Trump's advisers reportedly in 'cloud of nerves' over Manhattan grand jury
Former President Donald Trump's team is more nervous than usual now that prosecutors have convened a grand jury in an investigation into Trump and organization executives, Politico reported Wednesday.
"There's definitely a cloud of nerves in the air," said an adviser to Politico. The shift in attitude compared to what Politico calls "the typical barrage of legal issues surrounding Trump," is reportedly attributed to fears that Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, whose taxes are under investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James' office, will "flip."
"I think the Weisselberg involvement and the wild card of that makes the particular situation more real," said the adviser. "The fact that they're dealing with a numbers guy who just has plain details makes people more nervous. This is not a Michael Cohen situation."
In a Tuesday statement, Trump maintained a seemingly different attitude than his team, claiming the whole probe is "purely political" and proof "our country is broken." "This is a continuation of the greatest witch hunt in American history," he added.
The latest development in the ongoing investigation into Trump and his business dealings, started by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. in 2018, reportedly suggests prosecutors have found evidence of a crime. The grand jury will meet over six months to discuss possible indictments. Read more at Politico.
Behar: When Trump Is Indicted, ‘I’m Having a Big Party’ — I’m Having ‘Schadenfreude’
Joy Behar told her co-hosts Wednesday on ABC’s “The View” that if former President Donald Trump was indicted, she would throw a “big party” because she was feeling “schadenfreude.”
Whoopi Goldberg said, “You-know-who is back in the headlines thanks to New York’s D.A. convening a special grand jury in their investigation of whether he had a hand in his business committing criminal bank fraud, insurance fraud, and tax fraud, among other things. Of course, he’s denying all charges with his go-to it’s a politically motivated witch hunt claim. Joy, do you think he’s really worried about all this?”
Behar said, “Well, you know, I was reading that 95 to 99% of all cases that go to the grand jury end up in indictments. So, I mean, I’m a betting woman. I say he could be indicted very easily. I think he’s probably trembling. Of course, he’ll deny everything. It’s a witch hunt. When he was impeached, it’s a witch hunt. It’s always a witch hunt, and he’s always completely innocent. You know you’ll find his accountant, Weisselberg, under a bus any day. Ivanka, I don’t know who he is. He’s only been in the family for 30 years. Ivanka, stop it. When he’s indicted, I’m having a big party with Mexican food, a pinata, margaritas, everything. I can’t wait. I’m having a severe case of schadenfreude as we speak.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
Sen. Graham: Trump's 'In Great Shape to Win the Primary and Could Get Re-elected'
(CNSNews.com) - "Would you support President Trump if he's our nominee? Every Republican needs to be asked that question," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity on Monday night.
Graham said he thinks Trump is "in great shape to win the primary and could get re-elected."
Graham was talking about the newly re-opened Reagan Library, which is hosting a series of speakers to "address critical questions facing the future of the Republican Party." Those questions include: Why are you a Republican? What should the Republican Party stand for? And what are the Republican philosophies we can all agree on?
The library's speaking series is titled, "A Time for Choosing," the phrase Ronald Reagan used in his famous 1964 speech.
"What I would tell the people putting on the conference, the Republicans have already chosen," Graham said.
They've chosen an American First agenda to rally the party around, and if the primary were held tomorrow, President Trump would win, if he chose to run, going away.
So the question really is, does anybody in the Republican Party doubt that to the American First agenda is the way to move forward? And here's a question I have: If President Trump decides to run in 2024 and he wins the party's nomination, will you support him? It's a time for choosing in that regard.
Would you support President Trump if he's our nominee? Every Republican needs to be asked that question.
Graham said the Reagan Library's "Time for Choosing" series is intended to define Republicans:
I would look at what President Trump did, and I would choose that as my way forward. That we believe in strong borders, we believe in a strong military, that we're expecting people to do more to help themselves, America can't be everything to everybody all the time. We believe in lower taxes. We believe in free and fair trade and not being a chump when it comes to trade.
So the bottom line is, if you're running for president or thinking about running for president, are you smart enough to embrace the American First agenda? And the question for the Republican Party right now is that (if) Donald Trump ran in the primary, he would win a going away. And the question is why?
Why would -- why are so many Republicans willing to give him another shot at this? Because they believe in what he did, and they believe that his policies worked. And if you don't see that, if you don't get that, then you really don't understand the Republican Party in 2021.
Graham said Republicans, to win in 2024, must embrace the Trump policies that worked.
"So, this idea of having a conference trying to figure out what the Republican Party should do and be, to me, is sort of nonsensical.
"We know what it should be. It should be an American First agenda, and if President Trump runs, he's going to have some damage to repair, but I think that he's in great shape to win the primary and could get re-elected. And my question is, if he's the nominee, would you support him? I'd like to hear a lot of people answer that question."
