 current and former priests who had been accused of molestations by people in that archdiocese.”
Schweizer went on to say that “Terence Hallinan talked about the fact that he was going to pursue prosecutions. He also wanted to have victims’ groups go through [to] redact names, and then he wanted to release the records to the public, which had been done in so many other areas. Well, he lost in the 2003 elections to Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris came in; she deep-sixed those documents. She basically put it under seal so that it could never be released publicly.”
Victims’ rights groups criticized Harris’s suppression of the documents detailing allegations of sexual abuse against priests, Schweizer noted.
“The victims’ rights groups snapped,” Schweizer remarked. “Some of the other groups went absolutely ballistic, and you can understand why. Kamala Harris claimed that she sealed those records to protect victims. The victims call that outrageous and wrong. They used language that I couldn’t use on radio.”
Schweizer determined, “The bottom line is [Harris] has a terrible, atrocious record on this specific issue, and it’s a little bit baffling because she proclaims to be somebody who’s a victim’s advocate, but she has this horrible record of covering up and failing to prosecute these crimes.”
Harris received political campaign donations from lawyers and law firms representing the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
Schweizer assessed, “Many of the law firms and lawyers who were representing the archdiocese on a variety of legal matters — including priests that had been identified as possible culprits — gave large contributions [to Harris’s political campaign]. Some of them had never given contributions to a race like this before, but they loaded up her campaign coffers.”
Schweizer went on. “When you look at some of the [Catholic] institutions that were in the gun sites at the time, these are some very powerful and elite-connected organizations. One of them is a school called Saint Ignatius Prep. This is the alma mater of former California Gov. Jerry Brown — who talks very eloquently and passionately about how important that school is to him. That school has also educated several generations of the Getty family, the very wealthy family that made its money in oil.”
Marlow pointed out that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) father was the general counsel for Getty Oil.
Schweizer replied, “Gavin Newsom is also very passionately supportive of this school. Members of the Getty family sit on the school’s board of directors, and, of course, the Getty family were huge backers of Kamala Harris’s run for this office.”
“[Harris] has never given an explanation of why she handled this the way that she did,” Schweizer stated.
Schweizer concluded by contrasting Harris’s reversal of Hallinan’s pursuit of sexual abuse allegations against clergy. “Once Kamala Harris took that position as San Francisco [district] attorney, these victims were completely shut out by and all cooperation ended,” he said. “This is a story that needs attention. It demands her being asked about it and her answering questions about it.”
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