The recent ouster of Liz Cheney as Republican Conference chair highlighted a bitter split in the GOP between those who still see Trump's policies -- if not the man himself -- as the way forward for Republicans, and those who despise Trump and want to remove his influence on the party.
TRUMP CRIME FAMILY, THE CLINTON MAFIA AND THEIR FRAUDULENT CLINTON FOUNDATION FAMILY SLUSH FUND, THE OBOMBS AND THEIR RIGGED CROOKED BOOK DEALS, THE BIDENS AND THEIR PHONY FOUNDATION AND CRACKHEAD BRIBES SUCKING LAWYER SON PASSING 50% OF THE TAKE TO THE 'BIG GUY' JOE. AND THEY ALL SUCK OFF BANKSTERS FOR 'SPEECH FEE' BRIBES THAT ADD UP TO MASSIVE FORTUNES. KAMALA HARRIS LEARNED WELL ON THAT ONE FROM BILLARY, HILLARY, OBOMB, OL' JOE AND THE BANKSTERS' RENT BOY LAWYER ERIC HOLDER!
Clinton Foundation Put On Watch List Of Suspicious ‘Charities’
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/charity-navigator-clinton-foundation.html
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy
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
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 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.
VIDEO:
THE FRAUDULENT CLINTON FOUNDATION EXPOSED.
PAY-TO-PLAY FROM THE FIRST DAY!
Is it a signal that she's back in the game because she's selling her president-ability to the world's global billionaire crowd and laying the groundwork for more funds? There are all kinds of ways for foreign billionaires to get money to the U.S. without consequences, after all. What's more, it's pretty much the biggest base of support she has, which is at least one reason why she lost the 2016 election.
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in “public service” into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes.
The basic components of the operation are
lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street
and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign
contributions, and donations to the ostensibly
philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
Report: Emails Show Ex-FBI Chief Gave $100,000 to Joe Biden’s Grandkid Trust, Seeking ‘Future Work’
Former FBI director Louis Freeh reportedly gave $100,000 to a trust for President Joe Biden’s grandchildren, seeking “some very good and profitable matters” with Biden, according to emails obtained by the New York Post.
The emails reportedly emanate from Hunter Biden’s water-damaged laptop and apparently show the gifts were made in April 2016, before Hunter Biden received an email from Freeh that he “would be delighted to do future work with you.”
The alleged emails show Freeh wrote on July 8, 2016, “I also spoke to Dad a few weeks ago and would like to explore with him some future work options. I believe that working together on these (and other legal) matters would be of value, fun, and rewarding.”
The emails also show Freeh wrote Hunter on March 12, 2017, saying he saw Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, walking back from church, noting, “I would still like to persuade him to associate with me and FSS—as we have some very good and profitable matters which he could enhance with minimal time.”
The New York Post reports the “initials FSS are an apparent reference to the law firm of Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan, where Freeh, a former federal judge, was a partner at the time.”
One month later, more purported emails show Freeh wrote Hunter again. “As you know, our family foundation made a $100K contribution to Hallie’s children’s trust last year,” said Freeh in reference to “the gift he’d made to the trust for the children of Hunter’s late brother, Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in 2015, and Beau’s wife, Hallie, with whom Hunter later had an affair.”
The same email shows that Freeh said he made an accounting error via an improper “foundation gift” that would be remedied by “a new $100k gift” upon being reimbursed by the foundation the $100,000.
Hunter Biden reportedly responded the same day, “Thanks so much and of course no burden at all. Speak to you soon.”
The FBI directory provides Freeh’s background:
Director Freeh served as an FBI special agent from 1975 to 1981 in the New York City Field Office and at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 1981, he joined the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York as an Assistant United States Attorney. Subsequently, he held positions there as chief of the Organized Crime Unit, Deputy United States Attorney, and Associate United States Attorney.
During this time, Director Freeh was the lead prosecutor in the “Pizza Connection” case, the largest and most complex investigation ever undertaken at the time by the United States government.
Former FBI Director Freeh gave $100k to a trust for VP Biden’s grandkids in 2016 while exploring ‘future work options’
Take it from the New York Times and Washington Post: nothing to see here, move along. Definitely not a bribe.
Emails recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop reveal that while Joe Biden was vice president, a trust for his grandchildren – the children of his late son Beau Biden – received a hundred thousand dollars from a foundation controlled by former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who was a lawyer for 3 corrupt foreign businessmen, later convicted and imprisoned. In the emails it is revealed that Freeh actually met with the sitting VP in 2016 "to explore with him some future work options," in addition to courting his son Hunter for collaboration.
Louis Freeh in 2020
photo credit: Ott Heinapuu (cropped) public domain
Both the New York Post and the UK Daily Mail have published excerpts from the letters, though as of this writing, neither the Washington Post nor New York Times appear to have found the gift and emails worth mentioning.
The UKDM writes:
The 71-year-old, who served as FBI director under Bill Clinton and George Bush, ran a consultancy firm with highly controversial clients including a now-jailed Malaysian prime minister who stole billions of dollars from his country, a Romanian real estate tycoon convicted of bribery, and a French-Israeli diamond magnate later convicted of bribery and a $145 million property graft.
Freeh, a former judge, emailed Joe's son Hunter Biden in 2016, revealing he had spoken with the Vice President and proposed that they work together on private ventures once Biden left office.
In July that year, in an email marked 'confidential and privileged', Freeh wrote to Hunter that he 'would be delighted to do future work with you.'
'I also spoke to Dad a few weeks ago and would like to explore with him some future work options,' Freeh said. 'I believe that working together on these (and other legal) matters would be of value, fun and rewarding.'
Freeh brought up the idea again a month later – and mentioned that he was working for the then-Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, who was in the midst of a scandal over one of the world's biggest financial frauds, and was later sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2020.
'I would like to talk with you and Dad about working together next year,' Freeh wrote to Hunter.
One letter seems to indicate that’s the gift was to be refunded and re-donated so as to be able to qualify for tax-deductible status – meaning taxpayers subsidize the gift that weas made in the context of seeking business arrangements, as the NYP summarizes:
“As you know, our family foundation made a $100K contribution to Hallie’s children’s trust last year,” Freeh wrote on April 24, 2017.
But Freeh said that his accountants “now advise that since the grant did not go to a 501(c) organization, it was not a proper foundation gift” and that he planned to fix the situation by making “a new $100k gift” and having the trust “reimburse the foundation by paying it $100k.”
(source)
Clarice Feldman advises me that she can find nothing in the federal government’s policies regarding gifts to its employees that would require disclosure of a gift to grandchildren. Public Citizen’s review of rules for gifts to the president and vice president indicates in point ten:
Gifts to the President and Vice President. Both offices may accept any gift on his own behalf or on behalf of any family member, provided that such acceptance does not violate conflict of interest or anti-bribery laws, or the Constitution of the United States.
Was there any conflict of interest or bribery? I would guess that a quid pro quo would have to be proven to make a charge of bribery stick. AS for conflict of interest, again, I can’t see any specifics that would be involved.
What about gift taxes? Anything over $14,000 a year is subject to federal gift taxes. But did this gift qualify for tax exempt status after it was re-gifted? If not, the gift could have been structured to pay out $14,000 per year and avoid those taxes.
It appears that the relationship that was cemented with this six figure gift flourished, at least to the extent that Freeh joined the board of directors of the Beau Biden Foundation.
The entire situation reminds me of the old saying about DC that the problem about what’s going on is not so much what’s illegal, as what is perfectly legal.
Can New York Arrest Donald Trump?
Leftists are fantasizing about Donald Trump being arrested, booked, and put on trial. Well, they are fantasizing about that…again.
The New York State Attorney General’s investigation of the Trump Organization is now “no longer purely civil in nature,” Fabien Levy, the spokesperson for New York Attorney General Letitia James, confirmed to Politico by email. “We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan D.A. We have no additional comment at this time.”
It is important for political observers, cowardly-lion Republicans, patriots, and activists to know what is happening here. More ammunition and detail are needed to arm the reader properly for this latest tempest in a teapot being sold as a hurricane.
Leftists are so enthusiastic about Trump’s imminent arrest that the government of Palm Beach County is making plans to arrest the former President at his Mar-a-Lago resort in high-society Palm Beach, Florida. According to Politico,
Law enforcement officials in Palm Beach County, Fla., have actively prepared for the possibility that Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance could indict former President Donald Trump while he’s at Mar-a-Lago, according to two high-ranking county officials involved in planning sessions. Among the topics discussed in those meetings: how to handle the thorny extradition issues that could arise if an indictment moves forward.
Do sensible people think that local County officials sit around making plans for something that might happen and that others would handle? For crimes like these, an accused might turn himself in or show up in court.
If New York state issued an indictment, arresting Trump would require opening a case in Florida with its governor, Ron DeSantis, executing the indictment through the state’s police. The Palm Beach County government would not be involved. The Secret Service would handle surrounding events.
So why is Palm Beach exciting the media about something that is really none of its business? The magician distracts the audience by getting them to look over there.
Speaking as a political activist since 1984, this is a stunt aimed at the same failed tactic: The establishment tries to peel away Trump voters to get their support for the Mitt Romneys, Bob Doles, John McCains, Bushes, and so on. If Trump voters see him being hauled off in handcuffs, would the voters fall back in love with Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and John Kasich?
The establishment misses that the voters never liked the swamp creature Republicans in the first place. In 2008 and 2012, we stuck clothespins on our noses to make sure the Democrats didn’t win but they’d already lost us at “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Nevertheless, in 1994, the establishment ran independent candidate Marshall Coleman against Oliver North, the GOP nominee and choice of Republican voters, resulting in the election of Democrat Chuck Robb as Virginia’s U.S. Senator. We were mad before Trump.
As a criminal defense and constitutional attorney in Virginia and the federal court in the District of Columbia, I analyzed this in-depth with criminal defense consultant Norm Bradford for Thursday’s discussion on Action Radio (starting at 1:32). I passed the New York State bar out of law school although I did not end up practicing there. Here are the key points from that discussion:
First, New York is investigating “The Trump Organization” (“TTO”), a business, not Donald Trump, the individual. Companies can be charged with crimes.
Therefore, is Donald J. Trump going to be arrested? No.
Second, what does it mean that the investigation is now a “criminal” probe? Nothing. At most, it means that some people from different offices down the hall have been called in and asked “Well, what do you make of this?”
Third, will New York prosecutors indict The Trump Organization? Yes. Everything I hear says they’re crazy up there. New York’s legal system was woke before anyone knew the word. Because it is New York, where the grand jury and the petit (trial) jury are drawn from the mostly Democrat voters, and the prosecutors and judges are all soaked in just one political party, it is likely that they will indict TTO. No one can stop them.
Fourth, is this indictment dangerous? Probably not. There will be a trial that the prosecutors will lose at the end (which may be a year or two down the road).
Fifth, does it matter? No. Three words: Statute of limitations.
The statute of limitations is one of the very few defenses that are objective and non-discretionary. A judge has no choice. Once the statute of limitations is invoked, the entire project comes to a screeching halt.
Anything the New York A.G. is investigating expired years or decades ago. The statute of limitations is three to six years under New York State law depending on what kind of crime is alleged.
The rumors we have heard involve events in the 1990s. Although Trump did not set up a blind trust, in the summer of 2015, Trump turned TTO over to his children for them to run.
So, it has been almost six years now since Donald J. Trump even ran TTO. His children may want to review their actions, but what the Left wants is the former President in handcuffs. Expect more screaming at the sky as Leftists’ unrealistic hopes are dashed once again.
Sixth, could Trump’s lawyers screw this up? Yes. Everything here assumes that Trump’s lawyers respond effectively.
Trump’s lawyers should have motions to quash any indictment already written and in their briefcases. Anywhere they are in New York or the country, they should be able to file a motion to quash within an hour…before there is time for Democrats to spin up talks about arresting him.
Seventh, unlike Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Trump does not do his own taxes. If anything was amiss, the fault lies with attorneys, accountants, real estate appraisers, financial advisors, etc. Because it is their job to tell Trump and TTO what can and cannot be done, they would be the ones at fault. Even if Trump said to do it, it is their actual legal responsibility to say no, you may not do that.
Eighth, did TTO do anything wrong? No.
The rumors are from former attorney Michel Cohen, who claimed that TTO valued real estate too high for the purpose of getting loans but too low for the purpose of paying taxes.
Governments have Tax Assessors. They don’t listen to your opinion about what you think your real estate is worth. There is a process for disputing a tax assessment. That makes it even more clear that it is up to the government to decide.
Similarly, nobody loans money on real estate without ordering an independent appraisal from a licensed appraiser. A lender who does not order its own independent appraisal is grossly reckless.
In the law, fraud cannot be fraud unless the accused made a knowingly false statement intending that someone rely upon it, that the person (or entity) did rely on it, and that this reliance was reasonable. If Donald Trump says, “This is the most beautiful high-rise in Manhattan,” that is purely an opinion. If I say that my townhouse is worth its weight in platinum, no reasonable person would believe that and therefore (a) it is not intended to be relied upon and (b) it would be unreasonable for anyone to rely upon that statement. These are clear-cut legal principles. Any case against TTO will lose in the end.
At the end of the day, we’re witnessing leftist and NeverTrump grandstanding. Trump should be prepared to fight back hard but, ultimately, none of this is serious.
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.
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?”
Big Dirty Money: “White-collar crime” and the nature of capitalism
Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White-collar Crime , by Jennifer Taub, Viking, New York, 2020
The term “white-collar crime,” which appears in the subtitle of a new book, Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime, was apparently first coined during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The phenomenon is as old as capitalism itself. In Jennifer Taub’s work the focus is on the United States, but the reality she describes, though nowhere more explosive than in the US, is a global one.
Taub, a professor at the University of Western New England School of Law in Springfield, Massachusetts, brings together much valuable data and information on white-collar crime and on the connection between its recent prominence and that of extreme wealth inequality. Her book is noteworthy for correctly focusing on the role of class in shaping the lives and futures of humanity.
The author indicates that white-collar crime must be defined far more broadly than embezzlement or what might be termed low-level forms of corruption. She gives some recent examples of white-collar criminals, all extensively reported by the WSWS: the Sackler family, worth some $14 billion (as of the book’s printing), responsible for the marketing of oxycontin, which led to 232,000 overdose deaths between 1999-2018; Pacific Gas and Electric, to blame for the deadly Camp Fire of 2018 in California, which left 85 dead and the town of Paradise completely destroyed; and General Motors, whose faulty ignition switches led to sudden engine shutdowns and at least 124 deaths between 2002 and 2014, when the cars were finally recalled.
All of the above criminals escaped serious punishment, paying for the lives lost through fines that amounted, even where sizable, to the mere cost of doing business.
Taub makes a number of useful points in the course of discussing these issues. As she notes, the US has a prison population of 2.3 million, but even the very few white-collar criminal convictions (as opposed to civil cases) rarely lead to jail time. The few who have been jailed— Michael Milken is one prominent example—have served their time in “country club” prisons, facilities whose very existence illustrates the fact that incarceration is a weapon principally designed for and used against the working class.
Taub is hardly the first to note the huge gulf between the treatment of the poor and the wealthy by the so-called justice system. Petty offenses get harsh punishment while big criminals get off scot free. Eric Garner lost his life for selling untaxed loose cigarettes, Taub points out, while the executives of companies responsible for death and misery on a vast scale have paid no price. Indeed, as Taub was putting the finishing touches on this volume last May, this class reality was brought home, to the horror of vast numbers of people all over the world, in the murder of George Floyd after he was accused of passing a small counterfeit bill at a neighborhood convenience store.
The magnitude of the class gulf today is one that could barely have been imagined by famed French novelist Anatole France when he famously ironized, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
The last 40 years have seen an uninterrupted growth of white-collar crime and of all the abuses associated with it. Government has done much to facilitate this growth, and the political representatives of the corporate elite have often shared in the spoils. Furthermore, this has been a thoroughly bipartisan operation. As Taub explains, “in the Carter and Clinton administrations, legislation was enacted that allowed the credit default swap and private mortgage securities markets to flourish, enabling the toxic mortgage-backed securities that eventually blew up the banking system in 2008.”
This history serves to illustrate, as Taub does not point out, that the dividing line between the legal and the criminal, to put it mildly, is a porous one in the capitalist economy.
After the 2008 crash, the greatest since the Great Depression, the get out of jail card really came into its own during the two terms of Democratic President Barack Obama. “The Justice Department led by Attorney General Eric Holder from 2009 to 2015 let every bank executive engaged in accounting or securities fraud get away without prosecution,” writes Taub. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., another Democrat, brought no charges, except against a tiny bank that no one had ever heard of.
Taub’s polemical zeal in exposing glaring injustice can only be welcomed. Her outlook, however, could perhaps be summed up in a paraphrase of the Biblical reference to the poor—we will always have white-collar criminals with us. Or to put it somewhat differently, capitalism is here to stay.
She reviews the history, over most of the last century, of what she terms “corporate crime waves and crackdowns.” This is a cyclical conception, in which capitalist “excesses” are followed by regulation and reform, until the pendulum swings back toward corruption once again. The Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era, whose birth is associated with the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. Later, after the speculative boom of the 1920s, came the reforms associated with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Big business steadily attempted to evade or circumvent regulation, and the decades from the 1940s through the 1960s are dubbed a period of “invisible industrial violations,” as Taub puts it, leading to scandals such as Love Canal and the thalidomide birth defects. This was followed by yet another decade of regulation, this time under the improbable reformer Richard Nixon. The Environmental Protection Agency was established, along with the Consumer Product Safety Commission. After Watergate, other legislation established the Federal Election Commission.
American capitalism unquestionably did undertake major regulatory efforts in the last century. What Taub does not discuss, however, is the connection between the last 40 years, a period of uninterrupted deregulation and social counterrevolution, and the crisis and decline of US capitalism. There is little or no mention of globalization in this book, and no discussion of the financialization of the economy. We are left with the supposed problem of human nature, and of what is seen as an endless struggle against greed. Behind white-collar crime, however, is not simply greed, but a system of production and distribution that produces and requires it.
A cyclical theory of inequality and corruption followed by regulation and reform does not explain the last several decades. The Biden administration and its backers, who it is safe to presume include Professor Taub—even if she recognizes, quoting New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, that Donald Trump “did not come to Washington to clean up the tainted system; he came to bathe in it”—claim that a new era of reform is beginning. The conditions confronting US and world capitalism, however, are entirely different from those of the post-World War Two era.
The capitalist media dwell incessantly on misleading catchphrases like “systemic racism,” but the conditions described by the author demonstrate that what is truly systemic to capitalism is class inequality and all of its consequences. The solution to the misery that Taub details—the lives lost to poverty, illness and police violence—must also be systemic. It is not the pipe dream of a new era of reform, but rather the overthrow of the capitalist system and the building of a socialist society.
This is not Taub’s program. The final chapter of her book is entitled, “The Six Fixes,” and what she proposes is not much more serious than this somewhat glib heading. She calls for a new Department of Justice division devoted to white-collar crime; the amendment of the bribery laws to make it easier to convict politicians like Virginia’s former governor Robert McDonnell, who beat a bribery rap because of a legal loophole; legislation to protect journalists and whistleblowers; the restoration of Internal Revenue Service funding, after years and years of cuts that have been designed to cripple any effort to go after massive tax fraud; a nationwide registry for white-collar convictions; and improved data collection on white-collar crime.
To call these reforms would be a genuine stretch of the definition. Some of them amount to little more than improved methods of keeping track of the crime taking place, not doing anything about the conditions themselves. Even New York Times columnist James B. Stewart, in his review of Big Dirty Money, observes about these “fixes,” “These are earnest and well-intentioned, but small bore given the scope of the problem [Taub] so vividly illustrates.” It should also be pointed out that the fact that Taub, discussing whistleblowers, mentions Daniel Ellsberg and Karen Silkwood, but not Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, reflects her allegiance to what passes for bourgeois liberalism today.
Despite its serious faults, and although Big Dirty Money does not go much beyond a description of important aspects of 21st century capitalism, the exposures in this volume are vivid and at times gripping, and the book is therefore recommended, with the above caveats.
Citing Free Beacon, Hunter Biden Slammed Bill Clinton
Hunter Biden thinks Bill Clinton has seen better days.
Biden called the former Democratic president an "ahole" and added, "God he looks like shit," according to an email recovered from the troubled first child's hard drive by the Washington Free Beacon.
The remarks came after Biden's business partner Eric Schwerin forwarded him and then-deputy counsel to the vice president Alexander Mackler a tweet from New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin.
Martin Shared a 2016 video uploaded by the Free Beacon in which Clinton blamed Biden's father, then the vice president, for the controversial Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, known more commonly as the 1994 crime bill.
"And Biden said, ‘You can't pass this bill, the Republicans will kill it if you don't put more sentencing in,'" Clinton, once labeled by the media as the country's "first black president," said over objections from Black Lives Matter protesters.
Then-Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton called on her husband for support after activists attacked her record, as well as her past statements calling young black criminals "super predators." The former president added that various black groups in the country, including the Congressional Black Caucus, endorsed the enhanced sentencing provisions added to the law.
"Oddly enough, after unnecessarily throwing [Joe Biden] under the bus he gave a damn forceful pro-minority defense of the crime bill," Mackler replied in an email.
But Clinton's ultimate endorsement of the law failed to impress the 2019 Free Beacon Man of the Year. "He's still an asshole," Hunter Biden wrote back.
Both Hillary and Bill Clinton played minimal roles in the 2020 Democratic National Convention, with most of the prime speaking time given to various musicians, actors, and former president Barack Obama.
The 1994 crime bill caused headaches for President Biden on the campaign trail as well, with his party's left-wing base regularly attacking his voting history in the Senate. One of Biden's harshest critics was Vice President Kamala Harris. In May 2019, Harris said the law's three-strikes provision for violent offenders bears responsibility for the country's large prison population.
"I have a great deal of respect for Vice President Joe Biden, but I disagree," Harris told reporters at a New Hampshire campaign event. "That crime bill, that 1994 crime bill, it did contribute to mass incarceration in this country."
Prior to the 2020 campaign, Biden prided himself as one of the most vocal law-and-order Democrats in the Senate.
"The truth is," Biden said on the Senate floor in November 1993, "every major crime bill since 1976 that's come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the state of Delaware: Joe Biden."
Hunter Biden did not respond to a request for comment.
According to the documents reviewed by the Journal, Ms. Gates and her advisers held a number of calls in October 2019 when the New York Times reported that Mr. Gates had met with Mr. Epstein on numerous occasions. Mr. Gates once stayed late into the night at Mr. Epstein's Manhattan townhouse, the Times reported.,
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.
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).
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
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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 mag
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY’S BILLIONAIRES’ GLOBALIST EMPIRE requires someone as ruthlessly dishonest as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be puppet dictators.
http://hillaryclinton-whitecollarcriminal.blogspot.com/2018/09/google-rigged-it-so-illegals-would-vote.html
Globalism: Google VP Kent Walker insists that despite its repeated rejection by electorates around the world, “globalization” is an “incredible force for good.”
Hillary Clinton’s Democratic party: An executive nearly broke down crying because of the candidate’s loss. Not a single executive expressed anything but dismay at her defeat.
Immigration: Maintaining liberal immigration in the U.S is the policy that Google’s executives discussed the most.
Why do Trump's foreign golf
resorts lose millions of dollars
every year? Experts say it
could be incompetence,
vanity, or something more
sinister
Donald Trump's flagship foreign golf resorts posts massive losses every year.
He has said they are "not really golf investments" but "development deals."
Experts and critics think Trump may have other reasons for keeping them.
Donald Trump's golf resorts lose a lot of money. According to a bombshell New York Times report published last year, the 15 courses he owns around the world have lost over $315 million over the past 20 years. The interesting question is why does Trump hang on to so many money-losing enterprises?
Much about Trump's financial arrangements remains a mystery - partly because privately listed companies in the US can largely avoid public scrutiny - though investigations into whether Trump committed bank and tax fraud may reveal more.
No one's quite sure how much he's worth. No one's sure why the self-styled "king of debt" decided to plow up to $400 million into his two Scottish golf resorts. And no one's sure what his tax returns might turn up.
But because the United Kingdom has a registry of companies that requires them to publicly file accounts every year, we can look in detail at how much his two courses in Scotland lose every year and how much debt they've racked up. (Hint: It's a lot.)
So why do Trump and his sons, who ran his businesses while he was president, continue to run courses that lose so much money?
We spoke to leading experts, examined the financial data, and looked back at Trump's own words on the matter to find out why.
Insider contacted the Trump Organization for comment but did not receive a reply.
Trump's losses aren't 'normal'
Trump has two golf resorts in Scotland. He opened the first, Trump International Golf Links, in Aberdeenshire in 2012 on a piece of land he had purchased six years before. The course has lost money every year since.
Company accounts for 2019 - which covered the period before COVID-19 wreaked havoc on many businesses - showed that Trump International Golf Club Scotland Limited, which owns the course, posted an annual loss of $1.5 million. The total debt on the resort is more than $60 million, the balance sheet showed.
The second course is Turnberry, the crown jewel of his global golf empire. He paid $60 million in 2014 for the storied resort, where Tom Watson famously scraped out a win over Jack Nicklaus at the 1977 Open Championship.
Trump claimed to have spent a further $150 million on its lavish refurbishment. Turnberry's parent company, Golf Recreation Scotland, posted a $3.25 million loss on revenue of $26 million in 2019 and owes nearly $160 million to its creditors, the balance sheet showed.
Such losses are not unprecedented in the industry. Running a golf resort profitably is hard to do, said Larry Hirsh, the president of Golf Property Analysts, which values and markets golf properties.
"Over the last 10 to 20 years, golf courses have had their challenges," Hirsh told Insider.
"It costs a lot to go play, and Trump has never been shy about pricing his properties. Certainly, golf has experienced over the last 15 or 20 years a decline in participation," he said.
However, he added that "it's certainly not the idea" for major golf courses to lose money. "I don't think it's normal," he said.
Trump said his golf courses were 'not really golf investments'
Trump said in a 2016 interview with Reuters that people looking at the massive losses at his golf resorts were missing the point.
He said his resorts were "not really golf investments" but real-estate "development deals."
"It's pretty simple," he said. "My golf holdings are really investments in thousands, many thousands of housing units and hotels. At some point the company will do them. Hopefully, I won't because I will be president, but we're in no rush to do them."
There's just one problem with those claims: Trump hasn't built a single residential property on any golf resort he owns in the past decade, in Europe or the United States, Reuters reported last year.
He secured provisional permission in 2008 to build about 1,500 luxury homes and a hotel on farmland surrounding the Aberdeenshire estate, in what the Trump Organization had billed as the "world's greatest golf course." The economic gains would outweigh the environmental impact of the building work, officials said. But neither the houses nor the hotel materialized.
In 2019, he secured approval for a reworked plan to build 500 homes, but construction hasn't started.
At Turnberry, Trump failed to secure permission to develop hundreds of houses on the adjoining land. He had boasted to Reuters that he "would have the right to build at least a thousand houses on Turnberry, if I wanted to." But Scottish planners had different ideas. In 2019, the local authority rejected plans to develop the land, The Scotsman reported.
The ruling said the development could "negatively affect" Turnberry's status as an iconic resort. It suggests that Trump's plan to build houses on his golf resorts may be unsound from a business perspective.
That brings us to the second theory: incompetence.
Is it simply incompetence?
"Stupidity and grandiosity should never be overlooked as possible grounds for all of this," said Daniel Shaviro, the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at New York University Law School, who wrote about Trump's tax returns last year.
Trump's patchy business record is well documented. He demonstrated a genius for self-marketing and licensed his name to resorts and luxury developments all over the world, propelling him to the White House. But his businesses have also filed for bankruptcy six times, and he counts dozens of hugely expensive failures among his successful business ventures.
There were his Atlantic City casinos, which closed after racking up billions of dollars in debt. There was Trump University, which paid a $25 million settlement to former students in 2017 after New York's attorney general called it "fraudulent." And there was a short-lived airline called Trump Shuttle.
The accounts for Turnberry and Trump Links suggest they may be two further examples of poorly run businesses. A detailed analysis of Trump's two courses by Behind the Balance Sheet, a financial research consultancy, illustrated that profits had been consistently lower than at other established rivals in Scotland, including Loch Lomond Golf Club and Gleneagles, and that capital expenditure had consistently outstripped revenue growth at both resorts.
All in all, it's difficult to see how either business would ever generate a positive return on Trump's huge initial investment.
Are they being kept for 'fishy' tax purposes?
Companies House accounts showed that Golf Recreation Scotland, Turnberry's parent company, depends on an eye-watering amount of debt - around $160 million - owed to its parent company, the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, which is registered in New York.
Trump International Golf Club Scotland, which controls Trump's Aberdeenshire resort, owed Trump more than $55 million, and nearly $5 million to its parent company, DJT Holdings.
Their loans are unusual, however, because they are interest-free, negating the tax benefit of loaning money between companies owned by Trump, Mother Jones reported in November.
It's "a bit fishy," Shaviro said.
"Under US tax law, you can't really have an interest-free loan between related parties," he said.
"There would be a tendency to impute the market interest rate, or else they say it's really equity.
"So when separate tax entities are engaged in transactions, the idea is that it's got to be arm's length, it's got to reflect reality."
Shaviro said it wasn't clear there was any tax benefit to the way Trump had set up the loans.
"I don't see the obvious tax benefits here," he said. "Whether it's money-laundering or playing games with lenders, there is a pretty good guess something is going on, but I'm not sure exactly what it would be."
That brings us to the last theory.
Trump's 'unexplained' funding for his golf courses
A group of Scottish lawmakers led by the Green Party's Patrick Harvie this year called for an "unexplained wealth order" over Trump's finances. Their central question: Where did Trump get the money to pay for his resorts in the first place?
Harvie, a member of Scottish Parliament, said in February: "The purchases in Scotland were part of a very long spending spree, with his spokespeople claiming that he had vast sums of money sitting around and available for investment even though, at the same time, he was apparently being turned down for credit."
Trump, who once called himself the "king of debt," had spent his career building businesses on other people's borrowed money, even bragging about it on the campaign trail in 2016.
He began that spending spree in 2006, buying up more than $400 million worth of properties in cash over the next decade, The Washington Post reported in 2018. The first purchase was his Balmedie estate. The most expensive was Turnberry in 2014, even though it was losing money then, too. He purchased a course in Doonbeg, Ireland, in the same year, also using cash.
Harvie alluded to the closed-door congressional testimony in 2017 of Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, the political-research agency that produced the so-called Steele dossier on links between Trump and Russia (one part of which a UK judge called "misleading").
Simpson told lawmakers that the firm's investigations had identified in the Trump Organization "patterns of buying and selling" real estate that "were suggestive of money laundering."
Later, he said that "because the Irish courses and the Scottish courses are under the UK," Fusion GPS was "able to get the financial statements."
"And they don't, on their face, show Russian involvement, but what they do show is enormous amounts of capital flowing into these projects from unknown sources and - or at least on paper it says it's from the Trump Organization, but it's hundreds of millions of dollars," Simpson said. "And these golf courses are just, you know, they're sinks. They don't actually make any money."
Trump's son Eric said last year that Harvie's claims had "no basis in fact" and called them "disgusting."
Scotland's government rejected the calls for an unexplained wealth order on the grounds that it was for the country's law officers, not politicians, to instigate such investigations. Nonetheless, these questions about how Trump paid for his golf resorts and why they keep losing so much money will only grow.
Read the original article on Business Insider
New York AG: "We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity"
The New York attorney general's office said Tuesday night it has informed the Trump Organization that its investigation into the company "is no longer purely civil in nature" and is now also a criminal one.
Why it matters: The attorney general's office is now working with the Manhattan district attorney's office, which has been investigating the Trump Organization for potential bank, tax and insurance fraud.
Driving the news: New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) announced in 2019 that her office was investigating Trump Organization finances.
Her office filed a lawsuit last August to compel the organization to comply with subpoenas for an investigation into whether former President Trump and his company improperly inflated the value of its assets on financial statements.
Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for James, said in an emailed statement Tuesday: "We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA." Levy declined to comment further.
What they're saying: Representatives for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment on the news, first reported by CNN.
But Trump has previously denied any wrongdoing and accused James of "politically motivated harassment" and called Manhatt
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